Dreaming Of Danzan Ravjaa

Tsaagan Aristan Khöömös

Well, it’s sneaking up on Naadam, Mongolia’s national festival that harks back to the days of empire, replete with ritualized contests in wrestling (worst costumes of any sport, anywhere, ever), archery, and horse racing, in addition to the perennial demonstration sports of vodka ingestion and bellowed, off-key Mongolian long-song. Anticipating the spectacle, Palzang and I are high-tailing it out of town to spend a week in Dornogov.

Naadam marks the height of tourist season so the streets are more and more full of tsaagan aristan khöömös. Khöömös means “people”, aris means “skin” with the tan being a modifier like “of”, while tsaagan means “white”. So tsaagan aristan khöömös means “honkies”. Already I feel like a bit of a local, bemused by my earnest, Lonely Planet-totin’, Gobi sunburn-sportin’ brethren and sistren, gawking at my own honky butt, wrapped in Buddhist monk robes no less. Today we even got our picture taken with a dude from New Jersey. Tried to charge him 500 tugrig apiece but for some reason he just laughed.

Today’s an odds ‘n’ ends day, with some little snippets I’ve been saving up. The first concerns the name of the Eastern Gobi monastery with which I’m so enamored, Khamariin Khiid. Names for spiritual places are funny things. When His Holiness Penor Rinpoche first came to our temple in Maryland, he bestowed the name Kunzang Ödsal Palyul Changchub Chöling which gorgeously translates into “Fully Awakened Dharma Continent of Absolute Clear Light”. He, however, is the throneholder of Palyul Monastery in Tibet and Palyul means, well, Palyul. When I looked into Khamariin Khiid I quickly learned that khiid means “monastery” or “hermitage” and just figured that Khamar was kinda like Palyul. Ah, but this is Danzan Ravjaa we’re talking about and so I just cracked up when at our Mongolian language lesson the other day I discovered that khamar means “nose”. So with the modifier on there, this profound place of spiritual accomplishment is called Hermitage Near The Place Shaped Like a Nose. Now I love that I love it even more.

And speaking of Mongolian lessons, a big shoutout to bid nariin bagsh (our teacher) Tumee who starts a fulltime job this Friday. Tumee had a bad accident last year which injured her leg and forced her into months of unemployment. She was so backed into a karmic corner that she was forced to endure a New Jersey monk’s bumbling attempts to grasp even the rudiments of her mother tongue for an hourly pittance. We dig her, though – she’s got a quick laugh and is smart as a whip – and begged her to stay on as our tutor with a modified schedule, which she has graciously agreed to do.

Good thing we have her guidance, too, because the English-Mongolian dictionary we rely on is a leetle bit quirky. Yet another Altangerel compiled it and it’s clear he was educated in an eccentric part of England, which is to say, England (viz. entries for such words and phrases as “jiggery-pokery” with two possible ways to say it in Mongolian, “hackney carriage”, “thingummy” and “kip”). With each entry, he defines the word and then often gives examples of idiomatic sentences. My favorite so far is under the entry for “friend”, which is commonly naiz in Mongolian, but here also has a translation of khain nökhör, which I suspect means more like “companion”. To illustrate, he trots out the sentence “Televiz ni gants biyo khöömösiin unetei khain nökhör bilee.” This translates as “Television can be a valuable companion for lonely people.” To which I can say with confidence that this is unnecessary when you have voices in your head.

Which brings us to places that have no television or any kind of visual entertainment whatsoever. Who could forget this image of a certain part of the Gobi Desert?

But I want folks (OK, my mother) to be reassured that this is not our everyday environment. About 10 days ago, Palzang and I had had it with the noise of UB and escaped south of town to hike a really lovely trail that follows a stream-cut valley into the protected forests of the Bogd Mountain Wilderness. These two photos capture a bit of this soothing locale.

Then, as we were walking back, we had a classic Mongolian moment when a encountered a small herd of horses casually munching their way down the trail with us. Who was it that said he’d never work with children or animals? W.C. Fields? I ran like a total goober around the fields trying to get just the shot I wanted, with the horses grazing in the field, so close and yet so far from Ulaan Baatar sprawled in the background.

And then, just for yuks, one of Palzang's:

Dulaan To Others

UPDATE: Now I seem to be able to get on the site. But ever since I got here it seems that blogs hosted by Blogspot are blocked. Sorry Ani Dara...

I love the internet, and have often said that it is the greatest invention of the 20th century next to clumping kitty litter. I love its utter freedom and relative lack of regulation. I love the infinitude of information and opinion so easily accessible, even the strange mirrors held up to the spectrum of peculiar human appetites. I love that “google” is a verb.

The internet is one of the last frontiers of unfettered expression; totalitarian states, therefore, despise it.

Case in point: for the past week, I have been able to create DODR within the software that Typepad provides me, but I have not been able to access the site itself to check what I have created. This has made me extremely uneasy, like a parent who cannot get to his infant child. It wasn’t a computer problem; I use a different computer each time at local internet cafés. Mystified, I emailed Typepad and they said, “Hmmm. I wonder if you’re experiencing some fallout from this.”

China. I know I’m supposed to bless all 1.3 billion of their pointy little heads, and love even the Communist bureaucrats whose sacred task it is to squelch the free exchange of ideas and make it virtually impossible politically for the Dalai Lama to tour Mongolia. But I’m reminded of one of my family’s favorite children’s books, Rotten Ralph. It’s about a cat, Ralph, who does rotten thing after rotten thing. He finally provokes his exasperated owner, Sarah, to say, “Ralph, sometimes you make it very hard to love you.” It’s a sentence we still trot out with each other at appropriate moments.

That the Chinese cannot read DODR is regrettable, but the thought that the Mongolians are being prevented by the Chinese from reading it is killing me. If you’re in Mongolia and accessing this site, please let me know in the comments.

Thomas Jefferson (for whom I’m named – no, his middle name’s not Konchog, you clown) said, "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government;... whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights." It’s as true today as it was then.

Ah, but I’m actually in an expansive mood today and wish to celebrate rather than criticize. I want to sing a subject I had thought to write about this coming Friday but that’s an auspicious day so I’ll reserve that for writing about Jetsunma’s impending visit. Today’s happy topic is the roaring success of The Dulaan Project.

In October of last year, I started doing research on Mongolia to assist with Jetsunma’s wish to help with the post-independence revival of Buddhism here. By December it was pretty clear that I was to be the first one going to Mongolia. Following my teacher’s example, I didn’t want to just gather information; I wanted to find a way to create some dynamic, positive energy that might catalyze similar karma and drive the project in a beneficial direction.

Even basic research will quickly kick up two facts about Mongolia: its winters are long, dark and extraordinarily cold; and the sudden transition from a state-run to a market economy, combined with a couple of years of vicious, livestock-killing weather, has plunged a full third of the population below the poverty line, including tons of children.

While mulling this information, I had also been thoroughly enjoying my cousin Ryan’s charismatic, laugh-out-loud-funny blog, Mossy Cottage Knits. I noticed that she had garnered a substantial, loyal readership of equally fanatic knitters, who rival birders in their quirky, and often eloquent, devotion to their passions.

This is another thing I love about the internet – the ability to create intimate, virtual community in a way that renders physical distance meaningless.

Anyway, with all of this info jostling in the hopper suddenly a bulb fizzed to life over my noggin and I gave Ryan a jingle. What if, I asked her, we were able to harness the good-hearted energies of these knitters, and whatever networks they were connected to, and create a pile of high-quality, durable, warm clothes for impoverished Mongolians? I’ll do all the initial set-up and promotion and you just have to cheerlead through Mossy Cottage (and, believe me, she’s got the pom-poms).

Ryan was intrigued and said she’d think it over. While she did so, I discovered that the Mongolians have a lovely word for “warm”, dulaan (pronounced doo-'lahn) and that a mere 30 miles up the road from Sedona was the Flagstaff International Relief Effort (F.I.R.E.), an organization devoted to transporting and distributing warm clothing to the poorest of the poor in Mongolia!

It was too perfect. Once I presented to Ryan the catchy name of The Dulaan Project and told her about F.I.R.E. agreeing to serve as a collection point for whatever was knit as well as distributing it in Mongolia, she was totally down. Her partner, who I am only permitted to refer to as The Mysterious K for reasons that will be clear if you read Mossy Cottage, just happens to be a graphic designer and whipped up a fabulous downloadable promotion/instruction flyer. On January 30, we launched The Dulaan Project into cyberspace, not knowing at all whether people would be into it and actually participate.

Oh we of little faith. Ryan’s readers responded enthusiastically to the project right out of the gate, but it didn’t fully take off until it was revealed that F.I.R.E.’s founder, the photographer Dave Edwards, and his executive director Meredith Potts had made a little wager. Dave bet that the project wouldn’t even generate 500 items; Meredith thought it would bring in more and if she was right, Dave had to buy her a nice bottle of wine.

Well, knitting ain’t your grandma’s fireside hobby anymore. The art’s been taken up in a big way lately by some pretty feisty gals (and fellers too) who don’t seem to cotton to the puny expectations of a camera-totin’ bubba, even if he do take perty pictures. After Ryan posted about all of this, her reader MaryB huffed in the comments, “Five hundred? That’s child’s play. Let’s set the mark at 2000. Whaddya say, ladies?” And after a collective, “Right on, sister!” I swear that dogs around the world cocked their heads at the sound of hundreds of determinedly clacking needles.

Very quickly The Dulaan Brigade (as Ryan styled them; I called them the Dulaanettes) grew to over 100 and they had produced and delivered to F.I.R.E.’s doorstep more than 500 items before I boarded the plane to Mongolia on March 18! I made Dave pose for a sheepish picture and knew we’d really unleashed something good.

Well, the deadline for mailing finished items for The Dulaan Project is this Friday and the F.I.R.E. office is buried in boxes that have arrived from all over North America and four other countries to boot. As near as their staff can figure, the total number of hand-knit goods, made with love to warm some lucky Mongolians, is approaching (drum roll, brass check your spit valves for the fanfare) 4,000!! That’s four. Four thousand. Twice two. Four. Dörvön myang if you want to hear it in Mongolian. In five months. That’s more than 25 items a day. Just absolutely, incredibly, unbelievably flabbergasting. Dave better buy Meredith a whole case of fine wine, and take her out for dinner.

I couldn’t be more proud of my cousin and her horde, especially now that I’m living in Mongolia and know that it’s no joke, the need is real. The F.I.R.E. volunteers will come in November and I so anticipate the day when I can work side by side with them, and share the images and stories with all of you. I just wish they’d be able to read about it in Beijing.

The Sting

Well, the body’s ailing a bit and I’m a little exhausted after a full-tilt week, so we’ll abide by the maxim that brevity is the soul of wit.

It’s a somewhat strange atmosphere at home. Palzang and I returned one day to find that a layer of cedar chips had been strewn on all the stairs and landings. That combined with the security cage that was installed over our balcony has provoked us to communicate in strange chittering noises, nervously nibble lettuce, and scan the apartment for a place to put an exercise wheel. Actually, we discovered that the chips were a prelude to our hallway getting a fresh coat of paint, for which we rejoice, because the hallway before was fairly revolting.

The week was dominated by the Northern Buddhist Conference on Ecology and Development, which ran from Monday to Thursday. It was masterfully organized by my man Guido Verboom, who is Mongolia’s representative for the Manchester, England based Alliance of Religion and Conservation. The World Bank co-sponsored the event, as did the governments of the Netherlands and Mongolia. More than 200 people attended, at least a third of whom were monks and nuns from across East Asia. The main issue was how can Buddhists, living a life based on compassion and the understanding of the interrelationship of all things, take the lead in their respective countries as far as environmental protection and community education in good practices. It was really fascinating and, I think, very productive.

Altangerel and Dush Lama attended from Dornogov so, happily, we were able to spend some time with them. One excellent outcome was that we generated the first official invitation for Jetsunma to teach when she visits Mongolia (by the way, I’m embarrassed to think that I may not have mentioned this yet, but Jetsunma and a small entourage are definitely coming, August 18-September 4. More about this next week.)

Yesterday, Altangerel echoed an astounding Danzan Ravjaa story told to us by Sharavdorj, over a lovely dinner for Khamtrul Rinpoche at his home Wednesday night.

Take a look at the picture in the upper left corner of this blog. That’s the image of Guru Rinpoche called the Statue of 10,000 Knives, the finding of which is such an amazing tale and central to KPC’s initial connection to Khamariin Khiid. Notice that Guru Rinpoche wears a brocade hat. This is not the original hat. The original was made of finely wrought metal but had gone missing at some point during the statue’s incredible journey.

Some time last year, Sharavdorj conceived the notion that he would sponsor the recreation of the statue’s missing hat, engaging Mongolia’s best metalsmiths. (Can we just take a moment to appreciate that the Sharavdorj telling me this story over his home coffee table is Mongolia’s Minister of Defense?) The problem was, no one knew what the original looked like or, really, what any comparable metal hat for a Guru Rinpoche statue looked like.

Just at the time they were mulling over this dilemma, a stonemason working at Khamariin Khiid took a break and dozed off on the sand at his work site. He was jolted awake by a sharp sting on his hand, and looked down to see a small scorpion. Initially angry, he was going to kill the scorpion when he thought, “Well, I’m at a holy Buddhist place so I shouldn’t deliberately kill a sentient being. Besides that, the scorpion is Danzan Ravjaa’s sacred symbol for the Dharma, so it would be really bad to kill it. I’ll just move it.”

So, he scooped up the scorpion and carried it to a place away from his work site. Just where he set it down, he caught a glint of something metallic poking out of the sand. He dug away the sand, and dang if it wasn’t the original hat from the Statue of 10,000 Knives!

The hat is a little worse for the wear (we were shown photos, not the hat itself), but Sharavdorj will have it restored by an antique expert and installed in the Danzan Ravjaa Museum. In the meantime, based on this discovery, as well as hats on Guru Rinpoche statues he photographed while on pilgrimage in India earlier this year, he is having a new one fashioned out of pure silver, decorated with precious stones from India, Tibet and the Gobi. His intention is to have it finished before Jetsunma’s arrival, so that she might be the first visiting lama to see it and confer a special blessing for the auspicious occasion of the complete reinstallation of this holy object.

As for the scorpion, it will begin to figure more and more into the DODR narrative. Stay tuned.

Have a lovely weekend and come on back Monday. If you need entertainment in the meantime, check out the two blogs I've newly linked to, New Mongols and Don Croner's World Wide Wanders. Also mad love to The Marmot for singing my praises from deep in his Hole.

Regeneration

If you want to come to an experiential understanding of the truth of impermanence, come to Mongolia. Yesterday was, like, Arizona hot, hitting about 96 to welcome the first day of summer (and, by the way, Palzang’s 59th birthday). Then in the afternoon a front roared in, blowing dust all over everything, and this morning it’s overcast and I’ll be surprised if it cracks 70.

Anyway, I don’t know if I can continue this blog and hang around with the likes of you people. Day before yesterday, Palzang and I dined with the newly-elected president of Mongolia, Nambaryn Enkhbayar. Oh, OK, yes, there were 200 other people there and it was buffet style and we didn’t exactly get personally introduced, but still. The occasion was the first night of the Northern Buddhist Conference on Ecology and Development and I snapped this cool photo of Mr. Enkhbayar and HE Choijamts Lama offering a toast (that’s iced tea in the lama’s glass, not lager).

For the dinner we were bussed to the brand-new airport hotel (complete with police escort and stopped traffic!), which sounds lame, but really isn’t. The “hotel” is actually a sprawling complex of various temporary and permanent structures – everything from gers to a ten-story high-rise – located far beyond the airport down a lovely long valley. For the evening’s entertainment, they put on a mini-Naadam (Naadam being Mongolia’s extravagant annual July festival) complete with music and dance, strongmen and contortionists from the circus, and the three traditional sports of wrestling, archery, and horse racing. Here are a couple of shots. In the first, I got lucky. This little Nikon digital is the first camera I’ve ever owned, and I find the auto-focus delay in shooting a little maddening, especially with moving subjects. But the cool thing about digital is that you can take a zillion shots and hope one or two turn out. The second photo is of a strength and balance feat. I like the layers of red, green, and blue.

Now I know we’re far away from the last Gobi trip, but I wanted to share some thoughts and images on a matter I’ve been mulling over here, and that is aging with grace and dignity, and the sharing of wisdom that enhances the promise of a new generation. Before I get to Mongolia, however, I want to tell you about these two elderly German women. They showed up at Khamariin Khiid just in time for Khamtrul Rinpoche’s first empowerment. They weren’t part of a tour group, so I asked them how they had come.

“Oh,” one of them replied, “we walked from Sainshand with a Mongolian friend. It took about two days.”

I must have done one of those cartoon things where my eyeballs popped out and zipped back into my skull (remember this image?) so she helpfully continued, “It’s the only way to really get a feel for the land. My friend and I are retired now – I’m a goldsmith and she’s a teacher – and we’re taking several months to wander across Mongolia. It’s amazing that we’ve come to this holy place during a special event just at the beginning of our journey. We feel so blessed.”

Hearing this provoked my silent prayer, “Please, please let me be so cool when I get old.”

The harsh Gobi elements sculpt and burnish the faces of the elders there in ways that are gorgeous to my eyes. When I get to know them (and my camera) better, I will ask their permission to take some formal portraits. Already we’re getting along beautifully, though. I address them with respect and affection as “minii eej” and “minii aav” (“my mother” and “my father”); they in turn have started to jokingly call me “shovoo lam” or “bird monk”, given my obsession with feathered critters.

This is Tongalag, and it was her job to serve Rinpoche and his guests in the ceremonial ger. She’s so elegant; everything she did was infused with beauty and love.

This is Baatar under a tapestry portrait of Danzan Ravjaa. He’s the monk who has special access to Danzan Ravjaa’s healing spring and who keeps order during ceremonies in the temple.

This is Ayushjao, the mother of the man responsible for the Shambhala stupas. I’m so in love with her, I can’t even explain it. She’s very reserved and dignified without affectation. But when she went into the tent to offer a kata to Rinpoche, she cast formalities aside, grabbed his face and kissed him on both cheeks in spontaneous gratitude for his coming so far to bless her remote corner of the world.

On the right here is Tserendorj, retired doctor and professor, listening as Rinpoche conducts a blessing of the Sainshand Medical College. He later spoke the words of thanks on behalf of his community. Earlier he had delighted in chatting with Palzang in Russian and was the first to chuckle and call me “bird monk”.

It is these elders who are only now, in their twilight years, allowed to freely express the devotion and faith taught to them by their elders. Seventy years of Communist suppression could not squelch their spirit, especially in a place like the Gobi, which is so utterly untamable, wild and free. And since a full third of Mongolia’s population is under age 25, these elders and their example are a truly precious natural resource. I think this next photo is the best one I’ve taken in Mongolia and says so much about the cross-generational continuity of faith.

These photos, taken at Rinpoche’s college blessing, also convey something of the natural devotion emerging among Mongolia’s young people.

And to deepen and repair these traditions, exceptional boys and girls are being sent to the Tibetan Buddhist training centers in India to fully absorb the wisdom and practices that the Tibetans have preserved in exile and carry them back to benefit Mongolia. This amazing little monk sought Rinpoche’s blessing for his impending journey to the Drikung Kagyu Institute in Dehra Dun, sponsored by the Tilopa Center. It was a moment that was profound beyond words. One of our first projects here in Mongolia will be to sponsor four young people identified by Altangerel and Dush Lama to go to HH Penor Rinpoche’s monastery next March. They actually intend to send ten altogether. Absent major societal disruption, Mongolia’s Buddhist culture should regain much of its pre-revolutionary splendor in a generation or two.

Mongolian Birding

I’ve got to scamper to my Mongolian lesson, but quickly another wander in Sainshand’s town park added three lifers to the list – Dusky Warbler, a ubiquitous ground forager; the gorgeous Yellow-billed Grosbeak; and the Common Rosefinch. And here is my first-ever whack at bird photography, showing a cheeky Desert Wheatear perched at Khamariin Khiid. Not too bad for a first attempt, eh?

Oma Ode -- Well, Not THAT Ode

Today is another day of great celebration. Umpety-eight years ago, an event occurred without which your humble author would not be here to tell his tales. Yes, I am speaking of the birth of my mother, Josephine, in Bronxville, NY, the marking of which I am so sorry not to be able to share with her in person.

Though born in New York, my mother spent most of her childhood nestled in an 18th c. farmhouse with her mother, grandmother, and older sister in the idyllic town of Woodstock, VT. Today, Woodstock is like a Museum of the Quaint; then it was authentically quaint. They raised angora rabbits, grew vegetables, baked from scratch, hunted small game (my grandmother apparently learned to be quite a shot from the denizens of her father’s California gold mining camps – long story), sewed and knitted their own clothing, and enjoyed the country’s first ski tow.

My aunt went off to Swarthmore College and, at her suggestion, my mother boarded at the very progressive, Quaker-run George School, and from there attended Vassar College, where she majored in English literature and developed a love for both poetry and Princeton boys. To be literate in my family is just about the highest virtue; I grew up surrounded by books and I can’t think of a single family member who isn’t a clever writer.

Ultimately, none of the Princetonians made the final cut, perhaps to the chagrin of my grandfather (Princeton ’15). My mother married a Harvard man, Kent Fry, and, after a brief stint in the unlikely location of Detroit, my father landed a gig with W.R. Grace that flung them to the unlikelier location of Lima, Peru. It was there that my mother gave birth to my two sisters, Sarah and Laura, and my father became fascinated with the nascent industry of international air travel. He moved on to Pan Am, which shifted the family briefly to England and then for ten years to Germany, in both Stuttgart and Frankfurt.

The final European move brought the family to Paris, where yours truly was born on the last day of 1965. It was not long thereafter that my parents’ marriage finally collapsed, and before my third birthday my mother and I left France to stay for a time with her sister who had resettled in Bronxville and, strangely enough, to set up house in Princeton, NJ. I often joke that I became a Buddhist monk in order to purify whatever karma caused me to be born in Paris, but raised in New Jersey.

The sudden transition to independent life was difficult for my mother, to say the least, and I didn’t help much by growing into a confused, angry teenager who developed a passion for the punk rock scene and all its attendant vices. If you think I’m exaggerating, this photo is me, in London, age 17. One weekend in my early 20’s, I paid my mother a visit just to formally apologize for those years and chop a winter’s-worth of wood as penance.

My mother found her groove as a librarian, and endured New Jersey (we had moved from Princeton, which is actually quite lovely, to East Windsor, which is actually not) so that I could finish prep school. Once I shipped off to Brown, she returned to Vermont to be near her sister and live in a place that held cherished memories. She settled in Brattleboro, found employment at their public library and, though now retired, cannot shake her addiction to the written word and still makes time to volunteer there.

Given my current vocation, I’m often asked if I grew up in a religious household. Not at all, I reply, and…um…thank God. But I grew up with ethics. My mother and her sister consciously rejected the racism of their parents, an attitude I naturally absorbed, and my own sisters, both wonderfully strong women whom I adore, helped me develop an innate sense of gender equality (I think I may still have the bruises to prove it). So I learned from these women, as Martin Luther King suggested, to judge myself and others solely on the content of our character. The Quakers must have also influenced my mother, because she abhors war and violence and strictly forbade me to have toy guns and the like.

My mother possesses a host of virtues, too numerous to mention. But one which resonates for me in a Buddhist context is her unconditional love for her children and concern for their welfare. Time and again she has made personal sacrifice to benefit us. Recently she revealed to me that, during my difficult birth (I was being strangled by the umbilical cord), she begged the doctors to let her die if it would only let me live. I’m in tears even now thinking of the profundity of that. The Buddha teaches that at one time or another in our endless cycle of rebirths, each and every sentient being has been our mother and loved us in exactly such a fierce way. He counsels us to strive to repay their kindness by living a life dedicated to the total liberation from suffering of all of them. He has provided methods by which we vow that no matter how long it takes we will gain the wisdom and power of enlightenment, and not rest until each sentient being is established in that same bliss, free from all sorrow. I use my own mother’s example to help me in this task.

Therefore, it was one of the happiest days of my life when my mother took me to a dinner in Maine that had the air of a Special Moment. She and I, as you may have guessed, are very close, and I had been sharing with her all along the marvels of my personal awakening to the Dharma since meeting my lama in the summer of 1990. This included the afternoon of July 31, 1993 when I called and said, “Hi, Ma! Guess what I did this morning? I renounced samsara, shaved my head, and took the robes and vows of a Buddhist monk for the rest of this life. So, how is it up there, hot?” She actually wasn’t so shocked. It seems that during these years, quietly, she had been pulling Buddhist books from her library shelves and sparking her own inner fire.

“So,” she asked me over dessert that evening in Maine, “how does one officially become a Buddhist?”

“You mean so you get the laminated wallet card and the sew-on patch? Well, there’s the small matter of the fee paid to any monk to whom you’re related by blood.”

“Ha ha.”

“Are you asking in the abstract,” I wondered, “or for yourself personally?”

“Myself personally.”

Oh, my heart sang! I ordered another coffee, quit with the jokes, and explained about the Refuge Vow, through which one enters the gate of the Dharma, and the Bodhisattva Vow, through which one enters the sublime path of the Mahayana. That sealed it, and shortly thereafter I had the indescribable pleasure of witnessing my mother, who traveled to Maryland expressly for this purpose, take these vows with Jetsunma. She has grown beautifully as a Buddhist practitioner ever since, further deepening her path by entering the Vajrayana through empowerments from HH Penor Rinpoche and HH the Dalai Lama. Now, she even hosts a weekly Dharma study group in her home and when she visits KPC, the monks and nuns no longer use her given name – they just call her Dharma Mama. It’s beyond amazing.

We’ll return to Mongolia on Wednesday. But since I know it pains my mother to be so physically distant from me right now, I wanted to span the gap with this love letter, and reveal a small fraction of what a marvelous woman she is. Knowing her as I do, by posting the following photographs I risk losing the warm feelings these words may have generated. Nonetheless, I think she’s beautiful, and I know you will too. One is her and me at the Grand Canyon and the other is her with all her children celebrating a previous birthday in Ogunquit, Maine.

Happy Birthday, Ma. I love you, and pray that we may share many more years to come. May all motherly sentient beings swiftly know complete liberation.

Maybe Has Chance

Well, it will come as little surprise how many Mongolians evidently get through their long, dark winter. It seems that about one out of every four young women we pass on the street is about five months pregnant.

This reminds me of a story that Rinpoche told, which became a joke during our visit. It requires some background for those less familiar with Tibetan Buddhism, which I hope you’ll find interesting.

The supreme Vajrayana master from India, Padmasambhava, traveled to Tibet in the 8th c. at the invitation of King Trisong Deutsen. During his 60 years there, he subdued all the forces hostile to the Dharma, and gave teachings and transmissions according to the capacities of his various disciples.

Padmasambhava, more commonly known as Guru Rinpoche, spontaneously appeared in this world as an emanation of Shakyamuni Buddha in order to disseminate the Vajrayana. Guru Rinpoche embodied a perfect Buddha mind, one facet of which is complete, unmistaken knowledge of the details of all physical and mental phenomena everywhere, past, present and future. Therefore, he saw that many teachings, practices, and objects he possessed would be of little benefit to the people of his time, but great benefit to future generations.

Guru Rinpoche’s foremost disciple in Tibet was the Princess of Kharchen, Yeshe Tsogyal (it’s of interest to note that his foremost disciple in India was also a woman, Lhacham Mandarava). At certain times, Guru Rinpoche would dictate teachings and practice methods which Yeshe Tsogyal, with her perfect recall, would copy on yellow parchment in a symbolic writing known as Dakini Script. This is not just a story. I’ve seen photos of these originals and they’re amazing. Anyway, together they concealed these parchment scrolls, often along with sacred objects and precious substances, all over Tibet. The hiding places are hard to comprehend for those of us attached to our notions of solid reality. They would be put high up in sheer rock faces, in lakes, cave walls, pillars of monasteries, etc., often in caskets made of materials foreign to Tibet, such as rhinoceros hide. These caches came to be known as terma, or treasure teachings.

Along with Yeshe Tsogyal, Guru Rinpoche had 24 other disciples of superior accomplishment. He blessed and empowered each of them to reincarnate at various times in the future and discover these caches. Those who engage in this activity are known as tertöns, meaning treasure revealers. Such discoveries began with Sangye Lama in the 11th c. and have continued unabated up to the present day. Thus, the Nyingma canon is divided into two lineages. The first is kama, or those actually spoken by Guru Rinpoche, and actively practiced and transmitted by others, during his lifetime. This is also known as the distant lineage. The other is terma, known as the close lineages. Terma is further divided into two categories, sater, or earth terma, meaning these physical caches, and gongter, or mind terma, meaning cycles that are revealed in visionary experience.

Which is the long way ‘round to our story. In the 19th c. there was a particularly great tertön in Tibet named Chokgyur Lingpa. Rinpoche told us over breakfast that before Chokgyur Lingpa was born, the man who would be his father had a vivid dream in which Amitabha Buddha appeared to him and said, “You have to make the way for the tertön Chokgyur Lingpa to be born in this world! Right now!” So, he shook his wife awake, related the dream, and can you imagine the scene? Great rolling of the eyes and thoughts such as, “Oy, now it’s Amitabha Buddha’s command. What’ll he come up with next?” Nonetheless, they went into tertön-production mode and Rinpoche said that my man, being an especially devoted sort, ran the sequence twice, just to be sure.

This story came up because one of the empowerments that Rinpoche conferred at Khamariin Khiid was from Chokgyur Lingpa’s terma cycle. One of those attending these empowerments was a particularly big and boisterous lama. Everything he did, from prostrations to offerings to chanting, was done in such a loud and exaggerated way that one couldn’t help but feel they were designed to draw attention to himself. He was one of those older monks who had been “encouraged” by the Communists to leave aside his celibacy vow and get married. But this one seemed to adapt pretty well to his new situation, as we discovered that he had ten – count ‘em, ten – children. “Wow,” I remarked to Rinpoche and Palzang, “he must have had lots of dreams of Amitabha!” This provoked a long round of laughter and joking, at the end of which we had dubbed him Amitabha Lama, for reasons he’ll never suspect.

I also tell all this because today is the 10th day of the lunar cycle, the day on which Guru Rinpoche promised to be present for those calling to him with devotion. Recalling and relating aspects of the incomparable life and deeds of Guru Rinpoche is for me a devotional act. This particular 10th day celebrates the spontaneous appearance of Guru Rinpoche, an event only surpassed in importance for me by the birth of my own root teachers. Rinpoche will confer the same Guru Rinpoche empowerment this afternoon at the Tilopa Center that he gave at Khamariin Khiid. The day feels charged with blessing.

As it did at Khamariin Khiid, primarily because of the intensity of the devotion of those present. Word got around in the mysterious way that it does in far-flung communities (well, OK, radio announcements aren’t that mysterious), and people kept arriving by vehicle, horse, and camel until the Nyingma temple was packed to the rafters.

Because Palzang and I were, I think, the only fully-ordained monks there, we were given special seats and Rinpoche asked us to wear our yellow robes. While such respect always makes me feel personally uncomfortable, undeserving as I am, it did afford me a perch from which to delight in the devotion of the assembly and discreetly snap some photos. I’ll let some of them speak for themselves, with just short captions:

Here's the "PA Sysytem", Ideerbayaar translating from Tibetan to Mongolian with a bullhorn:

The people listen intently:

Rinpoche begins the empowerment...

...and it gathers in intensity:

At the end, the assembly perform a traditional offering ritual:

And Rinpoche is astounded that even several soldiers from the nearby military camp have attended and seek his blessing:

It was so lovely to see how integrated the community was with this monastery, more so than any other I've seen in Mongolia thus far. It was like the descriptions of Danzan Ravjaa's time, albeit on a humbler scale, where Khamariin Khiid functioned as much as a community center for people living in the remote outback, as well as a place of religious instruction and practice. I clearly recall Rinpoche’s comment in the receiving tent before we left: “This place good. Maybe has chance.”

Trichiliocosm

After seeing the photo in the last post of our view at the ger camp, can you imagine the night sky? No, you can’t. You have to see it to believe it. The only other time that compared was when I was little, visiting my grandmother in the desert outside Tucson. The difference is the panoramic horizon. A massive, ebony half-sphere vaults over you, and I thought of the Buddha’s various teachings in which he describes the extent of the realms encompassing sentient beings as three thousand myriads of universes (some smarty with too much time on his hands actually came up with a word for this: trichiliocosm). I weighed that against the enormity of the fraction of just one galaxy I was seeing and my mind imploded. The gift of the Gobi is the unavoidable truth of your personal insignificance.

Another gift is the heightened appreciation of small pleasures. Like waking refreshed in a cool, clean white ger, the only sound being the low, staccato murmur of a good lama’s quicksilver chanting.

Of course, no pleasure lasts, especially when one is hopelessly attached to real morning coffee (by being a squeaky wheel, I have, I swear, eight pounds of high-quality beans in my freezer, including three sent by Global Express from Tully’s in Seattle! Thanks TMK! We’re thinking of opening a kiosk.) In the dining hall we were introduced to an instant powder originally from Brazil called Café Pelé. Well, the soccer star might consider rescinding his endorsement. By the second morning, we were quietly calling it Café Crappé. This was made up for by the fact that the young woman serving it was utterly adorable, leading Palzang and me to a funny free association. I like milk in my coffee, and this was never served. So each morning I would ask for “khaluun suu”, hot milk. Our server would whisper “za”, the universal Mongolian syllable for “roger that” and so many other things, and go off to fetch it. This scenario played the same way every morning, until finally we dubbed her “Hot Sue”.

Rinpoche was so full of stories that he shared over our meals. One particular subject that fascinates him is the phenomenon peculiar to the Nyingma practices of Dzogchen called the “rainbow body”. This is where a highly-realized yogi or yogini, at the time of death, meditates in such a way that the gross physical elements of their body dissolve into light. This tends to happen two ways. One is all at once, often in seclusion, leaving only the hair and fingernails (I often joke that if I attain this, I’ll leave a veeery small pile, scattered by the first decent breeze). The other is the gradual shrinking of the body. Now, this is not a long-ago fairy tale. He described one great lama who had four exceptional disciples. One was a yogini who passed away in 1980. Her body shrunk to about 8” high. He said her hair covered it like a wig on a stand. He also described speaking with an old Tibetan man who had been in the army and was made to help arrest a famous yogi. They put the yogi in restraints and led him away on a red cow. Impassive, the yogi began to chant the mantra to Guru Rinpoche, “Om Ah Hung Vajra Guru Pedma Siddhi Hung”. As they were riding, the yogi’s body shrunk to the size of a child. Furious and freaked out, the military unit’s commander shouted, “Hey! You! Cut that out!” The yogi did for a little bit but then took up the mantra again. A ferocious wind blew up that swept the yogi off the cow, and then everyone saw him just disappear into space (OK, knock off the “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Lhasa anymore” jokes). The Tibetan had been forbidden to talk about it at the time, but finally told the story, which Rinpoche confirmed with one of the Chinese soldiers who had also been present. Hearing these, I showed him a photo of one of the most amazing things I’d seen in Mongolia. I can’t discuss the details or show the photo because I promised I wouldn’t, but I can tell you that I was shown an astounding relic of a Mongolian lama who died in UB in 1998 and displayed the rainbow body phenomenon. One of the items I was shown was his upper arm bone, shrunk so small it fit with room to spare in the palm of the person’s hand.

The first full day was devoted to seeing the monastery and surrounding sights. Rinpoche offered many long prayers of auspiciousness in the temple and then we went to a spot I hadn’t been before. Just next to the monastery is a sacred spring, protected by a small locked house. Only this monk, Baatar, is allowed to enter and serve the water. If there are too many people, he pours the water into a tube that exits for people to drink from the mouth of a concrete lion’s head on the outside.

The water is said to have many healing properties. Rinpoche seems to have enjoyed it very much!

On the way to the more remote sites, I asked to be left off at the ravine that had made such an impression on me the last visit. One of the meditation caves had obviously been a hiding place for some dharma objects. Treasure hunters, or whoever, had trashed them and there were texts, Buddha pictures, prayers flags, etc. mangled and half-buried in the dust and mixed up with ordinary garbage. This had really disturbed me but there had been no time before to clean it up. This time, I spent a couple of hours carefully separating the Dharma-related objects from the trash and chanting a purification mantra. When Dharma items are no longer useful, they should be burned. I bagged up the Dharma items for Altangerel and was able to come back the following day and haul out the trash. It is now an ideal cave for meditation retreat and I felt like quite the Boy Scout.

With Rinpoche, then, we made a quick visit to the Shambhala Land. As we entered and approached the center, we were once again greeted with an auspicious light mist of rain, only falling there. Rinpoche seems here to feel the inspiration we all do at the ovoo that graces the kapala mound.

Mongolian Birding

Only one bird to report from this day, but a good one. After getting left off at the ravine, the owl I had seen before took off, but had the courtesy to land for a time and look back at me. I whiffed of my previous guess of Short-eared and my friend John didn’t nail it either with the better guess of Eagle Owl. It was, in fact, a lovely Little Owl, a completely great lifer.

Space And Silence

Thanks for your patience during my absence last week, gentle readers (well, except for my jonesin’ cousin Ryan, who was not content with photos suggesting famous explorers were Irish and not Eye-talian – see previous post’s comments), but I have been literally in the middle of nowhere. Don’t believe me? This photo shows, I swear, the view from the ger camp. I had another marvelous adventure in the Eastern Gobi, this time with Palzang in tow.

Of course, some people would view this as a wasteland (the lama we were traveling with made this comment: “The worst place in Tibet – Ngari – is better than this place.”) So why do I love it so much? The main reason is probably the vast interplay of space and silence, the likes of which I’ve never experienced before. They’re one. You seem permeable in this desert and the silence flows right through you. It’s indifferent to the folly of your habitual self-assertion – you’re so small and insignificant here – while it erodes your inner chatter. There’s so little to entertain your senses, or to observe and make judgments about, that the discursive part of your mind simply relaxes out of boredom, revealing hints of its natural clarity. This is simply an environment that has no nurturing characteristics and does not care about you at all. In fact, living things, people in particular, seem almost an aberration on the landscape, comically out of place. Many more things die here than are brought to life. The Gobi elements are severe and pitiless and demolish whatever solid thing you try to build. Given half a chance, they will kill you too. As for the Gobi residents, this stark reality produces humility, alertness, and a keen sensitivity to, even a resigned kind of humor about, impermanence. I’ve also observed in them the gritty toughness of survivors, tempered by the knowledge that such survival depends on everyone caring for everyone else, family and stranger alike. Hospitality for visitors is unstinting; crimes such as theft are rare. If you combine these qualities – a humble and alert attitude, the relentless experience of impermanence, the grit of one tested by adversity, and the understanding that selfishness must be given up since otherwise you can quite literally cause the death of yourself or others – it’s no wonder the Gobi produced extraordinary, enlightened beings such as Danzan Ravjaa. These are exactly the qualities one needs to produce swift realization on the Vajrayana path.

This will be another Gobi week on DODR. There’s so much to share about this place that I’m coming to consider my home, I will probably post every day.

The occasion for this journey was the visit of Khamtrul Rinpoche Sonam Dondrup, a 59-year old lama from Lhasa making his first excursion outside of Tibet. Rinpoche is a lama in the Drukpa Kagyu tradition (which produced the inimitable Drukpa Kunley and is very strong in Bhutan) who has come to Mongolia at the invitation of the Tilopa Center. His practice also flows with a strong Nyingma current from this and previous lives. Like, he was Namkhai Nyingpo, one of Guru Rinpoche’s 25 main disciples. In a funny twist I never heard before, he says he is also known in Lhasa as “Monkey Tulku” because it is said that in a previous life he was the monkey in the story of the “Four Friends”.

This time we drove, five of us packed into Jan’s Mitsubishi Pajero SUV (Iderbayaar was the fifth, to provide Tibetan-German and Tibetan-Mongolian translation). The Chinese are working on a highway linking Ulaan Baatar and Sainshand – perhaps stretching as far as the border town of Zamyn-Uud, I don’t know – that is clearly in their own interest, i.e. unloading more dismally designed and manufactured crapola on the Mongolian population. The road is probably no exception; Jan says they’re skimping and paving it too thinly. He gives it two years at the outside before the Gobi temperature extremes start busting it up. Nonetheless, it made for 100 miles of relatively smooth driving out of UB. That left 200 miles of bone-wracking dirt track – broken up by lunch in the railside town of Choir (pronounced “Choyor”) which doesn’t have much to recommend it beyond this incredibly bizarre and hilarious monument to phallic warfare next to the train station – before spitting us out at the Gobi Sunrise ger camp. Gobi Sunrise is the tour company founded to create a revenue stream for Khamar Monastery. We found the gers nicely appointed, the bathrooms and showers functional and clean, and the service remarkably friendly and attentive (customer service is decidedly not part of the Communist legacy), helping us quickly shake off our road weariness and begin swapping stories over dinner with robust good humor. Rinpoche speaks enough animated English to spin a yarn and it seems he knows a million funny and poignant stories about the great lamas from Tibet’s Buddhist history. We had a ball.

On the drive down, we stopped to let Rinpoche delight in the bowing and leaping courtship dance of two Demoiselle Cranes. He considered this an auspicious sign, as he did the arrival of a herd of horses on the hill outside of Sainshand where Altangerel and a small group had gathered to greet us.

Such signs continued into the evening, more profoundly. As Rinpoche began his evening prayers in his ger, an intense wind led the charge of a storm we had been watching billow out of the northwest. The dark clouds offered a short spray of rain on the camp. Then their trailing edge lifted just off the western horizon so that the setting sun could arc a full rainbow across the desert. It was getting dark and this is the best image I could get with my little camera. I have enough experience with elemental phenomena around good lamas to know that we were in for a special week. It was indeed, and I will bring as much to you as I can, a bit sad that so much will still have to be left a sweet, untold memory.

Mongolian Birding

Birding was not exactly on the agenda, but you know how sneaky we are. The first evening I scanned around the camp and darn if I didn’t pick up two lifers: Desert Wheatear (common as flies around the monastery) and, quite improbably, a pair of Thick-billed Warblers that the field guide said usually skulk around damp forest thickets. I looked at the latter really carefully because of that, and that’s definitely what they were. There was another dinky bush warbler but I couldn’t get a fix on it.

Mongol Go Bragh

Have felt utterly lousy all week, today being no exception. The witty banter, it just will not flow.

So, in the "Worth 1000 Words" dep't, I submit the following, a real place on my street, encouraging you yet again to supply a caption:

Palzang and I are going to the Eastern Gobi on Monday for the week with a lama from Tibet named Khamtrul Rinpoche. This time we're staying in a ger! No posts next week, but a full account the following.

Please send good vibes my way. I find out about my residency permit on June 10!

Already!?

I haven't a lot to report; I've been feeling a bit pooky the last three days, sort of low-grade feverish. I did, however, just lead a Shower of Blessings offering practice at the Tilopa Center with a crowd from the self-styled Drikung Dzogchen Community of Mongolia. Also there was a lama from Lhasa, Tibet named Khamtrul Rinpoche who Jan has invited for a month. Many other good monks were there. It was a bit intimidating. But Palzang and I carried it off well, I think. Did I get photos? No, that would have been smart.

Anyway, I just want to give you an image to contemplate for the next couple of days. From the look on his face, I imagine Santa saying, "What the @#%! am I doing in Mongolia in June!?" What would your caption be?