Ink

A coupla times recently I’ve met people who ask me with a wagging finger, “Saaay…aren’t you that guy? In that newspaper?” At which I study the dirt I’m pushing around with my boot and mumble, “Garsh, I dunno. Maybe.”

Then I provide an autograph for a very reasonable 5000TG.

Cuz, see, I’m a Cover Boy for this month’s Ариусахуй Бясалгахуй, i.e. “Purification & Meditation” (got it backwards last time). And I gots da proof. This is really gonna give Brother Don a chuckle, as it’s probably the only time I’ll ever be featured in a sequence with his beloved Helena Petrovna ("Madame") Blavatsky:

Inside they offer a transcription of the interview we did under the title Говийн Бясалгаач (“Goviin Byasalgaach”), which means “Charlatan ‘Monk’ in the Gobi.” OK, it really means “Gobi Meditator.” This is such a joke, and I said so during the interview. Five days is a kindergarten retreat, and they must have been desperate for page filler to bother to include it. But we did manage to range over a bunch of topics during the interview, so hopefully some good came out of it. And best of all, they published Jetsunma’s image, a blessing to counteract having to look at my dopey mug:

In other publishing news, Vesna Wallace writes in to tell me that Michael Kohn’s new book, Dateline Mongolia: An American Journalist in Nomad’s Land (can’t believe I didn’t think of that pun first), has been boxed and shipped. Astute readers will recall that Kohn authored the first book in English about Danzan Ravjaa, Lama of the Gobi, rare copies of which you may still obtain by sponsoring two volumes for our Nyingma Text Project! Looks like Michael’s got a blog now, too, Dateline: World, where he provides a calendar of upcoming slide show/lecture dates for the Mongolia book (mostly in the Bay Area of California) and some earlier posts with very interesting reporting from Afghanistan.

And, completing our ink tour, I paid a visit to my tattoo artist Tulgaa today. Tried to find Lisa Fink to take along, whose tat of the Mayan solar eclipse symbol I admire, but she was in deep poetic seclusion somewhere. In any case, it seems Tulgaa and his partners have parted ways and the studio’s all his now. It was a much more subdued atmosphere, and that’s fine with me. This was a preliminary visit, to get him started on the artwork. I finally decided what to do. More accurately, I knew what I wanted – the mantra of Amitabha Buddha, Om Ami Dewa Hrih – but I couldn’t find the right image. I had an idea to get it in Sanskrit, but it proved impossible to either locate or have someone create original calligraphy for me. But in my searches I happened upon this fascinating site, Visible Mantra. Here you find various mantras rendered in a script called “siddham.” This short history traces this script as a crucial component of the early promulgation of the Dharma in Central Asia generally, and forms of the Vajrayana in particular. It also has a calligraphic flow that I find unusual and gorgeous. Here are all the mantras, and here is the Amitabha one in particular. My intention is to get it on my left forearm this coming Sunday. That’s the tenth day of the waxing moon, a day sacred to Padmasambhava, who is known to have been an emanation from the heart of Amitabha into this world.

Comments

[Carol]

People will publish all kinds of crazy stuff about expats. I used to joke that I was the only foreign woman to make it into the Turkish papers with my shirt on.

Seriously, you're doing a wonderful thing, and you make a compelling photo op while you're doing it.

[marylee]

Desperate for filler? Dopey mug? Take it back!

[Ariel]

Do monks get tattoos? I didn't realize...

[Chet]

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/weepingcamel/gallery/land/

I thought these were some nice landscape pics from Mongolia.

Do you get to do much birding? I remember your Mad AZ Monk blog fondly.

[Konchog]

Ariel -- I wouldn't say that "monks get tattoos," but my teacher condones it if the spiritual purpose is solid. I've written about it here and here.

Chet -- *sigh* You know, last night I had a dream about birding (I frequently do) where I was out with my friend Tom Linda and got my 600th lifer. It was weird. I forget the species, but it was somehow physically attached to a ratty-looking Harris' Sparrow and they were quite incongruously feeding with waders in the shallows of a pond.

At any rate, deep winter Mongolia ain't exactly conducive to birding cuz, mainly, there are no birds. Just hardy corvids, Eurasian Tree Sparrows, and pigeons. Might be woodpeckers, owls, etc. in the woods but it's not worth the frostbite to search for 'em.

And anyway, most tragically, I somehow left my binocs on a train to Dornogov last fall. Needless to say, they were not turned in to the station master.

Thanks for the kind words about Mad AZ Monk. That was a lot of fun.

[Christian]

Lama Konchog, I have a naive question: why do not offer to monasteries the DVDs containing the texts? That would be cheap.

[Konchog]

Not naive at all. You're not the first to ask. What we intend to do is give both. The idea with the printed books is to have them easily available for study or initiation ceremonies. And it's not just a one-button operation to print from the CD's. My printer has been taking these last two months just to get the files in shape for easy printing. The good news is that the first collection will likely be finished next month!

[Sarabaite]

Cool tattoo story! I was most intrigued, though, at the mention of the moon cycle having meaning in Buddhism. Is it (the moon cycle) something that comes up regularly in your studies? Different beliefs regarding the phases always catch my interest. (I don't have the dedication to follow any one set of beliefs, unfortunately, but I do attempt to learn a little about as many system as possible. Some aspects here and there get internalized in my overall outlook; a tendency which is frequently ridiculed as "salad-bar spirituality." Oh well. Salad bars can be rather healthy, after all.)

Total non-sequituer (spelling?) here: how long have you studied Mongolian? Have you studied other languages as well? Attempting to learn Spanish as an adult in So Cal is hard enough, and the similarities between English and Spanish are substantial. Picking up the written language is one thing, getting phrases out of my mouth -- TOTALLY different.