Dear friends, as you know I am a very spiritual person, but I admit that often I have doubts about whether or not any of my prayers are really more than an idiot wind from both ends. However, recently in Kham Tibet something happened that gave me great affirmation, and I want to share this rare experience with all of you...
I was in Dzongsar Kham a tiny village deep in the western Himalayas and was trying to buy some cedar wood from the Monastery there (the reason for that I'll explain in a later letter, its for the Ark of Essences Project happily still alive and well) which is up on a hill above the village. I stood beside the prospective pile of cedar, that I later discovered was owned by one of the higher monks of the monastery, and was in the company of two other monks. Together we watched a dog sunning herself on the accessible rooftop below the level where we stood. Now, its not because I am so psychic that I so knowingly call her a "she" but because a male dog came along and had his pleasure with her, no foreplay, just a quick sniff and into her sanctum. It seemed like a normal enough event, the monks were laughing harder than I was, but afterwards he couldn't get out. I have heard of dogs getting stuck together, these two seemed in real pain. They rolled around and twisted and howled, while a third looked on with great interest, but it was no use. I wanted to go help them but was afraid that I would be bitten so after half an hour, and no one arriving to barter for the wood, and the monks thinking it all very funny, I went down the hill to my guesthouse.
Next day I carried my medicine pipe back up the hill, still on my wood errand, and, as I had intended to since arriving in Dzongsar, I smoked it sitting on the platform of a stuppa under construction. I've been carring one for about 25 years and now find that mixing the Native American pipe with Dharma prayers is very effective, but I am selective about smoking it, have done so only a few times since I made this pipe following Kalacakra in January. As I was closing it off, to my surprise, those two dogs appeared on a knoll near where I sat and the poor dears were still stuck together. They seemed to have adapted a bit, they moved like Dr. Doolittle's Push-me-pull-ya beast, their rumps together. So with the last breaths of my sacred pipe, I did some Tong-len, the taking on of other's suffering and replacing it with the Buddha's evoked and your own light and health and life. Having been at least emotionally in a similar position as those dogs several times in my life, I felt great compassion.
I didn't really pay attention to the dogs after that, was busy putting the pipe away, figured they were stuck still but to my surprise when I climbed off the stuppa platform they were laying down a few yards away from each other sleeping peacefully. Must have been a ruff night. Probably for the dogs, since it occurred around a sacred monastery like Dzongsar which pre-1959 was one of the great seats of learning in Tibet, it was a karmic baloon payment for past attachment karma.
But whatever the arising conditions, isn't that a great confirmation of the power of prayer? I think it should go in the Chicken Soup for the Animal Soul Book, what do you think?...
I can't expect miracles like that one everyday and we yogis are not supposed to brag about our magickal powers but I guess I am flush with pride and just can't help myself in this case. It is true though that travel does seem to open the opportunities for such marvels to occur... now I am about to get on a train for Outer Mongolia which I think will be a wonderful place, full of sheep and stewed mutton I hear, and wish I had more than ten days to spend there... then it is back to Kham to learn how to die properly... in between is a lot of China where they seem to keep Buddha-in-a-box and charge a lot of Yuen to go see him there, like at the caves I visited today with their Buddhas deeply hewn into the sandstone cliffs, but it was interesting and I met a nice girl from Yale who was living in George Bush's old dorm room...
O Go Ahead! Expect a miracle! __._,_.___
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