One More Shantideva

From Chapter 2: The Confession of Sin

34. I have committed various vices for the sake of friends and enemies. This I have not recognized: "Leaving everyone behind, I must pass away."

35. My enemies will not remain, nor will my friends remain. I shall not remain. Nothing will remain.

From Chapter 4: Attending to the Spirit of Awakening

20. Therefore, the blessed one stated that human existence is extremely difficult to obtain, like a turtle's head emerging into the ring of a yoke in a vast ocean.

And now, a pause for the words of Shantideva

Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life--

From Chapter 5: Guarding Introspection

13. Where would there be leather enough to cover the entire world? The earth is covered over merely with the leather of my sandals.
14. Likewise, I am unable to restrain external phenomena, but I shall restrain my own mind, what need is there to restrain anything else?

From Chapter 6: Patience

33. Therefore, upon seeing a friend or an enemy committing a wrong deed, one should reflect, "Such are his conditions," and be at ease.
34. If all beings would find fulfillment according to their own wishes, then no one would suffer, for no one wishes to suffer.

(These are not the most fluid translations, but rather the ones found easily online. Here's the monk-approved translation we read at my sangha; here's the version with excellent commentary some members bring instead.)

Being Tibetan

Tomorrow is the long-awaited Compassion Festival sponsored by my sangha! The monks have been working on the sand mandala for a week. I saw it today, almost finished, and it is stunning, beautiful, glorious, gorgeous, touching.

Late this afternoon, I went to the high school hosting the mandala and festival to help with food prep. I was surprised to find pretty fliers on the school's doors advertising dharma talks our monk gave for students throughout the week. The high school was massive, the main office closed, and no map to be found. Some students pointed me in the right direction. I wondered how I would know when I was approaching the right place.

I need not have worried. At the foot of the stairs, I heard recorded Tibetan chants and saw the bright yellows and greens of Tibetan Buddhist banners. There were four or five cinnamon-robe-clad monks. One was working on the mandala, measuring the edges with a compass. His sneakers peeked out from beneath the red robes. People clustered around the mandala for a glimpse. Were they parents of high school students, or just people who lived in town? I paused for a moment, bowled over by this work of art, deeply afraid of sneezing. Further down the hallway, I saw Lobsang, "our monk," answering questions, and his best friend, Amdo (another monk), at his elbow. At last I spied a woman wearing an apron dusted liberally with flour, and asked where the kitchen was.

I expected to slog through boring hours of chopping, but I was essentially treated to a cooking class on stuffing and shaping Tibetan dumplings. Chef Viktor, our leader, seemed impressed with my work, and the high school cafeteria manager half-jokingly offered me a job. It was great fun to socialize with the sangha members who were there, but meeting Chef Viktor was the real treat. He made sure that his volunteer cooks tried the carrot fudge (ohmygod, like the best carrot cake you never had) and enjoyed the samples of reject dumplings. When the other cooks cleared out and I stayed with just a few others to clean, I had the chance to chat with Chef. He grew up in Mozambique, has lived in 7 countries in 3 continents, and has studied the cuisine of all of them. He uses only Succanat for sweetener and has fascinating insights about the mineral and nutritional value of sweeteners. We both admire Jacques Pepin.

I also enjoyed the cleaning, the pulling long streams of cling wrap across trays. It reminded me of my college work study days in the Kosher Kitchen. I missed the Beatles compilation we used to play during cleanup.

As we cleaned and tidied, Lobsang and Amdo entered the kitchen. Lobsang does not know my name, but often greets me with a warm bow-handshake-hug, a fusion hello which always delights me. Chef explained that he may not return tomorrow, as he lives far away, and a Tibetan who speaks no English was slated to be running the kitchen. (I had already volunteered to lead the crew to fold the remaining 150 dumplings and fry all 300 if Chef couldn't return. Chef was glad to have me when I mentioned my high school summers frying up clamcakes.) It turns out they found another Tibetan chef who does know English, and Lobsang charmingly requested Chef's return tomorrow. You can't say no to a monk, especially one as charismatic as ours, so Chef and I will be manufacturing the dumplings together in the morning.

The food we made today is just the snacks to sell in the afternoon. The evening's dinner for 300 will be prepared by the Tibetan crew tomorrow. I wonder what time service will really happen. It's scheduled for 6. Based on my limited exposure to the Tibetan sense of time, I would guess we will eat somewhere between 6:45 and 9.

As we walked out, Chef told me the mandala is so beautiful it made him weep. We looked at it from the second-floor balcony, mesmerized by the colors and intricate patterns. Two high school girls were departing from extracurriculars at that time. They leaned over to look at the mandala again. "It's sooo beautiful," one whispered in awe.

My parents are coming up for the festival, too! Yay!

Confession

I have grown somewhat weary of my shiatsu colleagues--not of my clients, who are wonderful, clever, generous, insightful human beings--but my fellow practitioners. If I have to endure one more conversation that takes as its starting point the presupposition that The Law of Attraction is really a "law" of the universe, witness one more debate about the symptoms of entity possession and the best cure thereof, or hear any more tales of the healing properties of angels, spirit guides, and/or crystals, I might just snap. I may show symptoms of demonic possession myself.

Many of my colleagues, mind you, are not like this. It just seems that the ones who are will Not Stop Talking. Most startling to me is that the offenders are completely unselfconscious about their cockamamie ideas.

Of course, this is just one branch of a General Misanthropy I'm experiencing of late. Other irritations include Printer Discourtesy (PUT YOUR DAMN LABELS IN THE PRINTER WHEN YOU'RE PRINTING LABELS, RESTOCK THE PAPER WHEN YOU PRINT THE ENTIRE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA); No One Knows Who Replaces the Toner Cartridge; Yakking on Cell Phone While Driving an SUV Too Large For You to Handle--that means YOU, Soccer Mom and Angry/Entitled Corporate Guy; and, my favorite, Outsourcing/Slashing Pay for Local Vendors in Order To Line the Pockets of Senior Management (NOT Ethical).

Word of the Day: Equanimity

I have certain nihilistic tendencies, but I channel them into equanimity.

My mother, while a very loving woman, is devoid of equanimity. She carries other people's worries. Her classroom comes home with her every single day. She finds the Sad in the funny stories I tell about my Alzheimer's patients in hospice. She cannot stop worrying about my sister, her students, my brother, random people she reads about in the news, or the state of education in Massachusetts.

After I gave shiatsu to a yogini friend this weekend, she said, "Sometimes I feel spaced out or exhausted after massages. Instead, I feel like the shiatsu put me in a state of equanimity."

Equanimity.

Dreamscape

I am at a Tim Horton's with friends at night. I think we are in Texas, or western PA. Jackie and the others get a table while I place my order. I choose both oatmeal and an almond croissant because almonds lower the glycemic index of the pastry. It comes to $17.95, which I think is steep, but I hand the cashier a twenty. She hands me my change. There is a check for $500 shuffled in it. The check is made out to the "Jesus Love Association" or something like that. I realize that this Tim Horton's is also an evangelical Christian recruiting center of sorts. For a nanosecond I am tempted to pocket the check and try to cash it, but instead I return it to the cashier, as it rightly belongs to the Tim Horton's/evangelical church.

The chubby, nice teenage cashier becomes flustered and embarrassed. She thanks me for my honesty and promises to make it up to me by getting me $500 in cash from her friend who's the son of an oil baron.

Then I return to the giant, Victorian house I'm staying in with my husband on a visit to family. Everyone else is already asleep. I am elated because I will receive $500 soon, thanks to the law of karma operating even in a Christian doughnut shop in Texas/western PA. But it is cold and pouring rain outside, and the rain is leaking through the roof of the old house and pouring in everywhere. A Dad Person, an amalgam of my dad and my father-in-law with no distinctive features, tells me I've made too much noise coming in the house.

I wake up to find I've cracked the window above our bed for air and it is, in fact, raining outside.