Sun, 20 Dec 2009
More Links
IThis weekend the East Coast was hit with a blizzard. Baltimore got twenty inches of snow (that's almost 60 cm for you metrics fans). I was home, so there was no problem until I had to go out and shovel the snow. It was a lot of work to clear off the car. I did my grocery shopping and came home and that was the extent of my adventures for the weekend.
Lama Gursam sent out an email message with some news. He attended the consecration of the new Drikung monastery in Nepal and then made a brief tour of the sacred sites in Nepal. He's about to start a one month retreat.
Here's a few links that I've found recently. First, Angela attended the consecration of the Drikung monastery and blogged about it. Now that it's over you can read the whole story. The Kagyu Monlam is just starting and anther blogger is repaorting his impressions. I hope he keeps going. Here's a somewhat strnage extract from Rechungpa's biography that has him getting teachings on immortality while studying with Tibupa in India, The story of the hippie drug dealer who became Kalu Rinpoche's student has a happy ending in that he's now out of jail and back in Nepal. In this second chapter he has some more to say about his Buddhist practice:
As we reach the airport, Smith rushes to finish telling me how he spent the past 30 years of his life. He met his guru, Lama Kalu Rinpoche, at a Buddhist retreat in Palm Springs, about five years after becoming a fugitive. He followed Rinpoche from California to Maui to Darjeeling, India, where he spent the next 11 years living at Rinpoche's monastery. Half that time, he lived in isolation, praying, "om mani padme hum" 100 million times. He befriended a quiet Norwegian, a fellow devotee of Rinpoche, who turned out to be extremely wealthy and who offered to sponsor Smith for the rest of his life if he continued to pray for the betterment of humankind.
In the mid-1980s, just as Smith wrapped up his prayers, civil war erupted in Darjeeling as the ethnic Nepali population sought to secede from India. He slipped across the border to Nepal, married a Nepalese woman and raised a daughter, who is now 21 years old. Besides spending time with his family and passing a few unpleasant months in Orange County, he says, he's led a very quiet life. He says he just wants to give his interview to the documentary crew making their movie about Buddhism, and then go back to Nepal.
