Mon, 07 Sep 2009
The Carless Hand
No that's not a typo. I've been without a car for a week, since I took it into the body shop. Being without a car means riding the bus to work again. It also means that I've gotten a lot of my unpaid web work, mostly for Lama Gursam, done. Time on the bus is also time to think and that is dangerous, because it has caused me to rethink some of my Perl code. So the time I was not spending on web work was spent recoding Perl packages. Not the most exciting way to spend a weekend, but what else am I going to do without a car? Last Monday I started doing Vajrakilaya package. My simple shrine is now more elaborate, as I have to do a torma offering as part of the practice.
Mahasangha News reports that Lama Tsultrim (actually ex-lama) died recently of cancer. I met him when I did a dathun at Karme Choling. If you don't know, a dathun is four weeks of all day shamatha meditation. Da is short for dawa (month/moon) and thun is practice. Lama Tsultrim was on staff and explained the practice to us eager young meditators. After he explained the details of oryoki practice, I let out a loud sigh, for which he gave me a dirty look. But he was a good soul. Hearing about his death reminds me how much has changed and how much time has passed since then.
