Mon, 18 May 2009
Trivial Pursuits
I don't know if people are interested in the trivia of my life, bute here it is. As I mentioned Sunday we had a traditional Tibetan doctor give a talk on the Tibetan view of disease. Tibetan medicine views disease as an imbalance of the three humors, wind, bile, and phlegm. I have notes, but I think they may not be useful or even harmful if taken out of context.
As I mentioned, I bought a new small laptop to replace my Alpasmart. It arrived a week ago, but I had to send it back because the hard disk was bad, probably dropped during shipment. Today the replacement arrived. It ships with Windows, but I fixed that by installing Ubuntu Linux. It seems to work fine from the little bit I've been able to use it. It still needs to be configured for how I plan to use it. I hope I have that done before this weekend's teaching.
Yes, this weekend starts the Drikung meditation center's annual retreat. Khenchen Konchog Gyaltsen will be teaching on two texts he composed. The first is "Precepts and Prohibitions: Their Mode of Abiding" Though P & P sounds like a text on Vinaya. it's actually a short summary of the path in verse. The second text is a short guru yoga to Jigten Sumgon, the founder of the Drikung lineage. Every time Khenchen teaches here, it's a big deal, because he founded the Frederick center and many there know and love him.
I also bbought a new shrine table from Ikea and spent the morning putting it together. Ikea, of course, doesn't have shrine tables in its store, it's a repurposed television table, which was the best substitute I could find. It took some time for me to get it put together, as I'm tools challenged. And it's slightly crooked, but it will do.
