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icarusI've been AWOL from fandom. Every time I've tried to get the fic machine going again, I've just gotten too busy. My relaxation time tends to be more of the sack out in front of late night TV variety these days.
The Buddhist temples I visited in Seattle were living room affairs, just starting.
You know, one person knew a Tibetan teacher, would fly that Lama in for teachings that would take place in her Capitol Hill apartment. Another group was well-established and had a large house in the suburban Greenwood neighborhood that had been renovated into a traditional temple, with a stupa out front. The other was in a group house in the University District, with three roommates upstairs and the downstairs devoted to the temple. They later bought a former church in Wallingford. A friend in Connecticut, well, his temple is also just a building downtown and land they just bought in the country a few years ago for a retreat place.
But the temple here in Maryland is HUGE. The temple was established over twenty-five years ago. The main temple itself is in a former antebellum-style mansion on about fifteen acres of land on one side of the street with a large stupa. The opposite side of the street is sixty-five acres of wildlife refuge with more stupas, trails, and space for meditation huts. There's another enclave in Arizona, with a large stupa in a beautiful valley.
On the grounds, well, we ended up with a colony of six-ten feral cats that we capture and have spayed and neutered and adopted when we can. They're called the "stupa cats" because they hang out by the main stupa, though they also could be called the "car cats" because they hang out on the warm cars by the stupa. One of the nuns feeds them while temple members buy cat food to help ... there's a little donation basket in the temple. My mom bought a cat-sized house for them during the harsh winters we had a couple years ago, and the temple's former maintenance guy renovated a section of the tool shed for them as well. I worry because sometimes the more aggressive cats force out the gentle ones when there's not enough space.
Around the property, mixed in with the landscaping, are bird feeders and more bird feeders. As you drive up there's a twittering chaos of birds ... cardinals, starlings, the typical bluejays, and others I don't recognize. We get birders on weekends because apparently we attract some pretty rare varieties both sides of the street. You can tell the birders by the expensive binoculars and the fact that they might not even set foot in the temple, except to get water. We have bottled water on sale near the animal donation baskets as a fundraiser.
In the far corner of the property you can hear the piercing squawks of the Garuda Aviary. It's just behind the house where the visiting Lamas stay. Usually the Aviary's open on weekends and guests can view the birds. My old buddy Tashi bird is there, with that mischievous twinkle in his eyes, along with rescued cockatoos and parrots and exotic birds. They have a lifelong home, especially since many of them had been abused. The temple members involved with the Aviary work with state and local agencies and keep their ear to the ground for news of more abused birds, since a lot of owners' knowledge of their birds can be summed up with: "Pirates of the Caribbean."
Rescue can get complicated and involve internet campaigns, letter writing, legal and political issues, not to mention the travel to go get animals. There's also a dog rescue, which is largely located at the Arizona temple, though our teacher, Jetsunma, and most members take in a lot of dogs (mom and I are cat people). There's a pack of at least ten rescued dogs at Jetsunma's farm, ranging from fluffy little Pekinese (I love the Pekes, they remind me of Maine Coons) to pit bulls. There's one hunting dog whose bellowing bark makes jump back a foot. Yeah, definitely a cat person.
Jetsunma's son is the main caretaker at the Aviary. The landscaping takes a lot of upkeep and so does the Aviary and bird feeders. I'm not involved in the bird seed brigade. There are more donation baskets for bird seed and Aviary funds next to the food donation shelves we try to keep stocked for whoever needs it. Temple members bring in whatever they have on hand ... canned goods, noodles, cake mix ... and people can take what they need whether they're members or not. The food donation shelves seem to be emptying more quickly the past few weeks, which reminds me, I need to pick up some more cans. I forgot when I was shopping last night. The kidney beans go fast.
We have volunteers on weekends for landscaping (can't afford a professional service like some churches), but a few gardens at the far corners of the property have been neglected because of lack of manpower. There's a garden the former maintenance guy started that no one has time to maintain since he left. My mom does flower arrangements for special events so she sometimes has me pick up plants. The last event I also bought some pansies for the neglected gardens, only to learn they're deer candy. Oh well... guess I should have coordinated with the folks who do the landscaping.
The interior of the temple has a warm and inviting gift store (the proceeds go to the temple, and I think they should expand online, but that's another issue). You're treated to wind chimes and Buddhist music as you step in. There's a large altar room to the left where most of the weekend and Thursday night teachings occur, and to the back of the building, a fifteen hundred square foot main temple. You pass the Solarium (a place for guests to relax and have tea, and also where we have the food donation shelf and animal donation baskets) on the right as you head under the stairs to the main temple.
The floors are carpeted, and there are mahogany altars on all the walls with traditional colorful Buddhist paintings and large brass statues. The main temple room has a special altar dedicated to Tara, the female Buddha, which takes up one corner. There's a massive altar to Shakyamuni Buddha with a main statue and thousand-and-two tiny Buddha statues. The Indian and Chinese Buddhists who visit during the week pay particular attention to this altar. The Tibetans pay more attention to Guru Rinpoche and Tara.
There is always somebody in the main temple room, because that's where the twenty-four hour prayer vigil takes place.
The prayer vigil is the reason this temple was founded. We bought the building to house the vigil--everything else expanded from there. There's a huge white board chart dominating one wall of the Solarium, with dry erase markers and names filled in. The day is divided into two-hour shifts, twelve shifts per day, eighty-four shifts per week. About forty-three members actively participate right now. Anyone can come and be part of it, but to take a shift you have to know how to do Buddhist practice within our tradition. Ani Hesper, who just moved to Alabama to live with relatives, used to take five shifts a week, so we're having to do more to replace her. I'm on the board for my regular Friday shift, and usually take a second every week. I stay after the second shift to clean a bit. Over a thousand Buddha statues requires a lot of dusting.
At the beginning of each week at least a third of the chart is blank. That's where the prayer chart caretakers come in, one of the toughest jobs in the temple. In rotating teams of four, they're in charge of phoning, emailing, buttonholing and cajoling members to take more shifts. Any shifts left over they volunteer to cover themselves. You can tell a rough week when the same four names appear on all the middle of the night shifts. As a participant I get an email every day with inspirational messages about the vigil, and a plea.
Other Buddhist practices happen regularly ... there's a daily food offering practice, called Tsog. There's a prayer book outside the main temple room where people can write down the names of those in need of prayer. These names are read before each of the daily Tsogs. The remaining tsog offerings appear in the Solarium, one reason there are always snacks! A small group of members do the daily practices called "Three Roots" for the temple, as well as a smoke offering practice called a Sur. I do these on my Friday prayer shift. A number of students have accumulations of their personal practices to do. There's a yearly retreat up in upper state New York; seven years of seven different levels of practice, each more subtle than the next. The people who've done second year have a commitment to that practice, called Tsa Lung, out in the wildlife refuge (we have a little hut). Saturdays are busy with temple work, yard work, renovations, meetings, while Sundays are busy with guests. The ten a.m. morning meditation led by Ani Rinchen is quite popular with Buddhists and non-Buddhist alike.
Twice a month the teaching room, called the Dharma room, fills with monks and nuns in formal gold robes. Ordained only, the traditional monastic So Jong practice.
Upstairs is a second Tara altar, temple offices, and living quarters for a half dozen nuns. Some of the nuns are retirees, others have jobs. The rest of the thirty or so monks and nuns live in group houses scattered around the county. I wish we could afford to support them full-time, but we can't. There's a table with altar candles just outside the main temple room as a fundraiser for the monastic community.
The nuns who live at the temple pay a small rent which helps keep the temple bills covered, though our electrical bill is way too high. We have solar panels on the roof and used to sell electricity back to the local power company, but those are out of commission now and need to be replaced. We also have to replace the roof (we had an All Hands email and phone tree during the heavy rains a few weeks ago to put tarps up), and the siding on the temple has needed to be replaced since before we bought the place. My mom's best friend cleans the temple windows every spring and fall, and the windows need replacing as well.
There's been a big temple renovation plan in the works for the last two years, but it would cost something like a million dollars. How we'd get a million dollars to renovate is, well, I don't tend to think big. There are people who lobby for grants and fundraise, but I'm more the type to look in my own wallet for what's needed. I tell my disheartened friends to think of the temple as a "fixer-upper." You don't renovate a "fixer-upper" all at once. You do it in bits and pieces as you can ... a little here, a little there. Pretty soon you've done a lot. I fixed a doorknob a couple of weeks ago. Dealt with gaps around an air conditioner. Helped do a temporary fix on a door. We're going to repaint the main temple room soon--one of the nuns gave me money for primer. Now I all I have to do is buy the additive that will reduce heat loss, buy paint, and recruit painters from among my friends. :)
Ani Dawa is getting a crew together to repaint the stupa (over by the stupa cats) if the weather doesn't get too cold, too soon. Otherwise the stupa will have to wait for next spring. The really big stupa also needs some work--that's going to take some research. We have to redo a plaque that was attached to the north side, but while we have the mold for it, no one here has ever made one before. the one in the middle of the wildlife refuge where I find the elderly Tibetan woman weekend afternoons, circumambulating, circling, circling. It's said that prayers made around a fully blessed stupa will certainly come true. It makes sense. There's virtue in circling a stupa out of devotion, and virtue is what makes it possible for prayers to come true. This one is special, though. It has a particular blessing for healing incurable diseases.
The heavy snows over the last two winters made some of our walking trails through the wildlife refuge impassible. I planned to string a line along those trails last spring and talked to our former maintenance guy about it (he got a job out of state but I hope he'll be back soon), but never got around to it. When a visiting Lama expressed a wish to walk those trails (uh-oh...) a bunch of the guys at the temple who usually work at the farm and the meadowland reclamation project, managed to get most of them open this fall. Then the heavy rains washed out roads and bridges all over the county, including our little bridges which have stood for the last ten years. Sigh.
While there are regularly scheduled teachings on Sunday afternoons and Thursday nights, the main teaching activity is in the archives and online. Jetsunma is very active on Twitter, where she has something like 30,000 followers, and the teachings that have been buried in archives and only viewed in video form are now getting edited and posted to her blog. A few students are involved in that--and it's hard editing, going from an informal oral presentation, to formal written work, while keeping her voice and shortening it to blog length. I tried, and I would make headway but get stuck after a few pages. My brain would just click out. A student out in California does the daily Astrology posts, while there are also teachings from other Lamas in our tradition ... there's an ongoing teaching on Tara that I need to catch up on. I do appreciate the convenience of having the teachings available online.
Unfortunately, an ex-con with a grudge has decided online is a legal gray area where he can attack Jetsunma and the temple. He and dozens of his sockpuppets sent over 8,000 nasty Tweets attacking her, our lineage Lamas, the monks and nuns, the temple ... and me, too. Although I don't care what he says about me--defaming teachers however, causing people to distrust them is a spirit-killer. When you destroy someone's faith, you destroy their entire spiritual path.
In the Tibetan tradition, spiritual teachers take a risk when they give profound teachings: they trust the student to keep faith and to practice them. If the student is just lazy and doesn't use them, it affects the health and long life of the teacher. To turn against the teacher and teaching is very severe. So what this ex-con doing to people goes beyond the usual debilitating impact of stalking. In addition, he's been trying to set himself up as a spiritual leader which, whoa, ex-con who's raped his ex-wife and set her business on fire, not what we want out there teaching "Buddhism." He's in jail right now, awaiting trail, so we have a bit of breather, but it's become a landmark court case, setting the stage for how law enforcement deals with online stalking. It's been expensive, and taken a lot of research and investigative work by a number of the members.
Other archiving activities involve transferring twenty-five years of teachings that are in CD form to MP3s, transcribing these teachings, and a slew of other projects Ani Aileen is involved in, such as a documentary and biography of the late His Holiness Penor Rinpoche (the head of our lineage), and a biography of Jetsunma.
There are other projects I'm sure I don't know about. Especially since things seem to just grow organically here, with people asking their friends to help with painting, etc. But yes, there's a lot involved in being part of a large Buddhist temple.
The Buddhist temples I visited in Seattle were living room affairs, just starting.
You know, one person knew a Tibetan teacher, would fly that Lama in for teachings that would take place in her Capitol Hill apartment. Another group was well-established and had a large house in the suburban Greenwood neighborhood that had been renovated into a traditional temple, with a stupa out front. The other was in a group house in the University District, with three roommates upstairs and the downstairs devoted to the temple. They later bought a former church in Wallingford. A friend in Connecticut, well, his temple is also just a building downtown and land they just bought in the country a few years ago for a retreat place.
But the temple here in Maryland is HUGE. The temple was established over twenty-five years ago. The main temple itself is in a former antebellum-style mansion on about fifteen acres of land on one side of the street with a large stupa. The opposite side of the street is sixty-five acres of wildlife refuge with more stupas, trails, and space for meditation huts. There's another enclave in Arizona, with a large stupa in a beautiful valley.
On the grounds, well, we ended up with a colony of six-ten feral cats that we capture and have spayed and neutered and adopted when we can. They're called the "stupa cats" because they hang out by the main stupa, though they also could be called the "car cats" because they hang out on the warm cars by the stupa. One of the nuns feeds them while temple members buy cat food to help ... there's a little donation basket in the temple. My mom bought a cat-sized house for them during the harsh winters we had a couple years ago, and the temple's former maintenance guy renovated a section of the tool shed for them as well. I worry because sometimes the more aggressive cats force out the gentle ones when there's not enough space.
Around the property, mixed in with the landscaping, are bird feeders and more bird feeders. As you drive up there's a twittering chaos of birds ... cardinals, starlings, the typical bluejays, and others I don't recognize. We get birders on weekends because apparently we attract some pretty rare varieties both sides of the street. You can tell the birders by the expensive binoculars and the fact that they might not even set foot in the temple, except to get water. We have bottled water on sale near the animal donation baskets as a fundraiser.
In the far corner of the property you can hear the piercing squawks of the Garuda Aviary. It's just behind the house where the visiting Lamas stay. Usually the Aviary's open on weekends and guests can view the birds. My old buddy Tashi bird is there, with that mischievous twinkle in his eyes, along with rescued cockatoos and parrots and exotic birds. They have a lifelong home, especially since many of them had been abused. The temple members involved with the Aviary work with state and local agencies and keep their ear to the ground for news of more abused birds, since a lot of owners' knowledge of their birds can be summed up with: "Pirates of the Caribbean."
Rescue can get complicated and involve internet campaigns, letter writing, legal and political issues, not to mention the travel to go get animals. There's also a dog rescue, which is largely located at the Arizona temple, though our teacher, Jetsunma, and most members take in a lot of dogs (mom and I are cat people). There's a pack of at least ten rescued dogs at Jetsunma's farm, ranging from fluffy little Pekinese (I love the Pekes, they remind me of Maine Coons) to pit bulls. There's one hunting dog whose bellowing bark makes jump back a foot. Yeah, definitely a cat person.
Jetsunma's son is the main caretaker at the Aviary. The landscaping takes a lot of upkeep and so does the Aviary and bird feeders. I'm not involved in the bird seed brigade. There are more donation baskets for bird seed and Aviary funds next to the food donation shelves we try to keep stocked for whoever needs it. Temple members bring in whatever they have on hand ... canned goods, noodles, cake mix ... and people can take what they need whether they're members or not. The food donation shelves seem to be emptying more quickly the past few weeks, which reminds me, I need to pick up some more cans. I forgot when I was shopping last night. The kidney beans go fast.
We have volunteers on weekends for landscaping (can't afford a professional service like some churches), but a few gardens at the far corners of the property have been neglected because of lack of manpower. There's a garden the former maintenance guy started that no one has time to maintain since he left. My mom does flower arrangements for special events so she sometimes has me pick up plants. The last event I also bought some pansies for the neglected gardens, only to learn they're deer candy. Oh well... guess I should have coordinated with the folks who do the landscaping.
The interior of the temple has a warm and inviting gift store (the proceeds go to the temple, and I think they should expand online, but that's another issue). You're treated to wind chimes and Buddhist music as you step in. There's a large altar room to the left where most of the weekend and Thursday night teachings occur, and to the back of the building, a fifteen hundred square foot main temple. You pass the Solarium (a place for guests to relax and have tea, and also where we have the food donation shelf and animal donation baskets) on the right as you head under the stairs to the main temple.
The floors are carpeted, and there are mahogany altars on all the walls with traditional colorful Buddhist paintings and large brass statues. The main temple room has a special altar dedicated to Tara, the female Buddha, which takes up one corner. There's a massive altar to Shakyamuni Buddha with a main statue and thousand-and-two tiny Buddha statues. The Indian and Chinese Buddhists who visit during the week pay particular attention to this altar. The Tibetans pay more attention to Guru Rinpoche and Tara.
There is always somebody in the main temple room, because that's where the twenty-four hour prayer vigil takes place.
The prayer vigil is the reason this temple was founded. We bought the building to house the vigil--everything else expanded from there. There's a huge white board chart dominating one wall of the Solarium, with dry erase markers and names filled in. The day is divided into two-hour shifts, twelve shifts per day, eighty-four shifts per week. About forty-three members actively participate right now. Anyone can come and be part of it, but to take a shift you have to know how to do Buddhist practice within our tradition. Ani Hesper, who just moved to Alabama to live with relatives, used to take five shifts a week, so we're having to do more to replace her. I'm on the board for my regular Friday shift, and usually take a second every week. I stay after the second shift to clean a bit. Over a thousand Buddha statues requires a lot of dusting.
At the beginning of each week at least a third of the chart is blank. That's where the prayer chart caretakers come in, one of the toughest jobs in the temple. In rotating teams of four, they're in charge of phoning, emailing, buttonholing and cajoling members to take more shifts. Any shifts left over they volunteer to cover themselves. You can tell a rough week when the same four names appear on all the middle of the night shifts. As a participant I get an email every day with inspirational messages about the vigil, and a plea.
Other Buddhist practices happen regularly ... there's a daily food offering practice, called Tsog. There's a prayer book outside the main temple room where people can write down the names of those in need of prayer. These names are read before each of the daily Tsogs. The remaining tsog offerings appear in the Solarium, one reason there are always snacks! A small group of members do the daily practices called "Three Roots" for the temple, as well as a smoke offering practice called a Sur. I do these on my Friday prayer shift. A number of students have accumulations of their personal practices to do. There's a yearly retreat up in upper state New York; seven years of seven different levels of practice, each more subtle than the next. The people who've done second year have a commitment to that practice, called Tsa Lung, out in the wildlife refuge (we have a little hut). Saturdays are busy with temple work, yard work, renovations, meetings, while Sundays are busy with guests. The ten a.m. morning meditation led by Ani Rinchen is quite popular with Buddhists and non-Buddhist alike.
Twice a month the teaching room, called the Dharma room, fills with monks and nuns in formal gold robes. Ordained only, the traditional monastic So Jong practice.
Upstairs is a second Tara altar, temple offices, and living quarters for a half dozen nuns. Some of the nuns are retirees, others have jobs. The rest of the thirty or so monks and nuns live in group houses scattered around the county. I wish we could afford to support them full-time, but we can't. There's a table with altar candles just outside the main temple room as a fundraiser for the monastic community.
The nuns who live at the temple pay a small rent which helps keep the temple bills covered, though our electrical bill is way too high. We have solar panels on the roof and used to sell electricity back to the local power company, but those are out of commission now and need to be replaced. We also have to replace the roof (we had an All Hands email and phone tree during the heavy rains a few weeks ago to put tarps up), and the siding on the temple has needed to be replaced since before we bought the place. My mom's best friend cleans the temple windows every spring and fall, and the windows need replacing as well.
There's been a big temple renovation plan in the works for the last two years, but it would cost something like a million dollars. How we'd get a million dollars to renovate is, well, I don't tend to think big. There are people who lobby for grants and fundraise, but I'm more the type to look in my own wallet for what's needed. I tell my disheartened friends to think of the temple as a "fixer-upper." You don't renovate a "fixer-upper" all at once. You do it in bits and pieces as you can ... a little here, a little there. Pretty soon you've done a lot. I fixed a doorknob a couple of weeks ago. Dealt with gaps around an air conditioner. Helped do a temporary fix on a door. We're going to repaint the main temple room soon--one of the nuns gave me money for primer. Now I all I have to do is buy the additive that will reduce heat loss, buy paint, and recruit painters from among my friends. :)
Ani Dawa is getting a crew together to repaint the stupa (over by the stupa cats) if the weather doesn't get too cold, too soon. Otherwise the stupa will have to wait for next spring. The really big stupa also needs some work--that's going to take some research. We have to redo a plaque that was attached to the north side, but while we have the mold for it, no one here has ever made one before. the one in the middle of the wildlife refuge where I find the elderly Tibetan woman weekend afternoons, circumambulating, circling, circling. It's said that prayers made around a fully blessed stupa will certainly come true. It makes sense. There's virtue in circling a stupa out of devotion, and virtue is what makes it possible for prayers to come true. This one is special, though. It has a particular blessing for healing incurable diseases.
The heavy snows over the last two winters made some of our walking trails through the wildlife refuge impassible. I planned to string a line along those trails last spring and talked to our former maintenance guy about it (he got a job out of state but I hope he'll be back soon), but never got around to it. When a visiting Lama expressed a wish to walk those trails (uh-oh...) a bunch of the guys at the temple who usually work at the farm and the meadowland reclamation project, managed to get most of them open this fall. Then the heavy rains washed out roads and bridges all over the county, including our little bridges which have stood for the last ten years. Sigh.
While there are regularly scheduled teachings on Sunday afternoons and Thursday nights, the main teaching activity is in the archives and online. Jetsunma is very active on Twitter, where she has something like 30,000 followers, and the teachings that have been buried in archives and only viewed in video form are now getting edited and posted to her blog. A few students are involved in that--and it's hard editing, going from an informal oral presentation, to formal written work, while keeping her voice and shortening it to blog length. I tried, and I would make headway but get stuck after a few pages. My brain would just click out. A student out in California does the daily Astrology posts, while there are also teachings from other Lamas in our tradition ... there's an ongoing teaching on Tara that I need to catch up on. I do appreciate the convenience of having the teachings available online.
Unfortunately, an ex-con with a grudge has decided online is a legal gray area where he can attack Jetsunma and the temple. He and dozens of his sockpuppets sent over 8,000 nasty Tweets attacking her, our lineage Lamas, the monks and nuns, the temple ... and me, too. Although I don't care what he says about me--defaming teachers however, causing people to distrust them is a spirit-killer. When you destroy someone's faith, you destroy their entire spiritual path.
In the Tibetan tradition, spiritual teachers take a risk when they give profound teachings: they trust the student to keep faith and to practice them. If the student is just lazy and doesn't use them, it affects the health and long life of the teacher. To turn against the teacher and teaching is very severe. So what this ex-con doing to people goes beyond the usual debilitating impact of stalking. In addition, he's been trying to set himself up as a spiritual leader which, whoa, ex-con who's raped his ex-wife and set her business on fire, not what we want out there teaching "Buddhism." He's in jail right now, awaiting trail, so we have a bit of breather, but it's become a landmark court case, setting the stage for how law enforcement deals with online stalking. It's been expensive, and taken a lot of research and investigative work by a number of the members.
Other archiving activities involve transferring twenty-five years of teachings that are in CD form to MP3s, transcribing these teachings, and a slew of other projects Ani Aileen is involved in, such as a documentary and biography of the late His Holiness Penor Rinpoche (the head of our lineage), and a biography of Jetsunma.
There are other projects I'm sure I don't know about. Especially since things seem to just grow organically here, with people asking their friends to help with painting, etc. But yes, there's a lot involved in being part of a large Buddhist temple.