Tuesday, November 15, 2005

In a Pureland

Again I have fallen into the category of lazy blogger, but I think it is ok as no one is really reading these blogs anyway. For me it’s a diary that can’t be lost when my bag gets stolen (yes I’m still cranky about that even though it was nearly 6 months ago!)

Sometimes I’m not sure how honest to be with these things. Do I try and preach, discuss what ever thing I’ve been reading or something that has ‘spoken’ to me. Do I talk about my upcoming holiday, what I did on the weekend, would anyone really care, do I care? Not so much I guess.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned how beautiful the nunnery I live in is. There is a beautiful mountain range that runs behind it, smaller green hills and then some big rocky snow capped mountains. Completely surrounded by graded farmland. When the sun shines here (which is most of the time) the mountains are so clear it looks like you could touch them and you can see all around us in every direction. It really is very amazing.

I often think about how lucky I am to be here, other than being very beautiful this place is like the dead centre of the Tibetan Buddhist universe. I still can’t get over the fact that I live a 5 min car ride from His Holiness the Karmapa and a half an hour drive from His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Recently the regents of the Karma Kagyu have been staying near-by to get teachings from His Holiness (Karmapa) and we were able to go and knock on their doors. I went and had tea with Mingyur Rinpoche! (I even asked him to come and visit us, which he might do at the end of the week)

This is so crazy, these people nearly never go to Australia and even in the states maybe they go once a year but not all together and you definitely can’t just dropped by and visit them.

Earlier in the year a woman I know from Australian came, it was nice to see a friendly face. She had a volunteer job at a very special Dharma centre in the main village which was a really great opportunity, I was almost jealous! However with in a week she e-mailed me to say she was going home, I couldn’t believe it! She had the greatest opportunity to meet with all the visiting teachers and learn so much from the place she was staying in but all she wanted to do was go back to what was familiar, I was shocked.

To me this place really is a pureland and I truly couldn’t imagine going anywhere else, its funny because I get so surprised when people don’t see it the same way. When I left my temple in Australia I was really freaking out because I wasn’t sure if I was doing the right thing but it didn’t take very long for me to know once I had arrived that I defiantly did the right thing.

So this blog is a bit boring probably, sorry about that. The moral? We’ll I guess it’s that the Buddha really knew what he was talking about when he said that everything is a reflection of your mind, EVERYTHING.

I see a pureland and this woman saw a third world country and a lot of mud. I don’t know what else I can say, I guess kind of Ha Ha to everyone else who is living somewhere they hate because they are too scared to change anything.

Now that’s not very Buddhist!