Back to the Samye!

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           I brought me netbook thing down here and I've told myself it would be far simpler if I meditated all morning and most of the evening, but wrote for a bit in this cafe during the slow time for meditations, which for me is about three till five in the afternoon. But I'll probably just meditate during that time, as usual.

           I guess I stopped weeping for a wee while every day at the start of October, so I'm well over the worst of the grieving, and I've now got to settle down and find out what I want to do with the rest of my life. The Domestic Bliss's estate hasn't been settled yet, but once that is done ....

            I've been playing the guitar most evenings recently. Before I was living on my own, I hardly played it at all. This is partly because I could never get it in tune (now I have one of those electronic tuners) and when I did, someone would always walk into the room. I don't play my guitar in front of people, which is lucky for them.

            Now that I come to think of it, I don't know anyone else who plays the guitar now, or anything else. This is despite the fact that most of the folk I know were the progeny of the evil bourgeois, and you would kind of expect them to be sent to piano lessons when they were young. Anyway, there's even someone I know who claims to have perfect pitch, but can't play a note on anything.

            I realised there was not much point in me investing my life in music when I realised I couldn't tune the guitar. I have a terrible sense of pitch, but this did not prevent me from learning to play the guitar a bit. I've been playing it enough in the evening these days to miss it down here.

            None of my friends being able to play a musical instrument of any kind at any level should have alerted me when I thought they might be interested in meditating and getting into the bliss. Learning to meditate isn't all that different from learning to play a musical intrument.

             I guesss being brought up among the evil bourgeois makes one think that one is born to be comfortable. None of them, as far as I know, have ever learnt to do anything outside school unless they were getting paid for it. All that marching up and down they're subjected to as children .... no, they're just lazy basturns. Born to be comfortable. Dearie me.

             Anyway, I guess the reception will be open now, so ....

Back to the Diggings!

         Someone bought a copy of Alma Mater this week. This doesn't happen every week, but books like that are what makes Kindle and such like special. It took me six years to write it in all, but I never sent it out to publishers for one reason or another. But you can get it on Kindle for 77p!

         The last photie is of the last batch of potatoes to come out of the allotment this year. Kerr's Pinks, I think. I didn't plant or grow these. They arose spontaneously in the composty spot.

          The second photie is of the soup I made a few days ago. From the allotment, it contains tatties, onions, turnip, cabbage, kale, brussel sprouts ... plus broth mix and beans from the shops. Having sampled some deep fried green peppers from a sushi joint last Wednesday, I've decided home made soup and breid is the way to go!!

Andre Migot. Candler. YOung-Husband

          Due to staying down at the Samye Ling, and the Holy Isle earlier in the year, I've had access to some old and, no doubt, out of print books about folk exploring Tibet. I've read about six or seven though I can't remember all the authors or titles.

           The most sympathetic books seem to have been written by the French. Andre Migot's "Tibetan Marches" is particularly good. It was published in the 1940s. The boy was trying to get to Lhasa when Tibet was the forbidden land, and he didn't make it. But it is a wonderful account. The best thing about it is that Migot becomes a Kagyu (like me!) and has a real interest in the culture of the people.

           The joe who acted as the interpreter for the Young-Husband expedition by the Brits to Lhasa in 1903 is quite good as well, O'Connor, I think. He'd learnt Tibetan and obviously deeply regretted the massacre of the Tibetans at the Hot Springs.

            A better account of this is written in The Unveiling Of Lhasa, which is by a Daily Mail correspondent, Edmund Candler, and  very well written, especially considering the circumstances. ..."written mostly in the dry cold wind of Tibet. often when ink was frozen and one's hand too numb to feel a pen." Unfortunately, you can see all the justifications for imperialism shining through. He says to one point that the British are more evolved than anyone else!!

            The Tibetans had built a defensive wall across a valley and the British forces (Indians, Gurkhas, etc among them) just walked up to the wall. They were supposed to only return fire and the Tibetans didn't open fire. When they'd walked up to the Tibetans and crossed the wall and surrounded them, the Tibetans were supposed to give up their arms. Candler points how how this part was bungled, shots were fired and then the British forces mowed them down, just as they mowed them down whenever they encountered "natives" with great courage but primitive armaments.

            Candler is unable to give an explanation as to why the Tibetans started to walk away as they were getting massacred. They didn't run. They walked.

            The magic charms didn't work against the British bullets. Both the French and British accounts of Tibet paint a picture of a place that was completely medieval. Nobody washed. There were no wheeled vehicles at all. Most of their beliefs to us are superstitious crap, such as illness being caused by evil spirits. They thought the earth was flat and shaped like a shoulder of mutton, or that's what one lama told O'Connor, the boy who interpreted for Young-Husband.

             The interesting thing about Andre Migot is that he realised something else was going on here with all this juju about gods everywhere, magic pills and whatnot. I think folk like moi need to cherry pick our way through this stuff. What's useful and what's not? I'm not interested in what I can't see and don't know, but there is something wonderful about Tibetan buddhism. I don't care what anyone believes or thinks, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and some of these joes and josephines really know how to meditate.

             This is my first day off smoking after smoking for six days. I'll be fine so long as I can keep the too dumb to meditate at arm's length.

No More Open Graves!

          I really enjoy drinking. Sometimes I think it would be nice to go to a pub on a Saturday afternoon, place a few bets on the horses and have three or four pints of Guinness. Or sometimes meeting someone in a bar around eight o clock and having a nice chat, a few pints, and getting home around eleven still compis mentis. But the actuality of drinking these days fills me with despair. It's the usual story. It's three o clock in the morning and Brian Wilson is trying to flush your head down the toilet. Or Poisonous is pouring vitriol into your ear along with glasses of brandy. It's got to stop. I'm not having any more ruined mornings!!!

          So I've decided to take the advice of One Chopstick Harry, who knows all about buddhism, and said buddhists don't drink. I'm not really a buddhist, but I'm not going to drink either, at least not with Brian Wilson or Poisonous. In fact, I'm not going to drink with anyone except me.

           You can hide from hangovers in the bliss, but it's not as good, and you don't settle because your nerves are frayed. Without the hangover what a time I would have had this morning!! I know what I'm missing.

            In the afternoon I went for a walk round the Botties. The sun shone for a while and the colours were sometimes gorgeous. Then I went over and meditated on the bench in the allotment with the sun shining on my face and my newly bare scalp. I ate some raspberries.

       

Random photies

          Someone told me the gas had come out of the viewfinder of the camera, so that's why I can't see what I'm taking photies of. Doesn't matter. I'm no getting another one!

          Amazon sent me a tenner today. That's about ninety quid so far, but I must admit I was a bit surprised since the sales never got back to where they were before I went to the Holy Isle at the start of the year.

          The play is coming along so very well! I really like working with dialogue and I can do that for an hour or so a day and make real progress. Great.

Really Starting Now!

          I started digging the allotment this afternoon. The smudged photie is supposed to be of raspberries. Of course, since you can't see through the viewfinder anymore, who knows what you're taking photies of?

          As soon as I post this, I'm going to start re-writing Jock Tamson's Half Hearted Transformation. It will now be called Samsara. God knows what it was supposed to be about before , but now it's going to be about the results of selfish motivation in a tranformative, almost revolutionary social context.

           It was originally written with the stage in mind, but I'm going to cut it down to forty five minutes from an hour and a half and try to have radio in mind, though I don't think there's any chance of me getting anything on the radio. It's only twenty odd years since I wrote stuff for the radio and they probably won't have forgotten about me yet!!

            Today is the end of mulling stuff over. I'm going to try and cut the first twelve pages down to four.

Start to write again!

          I really stopped writing with any serious intention about six or seven  years ago, when I got an agent. I thought getting an agent might mean I could hustle him my old books and then I could concentrate more on meditating. Then Dave become my agent about three years ago and ....

          I went to Costas yesterday and read the notes for the play, the ones I made a month or so ago. So I'll see if I can get it down from one and a half hours to forty five minutes. This will give me something else to do. I've got lots of time to do it in these days!!

Awful Shame!

          The photies are of a wee shelter down by the river. I like sitting by the river when I'm down at the Samye Ling, but it sometimes rains. Over the last nine days or so, I started sitting in the wee shelter rain or not. No traffic noises. Just natural sounds really. The river.

           The first time I stayed overnight at the Samye Ling, in 1988, I was speaking to one of the guys who worked in the office about writing The Real McCoy, a radio play, over lunch one day.  I told him I wouldn't have written it if I hadn't started meditating. He wanted me to have a chat with Dr Akong, the guy who was in charge of the place because of this. He said I should call him Rinpoche. I asked what that meant. He said Precious One. I said why should I call him that. He said it's just polite. I didn't, as it turned out, call him anything.
           The Domestic Bliss's brother had been down there before me and told me he'd spoken to this guy and found him to be crabbit, but I jokingly thought to myself that maybe he didn't know how to speak to a Living Buddha and I'd have a go.
            We are the northern ice warriors and we're not crawling up anyone's arse. All this stuff that gave having a guru a bad name is Indian, hindu. It's devotional. It's servile and I really don't like it. I don't think it suits our temperament. We're all Jock Tamson's Bairns in this neck of the woods, as far as I'm concerned, and that accords with my kind of buddhism. Everyone has a buddha nature, and it's just that some of us have realised it more than others.
             He asked me if I'd come up from London, and I thought that's cool, he's not clairvoyant anyway. I told him I'd come from Edinburgh. He got up and walked about in this dowdy, dingy shambles of a manor house front room and I told him I was pleased that I could be there and not smoke fags since you're not supposed to smoke there. (You can, down by the river. I didn't know that, just as well!) He turned from slowly walking towards the window and gave me this really strange popeyed kind of look, which was a bit weird, but I ignored it. I told him I was pleased he'd come to Scotland and that was that.
             I must have a fine conceit of myself. I'm not impressed by famous people and I didn't know who he was. I only really knew much about him when I read Born In Tibet by Chogyam Trunpa. I'd avoided reading this because of Chogyam's future career. If anyone was mad, bad and dangerous to know, but what do I know? The Chogy boy displayed all the signs you are supposed to when you die apparently. Days and days with the heart still warm and all. I only read Born in Tibet this year. Still, drinking yourself to death is okay if you're Brendan Behan, but a Rinpoche ....
             When Chogy left the Samye Ling, it was down the Dr Akong. After a while, his wee brother got himself sorted out and became the Abbot. Being from here, I thought he was the man.
              I got interested in Tibetan Buddhism by reading Anagarika Govinda. One of his books is The Way of the White Clouds. His guru was Tomo Geshe, a Tibetan he met when he was at a conference as a Theravadin monk. There was an abbot in that monastery where Tomo Geshe stayed, after spending twelve years meditating in the wilds, but when it came to giving initiations, Tomo Geshe got wheeled out. This was the kind of thing that was happening at the Samye Ling. I had four empowerments there and they were all given by Dr Akong.

              After speaking to some of the nutters who washed up around the fringes of the Samye at the time, I was happy to go down there and speak to no one. I wanted a place where I could practise meditation and would check in with The Gatekeeper (Jurme) and not speak hardly to anyone else till I left, maybe a week later. I loved it. Nobody asked you any questions. You were left alone.

             I took refuge with his wee brother and waited to see if the meditations got any better. One day I was sitting meditating in the temple when this ceremony started up. Dr Akong was giving refuge. During his wee talk, he said you didn't have to get a new name, etc., and since I just happened to be sitting there, I took refuge with him. This should give you some kind of karmic connection. The only other person I've taken refuge with is the wee nun on the Holy Isle.
 
            One night about seven or eight years ago, he gave a Medicine Buddha initiation in the Royal College of Physicians here in Edinburgh. Beautiful setting, beautifully set out. He was a Medicine Buddha man first and foremost, I think. After that, I started using the Medicine Buddha instead of Dorje Semper, which is the deity yoga juju I was supposed to be doing at the time. Loved that night. I'll never forget it.

             One day I was down there with the Domestic Bliss at an initiation and she said she'd take a blessing, which you can go up and get if you don't want the initiation. So there's a big line of folk for this as you wait to go passed the man and get the blessing and all. Folk have got the white scarves to hand over and all that, but we're not doing any of that. I was very surprised that the Domestic Bliss was going forward to get a blessing at all. He's sitting there on the throne thing and as we are just about there. She's standing in front of me and just as he came to the part when he was going to bless her, I shouted out spontaneously, mentally, Give her mine as well! He suddenly kind of jolted and stared at me for a moment and then went on ...

             Warm, unassuming, unpretentious .. he just went about his bodhisattva business. .

              Scotland has never had an immigrant like that before. It says something great about our karma that we got him at all. I almost missed him. I'm gutted for the folk who knew him for what he was. It's just dawning on me what a disaster this is for us and we don't even know it.

               We're like snow slipping off a dyke. Shame to waste the time, but I'm going to get drunk and stoned now!