redouble of drums!: and the teachig is?Dranyen wrote: ↑Thu Oct 11, 2018 5:11 pm Hi all- Sorry to hijack the thread, but I have an interesting story about thangka consecration and thought this would be an appropriate place to share it.
This is a local story told to my by my teacher who was from Amdo.
In one of the larger Geluk monasteries in Amdo, I believe it was Kumbum, there was an incarnate lama who displayed very strange behavior. Usually he would be outside without wearing his lower monk’s garment- only the vest and zen.
A monk had commissioned a thangka and wanted to have this unusual lama bless it, that is, invite the deity to reside in the thangka. So the monk and a friend went to the lama’s household to request the consecration, but were told he was out somewhere in the monastery. Of course, the huge monasteries are like cities with streets and alleys, etc.
So these monks went to look for the lama and they spotted him in an alley, minus his lower garment, urinating on the ground. They approached him and said they had gone to his house hoping he would bless the thangka (which they were carrying, rolled up). The lama said “Yes” and told them to open it right there. When they did so, he reached down to the ground and gathered some mud mixed with the urine and flung this all over the thangka. Then he hurried away.
The monk who owned the thangka was very upset seeing how it was new and had most likely been very expensive. He took it back to his room and did his best to clean it up. Later, he approached another, more conventional, lama and asked if he would bless the thangka. The lama agreed but as he was preparing to do so, he looked at the thangka and remarked, oh, it’s already consecrated!
ahaha sorry, i always put my hands in my head in the middle of the story when i read this Drukpa Kunley-like tales, and end laughing. Yes there are saints beyhond conventional behaviour but ¿why are they remembered?
i wuld say that purity is external only, that impurity cannot taint nature (since there is "nothing"), that saints do test selfliberation of phenomena and if there is dependence about their attainment, etc. what do you think? what should we make of this?