A Diary Extract

April 21, 2010.

It was last drowsy evening. The sky had been overcast with the threatening rain-bearing dark clouds, not in shreds but in complete shroud. I was sitting on a flimsy iron chair by the wide opened window of the room on the first floor, the monastic office building, that overlooked the vast front and surrounding compound yard of the main prayer-hall Tsokchen. Well, it began to drizzle, the type I had been familiar with that would drag on for days sometimes, not long before I could somehow manage to get invigorated with the sluggish sense to behold the scenes more closely. The idle downpours thrashed wet-washed concrete floor of the compound and let reveal those tiny potholes filled with puddles out of the case of its being not well-engineered but laid and plastered in rather crude way giving it such askew, but not orderly sloping, surface level. I could also see how lovely it was to follow the alternate tiny dimples formed on those puddles as skimmed over by gently falling drizzles.

And meanwhile the colours celebration of heterogeneous types of umbrellas held by those pedestrians, monks in hurry for teachings, fetching drinking water from the monastic filtered water plant, pushing the loaded trolleys with dinner in steel canisters back home, etc. I was attracted in some way to those colours and patterns of the taut nylon fabrics: the only uncommon one was the darkly checked ones of the smaller compact type held by only a few; the more privileged but not compact are those big multi-coloured ones with long handle shafts; the most common ones are dark of varying sizes. There were twos walking under one small ones, may be the case of urgency to be out or any.

There were also many without any means of canopies above their bare heads braving through the drizzles with fastened speed of paces. Their maroon lower garments Shamthab tucked bit up from ankles revealing their calves and dashing ahead in different rubber slippers and flip flops.

On the other side the two storeys building was accentuated its title by the fancily painted concrete board rested on the top angle of it. Rather greenish but with the play of hue strokes that made it appear like a green landscape, a Tibetan prairie, set as the background of the square classic looking letters Drepung Lachi Office, the board faced toward me. And beyond the building a red and white painted cellular tower bearing dishes of different sizes on the top shot up giving the building another coloration.

Yes, it was the last sip of black strong coffee from the milk-white cheap porcelain cup put on the window sill. Yes, the above could be the observation out of the reverie up to that last sip, but I was back then into my reality: what I had been through since April 14 when I began by writing my cry A Fated Quake and the only solution out of my capability I had found was to dwell deeper inside for the mass sufferers at large. As His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s spiritual guidance recommending every individual Tibetan to recite Lord Buddha’s mantra “Om Muni Muni Maha Muni Yea So Ha”, the timely one for the case of being our only guiding light, I had begun recounting it silently too. Our only guiding light speaks of the case to be etched on one’s, if he is what he claims to be, heart so permanently how Lord Buddha Shakyamuni bestows, as had done so, his groundbreaking spiritually destined but through wishful resignation grace grandeur so sublime on us, of the most ill-fated eons, finding a tiny flame of viability in us fatedly unseen by the other transcendental beings like himself when choosing one’s destined worlds of followers, the true seekers. It’s the noteworthy case why he is the only guiding light of ours, who we are to rely on ever and ever to find the ultimate goal, namely the liberation seeded in us. So why not put him on the top of others here when gripped by such fated natural fury, a herald of major dooms ahead—the validation ticking toward its deadline. Get ready!

And I know I’m not rather crazed this time.