The Western Quarter

There is a wooded hill directly behind my house occupying about twenty acres and rising a hundred feet or so above the valley floor. The slopes are covered in trees. Three paths lead to the top; one on the north, one on the south and one on the east. The center of the hill is grassy, open and park-like. To have access to such a place, which is bigger than many urban parks and far more secluded is a good dream. I moved here to get my family out of the crowded, spiritually sterile and criminally overpriced suburbs of New England. Nineteen years ago, after having lived on this land for a year, my sons helped me begin tracing a circular path through the woods around the crown of the hill. At first they just followed me as we shuffled our feet and kicked leaves out of the way. Then we raked and set up rough little altars that were generally oriented in the cardinal directions and sat a little metal Buddha statue on each one.

Four years later, after a lightning bolt struck the northern altar and burnt it to the ground, my good neighbor Rigdzin replaced the old stumps with a simple slab of sweet cedar laid across cedar posts. The ladies sewed altar cloths in bright solid colors, one for each of the four directions. These cover the wood and are replaced about once a year. Gradually, each altar was outfitted with an incense burner, a bell and dorje, prayer flags, a conch, flowers, a turtle shell, a bench and many other offerings.

According to the Vajrayana mandala, spring is associated with twilight and the western direction so today I sat on the bench before the fire altar at sundown. Two tall oaks, one red and one white, frame the seat. A small mossy circle around the altar and bench has been raked free of leaves, but we are in the woods. A fair mixture of oak, hickory, poplar, and tupelo with white flowering dogwoods illuminating the understory. The land falls steeply away into a dark valley toward the creek before quickly rising again. Another heavily wooded hill of the same height rises a few hundred yards to the west with trees so tall that even here on the crest of the hill, I feel as if I am still in a valley; the density of the wood and spring foliage conspire to raise the horizon so that everyday fewer beads of orange solar fire bleed through the new growth.

The bench I sit upon features a large blood red triangle bordered by a two small disks, one red and one white, symbolizing sun and moon. The western altar is associated with the element of heat and illumination, so the fading cloth and tattered prayer flags between the trees are all shades of red. Amitabha, the Buddha of Infinite Light holds a bowl of immortality nectar and Guru Padmasambhava sits before him, brandishing a dorje vertically before his chest, the Diamond Axis which does not change or die. A chubby Hwa Shang lounges and laughs.

Offerings include two perfect flint arrowheads possibly fashioned by Chickasaw hunters discovered in local fields which echo the triangle shape. A shiney black core of obsidian from the highlands of Guatemala , a dense igneous stone from the top of a 13,000 foot volcano, lava rocks from New Mexico, sandstone from Canyonlands in Utah, a delicate conch with a good sharp tone from the Gulf of Mexico, a clear finger of crystal emerging from a fist of white quartz with a few smooth red stones from the Colorado Rockies, various shells, beads and many crystals.

This is the dimension of the lotus, the blessings of the ever youthful Padmasambhava, who along with Great Silent Shakyamuni, is considered an earthly manifestation (nirmanakaya) of Amitabha. According to Indo-Tibetan lore, the natural beauty of the peacock's tail is a result of her ability to consume poisons. During this dusk of transition from cold of longest night to heat of longest day, things are seen in an ever new light. The heat and energy of desire is transformed into discriminating awareness wisdom. The true nature of perception is revealed as infinite light.

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Along with the Mahayanist expansion of the buddhist sangha to include layman in the common era, there also evolved an arsenal of upaya (skilfull means) including the use of celestial bodhisattavas such as Avalokitesvara as a devotional focus. The tantric cartography of these principles gave rise to the double-dorje mandala associated with the peaceful deities of the heart center.

One of the earliest forms of such devotional worship and focus in Buddhism was the cult of Amitabha. The Buddha of Infinite Light and his retinue occupy the western quarter of the mandala. Some aspects of Amitabha's qualities may have originated in Iran where prior to the time of the Buddha, the Zoroastrians had developed the HOMA ritual. A sacred barbecue was combined with the use of a vegetable intoxicant. With the coming of the teacher Zarathustra, the use of the sacrament was criticized and associated with moral excesses. His popularity and the politics of the day led to abandoning the psycho-actives at least at public gatherings, but they kept the barbecue ritual central. The energy of the teacher's physical presence and spiritual influence around a communal meal was to replace what in some circles, had degenerated into the obscuring stupor of mundane intoxication. The terms homa and the soma (of the rishis), are cognate.

If not earlier, the Zoroastrian strain of the fire puja practice eventually migrated across the Hindu-Kush with the Parsis around the same time that Padmasambhava was visiting Tibet. It is likely that both he and they were fleeing Islamic oppression. India has had contact with 'lands beyond the Indus' since the times of the Mahabharata (5th c. BCE) and fire rituals were old hat, and were even performed by Brahman priests at the time of Sakyamuni. The Buddha taught his listeners the inner meaning of such ancient practices and openly criticized the superstitious, corrupt and spiritually inefficient rites of the old tradition and the caste system in which it operated.

The Western Pureland tradition blossomed on China's Mount Lushan in 402 and the mantra of Avalokitesvara, a bodhisattva in Amitabha's retinue, was chanted by the Tibetan King, fifty years before Padmasambhava came to Tibet Over the centuries since the Buddha's passing, various sacred forms had evolved to help practitioners recall the teachings and to invoke the spiritual presence of the teacher. But it seems that the actual practice of buddhist fire pujas began after Padmasambhava began working on the construction of Samye, the first monastery in Tibet. Originally, it was the smoke from burnt offerings which carried the essences to the host. The fire puja was intended to pacify demons both internal and external, obstructing worthy efforts. Padmasambhava had very likely been exposed to both Zoroastrian and Manichaean (with its legions of devils) teachings in his homeland and possibly adapted elements from indigenous Bon shamans as well.

An interesting note on the possible geographic location of Oddiyana, long assumed to be in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, although supportive archaeological evidence does not yet exist;

According to the late H.V. Guenther in Wholeness Lost, Wholeness Regained, "There is no evidence for either Alexander Cunningham's or Giuseppe Tucci's identification of Uddiyana with the Swat Valley in Pakistan. On the contrary, all the evidence points to Central Asia south of the Aral Sea. What they overlook or deliberately ignore is the unanimously accepted tradition of Padmasambhava's birthplace being associated with a lake and the overwhelming frequency of the ending, -ana in Central Asian place names, for instance, Sogdhiana, Drangiana, Ferghana, and so on, and even the name Urgensch (see Edgar Knobloch, Beyond the Oxus, p. 73). It therefore seems to be more reasonable to connect his birthplace with Sogdhiana, situated around Lake Aral, and to take note of the fact that the Sogdhians were highly educated people whose religion "was a synthesis of many creeds and currents, incorporating elements of Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Buddhism, and Christianity, together with Greek and Indian mythology. Trade with China was entirely in their hands and their outposts and settlements were scattered practically all over Chinese Turkestan" (Edgar Knobloch, Beyond the Oxus, p. 54). This synthesis, if not so say, syncretism is quite evident in Padmasambhava's own writings. It is more than likely that, when the Sogdhian civilization was crushed by the Arabs, he came as a "refugee" to Tibet and, in order to protect his relatives, who were left behind, declared himself to have neither a father nor a mother.

Mississippian Era Mud

The earth is still very alive. Early this morning slipping outside and pissing in the overgrown grass before spreading a cup of bird seed on the little wooden platform. Mowing late this year and offering free brunch has attracted more birds than usual. A Rose-breasted Grosbeak couple has recently nested in the neighborhood. I came back inside, turned on the 'puter when Dechen leaned over the railing above and asked if I'd felt the earthquake. Really? I hadn't felt a thing. She awoke at 4:37 a.m. with the bed shaking, the rod iron design on the wall above her pillow rattling. She wondered if the roof was going to blow off from a low pressure cell, (not an uncommon feeling around here) and then realized it wasn’t a storm at all, maybe density waves from helicopter blades? Recognition that the entire house was moving gave rise to a transcendent sense of place. She was feeling the release of great pressures deep in the earth's crust in a fault zone associated with the New Madrid earthquakes of 1812. Turtle Hill rises about 200 miles SSE from the epicenter 7.2 miles below the Wabash Valley of southeastern Illinois, but the shift woke her up. Tenkar felt it too, thought it a hellacious wind and drifted back to sleep. A harmless earthquake is a bit like a good entheogenic opening; a powerful reminder that things are not as solid or permanent as they may appear.

I was fast asleep for this one and have not experienced a good temblor for nearly thirty years. We were living in the hills above Lake Atitlan in Guatemala experimenting with soybeans and amaranth. In nearby Nicaragua, Sandinista Rebels had recently deposed the intolerably corrupt second generation dictator Anastasio Somoza. An electric surge of emotion accompanied this news as it spread through the highlands with the poor in good humor and the rich sweating new fear. The ongoing civil conflict in Guatemala was about to enter its most violent years. Tenkar was pregnant with Zoe, our third child. I was digging a hole for an outhouse. Progress stalled in the subsoil, where a layer of highly compressed volcanic clay required an initial breakup and loosening with a pick before filling buckets with chunks of tal-petate to deepen the hole. I was on my knees in the rubble a few feet below ground level, filling a tin when a wave passed which seemed to turn the ground to jelly beneath me, lifting and dropping one knee and then the other as the earth rippled like a snake and folks came tearing out of the main house hollering.

As the unquestioned abstraction of a solid earth persists in spite of the occasional quake or gamma ray blast, mind tends to casually equate a reality and stability to objects they do not possess. Basking in the seeming permanence of life, paying easy homage to idols of worldly happiness and counterfeit spirituality, the worship of fabrications, the fruit clinging to a seed of assumed existence; the separate self located within the infinite multiplicity of a world machine. We do not refer to real objects but deal in psychic artifacts, relative classifications of phenomena, manufactured according to user needs with no real borders; adopted and abandoned at will. Mind looks to relations and things, rituals of seeking through knowldege, friendships and possessions -- for keys and fulfillment, clinging to familiar forms and habits, reference points to continually recreate and identify a center of control, to re-affirm a sense of self-existence.

Inseparable from all of that, Mayapple groves simply appear on the lower slopes of Resistance Ridge and tulip poplars climb straight up toward the clouds. An old bearded friend who favors a beret lives up top, his movement and conversation hidden behind a thick grove of dark green bamboo. It is the same way on this side. This great hillside mass of organic silence and resistance between us offers vision and privacy and most years, hosts the play of barred owls.

Dechen, Tenkar and I walked further up into the hollow this afternoon, past magnolia, down the road below unimaginably pink redbuds afloat in the understory, an intensity long natural to this forested place, nameless hollow in these low hills of southern Tennessee. The gray gravel path runs beside a thick mat of watercress thriving in a spring called virtue. Further up red road identifying leafless trees by bark alone hackberry, sycamore, sweet gum, cherry and beech growing down out of small islands in multi-braided creek. The path leads around the biggest white oak on the land curving upon a ledge, creamy narcissus looking civilized among old foundation stones where the blacksmith's family settled long ago. Small pale yellow-green flowering dogwoods tweaked contrast under overcast skies at catkin time, a thousand baby junipers showing promise, chickweed, purple phlox and coils of fiddleheads laughing on mossy paths with a dozen other kinds of wildflowers blooming everywhere through the woods transforming clear light above into multi-color life below before the canopy mosaic fills in warm green summer shadows. A lizard scampers up a drain pipe and two black snakes, one coiled with head lifted and tongue flickering in bamboo, another gliding across dry leaves as we pass through a scattering of deer bones. "A charnel ground," I mutter as satin gray slithers off into a brush pile.

Descending out of the woods toward the soft dirt around the edge of the pond we come upon plenty of deer tracks. As beautiful and attractive as such open places can be, the water hole is notoriously dangerous. Nobody but human beings and their dogs drink at ease here. Dechen calls me over to look at a large footprint and what certainly appear to be bobcat tracks. They usually walk with their claws retracted so this one must have been on the move. First time I've seen those in these parts. I’ll bet I know what he had for dinner.

Bobcat track next to deer hoof print in soft Mississippian era mud (shot by Tenkar). According to Wiki, "The Bobcat's range does not seem to be limited by human populations, as long as it can still find a suitable habitat; only large, intensively cultivated tracts are unsuitable for the species. The animal may appear in backyards in "urban edge" environments, where human development intersects with natural habitats."