Tonglen

Saturday 3:50 p.m.
I found this story in the kid's section of Stockbridge Library when the kiddo was wee. A favourite.

This chinaman had a horse that he used to pull the plough for his field. One day the horse ran away. Everybody said: What a shame! A wee while later, the horse came back with another horse in tow. Everybody said: Hurrah! Now that he had two horses, the chinaman used one to plough his field and let his son ride about on the other one. The son fell off the horse and broke his leg, and because they didn't have the National Health Service, the son was left with a permanent limp. Everyone said: What a shame! Then the government called up all the able bodied young men and took them away to the war, but had no use for the son with the limp, so he never got killed.

The point is that you cannot tell the difference between good and bad fortune.

Because only me and Jack and few other spam robots come to this blog, I won't have to reiterate my views on tonglen or dedicating merit from meditations to folk. Anyway, I've been dedicating the merit to three folk recently, all of whom had the black spot. Two of them have just had the all clear. Hurrah! One of them is a very nice person and the other a complete rascal.

This is something to do with oncology and the National Health Service and bugger all to do with moi!

The one that's left over would require a miracle.

This boy from Easterhouse was in the terminal stages of stomach cancer one day and the next day he was fine. The Scottish catholics got someone canonised on the strength of that one.

I visited Lourdes twice as a teenager. They have a museum with before and after photies in it. There's a particularly impressive one of this boy with cancer on his tongue ... not something you'd want to see in the mirror every morning ... and then no cancer on his tongue. Voila!

So weird, inexplicable stuff does happen.

The 16th Karmapa died of cancer before he was my age. I used to wonder why he didn't live till he was 84, which a lot of the big shots in this juju tend to do.

If you were a Tibetan buddhist, you'd say that the mind and body are different kinds of thing. Like, the mind has a body and not the other way around. So to them there is a continuum there and who wants to be old anyway?

The 17th Karmapa will probably be in his forties by the time the Dalai Lama passes away. At least, he'll be grown up and will probably become the main man. So the previous one dying when he did might not be such a bad thing after all.

Nobody gets cured of their mortality. You might get cured of one disease and then be stricken by something a lot more horrible, like a brain cancer that causes you to feel totally terrified all the time.

When I was a wee boy, I prayed a lot for two of my family members to get healthy. I was told that God would answer my prayers. Both of them died. Maybe if you are going to pray for someone, you should pray that they are going to achieve equanimity, peace of mind and calmness.

But not many folk are fortunate enough to welcome death.

Anyway, doing tonglen and/or dedicating merit shouldn't do any harm. As I've said before, it will almost certainly help the person doing it.

Today, I was thinking I'd like to start praying or whatever to Saint Teresa of Avila for this. Catholicism seems to fit this stuff better.

This is no Saint Teresa of Avila, Hotboy. I know that, Jack. Even if there was a Saint Teresa of Avila, she's been deid for hundreds of years. Even if she could cure folk when she was alive, she's gone, gone, gone beyond and all that blah blah.

Still, it might not do any harm. Motivation is everything of course. Bound to do me some good to think less about moi anyway!

I've been getting revelations today. When you get revelations what you should do is keep them to yourself because they are bound to be rubbish. Speculation is fun though. When I've finished the next meditation, I may come back and tell the spam robots about The Theory of Everything. But I might not!