---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : On the wall over my bed hangs a Tibetan high lama's robe, from the 17th-18th century.
You hung a dress over your bed? Go figure. I bought it from a Tibetan who had managed to escape with it to a Tibetan sanctuary in the U.S. I bought it from him for a song ($500), not only because he agreed to share half the money with the Tibetan sangha-in-exile that had referred me to him, but because he told me a cool story about the robe. It's style -- Tibetan, after the style of Chinese robes at the time -- defines it in terms of time. It's really a high lama's robe from a certain identifiable period of time in Tibetan history (1690-1705); I had that verified by other experts. The person who sold it to me said that his family said it came from a certain monastery, where it was worn by the high lama during certain ceremonial occasions. He would wear it while dancing for them. The dance was a form of transmission meditation -- it was considered to be of huge karmic value to be present during one of these dances. OK, he had me at "a high lama used to wear this robe while dancing for his disciples to get them high." I bought the robe on the spot. But when I got home I remembered my Tibetan history and looked up the monastery in question and discovered the actual *name* of someone who could have occasionally been the visiting high lama of this particular monastery. None other than my favorite character in human history, the Sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso, the Turquoise Bee. It is actually possible that the Tibetan ceremonial robe I discovered and have hanging on my wall was actually worn by my favorite character in history as he performed a dance of transmission meditation to get his disciples high. It's also possible that there may be something to all this "relic" stuff and that something of the "vibe" of a person's bones or the clothes they wore is captured in and emanated by the articles themselves. That would certainly account for what it feels like to put on this particular robe and wear it. Let alone dance in it. https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8629/16644849512_524624a3b5_h.jpg https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8629/16644849512_524624a3b5_h.jpg View on farm9.staticflickr.com https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8629/16644849512_524624a3b5_h.jpg Preview by Yahoo There seems to be something in my psychology that 'likes' those kinds of connexions. Is this a general human thing to want to link together aspects of our lives? You seem to have similar kinds of connexions in your life, e.g., Robert Crumb being a neighbour. Something in our societal brain that maybe has to do with linking to something larger and beyond ourselves maybe? The alpha dog syndrome? The effect can get out of hand, particularly with religion, when you start to attribute magical powers to historical artefacts or replicas or outright fakes. It seems within reason to have nice feelings about things that link together those experiences in life that make us wonder, if it does not get out of hand. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : Although I have never read anything about this practice, I can imagine where it came from -- self-created "holy relics." Religious nuts in Asia were as crazy about relics as their Western counterparts. Think back to the booming business in "pieces of the true cross" and "the bones of Jesus." I personally have seen the supposed skull of Mary Magdalene in a reliquary in a cathedral in the south of France. ( Trust me, she's looked better. :-) Well, Eastern churches a few centuries back were no different than they are today -- they were looking for things to get newbies in the doors so they'd 1) become believers themselves and 2) leave the contents of their wallets there when they left. What better relic than the nearly-perfectly-preserved body of a monk seated in meditation, that they could show off to newbies to convince them their practices were so hot that this guy just went into samadhi one day and never got up. And the thing is, you're dealing with religious fanatics, so there would be no need to *force* the monks into starving themselves to death -- they'd do it willingly just to "spread the faith." This is all just a guess on my part, but if anyone feels motivated to do any research on it, I'd be willing to bet you'll find similar speculations on the part of scholars. In other words, s3raphita, I don't think it's a Buddhist thang at all. It's a "preserve the illusion that our teaching is cooler than it really is" thang. Religious fanatics do this kind of shit all the time. Just think about how many years Tony Nader pretended to be the ultimate purusha celibate because Maharishi wanted him to pretend to be. To do this, he had to lie to almost literally *everyone in his life*, including his best friends and co-Rajas. People will do *anything* in the name of their beliefs if those beliefs have been implanted in them deeply enough.
