W. H. Auden

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

-- W. H. Auden

On this Cold Night

涼冷三秋夜，安閒一老翁。
臥遲燈滅後，睡美雨聲中。
灰宿溫瓶火，香添暖被籠。
曉晴寒未起，霜葉滿階紅。

On this cold night in the third autumn month,

A solitary old man, tranquil and leisurely.

Laying down late after the lamp’s burnt out,

Pleasantly he sleeps with the sound of rain.

As ash lay resting in the stove still warm from the fire,

Its fragrance increases the warmth of quilt and covers.

At dawn, clear but cold, he stirs not –

Frosted leaves at their crimson fullness.

- Bai juyi (772-846)

Potato Bread & "Siu Yoke"

This past Sunday was dreary outside... wet, dark and the first full day of no-more-daylight-savings. So what better to do than to crank up the oven and bake some comfort food! After receiving my first lesson in breadmaking from Lateef a couple of weekends back, I decided to give it a try on my own. With much trepidation (I tend to mess up rather easily when it comes to baking stuff in the oven) but at the same time confidence that Teef was a good teacher, I prepared the "sponge" needed for the bread on the night before (which was Halloween). In a bold move, I decided that rather than making plain bread, I'll venture into potato bread (and there were a few potatoes that desperately needed attention). The bread turned out pretty good - good enough that I'm sharing a couple of loaves with some colleagues. So here are the pics:

After seeming success with bread, I decided to make some "Siu Yoke" (Cantonese for "roasted meat") - roasted pork belly. I did some grocery shopping at a couple of Asian stores in Charlotte on Saturday and bought a couple of pounds of pork belly meat. With pork belly, I usually either make "Tau Eu Bak" (Hokkien for "soy-sauce meat") - braising the meat for a few hours with garlic, cinnamon, soy-sauce, thick soy-sauce, sugar, star-anise and cloves or Siu Yoke. Since the oven is already warm, Siu Yoke was what I ended up making. It turned out ok... nicely fragrant with spices but needing a heavier dash of salt. Next time, it'll be perfect!

Experiments with Breads

Lateef came to visit this weekend. And maybe because he likes making bread, and maybe because I recently had a strange dream about being given a sourdough starter that has been passed down for "four generations" in the same family... my thoughts turn to bread-making! We made two types of bread: Indian fried bread - poori - to eat with the two vegetarian curries I made for the weekend and a regular yeasted bread.

Here are some pictures for your eyes to feast on:

Rolling out the poori dough. These are SO easy to make.

Best part is to see how large they will puff up.

Kala channa ("black chickpeas") curry in front.

Raven Ridge Mountain Sang-Offering

Last Sunday, after teaching "Sunday School" at Davidson College Presbyterian Church I started driving up to Asheville/Marshall, NC. Monday and Tuesday was the 2-day "Fall Break" here at Davidson College and so I was able to go up on a Sunday and not have to rush back to Davidson for Monday classes. I was scheduled to speak at two classes on that Monday at Warren Wilson but mostly, I drove up to meet with a small group of friends to perform a sang-offering - a purificatory-ritual in Tibetan Buddhism involving the burning of juniper, cedar and other incense - at Raven Ridge Farm.

Sang is meant both as an offering of sweet-smells to the enlightened deities as well as a cleansing of spiritual pollution or dirt that has accumulated and "infected" the local deities and beings (i.e. including us, the humans). This pollution (dripa) is the result of negative karma such as the committing of the ten non-virtues, lapses in the maintenance of vows of training. Pollution is also believed to accrue when inauspicious signs or omens appear, certain alignments of the stars and planets, accidental or violent deaths, digging and upsetting of the soil, mourning, cutting of trees and degradation of land and pollution of water. Some of these actions or occurrences have clear moral-ethical implications, some don't. Some are clearly avoidable and best avoided, others are matters mostly beyond our direct control. One way or another, pollution is the result and by performing the sang-offering, it is believed that such pollution (dripa) can be cleansed, sanctified - which is what "sang" literally means.

The Thursday prior to the sang-offering at Raven Ridge Farm marked the 49th day of Duncan's (Mr. Dog) sudden and accidental death at the farm. So a handful of friends drove over from Asheville to rendezvous with me and Kevin at the farm out in Marshall. It was a beautiful afternoon - the drive was uneventful in a nice way. I got there before the others and was greeted by Kevin and the two new calves that the dairy-moms Dana and Willa recently gave birth to. The calves - Zoey and Margaret (named after Kevin and Andy's grandmothers) - were a couple of weeks old and so, so, very cute.

(Margaret is the calf that looks like a fawn)

From among the various sang-offerings texts that were available to us, we selected to offer the famous "Mountain Sang-Offering" (Riwo Sangcho), a terma discovered by Lhatsun Namkha Jikme. The style of the text is very much Dzokchen-based, a tradition that we as a group are not very familiar with. But given the right context and conditions, it is good to expand our Dharma knowledge and practice. Also, given the title of the text, it's appropriate for a practice we were performing on a mountain ridge. This is also the sang text that we used the most during the pilgrimage to Ladakh two summers ago.

The farm was looking real good - a lot of work had gone in recently and the guys are clearly making very good progress. Hens were pecking away with a few roosters strutting around. And the ducks were lazily sunbathing by the pond. The lower fenced-in garden where corn and pumpkin and squash used to grow is almost empty now - ears of crimson corn are hanging in the milk-parlor area drying. So people don't just buy these from the store to create the Fall ambiance for their suburb homes huh? Fancy that! The potatoes that were growing in the upper garden have also been harvested and now in their place are winter crops - wheat and barley, I think? Of all the Fall/Winter yields to look forward to, I'm most excited about the duck-eggs....

And indeed, Duncan has the nicest spot on the whole land. He is now "returning" in the form of a (potentially) gnarly, Black Dragon, Japanese cedar that Kevin and I planted right next to Duncan's body. Kevin selected and gifted Mr. Dog that spot. From that spot, the entire land and beyond can be seen and kept under Duncan's "regal gaze." We gathered right next to the spot and offered our sang there. Up on that ridge looking out into the open space it was easy to "relax in the expanse of reality" and let our self-awareness appear spontaneously and magically as Guru Rinpoché - "the fierce and potent master of awareness, Skull-garland Lotus Lord." And thus we also emanated countless Guru Rinpoché's by intoning oṃ āḥ hūṃ vajra guru padma siddhi hūṃ...

For the basic fire and coals we used blocks of very fragrant, cedar wood harvested from the land. To that we added juniper from different places in Tibet, dwarf rhododendron (very fragrant, grows in the higher elevation in Tibet, no not poisonous like our rhodo... these in particular were from Tsurphu), agarwood/aloeswood from Malaysia, Indian sandalwood, white sage, white artemisia, frankincense, benzoin, osha root (potent!) and barley flour and corn meal. And sprinkles of beer and water here and there, now and then. And some clippings of fresh cedar foliage from the Black Dragon Duncan cedar tree.

"Let these flames fill the entire universe and every minute particle of flame
Becomes an inexhaustible cloud of offerings like Samantabhadra's
Pervading throughout all the buddha-realms!
May these flames, offering-rays of five-colored lights of wisdom,
Pervade throughout the six classes of beings, down to the Avichi Hells,
The three realms of samsara be liberated into the rainbow body,
And all sentient beings awaken into the heart of enlightenment!"

We finished sang around 4pm so that Chris could hurry on back into town as she was going to be interviewed by a local radio station about her recent book (click here to check out her website). The rest of us stayed a little for some tasty sweet tea that Kevin made and of course, for more time and photo ops with the calves.

p.s. calves, puppies and babies all smell the same, in a good way. I think.

(The girls sauntering over to greet Geoffrey's mom who just arrived from Massachusetts)