Mandarava
My heart so weary!
Time for surrender and trust,
big out breath of love
I truly do not like twisting mountain car or bus rides now. Especially the ones that move too fast, which they seem routinely to do, and where the switch backs are constant for mile after mile and hour after hour. They make me nauseous. They didn’t used to make me nauseous, but they do now. It’s been a few years since this change has taken place, maybe beginning in Thailand on the van rides we took up to Pai from Chiang Mai, a ride that requires the navigation of no less than 760 switch back turns over the course of the three + hour ride. The first of these rides didn’t bother me, but somewhere in the number of such rides we took I began to experience the renowned motion sickness that this trip has become famous for.
In any case, we decided to take such a car ride with our friend Tsultrim in the lovely new car his family has given him, to visit the small mountain city of Mandi, about 2 1/2 hours from Sherabling. This is on the road to Tso Pema, the town of the famous lake formed when Padmasambava (Guru Rinpoche) and his consort and enlightened yogini in her own right, Mandarava, were supposed to have been burned at the stake, but instead the Guru worked one of his more dramatic miracles and manifested a lake to douse any flames, which remains today a holy pilgrimage site for both Buddhists and Hindus here in Himachal Pradesh.
The facts surrounding Mandarava’s history are appropriately obfuscated by lore and tradition and fantasy, but let’s say that she was a princess in the northern Indian area where now Mandi is, said to have been named after her, and a principal consort of the great Guru Rinpoche, working miracles, teaching dharma, peacefully converting masses, etc. In Mandi then there is a small, hidden away shrine to her in the city proper, which requires inquiry of the locals to be able to find, and then a wander down some narrow, cool stone alleys to its unassuming location amidst shops and homes and offices and schools and other small temples.
When we found her there was a locked gate preventing access to the stairs leading down to the shrine itself, but Tsultrim called out with several namaste’s into the open door of the house right beside the shrine. This was a successful strategy since the woman who clearly is the caretaker of the shrine responded and revealed herself in full human form, unlocked the gate and allowed us to descend to the shrine for our respectful prostrations, kata offerings (a ceremonial scarf traditionally offered to deities and human eminences), oil lamp lightings, prayers and sittings.
All of this took perhaps 30 minutes and we were on our way again, having no doubt received the sought after blessings of Her Eminence.
One of the realities about doing this sort of thing here in India which I especially like is the ordinariness and largely informal quality of it all. People are often doing this in some fashion all day long at various small and entirely un-ostentatious temples or shrines hidden away here and there, between trips to the fruit seller or the ATM or the bazaar or the office or…. It’s the integration of spirituality with everyday life that I find so appealing. No big, orchestrated deal, necessarily. Of course, our lives are infused with spirit and permeated with sacredness and holy presence, and of course it is our rightful place to recognize this and to acknowledge and inhabit our humility in the face of it.
We all need refuge.
Drums call in protectors wrath
this trance makes more sense
