My trip to Bodh Gaya
I am so glad I could visit Bodh Gaya this year with my husband and mother. I have dreamt of it for quite long and when it finally came, it almost tantalized my feeling into something like fluffy pleasantries. It isn’t just the sight of the stupa that stands tall and spectacular. It is because of the weight of truth everyone is trying to look for in that place.
I know, we won’t find truth with a week’s stay there, nor with a month’s or a year’s, if we ain’t quite sure, what we are looking for is truth that Lord Buddha taught us thousands of years before. But, people there are all in deep meditation and prayer. Many are flawlessly making full body prostrations to the stupa. There is nothing else you can hear there but the sounds and music of dharma; of course, there are intermittent noises from the beggars outside. But it also makes us see the truth. It makes us see the unfairness that has born on us because of our past karma. We rarely try to understand it this way though.
We siblings dreamt for a very long time of going there with our parents. We lost our father before this could come true and this heavy reality made us even more determined to go there with Ama this year. This has woken us up from the dream like heaviness we were all sunk into. We always knew life was uncertain and death could come any time but the reality struck too strongly, in fact, too painfully on us when death snatched away our dear father. Though he wasn’t there with us during this trip, I held him in my prayer and I made special dedications for him during my week’s stay in Dorjidhen.
I sat there, looking at life very closely; tears flowed down my cheeks and I thought, I could have done it a long time ago.
I know, we won’t find truth with a week’s stay there, nor with a month’s or a year’s, if we ain’t quite sure, what we are looking for is truth that Lord Buddha taught us thousands of years before. But, people there are all in deep meditation and prayer. Many are flawlessly making full body prostrations to the stupa. There is nothing else you can hear there but the sounds and music of dharma; of course, there are intermittent noises from the beggars outside. But it also makes us see the truth. It makes us see the unfairness that has born on us because of our past karma. We rarely try to understand it this way though.
We siblings dreamt for a very long time of going there with our parents. We lost our father before this could come true and this heavy reality made us even more determined to go there with Ama this year. This has woken us up from the dream like heaviness we were all sunk into. We always knew life was uncertain and death could come any time but the reality struck too strongly, in fact, too painfully on us when death snatched away our dear father. Though he wasn’t there with us during this trip, I held him in my prayer and I made special dedications for him during my week’s stay in Dorjidhen.
I sat there, looking at life very closely; tears flowed down my cheeks and I thought, I could have done it a long time ago.
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