I am a Mahayana Buddhist. Among other things, but pertinent to this blog, in a nutshell, a difference between Mahayana and Theraveda Buddhism is that Theraveda believe that only monks and nuns can reach Nirvana at death, while middle path Mahayanas believe anyone may reach enlightenment. (Convenient for me, huh?)

So, off our little motley crew went. The "temple" is actually two little houses in a rural area near my town. One house, well it houses the monks, the other is the temple.  As we drove up, a few in our group commented as to the disheveled appearance of the grounds. In other words, the space is not "grand" by any means.

As we approached the temple, a small, dark monk with a huge smile came out to greet us. I explained that our little group was hoping to meditate with them and he said.."oh, yes! That will be good." He is originally from Thailand, and although he kept apologizing for his broken English, he made his points rather well. We followed him in and sat on pillows on the floor. He explained to us that we should have been there earlier, as there were "30 people for meditating!"  He had a small lisp and in a soft voice directed us to "breathe in through the nothe, breathe out through the nothe".  By the way, we all loved him immediately, especially the lisp!

After 15 minutes of silent meditation Little monk began to tell us that he does not ordinarily live at the temple, but is visiting because he is caring for his brother who is dying of cancer. In our flippy, floppy language connection, I stated that we do Reiki. He said, "Reiki?" I said, Reiki. After several of these, I put my hands palms down on a table and he said..."Oh! Healing!" I asked him if we could do some on his brother, back in the house. He gave us a huge smile and said, "Oh, yes!, I be making him Thai soup with leaves and he not on morphine anymore, and he say no more pain."

Little monk directed us toward senior monk at the doorway, who spoke virtually no English, so it was kind of fun trying to translate what senior monk was saying to little monk and then to my group. Eventually we figured out that Sr. monk was taking us for a walk around the grounds while little monk got his brother ready for a treatment.

We walked slowly. He showing us his garden and attempting to pronounce flower names and colors in English. "Pink, I love!" 

Finally we came back to the house, removed our shoes and entered the very modest dwelling. We were ushered into the bedroom where on the small bed was one of the tiniest persons ever. (Senior monk pulled out a movie camera and proceeded to film us...) Sick monk was gray, with a faint smile. We circled around, some of the younger members a bit hesitant to touch, not because of his illness, but, what is proper on monks who don't even shake hands with lay people? Finally I did the, "you do his arms, you do his legs" thing and I went behind him, where he was propped and proceeded to "lay hands" on his back.

An interesting thing happened. We pretty much had our eyes closed, but I am a peeker. As I looked at the faces of our group, they had their eyes closed but were smiling! I was too. What? We are doing Reiki on a guy who is so ready to cross over from this horrible illness, and everyone in the room is smiling. Monk said, "Feel good. Hot".

At that point my heart felt so filled with love that it brought tears to my eyes. Not sad, oh he's dying tears, but, "Wow, THIS is why we came!"

See, we all came to the conclusion that the fact of the matter was not that we came to the temple to meditate. We came to feel compassion, the very point of Buddhism!

We floated out of that place. The monks kept bowing and saying "Thank you!"  but all we could say was, "No, thank YOU!"

Many Theraveda Buddhists believe that when a monk dies, he goes straight to Nirvana. So, although we weren't jumping around with glee, we do believe that our little Reiki session may have helped him with his transition. And that aint bad!

Anyhoo, it started out as an ordinary Saturday.

Sending Love, Light and Laughter,

Star