Set in Kumbum Monastery, Qinghai, The People’s Republic of China
Prayer 3: As a Gelug Tibetan Buddhist, Praying from Kumbum Monastery,
Xining, Qinghai, the People’s Republic of China
I take a step. I bend down my knees. I kneel down. I genuflect. I lay down. I rise up. I face the sun. I stand fully. I take a step.
I want to be free from suffering. I want to be liberated from hate.
I take a step. I bend down my knees. I kneel down. I genuflect. I lay down. I rise up. I face the sun. I stand fully. I take a step.
I see someone I hate and I feel angry, and this is sometimes my son or sometimes my sister or sometimes my own mother or sometimes a stranger. These are people I hate, but they are also people I love. I pray in order to forgive them.
I take a step. I bend down my knees. I kneel down. I genuflect. I lay down. I rise up. I face the sun. I stand fully. I take a step.
Relationships change, and even if it is hard to speak to the people I love, that need not be my future. I am making an effort to change, and they are making an effort to change, and someday that effort will lead us to the point where we can agree on how we see the world.
I take a step. I bend down my knees. I kneel down. I genuflect. I lay down. I rise up. I face the sun. I stand fully. I take a step.
My land is beautiful, my country is beautiful, it is full of wide steppes even from this step of the monastery I look out and I see the white stupas in rows and the ups and downs of the clay-coloured land and I think of the wheat growing in the fields and the smell of the wool.
I take a step. I bend down my knees. I kneel down. I genuflect. I lay down. I rise up. I face the sun. I stand fully. I take a step.
I will circle this entire monastery. The sun was not up yet when I began. It is now fully up in the sky. Sweat stains my skin, and I refuse to notice it. I refuse to notice the hunger in my belly, the pain in my ankles. I will humble myself and my body and my restrictions. I have nothing in my heart but concentration.
I will take these thousands of steps, just as I have countless times before.
I take a step. I bend down my knees. I kneel down. I genuflect. I lay down. I rise up. I face the sun. I stand fully. I take a step.
I will forgive. I will be happy. I will learn to let go.
The thoughts that were given to me as I undertook this pilgrimage have been given for a reason. Soon they, too, will pass, and new thoughts will come. It’s really as simple as that. Why do I care about the thoughts that were inside of me once? They can be outside of me.
I take a step. I bend down my knees. I kneel down. I genuflect. I lay down. I rise up. I face the sun. I stand fully. I take a step.
This pilgrimage is painful and this pilgrimage fills my body with pain, but in the air of this monastery I feel free of the thoughts which poison my heart and mind when I am elsewhere. When I am on this holy land, I feel the spirits of those who have been here. I take these steps hoping that someday, when I leave and return home, I won’t once again be plagued by my fears and angers and hurts. I have been coming here for decades, and undertaking this pilgrimage for decades, and this day hasn’t come yet, but I have to pray with the faith that tomorrow will be a different day.
I take a step. I bend down my knees. I kneel down. I genuflect. I lay down. I rise up. I face the sun. I stand fully. I take a step.
I pray with full belief in you. I pray knowing full well that someday I will conquer my heartaches.