“We still have some good oolong form when the last merchants stopped by, oh, that must have been six months ago, just before winter.” I poured her a cup and she took a sip. “We are Buddhists, you probably know… dedicated to Kuan Yin” .”
“You said that Kuna Yin is the goddess of mercy,” I ventured. “Does that mean you worship her as a god?”
Sister Wei laughed. “No, no, not a god, not a goddess.” She looked past me, as thought scanning a far horizon. “Kuan Yin is…how should I say it…a convenient way for us to think about qi, the original energy. How could we devote ourselves to a formless, bodiless, nameless essence? Impossible! But with Kuan Yin, we are invited to imagine the essence of original Being in the form of a lovely woman, someone when would all love to be.”
I wondered if she saw through my disguise. “Even me?” I asked.
“Yes, Miss Scholar, even you,” she teases. “I have been alive too long to be misled at close range, even with these old eyes!” She laughed, and I smiled, not minding and not fearing that my disguise was a failure.
“That is of no matter whatsoever,” she said. “In fact, gender is of no matter! But that is just an old woman’s opinion. You know, as we grow older, gender differences are not so pronounced. Among babies and old people, what is the difference? Only those who would mate, for a short season fret about yin and yang!”
I had never heard that before. Certainly, there was a ring of truth….
“…Buddha above all else valued compassion,” said Sister Wei. “But how can we be compassionate if we are focusing only on saving our own skins!” I blushed, recalling years of single and dual cultivation, totally focused on my own progress to higher states of consciousness. “No,” she continued, “we must continue our practice, our meditation, untiringly, but stop short of the goal!”
“Stop short?” I asked, incredulous. “But why?”
She poured me another cup of tea.
“We must pray for the liberation of all beings, for everyone, form the Emperor down to the lowliest louse or housefly,” she said. “We take a vow that we will not experience eternal bliss ourselves until each living being has been liberated for the bonds that tie them to the material world.”
“That doesn’t make sense. What is the reason?” I asked, astonished.
"Because we do not exist in a vacuum," she said. "We are all connected, all part of the same celestial machine. Everyone must be enlightened, and those of us close to the truth must use all our resources to lift others up. Otherwise it is like a man who exercises only one joint of his small toe and makes it health, while the rest of his body falls apart and decays. We are not independent, even though, as her, we many live far from the mass of humanity. We are interconnected, and the salvation of all is our salvation."
I was totally blown away. This was a completely foreign concept to me. The idea that we were all part of a universal whole and responsible for helping all living beings to enlightment, even before we saved ourselves, this was too much to bear. It was terrible... and wonderful. It was impossible...and tempting. It contradicted all and at the same time fulfilled a lifetime of practice and cultivation....
Black Tortoise, Red Raven
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vegan
September 2008 
jacqui
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