![]() In Tibet they found a preliterate society, incapable of reading the texts they had brought. The earliest of these temples were erected in the eighth century, when Padmasambhava and a few other illustrious teachers carried the dharma - the enlightenment teachings of the Buddha - from India. The butter lamps, burning there for centuries, have coated everything with a fine layer of sooty grease, so that the stone floors, like the floors of movie theaters, are sticky underfoot. Like movie theaters, the temples are windowless and dark. What I smelled in Tibet were butter lamps, simple cups of yak butter with lighted wicks, carried by wide-eyed peasants as they walked in silence from one shrine room to the next, or glowing where the resident monks had set them at the feet of gold-painted buddhas. Actually, they smell like the hot buttery goop that’s pumped onto popcorn in the lobbies of movie theaters - as I walk from my car on a clear spring New Jersey evening, past the bank and the vacuum cleaner store, I can smell it a block away. Britney Spears (at the Sundance Film Festival) The movies are weird - you actually have to think about them when you watch them. The Buddha (to his disciples, shortly before his death) Go throughout the land and spread the dharma in the dialect of the people. ![]()
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March 2023
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