If you read my blog you will know I was a Christian hermit and I am now a Buddhist hermit. I started considering becoming a Buddhist nine years ago. I reached the point where it was right to ‘take refuge’ and I did so about two months ago. I am working out how to be a Buddhist hermit as I go along.
I have enjoyed the New Moon ‘sabbath’ and a rest from ‘doing stuff’ like writing this blog. I am now beginning to look ahead. In two weeks, Full Moon and Wesak. This is my first Wesak. I have no idea how to celebrate it but I will improvise something. I have made some Buddhist prayer flags, hung them along a string, and I intend to put this bunting up at the windows and on the walls to create flutter and colour.
Changes. Yet nothing really changes.
Tomorrow I will start making incense. I say ‘start’ because it can take years to make good incense. The incense I start making tomorrow I will not smell before this time next year, at the very soonest. All I will have to go on are some ‘pre-blending’ test sessions when I check the quality of my ingredients, some early ‘blend tests’ to get a hint of what it might be like. After that it gets sealed and stored to let the flavours mellow and mature. Making good incense is like making fine wine. You make not for this generation but the ones to come.
My existing incense was made when I was a Christian and I want to change my recipes. I want to create something ‘Buddhist’, something that reflects the experience of beginning anew at my time of life. I would like to make a ‘Taking Refuge’ and/or a ‘First Wesak’ recipe. I will make it now and put some away for ‘keeping’ and try it again in maybe ten years from now, and remember.
I will be using the same range of raw materials – they tend to be fairly constant for all kinds of incense – but I will alter the proportions I use and I will maybe add one or two new ingredients. I live on the edge of my city’s ChinaTown, near the warehouses. Maybe I will try to incorporate some of my ChinaTown’s ‘tones’ into my new incense.
Changes. Yet nothing really changes.
These run-down streets are often dirty with trampled waste, perfumed with the five spices, the reek of dead animals, birds, and seafoods, sweetness of rotten fruit and vegetables. You see seagulls, pigeons and rats foraging amongst it all, like a scene from the Middle Ages, from Marco Polo, from Dick Wittington. In summer you catch the rancid smell of rodent urine, the amoniac bitterness of guano, the overflow from the blocked drains – the restaurants dumping their cooking fat instead of taking to the recycling centre.
When I first moved here the dirt used to shock me but not any more. Besides, the locals have made a big effort to clean everything up and make it nicer for tourists and customers (and thus, quite incidentally, nicer for residents too). Once upon a time all cities smelt like this. My city is quite old, founded about 1000 years ago. I smell my local streets and I think of the Medieval city. I know it is under my feet because I have seen the archaeological excavations. One of the reasons I live here is because the last recorded hermit lived here in the 1520s (he died before Henry VIII’s ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’ in 1536-41 which ruined the eremitical tradition in England, for which I am grateful) and now I live here, carrying on the tradition. For all I know, if there is such a thing as reincarnation, I am him born again and resuming the old life – it would explain a thing or two.
Would he have been shocked by my conversion from Christianity to Buddhism? Perhaps. But I like to think he would have recognized that we have so much in common as fellow hermits that we would have to be friends, united by a shared contemplative awareness of the unity at the base of all things and a shared familiarity with humanity’s filth and stench which either makes you easy-going and mellow or drives you mad. We would have been mellow together or mad together. I find that a comforting thought.
Changes. Yet nothing really changes.
Blessing
I, Shi Pasang, bless my readers. May my readers bless me.
