The Hidden and the Revealed: Stupa

I never know there is a stupa in our small town.

Yesterday afternoon, i went to Lama Chopal’s place. He just came back from a long trip. The chanting room is under renovation. Lama said, “Let’s go to the stupa."

“Stupa?"

“You have never been to there?"

(i don’t even know there is a stupa in our small town!)

So we went–four of us.

We drove, in a sunny afternoon in the fall. We passed the highway, went on a small crooked road, reached a gated community…and then, here it is.

A small stupa. In our small town. It reminds me of a tiny stupa in the desert in Hsin-Jiang, on the silk road (李黎，新疆沙漠裡的小佛寺).

What described in that beautiful prose is like a miracle–time collapsed, when one was walking into the tiny stupa sealed in sands, over thousands of years. Levi-Strauss once described the magic moment,

 

  “…[W]hen, on one side and the other of the hidden crack, there are suddenly to be found cheek-by-jowl two green plants of dfferent species, each of which has chosen the most favourable soil; and when at the same time, two ammonites with unevenly intricate involutions can be glimpsed in the rock, thus testifying in their own way to a gap of several tens of thousands of years suddenly space and time become one: the living diversity of the moment juxtaposes and perpetuates the ages. Thought and emotion move into a new dimension where every drop of sweat, every muscular movement, every gasp of breath becomes symbolic of a past history, the development of which is reproduced in my body, at the same time as my though embraces its significance. I feel myself to be steeped in a more dense intelligibility, within which centuries and distances answer each other and speak at least with one and the same voice." (Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, p. 56-57)

I myself had a similar experience while reading Vimalakirti Sutra, Ch6, Inconceivable Liberation (維摩詰所說經，不思議品第六). I was reading it in a cold, dark apartment in Cville, in late winter, totally desperate and refraining from seeing others (desperate for reading the Sutra anyway–). Cville is thousands of miles away from where this sutra was transcribed, chanted, and transmitted. But, while reading that chapter, some certain paragraphs, in a winter late afternoon, it was getting darker and colder, and i felt as if i was in a cave in the desert in Central Asia when it was getting darker and colder, and the dust in the cave was beginning to sit, and the workers were about to leave or had already left……

Time and space collapsed. (Maybe my genius classmate would find the bone of my previous body in one cave–maybe it was an animal.)

Very strange experience, like a magic.

 

X X X

I just took the picture when we were about to leave.

I did not have the chance to photo the stupa from a farther place–how it was sitting in a barley field, in a small town, hidden in the hill, in North America, East coast. Sitting there alone, staring at four directions under the sky.

Inconceivable miracles are everywhere, all over the space, and time, and……a lot of time, right beside us. Sometimes time and space collapses in our own palms–we just could not see it as a miracle, but treat it as a junk…