Mar 2012
Stories in the Rosary
26/03/12 12:33 Filed in: Logbook
I keep fingering the sandalwood beads of a phat chau, a Buddhist rosary. It was given to me, with a smile and a blessing, by Thay Giau Nghia, abbot of Chua Van Diic, a small, colourful pagoda in a cool side road of Nha Trang, on the central eastern coast of Vietnam.
The rosary is used to keep count of the mantras being recited without distracting the mind. The canonical one has 108 beads, a sacred number for Buddhists, but others have beads in multiples of 9, which represents completeness. Mine has 18. Not many, for the number of stories I am reciting.
For example the one about the monk, or rather the Master (which is what Thay means). He and five other brothers will be going on a mission to three tiny islands, two on each one, in the midst of the Bien Dong, the Eastern Sea, as the Vietnamese call the South China Sea. They are known as the Spratly. The Vietnamese call them the Truong Sa. They are a myriad of rocks, coral reefs, islands and islets seemingly sitting on a sea of oil, in some of the most fish-abundant waters in the world, intersected by major shipping routes since the late 17th century. Which is why they are contested by Vietnam, China, Taiwan, the Philippines and Brunei. According to some global strategy analysts, these waters could spark the Third World War.
Six monks vs. one aircraft carrier, writes one blogger (on a curious site by a Vietnamese eye doctor living in Illinois, but that’s another story), with a certain heroic/melodramatic tone, in reference to the mission headed by Thay Giau Nghia and to the Shi Lang, China’s first aircraft carrier, which will be deployed in the South China Sea. For the Chinese it’s a dirty trick. For the Vietnamese it pits the use of force against the force of reason. For the monks, it’s also an opportunity to meditate, as one of the youngest, Thich Thanh Thanh, says: “A monk needs somewhere to meditate”.
This story has now been encapsulated into the first bead on the rosary; it lives there, in its present and perhaps in its future. It has only to come out from that little sandalwood shell with an ideogram engraved on it to be told. Just like many others that try to get their own rosary bead, settling into latent memory before transforming from notes, impressions, references and links into a story.
Almost as though each of these 18 shiny beads were like a rock, a tree or a termite hill, like those in the Australian songlines: singing revives the story that was deposited in that fragment of a parallel world. In the same way, this rosary is a potential songline reconnecting me to a personal Dream Time.
I may need a bigger rosary, the one with 108 beads perhaps. In the meantime, I move on to the second bead and try to feel who is there and what they are telling me.
The rosary is used to keep count of the mantras being recited without distracting the mind. The canonical one has 108 beads, a sacred number for Buddhists, but others have beads in multiples of 9, which represents completeness. Mine has 18. Not many, for the number of stories I am reciting.
For example the one about the monk, or rather the Master (which is what Thay means). He and five other brothers will be going on a mission to three tiny islands, two on each one, in the midst of the Bien Dong, the Eastern Sea, as the Vietnamese call the South China Sea. They are known as the Spratly. The Vietnamese call them the Truong Sa. They are a myriad of rocks, coral reefs, islands and islets seemingly sitting on a sea of oil, in some of the most fish-abundant waters in the world, intersected by major shipping routes since the late 17th century. Which is why they are contested by Vietnam, China, Taiwan, the Philippines and Brunei. According to some global strategy analysts, these waters could spark the Third World War.
Six monks vs. one aircraft carrier, writes one blogger (on a curious site by a Vietnamese eye doctor living in Illinois, but that’s another story), with a certain heroic/melodramatic tone, in reference to the mission headed by Thay Giau Nghia and to the Shi Lang, China’s first aircraft carrier, which will be deployed in the South China Sea. For the Chinese it’s a dirty trick. For the Vietnamese it pits the use of force against the force of reason. For the monks, it’s also an opportunity to meditate, as one of the youngest, Thich Thanh Thanh, says: “A monk needs somewhere to meditate”.
This story has now been encapsulated into the first bead on the rosary; it lives there, in its present and perhaps in its future. It has only to come out from that little sandalwood shell with an ideogram engraved on it to be told. Just like many others that try to get their own rosary bead, settling into latent memory before transforming from notes, impressions, references and links into a story.
Almost as though each of these 18 shiny beads were like a rock, a tree or a termite hill, like those in the Australian songlines: singing revives the story that was deposited in that fragment of a parallel world. In the same way, this rosary is a potential songline reconnecting me to a personal Dream Time.
I may need a bigger rosary, the one with 108 beads perhaps. In the meantime, I move on to the second bead and try to feel who is there and what they are telling me.
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