Portrait of a Circumambulator
It was sweltering hot out there in the blinding sun-smacked whiteness of the Great Stupa, so some of us were observing from indoors. I was in a coffee shop, very near but in the blessed shade. Next to me, sipping and talking on his cell phone that was cradled in the crook of his neck while he adroitly kept telling the beads of his mala, was a monk in his monastic robes. There were also some of us who had no idea of doing anything but what they had come there to do, and that was to circumambulate the stupa. This lady was one of those. Now and again she stopped to prostrate, and then she would disappear for a while out of sight on the far side of the circle, and then here she would come again, absorbed in her devotion, sidestepping tourists, completely intent.
As a Buddhist, I am so lazy I am sure I will be coming back for too many lifetimes to count before I am enlightened, but at least in my travels something has rubbed off on me from those whose discipline and dedication is single-minded and sincere as the sunrise. SARVA MANGALAM
23 May 2020
Texas Jim
Photographed at the Great Stupa of Boudhanath, Nepal
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