7 Day Chan Retreat (禪七) — The Beginning

I’m leaving for the 7 Day Chan Retreat at Dharma Drum Mountain (法鼓山) shortly. I’ve never been to one, so I don’t know what it’ll be like. To list what I know: During the whole time, no talking, no reading, no writing, no complaining, no giving up, but only meditating, meditating, and meditating. Sleeping at our own sleeping bags at 10pm (I think) and getting up and being ready for our first meditation session at 5am. Not your usual “retreat,” but more like a military camp with a very serious goal in mind.

For more information on Chan (Zen in Japanese), please take a look at here.

Taking Buddhism as Refuges (皈依)

Today I got up at 3am (not by choice, but by my jet lag), and started getting ready for today’s ceremony of “Taking Refuges” (皈依). The English term still sounds funny to my ears; it somehow feels derogotory, but it could very well be just me.

If you can read Chinese, the whole ceremony was published at Dharma Drum Mountain (法鼓山).

The main reason driving me to come at this specific time was due to the 7 Day Chan Retreats (禪七), not to become an official Buddhist. However, as I was purchasing my plane tickets at Eva Airlines’ website, its computer system was down for the very first time. I kept on trying to get a departure ticket that was closer to the Chan Retreats date, but the computer system wouldn’t budge. Finally I sighed and selected the date that would enable me to catch the ceremony, the purchase went through. It was a little weird, but that was exactly what happened and I couldn’t explain why.

But, boy oh boy, over 2,500 became official Buddhists today! And there were several hundred of friends and relatives waiting outside of the hall, and over 100 volunteers, and numerous monks and nuns… I’m not too fond of big crowd, and my jet lag and caffeine-free headache and the overhead AC started taking a toll on me…

Finally Master Sheng Yen (聖嚴法師) showed up after all the standard procedure and some proper Buddhist manners have been introduced. We were not allowed to take any photos, so the above one was taking out from DDM’s website. He is well respected, and that is a big reason why so many people showed up today. I was surprised by his sense of humor, because his books tended to be on the dry side. Serious and wise, yes, but dry.

Of course, a lot of people didn’t know what “Taking Refuges” really meant. Tons of Buddhists out in the world, but only relatively few would study sutras. This strange behavior created a lot of weird superstition phenomenon that gave Buddhism a bad name. Well, to be fair, sutras are not easy to study or understand, that I agree. Sutras were written in Old Chinese with numerous Sanskrit “technical terms” to make them almost impossible to understand. However, the new generation of Buddhists are doing their best to “modernize” sutras and make the teachings easy to implemented at our everyday life. The Buddha’s teachings are truly excellent and answer every problem of our modern world, if only if we can get passed the difficult language barrier and get the jewel. If you are not a Buddhist, that’s fine, because Buddha is not a god and he even told us the 33 “heavens” (33天), including all the well-known religions. Like I said, if you can get passed the language barrier, you’ll find that the kind Buddha already told us everything that we ever want to know.

To end this ceremony, everyone got a metal lunch box with vegetable and tofu and rice. Not a great one, but it was a tough job to feed almost 3,000 people all the same time and this was not as bad as I had imagined. (Oh, no, I didn’t put an equal sign between “vegetarian dishes” and “suck”.)

Mentally I didn’t feel anything different though, probably because I knew that I hadstarted changing since the day I took Buddhism seriously. Today it just marked the day as an official milestone, a milestone that I couldn’t have imagined just 3 months ago.

Helen Mirren, tHE qUEEN

Of course she doesn’t look like Helen Mirren!

Her photo caught my eyes as I flipped through the latest Time. I loved her message: I’m comfortable at age 61 and I don’t give a damn about Hollywood’s stupid age limitation on actresses.

I thought that not having to draw eyes would make this one a piece of cake, but the funny angle actually made it terribly hard. (Well, if I used a pencil for a quick sketch, it would be a different story, but I’m stubborn on my training rule.) Her nose is surprising long; I misjudged it and that messed up the rest of facial proportion. I also made boo-boo’s on coloring (the problem of working under the kitchen lights instead of my good Ott-Lite): The first layer of skin color was far too dark, and that made the rest coloring impossible.

I guess that I’ve learned a few lessons from tHE qUEEN.

David, My Man!

Here is David again, my favorite model.

[01/12/2007 Update] David likes it and said, “It’s easier to draw wrinkles, so that’s why I have them. To make it easier for you to draw me. “

Adam, The Dude v.2

I couldn’t make Ileana wanna leave Adam just because of my lousy drawing, so I redid Adam’s portrait. And it was even in watercolor! So there, Adam, you should feel special and loved, and Ileana won’t wanna leave you now (I hope!).

[01/12/2007 Update] Dorothy was wondering when I last saw Adam, because he had lost a lot of weight (No wonder he was not happy with either drawing!). OK, the photo was taken in late November, 2005, so I bet that Adam is a lot cuter and looks like his old self. Adam had better give me a new photo to show the world!

Adam, The Dude

OK, I didn’t do Adam the justice here, and I admit it. The real Adam is much cuter than this one, but hopefully it shows his playful spirit.

Oh, yes, he’s Julian and Nadia’s dad, and now you know where they got their personalities from.

Bruno Cramer as Maigret

“Maigret” is David’s favorite French show, and he has the whole collection with Bruno Cramer as the main character.

Even though the photo on DVD is not clear, the drawing just doesn’t resemble Mr. Cramer at all. The pipe, the hat, and the coat are OK, but the face… He doesn’t have much of a chin or neck, but somehow his nice face doesn’t give you the impression that he really needs to loose 100lbs or more. I don’t know how to handle this type of contradictory yet; hopefully as time goes, this will be less of a problem.