A sketch of our family’s altar in my childhood home. On the top was the Medicine Buddha statue I prayed to for help to stop the rain. On the next level are framed photos of Lama Tsongkhapa, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Green Tara. On the level after that are framed photos of the previous Telo Rinpoche, the life story of Buddha Shakyamuni and Sipa Khorlo, an astrological symbol that all married Mongolian couples have in their homes for good luck. Click to enlarge.

The Kalmyk people came to the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania around the 1950s. Because of the war where they were living in Europe, they left to America for a better life and with them, they brought their culture, their traditions, their dance, their food and their very precious Buddhist religion. After they arrived in the United States, the Kalmyks established five beautiful temples in the tri-state area – four in New Jersey and one in Philadelphia – which they would regularly attend for services. Wonderful, very learned monks and Mongolian geshes lived at and took care of the temples, and they would make sure that every single Mongolian family, which was in the hundreds, would have an altar and a shrine in their personal home.

Like every other Mongolian family, we had our personal shrine and it occupied one specific room in our house which we called ‘manya era‘. In Mongolian, it means ‘Room of the Buddhas’, ‘Room of Religion’, ‘Room of Dharma’ and that room was really for sangha (manya) to stay if they visited but otherwise, it was left empty. Inside that room was a shrine, an offering table and a bed. It was one of my favourite rooms in the house and whenever my parents were not around, I would often go in and offer incense, do mantras and do prostrations. But I would only do it when they were not around because my parents did not like me to be very deep in religion as they were very afraid I would become a monk.

The Buddha’s life story. My mom had this exact same print framed on the middle level of her altar. You can see it in the sketch above. Click to enlarge or click here to download more high res Buddha images.

The altar in our manya era was very beautiful, as you can see from the illustration above. On the top-most part was a Medicine Buddha which was about 12″ to 13″. It was done up in the traditional way with a painted face of pure gold, covered in silks and brocades. My mom told me it was very holy, sacred and powerful; she said that they had brought it over from Europe and that it had come from the Old Country. It now sat on her shrine inside a wooden box with glass and she revered that Buddha very, very much.

Because of what my mom told me, I had a lot of faith in this Buddha. I knew it was Medicine Buddha because one time, when she wasn’t around, I took the statue down and opened up the casing and the clothing to see who it was. That’s how I learned that it was Medicine Buddha. I would always make offerings of tea, butter lamps and incense to the Medicine Buddha when I was very young, and also made prostrations. I did that for years as I was growing up in Howell, New Jersey.

Now, I am not a very early riser. I have never been an early riser, and mornings are not something that I look forward to. I am much more of an afternoon, evening and late-night person. In fact, I have always been a very late-night person and that is when I’m fresh, and awake and alert. Conversely, I am very groggy and have always had problems getting up in the morning even as a child when I attended Land O’ Pines School.

My childhood school, Land O’ Pines. So often I would wake up too late to catch the bus here and have to walk and run four to five miles. Click to enlarge.

You see, it is the school’s responsibility to send buses every single day to pick up the kids and bring them to school. In the afternoon, those buses bring us back home. The school buses had their designated route and on my street, there were two stops for the bus. One was right in front of my house and the other one was down the street. So in the mornings, the school bus would come to our street and stop right in front of my house. About six or seven of the neighborhood kids would gather and the bus picked us up from that spot in the mornings, and dropped us off at the same place in the afternoon. This routine happened every single day for eight years so it was, in theory, really easy – just get up, wash, eat something real quick, grab my books and run downstairs, to the spot right in front of my house to catch the bus.

But for someone like me who has never been an early riser, it was a very big production. Very often, I would get up very late and in order to catch the bus, I would have to run downstairs and grab my books without eating or combing my hair properly. There were many, many, many times I would get up, look out the window and see all my neighborhood friends getting on the bus, waving at me…and off they would go. And there I would be in my room looking out the window, not dressed, having just gotten up and wondering what I was going to do.

This is the exact spot where the bus would stop on West 3rd Street. My childhood home is the white building on the right. I have never been an early riser so I would frequently miss the school bus and have to walk.

There were times when I would dress very quickly and run to the next street to catch the bus. I lived on the West 3^rd Street and the next street down was West 4^th street, West 5^th Street, West 6^th Street and so on; all of the streets were parallel and the bus went up and down these streets to pick up the kids, so I could cut across the streets and catch the bus at the next street or the next one after that. But a lot of times I couldn’t even do that because I got up way too late. I would get up and I look outside and guess what? All the kids were gone so I knew the bus had come. The bus came at 8:30am every day and I would say that at least once every two weeks, I would be late getting up and therefore miss the bus.

There were many times when I missed the bus and I arrived at school late. If a kid is late, the school makes a record of it and if a kid is late many times, then the school informs their parents. I knew that if the school informed my parents, I would be in big trouble so I really could not play hooky and just miss the whole day, I had to get to school. So there were times when the bus came and I missed it, and the bus was totally gone. It would be 8:30am, 8:40am, 8:45am and I had no choice, I had to walk to school. If I remember correctly, my school was approximately four or five miles away and being a young, quick kid, I was very active. I ran and walked very fast and although it was a long walk, I could make it to school within 20 to 25 minutes…if it didn’t rain. Many times however, it would rain and if it rained, it would be very difficult for me because even with the umbrella, I got soaking wet because I had to carry my books and all that stuff.

I was very active, fast and quick as a child, and so the four to five mile journey to school was no problem for me. The only issue arose was when it rained. Click to enlarge.

So there are many times when I would get up late, look out the window and the bus was gone. The neighborhood kids were gone and there was nobody in sight. I would have these panic attacks because with the bus gone, I would be late for school and if my parents found out, I would get scolded and screamed at by them. It was just a big production and it was like this for eight years because I’d miss the bus all the time.

Anyway, this one time I got up, I looked out the window and guess what? The bus was gone. Nobody was there so I had a panic attack. Everybody was gone and it was like, I don’t know, 8:45am, 9am. What I immediately thought was, “I had better go to school.” Even if I missed the first class, I knew I had better not miss the rest of my classes because that would be playing hooky for the whole day, and that was definitely more serious than being late. So what I remember is getting dressed and going into the altar room, and offering incense and light and praying to the Medicine Buddha to make it stop raining. I asked Medicine Buddha to make the rain stop because when I was about to leave for school, the rain was extremely heavy.

Being a young, innocent, unpolluted child with pure faith in the Buddhas, I just believed and had no doubts. You know what they say – when you don’t have doubts, there is a lot more power, energy and blessings. So I went in front of the altar, made three prostrations, offered butter lamps and incense, and I prayed to the Medicine Buddha,

“Please make the rain stop so that I can walk to school and make it for the rest of the day.”

And you know what? Within a few minutes, the rain would actually stop! A part of me was really happy; a small, tiny part of me was a little surprised; but a very big part of me was not surprised because I knew the Buddhas have power. I didn’t think I was anything special that when I prayed the rain stopped; I just thought it happened to everybody because the Buddhas are powerful and they bless everyone.

Anyway, I remember that when the rain stopped, I grabbed my books, ran out of the house, locked the door and started walking. Everything was wet because the rain had literally just stopped; it was very wet outside and because I was walking alongside traffic, from time to time the cars went by and splashed me. When the school was within sight, I was maybe two minutes’ walk away and that’s when the rain gently started again. I ran the rest of the way to school and just as I got inside the building, the rain restarted and went on full blast. Yes, on many occasions when I arrived at the school, or when I was just a few minutes away and about to arrive, the rain would lightly restart and it would come down very heavily when I entered the school. Yet, for the 20, 25, 30 minutes I had been walking to school, there would literally be no rain.

After I arrived in the school, I would go to the principal’s office and report that I was late. I would have to tell them why and they would make a record of it, and then I could go to class. So it was definitely better to be late for the first class than not be in school the whole day; the school’s records would show differently.

My reproduction of my mom’s Medicine Buddha statue. I made this for my beloved Mumu and every day, offerings would be made to collect merits on his behalf. Click to enlarge.

And you know what I just described to you, this happened many times when I was a young kid growing up in Howell. I would wake up late and miss my bus, and the rain would be super heavy when I was about to set off on my walk to school. So I would make an offering of tea, incense and a butter lamp on my mom’s altar and pray to the Medicine Buddha to make the rain to stop. The rain would literally stop. It wasn’t once, it wasn’t twice, it wasn’t three times; it happened many, many, many times until it became normal and ordinary for me. In fact, I never talked about it as a kid because like I said, I thought it was normal for everybody. To me, it was a matter of “you pray and you get your wish”. And since then, I have reproduced my mom’s Medicine Buddha statue and it is approximately the same size and look as her’s. Even the box is the same; I painted the box gold, while the one at home was a goldish orange.

Anyway, I thought I would share this little short story with you because it happened in exactly the way I’ve described and well, I don’t attribute it to anything special about me. I attribute it to my being a young child who was not jaded and did not have adult pollution in my mind which limits your thinking and makes you think things are not possible, when they are possible. At the same time, I had a very pure and strong faith in the Buddhas and when all of these aspects were combined, I think that somehow the Buddhas were able to manifest some kind of help for me, even as a little kid who didn’t want to miss school, because if it had kept raining, there was no way I could walk to school and then I would miss it and it would be on record and I would be in big trouble. In retrospect now as an adult, that was quite amazing. Anyway, thank you and I think it is very beneficial just to have pure 100% unadulterated faith in the Buddha.

Tsem Rinpoche

To read more about my childhood and life leading up to Malaysia, please check out https://www.tsemrinpoche.com/?p=100092

My childhood in Howell, New Jersey wasn’t easy because my parents were totally opposed to me becoming a monk, and wanted to discourage me from pursuing spirituality. However, I had kind cousins and aunties who helped with the situation: https://www.tsemrinpoche.com/?p=8201

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