Town making ancient Tibetan accessory

Town making ancient Tibetan accessory

In Tibet, there's a delicate and colorful apron favored by local women known as the "Pulu". A small town in Tibet's south mountainous Gonggar County, Jiedexiu, is often called "land of the Pulu".

People in Jiedexiu had mastered Pulu-making as early as the Tang Dynasty, some 13-hundred years ago.

At first, the people of Jiedexiu only knit Pulu for landlords and noble families. But they would keep excess aprons for themselves. Now, Pulu are sold around the world, and have found fame as a cultural treasure of Tibet.

Awang Pingcuo, head of the Jiedexiu Apron Factory, explains how making Pulu changed his life. He said: "My mother and grandmother taught me how to knit Pulu when I was just a little kid. My family made a living on only farming and we could barely survive. Now I'm the head of the factory. I make 15,000 yuan a year on top of my salary. This is like a dream coming true."

Awang Pingcuo says an order has just come in from the US. He's thinking of building a larger factory soon, to meet the growing demand for pulu.

The local government has also been doing its part to making things easier for pulu-makers. A special street has been set up for residents to sell Pulu to out-of-town businesspeople.

Ciji, Secretary of CPC Jiedexiu Township Committee, said: "More than 80-percent of the residents here work in the local handicraft industry. We have many sales channels that take our products to markets in Nepal, India and Bhutan. Every Jiedexiu family has their own spinning and weaving machine. Our unique handicraft skills are bringing us a better future."

And going into the 21st century, the future of pulu certainly does look bright.

 

A Buddhist Perspective on Compassion

A Buddhist Perspective on Compassion
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Buddha taught that none of his students should worship him, or anyone else -- nor any god or gods or anything else under the sun or beyond it. For Buddhists, the ultimate goal of spiritual practice is to awaken to ones own true nature, which is the nature of a fully enlightened Buddha.
Buddhism offers many different types of mental and physical and spiritual exercises to help individuals move toward this goal of awakening. One form of practice, highly respected by Tibetan Buddhists, is connecting with the qualities of an enlightened being, one who is already awake, as an example and inspiration. 

Various awakened beings are seen as manifesting various superlative qualities of awakened mind. Among the best known are three bodhisattvas, or buddhas of the future -- Avalokiteshvara, Manjushri and Vajrapani. Manjushri manifests supreme intelligence, insight, and wisdom; Vajrapani represents the power aspect of complete enlightenment; and Avalokiteshvara embodies unlimited loving kindness and compassion. Chenrezig is what the Tibetans call  Avalokiteshvara.

We shouldn't go much further in this discussion of Chenrezig as the Embodiment of compassion without being clear about how Buddhists understand the concept of compassion. The following brief discussion of compassion from the Buddhist perspective comes from a dharma talk, The Reason We Practice Meditation, by Venerable Thrangu Rinpoche, a senior meditation master and scholar in the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. 

"The importance of love and compassion is not an idea that is particular to Buddhism. Everyone throughout the world talks about the importance of love and compassion. There's no one who says love and compassion are bad and we should try and get rid of them. However, there is an uncommon element in the method or approach which is taken to these by Buddhism. In general, when we think of compassion, we think of a natural or spontaneous sympathy or empathy which we experience when we perceive the suffering of someone else. And we generally think of compassion as being a state of pain, of sadness, because you see the suffering of someone else and you see what's causing that suffering and you know you can't do anything to remove the cause of that suffering and therefore the suffering itself. So, whereas before you generated compassion, one person was miserable, and after you generate compassion, two people are miserable. And this actually happens. 

"However, the approach [that the Buddhist tradition takes] to compassion is a little bit different, because it's founded on the recognition that, whether or not you can benefit that being or that person in their immediate situation and circumstances, you can generate the basis for their ultimate benefit. And the confidence in that removes the frustration or the misery which otherwise somehow afflicts ordinary compassion. So, when compassion is cultivated in that way, it is experienced as delightful rather than miserable. 

"The way that we cultivate compassion is called immeasurable compassion. And, in fact, to be precise, there are four aspects of what we would, in general, call compassion, that are called, therefore, the four immeasurables. Now, normally, when we think of something that's called immeasurable, we mean immeasurably vast. Here, the primary connotation of the term is not vastness but impartiality. And the point of saying immeasurable compassion is compassion that is not going to help one person at the expense of hurting another. It is a compassion that is felt equally for all beings.

"The basis of the generation of such an impartial compassion is the recognition of the fact that all beings without exception really want and don't want the same things. All beings, without exception, want to be happy and want to avoid suffering. There is no being anywhere who really wants to suffer. And if you understand that, and to the extent that you understand that, you will have the intense wish that all beings be free from suffering. And there is no being anywhere who does not want to be happy; and if you understand that, and to the extent that you understand that, you will have the intense wish that all beings actually achieve the happiness that they wish to achieve. Now, because the experience of happiness and freedom from suffering depend upon the generation of the causes of these, then the actual form your aspiration takes is that all beings possess not only happiness but the causes of happiness, that they not only be free of suffering but of the causes of suffering."

 With this understanding of what Buddhists mean when they talk about compassion, we can proceed to consider Chenrezig as an embodiment of boundless loving kindness and compassion.