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Xinjiang
This vase planting journey was made in late June on a trip to see
the 4,000-yr old mummies of the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang Province,
Northwest China. It was a lonely and tricky one. The Tarim Basin is
the eastern end of the Silk Road which crosses Xinjiang Province south
of the Tian Shan (Heavenly Mountains). I saw this trip as an exciting
chance to see the land and archaeological remains of an ancient pre-Buddhist
Kingdom that some Tibetans believe may have lived in the Bön Kingdom
of Shambhala.
And of course, it was a chance to take a Treasure Vase to China..and
hopefully place the first one near this ancient kingdom.
The flatness of the landscape in this area coupled with the fact I
had no one to help me, made it difficult to locate a safe place for
the Treasure Vase. Lake Aiding or Moon Lake stretches for about 200
miles across the bleakest part of the Tarim Basin, at a depth of 160
meters below sea level (see Aiding Lake jpg). This is the second
lowest
place in the World: only the Dead Sea lies at a lower elevation.
After two weeks of traveling through the Tian Shan and seeing countless
mummies and graves, I almost gave up the idea of placing
the vase in the Tarim Basin, no
site
or opportunity had become clear and I thought perhaps I should leave
the vase at a Buddhist monastery in Beijing. Then, one day, out of
the dust at the Thousand
Buddhas Cave tourist site, four Tibetan monks appeared - and I knew
this was an auspicious
sign! Indeed, the next day, when I returned Moon Lake, I saw that
some of the shoreline was cratered by efforts of the local Uyghur
farmers to harvest nitrate salts.
When I saw the chance, I quietly disappeared into one of the craters
near the shore of the Moon Lake and quickly buried
the Treasure peace vase
(vase in crater & edge of crate jpg). During this time in the crater,
I recited the Vajrasattva Mantra ...and the Four Limitless Ones to
wish great happiness to the beautiful people (Uyghurs, Buddhist ruins
jpg) who live
in this part of China and are descendants of Mahayana Buddhists who
later became
Muslims when the Mongols invaded about 1000 years ago.
The Treasure Vase was placed at the edge of Aiding (Moon) Lake,
about 50 km west of Turpan at the eastern end of the Northern Silk
Road. It is called Moon Lake because at night, its white salt-covered
surface
shimmers as though the moon had fallen there from out of the sky.
The vase site is near some of the ancient (2,000 yrs ago) pre-Chinese
Buddhist cities of this region, in an area where many relicts of the
4000-yr old Bön people are found by farmers today. |
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