They also gave me a huge batch of free Buddhist gifts. We were all staying at a youth
hostel in the women's area, and I had just vacated a beautiful ocean front residential hotel, to save money.
My financial affairs were beginning a rapid downwards spiral, in keeping with the On & Off pattern of
my karmas.
The Chinese women stood out in the hotel, for their warmth, friendliness, and sunny smiles delivered
to all of the other exhausted guests, scraping by in Kowloon on low budgets.
Many small booklets were in Chinese, which I accepted because I liked the Buddhist pictures,
and the card of Kuan Yin to carry with me at all times. It is still in my purse, and I have felt grateful
to know of a female diety.
I began with Japanese Buddhism, and never knew there was a female deity. While
reading The Pillow Book, I learned that Japanese over 1000 years ago recognized Kuan Yin as a female goddess....and
only in recent centuries have the Japanese broken custom with other Buddhist nations, referring to Kuan Yin
as Kannon, the male diety.
Does it really matter? Is spirit male or female? Not really, yet women have so few role
models to look up to, so few heroines of their own. My mom and dad and school teachers encouraged me to have heroes
and heroines.
The best gift of the Buddhist women was a small Buddhist Prayer Radio which I saw as an
amulet against the mercenary attitude of the city.
The Buddhist Radio only played one type of music: Buddhist chants. I wore this around
my neck at all times, turned to the On Position.
(Hong Kong several years recorded itself as having the Second Highest Suicide Rate in the
world, and the CIA also records the city as having the worst rich-poor gap in the developed world.)
Listening
to this music kept me afloat, and even as I write now, to honour the Goddess of Mercy, I listen to the wondrous
Om Mane Padme Hum chanting free from YouTube.
I had met this Goddess before.
But the Japanese Buddhism with which I began my Buddhist studies, never mentioned her, and even in Japan, she is referred
to in the male gender as Kannon.
In all the rest of Asia, she is called feminine, and while I respect my Japanese Buddhist
friends and leaders, I take keen interest in her. She softens religion for me, because I feel Buddhism
difficult at times, knowing wrongful actions in previous lives may reap consequences in this one.
I also love this diety because she hears the cries of all people, not just people who belong
to Buddhism, or even to one small part of the faith.
I live surrounded by crushing crowds, suffering Financial Failure in the city that judges
local Chinese breadwinners so harshly they are driven to suicide by feeling they let down the relatives they
once worked so hard to support.
Yes,
that's an acceptable solution here. Even the Filippina domestic helpers, coming from a Christian tradition,
criticize the local Chinese for accepting that family patriarchs kill themselves in shame when money runs
out. And in traditional Christianity, suicides were not allotted burial spaces, another cruelty.
Still, I maintain the spiritual
perspective that my life given to me for a higher spiritual purpose, must continue, trying to help others, and by
good deeds, atone for whatever karma leaves me temporarily stranded in a place that leaves me so alone.
I reach out through my book, The
Goddess Of Mercy & The Dept. Of Miracles, about the city of Hong Kong and my own better lives in Canada and
the UK and California and Nepal and India, to speak to others outside of this place, a place that may seem ruthless
to outsiders as well as those suffering economically.
***
