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Sunday, May 29
Dear Shih Fu,
Please do not worry about us--Heng Chau and I are doing okay--we’ve hit a regular pace--and bow about 5-1/2-6 hours each day. We start bowing at 7:00 A.M., take one hour off at 10:30 to write and repair our gear or meditate--start again at 1:00 P.M. and bow until 6:00, taking twenty minutes stillness breaks each hour. At 6:00 we find spot to park the van for the night, wash up, meditate and prepare for woan keh. We listen to the Avatamsaka each night--I recite and translate from Chapter One--we haven’t got a tape recorder yet so we haven’t been able to listen to the Master’s tapes--and then we say the Leng Yen Mantra 49 times (the short version) and then rest, as tired as young boys after a full day outdoors. I forgot to add that we get up at 4:00, do zao keh and exercise and get ready to start by 7:00 A.M. As we leave the city behind we will be able to add more bowing hours each day.
Our bodies have adjusted to the work slowly. We are exhausted each night and ready to go again each morning. We took off our gloves last week because it looked insincere to others--these sidewalks are pretty smooth and we don’t need gloves until we get into glass and gavel on the highway shoulders. We took off our sunglasses too because people thought we were Muslem and Arab hijackers. I started using kneepads several days ago after I developed a deep aching bruise on my left knee from so much bowing. With the kneepads I can bow all day--we did 6 hours and 20 minutes yesterday. As soon as the bruise heals I’ll take the pads off. Heng Chau is still wearing his hat to cover his leaving-home burn scars but they will be all healed in a week. We have stopped all useless talking--plugged that leak.
The two of us are really looking forward to the master’s visit to L.A. next week. We need to hear the proper Dharma-wheel turned the way young babies need their mother: out thoughts turn to the Venerable Abbot and to the Avatamsaka Assembly the way bees turn to honey.
We have bowed through Beverly Hills and we are nearing U.C.L.A. in Westwood. By next weekend we should be out of Santa Monica and on Highway 1, ready to trade our van for a cart and ready to start the long road North to the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas. Each time I think of Wan Fwo Cheng I visualize a bright torch in the gloom. The Master’s vision of a Buddhist city based on true, wholesome principle is the very best medicine for our sick nation. Sometimes while bowing along through L.A., which is surely the center of the cancer, I feel myself on the point of tears--happy tears at the hope and the goodness in store for the West--we can turn our lives around and go towards the good and we now have a road to travel on, a road that will carry us, our parents, our friends, young and old, back to a place of purity and light and balance and harmony. I wouldn’t care if the road from L.A. to Wan Fwo Cheng was 70,000 miles instead of 700. I’d still feel it to be my sacred trust to bow and pace every step of the Way to make it come about.
Disciple Heng Sure