Drama and Dzambala

Wednesday was a bit of a drama.

I was happily in the middle of a KWPC Fundraising meeting when I received a frantic call from Umi, who was picking Sean up from school. Apparently Sean was nowhere to be seen and ALLLLL the kids were gone. All the equanimity, calm abiding etc hurtled out of the window as I immediately panicked.

Fortunately, good old Henry was in the same meeting and his daughter goes to the same school so he promptly called her up and heard that Sean was seen heading back into school fifteen minutes ago. I told Umi to go to the school to look for him and she did find him in the end.

Basically, there was a miscommunication because over the weekend, I had received an SMS which was in Mandarin. Someone translated it for me and told me that it meant Sean did not have tuition at school until 18 April. Sean was supposed to find out about it and get back to me, which he never did. And I forgot to ask.

To cut the long story short, he did have additional class which was why he didn't show up at the bus stop where Umi was waiting for him. So instead of 2.45, his school would finish at 4.30pm. And Wee Liang was supposed to pick him up at 4pm and bring him for Dzambala puja.

Argh. I was tearing my hair out.

We were having a Dzambala Puja that night, which Rinpoche had recommended that we do 108 Dzambala pujas, where each participant would count as one puja. I had wanted to Sean to join in but because of his tuition finishing late, AND that he didn't do his homework the day before *sigh*, I decided that he should stay home and finish his homework. So I had to tell Wee Liang that he didn't have to fetch Sean but could he still please bring Sean's Dzambala set so someone else could use it. You see, only the puja participants with full sets would count as one of the 108.

Dzambala
So off I went to Dzambala puja. We had 54 people with Dzambala sets which meant coincidentally that we could complete the required pujas in one night if we repeated it twice. (Thank Buddha for Sean's set which Anila borrowed)

I do like the Dzambala puja - we get to bathe Dzambala, flick peacock feathers, do mudras - exciting stuff. And of course connect with the Buddha of inner and outer wealth.

After we finished the first round and happily went to wash our ritual implements to get ready for the second round. There was a bit of a commotion. A good one though. Rinpoche was coming over to join us!

But we had to finish our puja first.

So Girlie, who was our Dzambala Queen, galloped through the puja at a cracking pace! I didn't even notice how long it took - the first session took one hour and 15 mins so the expedited one must have taken less than an hour.

Before i could calculate, Rinpoche was there!