Journal of a Sabbatical

March 11, 2001

mahamsa and future ananda

Today's Reading: My Generation by Sarah Anna Emery

Observation - Saturday: there's WAY less snow in Providence.

Observation - Sunday: there's NO snow in South County.

Sign of Spring: American robins hopping around on lawns! (Umm, that would be in South County where the lawns are visible.)

Our Story Today: something about a goose with a halo

While I was away, Nancy bought a huge coffee table book about Tibetan art. We spent the evening looking at several of the paintings in detail. Many of the Buddha paintings feature scenes from the Jataka stories in the background. Basically the Jataka stories are moral tales featuring the Buddha in previous lives as various animals. Scenes shown in several of the paintings feature the monkey king, who saves his troop of monkeys by forming a bridge with his body, the ape, who saves a man who has fallen into a ravine, and my personal favorite: the Buddha in an earlier incarnation as Mahamsa, the leader of flock of geese, also known as the "Golden Goose King", which has nothing to do with the goose that laid the golden egg or any other golden goose, and his goose sidekick Future Ananda. You can tell which one is Mahamsa because he is depicted with a golden halo.

Nancy, being extremely fond of geese, liked that one too. Mahamsa and Future Ananda and their flock of some 94,000 geese (not all 94,000 are shown in the painting) are lured to a lake built specifically by a king who wants to capture Mahamsa because the queen has had a dream about him. The fowler captures Mahamsa and Future Ananda but they break free and go voluntarily to the king and queen and teach them the dharma in golden voices. Nancy decided to name the two domestic geese who hang out at the Cove Mahamsa and Future Ananda.

This morning after breakfast we took a drive down to Galilee to walk on the beach. Nancy wanted to walk on the beach. I am not sure why I picked that particular beach, Salty Brine State Beach, but it was splendid. People are flying kites and walking their dogs. A lone sanderling probes for food along the water line. Two great black back gulls share a crab. They must be a pair. No gull would ever share anything with anyone but his mate and offspring. In the waves a single common loon dives and surfaces repeatedly as the tide starts to come in. There is no evidence of snow anywhere around Galilee. On the way back to Providence we even saw American robins hopping on lawns. Clues of the existence of spring are visible down here.