camwyn | "The Land of Snows is no longer a refuge. Find another Land of Snows, my boy."

As I mentioned yesterday, here are the notes I currently have scribbled down for the Monastery of the Midnight Sun. I've only just barely started to specifically tailor it to Feng Shui, and I haven't done any real revisions yet, so there's probably inconsistencies galore - but hey, first draft, right? I'll fix it as I go.

Monastery of the Midnight Sun

Founded sometime in 1920's or 1930's by monks fleeing Tibet. Chinese warlord situation (revolutionaries?) at the time was right ugly & monastery represented vital feng shui point, maybe had artifact. Monks made it to nearby village & deceived angry warlords out for revenge into looking for them somewhere else. Increasing health & prosperity & spiritual strength of village started to make warlords suspicious, so monks decided some of them had to leave. This included the abbot, who had just reached the position shortly before the armies came - it was determined by lot who should go and who should stay. Based on a great deal of praying, dreaming, and oracular divination, the monks decided America was the safest place to go, but not the lower 48. Too many dangers, too many unknown evils looking for them down there. A land of cold and forests and a great mountain in a vast wilderness figured pretty big in the oracles, so they managed to find an old (1900? 1910?) textbook and looked up northern American mountains. Couldn't find anything that seemed to fit in the lower 48, but someone mentioned the territory of Alaska. The monks worked their passage across as merchant seamen on a freighter out of China, but the company screwed them over when they arrived & they were almost deported. University / commercial animal raising people in Anchorage spoke up for them & they transferred their experience handling yaks in the village to dealing with Alaska curiosities like musk-ox, which gave them enough time to figure out Anchorage was not the right place for them. Eventually they found out about the Homestead Act of 1862 and got themselves the right papers, then headed north to an area the University people said would do them right - it was outside Fairbanks some ways, but still counted as frontier. They picked out their area and got their 160 acres and went looking for workmen and such; wound up hiring mostly Alaska natives, who were bemused but happy to take the money. Local missionaries weren't happy about these guys, but some eventually came 'round. Others got outright violent and tried to burn the monks' buildings down one night. Abbot ordered the monks to face them down this time, and their workers and the nicer Christian clergy came to their aid. The confirmation of the wisdom of their choice came the next night with their first witnessing of the aurora borealis, and shortly thereafter was made absolutely definite when someone took them to see Mt. McKinley - possibly a Native, who would have called it Denali as well. VERY happy monks.

Guardians of the Prosperity Sutra. Extremely misleading name. Does not ensure or guarantee material wealth - better off if you call it Vitality Sutra but no one outside the monastery knows this. Blessings of health, life, fertility, etc. (although fertility blessings are meant to be used on other people for most part). Those who have a clue about sutra's true nature think it can grant immortality. Can't. Not exactly, anyway. *Can* remove all disease and disorder conditions, & following its precepts & meditating upon them leads to longer lifespan. For some, this is enough. They can combine it with other things if they have to… Possibility of restoring Lotus guys to factory original condition? Maybe. I know that meditating upon the inner fires and controlling them through right exercise and right breathing is enough to allow the young, reluctant abbot to walk into an Alaska snowstorm dressed in autumn clothes and return after five or ten minutes having taken no harm. Must look up fu schticks, see if anything corresponds.

Quite possibly the monks are listed on paper as being Eskimos. I suspect that the animal raisers were people looking to produce musk ox as a commodity - fur or meat or both - and saw an opportunity to get some skilled workers without having to train Eskimos in herding instead of hunting. I have a mental image of a bunch of little old Native women solemnly swearing up and down, one after another, that these men are in fact their sons returned from hunting trips on which they were all presumed dead. Given the immigration situation for Asians during the Pulp Juncture, this may be the best they can hope for. Corresponds rather nicely w/Chinese phenomenon of 'paper sons' after records destroyed in SF earthquake.

The abbot: Haven't got a name for him yet. Tend to think of him as Poor Bastard. Poor Bastard is the oldest-at-selection abbot they've had in a long time, and the first in ten generations to be chosen while his predecessor was still alive. In earlier times - most of the time - they picked the abbot based on reincarnation, with the usual interim measures. This time, however, the old abbot had the same dreams many nights running, and actually went so far as to visit Lhasa and petition for the right to ask the Nechung oracle about it. (Or possibly another oracle since Nechung is the state oracle, but Nechung is the only one I know by name.) His fears were confirmed: the danger was coming, and the time would come within the lifetimes of some of the monks now at his monastery when Tibet would be overrun, even to the farthest mountains. He had some nasty suspicions about the religious leadership's own failures of strategy, so he went back to his monastery and posed the basics of the situation to his monks. Only one of them gave the answers he himself would have given. The old abbot then informed the assembled monks that he was passing on his mantle *now*. The danger was coming, and very soon, but he had only a few years of natural life left (dunno how old he was when he said this, but he was pretty frelling old). There would not be enough time for them to find his reincarnation and train him yet again to the point of leadership, not if they were going to protect the Tibetan tradition, their unique dharma, and their sutras. So he was passing it on to the monk whose answers he liked - Poor Bastard.

"The Land of Snows is no longer a refuge. Find another Land of Snows, my boy."

Poor Bastard believed, and rightly, that his monastery's most important purpose was the protection of their unique teachings. Every senior monk at the monastery had memorized the Prosperity Sutra - that was part of the rules for becoming a senior monk. It was his feeling (and the old abbot's) that the isolation of the most useful, powerful, & potent teachings in monasteries had done the Tibetan people a disservice; yes, some of the material could be dangerous in the wrong hands, but concentrating it so deeply in specific places meant that only a handful of spots had to be attacked to scatter those teachings to the eight winds. Why else was every monk taught the sutra if not to ensure that *someone* would always be able to carry the tradition on? Most of the other monks either felt that the monastery was capable of holding off invaders or that they should lay down their lives in protection of their home, but Poor Bastard had very little use for that idea. They'd be dead, the sutras left in texts for anybody to read, and the only people who'd benefit by their deaths would be their next incarnations. Nope. Not good. He set as many of the monks to memorizing everything *else* the monastery owned and arranged for people to learn crafts that'd serve them well in traveling. Turned out to be wiser than the grumbling monks thought, because within a year the Secret War came to the mountains. . .