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Dön Season: Be Very, Very Afraid! ~ Eileen Malloy
by elephantjournal.com on Feb 10, 2010
This article is a part of elephant’s Shambhala Day/Losar series. Illustration of the coming Eastern New Year, year of the Iron Tiger by Marguerite Sands. Check her web site here.
Your Birds are Coming Home to Roost…
Well, not roost exactly, because nothing can truly roost in the non-material world, but during this time of year—known as Don Season in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition—your karma will certainly fly by and sh*t on you in the most insulting way.
I’m all for the non-theistic understanding of all the infinite points of Dharma, but when it comes to Don season I revert to a strangely superstitious interpretation.
In one of the more memorable Don Seasons in my life, my car was totaled, I had a miscarriage, and my cell phone was lost.
Try as I might to avoid a heretical interpretation, the messages from the phenomenal world that are heightened and intensified in the 10 days before Losar (the lunar new year) seem to have a pointed, intelligent, and retributive tone during this brief but potent liturgical season.
I suspect that I am not alone in this. If you go by the war stories, many Buddhists secretly harbor a literalist interpretation of Don season. Each year the Boulder Shambhala Meditation Center, and usually Marpa House as well, host knowledgeable and erudite speakers to explain what the whole thing is about…yet still the voodoo stories persist. Don season, in the crudest terms, is the time of year when things go horribly wrong. It’s a reminder that when you are a f*ck-up, even a basically good f*ck-up, it has consequences. The seeds of negative karma that may not even have ripened for four, eight, or twelve lifetimes can suddenly actualize into disasters and calamities in a most immediate and painful way. To put it mildly, this is not the time to oversee groundbreaking ceremonies. Don season is the time of year to get on your knees—I mean (!) your meditation cushion, and supplicate.
And this we do, in a chant known colorfully as Pacifying the Turmoil of the Mamos.
The personification of the Mamos doesn’t help the confusion much. Superstition, mythology’s inbred cousin, is borne of trying to explain that which we don’t understand. And it isn’t easy to understand the Mamo chants. Who are the Mamos, these ghost-like troublemakers, and why are they throwing dice? Are they the good guys or the bad guys? It’s impossible to say, and perhaps that’s the point.
Good circumstances, bad circumstances? Let them all hurl you back to the path of Dharma. If you can’t wrap your mind around your own karma—and who can?—then let the attempt go and ride the energy of events as they arise. And mind your P’s and Q’s, because there is a process by which, unimpeded, those P’s and Q’s will align into a more or less incoherent message, unless you possess powers of seeing that are well beyond most of us.
So, suffice to say, they will always spell out the one thing that matters most: have some compassion for yourself and for others, because that is the only thing that makes any sense when a blizzard of karma shuts you down, if only for a day or two.
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Wow. Dead on I say! Thanks Eileen for sharing your war stories. I think I'll hide under the bed until the season passes.
Very interesting discussion of some of the more esoteric aspects of Buddhism. As it has been taught it is only for the enlightened minds to really understand the workings of karma.
But really one of the more puzzling points : why does the retribution of karma intensify during Don season?? Or why do the birds come to roost right before the New Year?
Like Guest says, below, darkness before dawn? I see it as a sort of accumulated-dust-bunnies-of-our-karma season, the time right before the Cheerful New Year hits when it's good to lay low, meditate, be cozy with family, delay big decisions, clean house, and sit, sit, sit. http://www.elephantjournal.com/2008/05/elebuddhad...
The Tibetan's see it as simply a kind of force of nature. It's this part of the season itself that cranks up negativity, "internally" and "externally." (even if neither are absolutely "real") Who knows why. Traditionally, Vajrayana Buddhists are very rigorous about astrology, and Losar is the Lunar New Year. A little darkness before the dawn?
Oh, and it's important to meditate during this season, to do as Eileen says (generate compassion). And important in the ten days following Losar (aka valentines day, this year) to meditate as well, since the opposite kind of phenomena occurs — more openness and freshness. Worth a try, eh?
On the one hand, I have the thought of greeting the roosting of good karma. But then I worry the bad karma might alight instead. Yesterday certainly felt like a karma dump. So I get caught in the middle with a frantic glance. Look up, look down. Look back, look forward. Smile. Frown. The only solution I can see is to get busy creating good karma so next year's delivery will be all roses. Happy New Year.
Nothing better than to go about unpacking the overstuffed suitcase of a year's karmic accumulation … or to simply riffle through the meaning of the döns and their "season". Very much appreciate Eileen Malloy's unpacking job, if for no other reason than that it's entertaining and instructive. As both Malloy and "Guest" point out, perhaps the most important activities of this period are to meditate and generate compassion — for all sentient beings, which includes oneself. I don't know about anyone else, but the time that marks the end -> the beginning of the year on the Gregorian calender, actually feels as unsettled and unsettling to me as any Dön season ever has. This last transition of Dec. -> Jan. especially.
Other than one Dön season when I participated in a trial-by-water, I have not experienced a series of events that particularly fed the mind that is fueled by superstition. That particular year (1989 perhaps), I spilled a glass of water on a portable phone that killed the handset; had a dishwasher overflow; the culmination was when I dropped a 5-gallon glass container of Eldorado Spring water on the tile floor in my kitchen, breaking the glass and sending a wave of fresh clear water over the tiles and a carpeted section of my dining room. Perhaps these were tame ways to purify some old, unfathomable karma. Who knows? Perhaps the enlightened ones. Seems like a very good time to ride the out-breath frequently, hone one's vipashyana, and further relax the mind … gently, gently.
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