Forty-nine Days

Within a few minutes of my mother’s passing, two friends, one of whom had sensed that they urgently needed to come, walked into the apartment. Other friends who knew that I wished to chant for twelve hours came as soon as they received the word. And so, in Elkhart, Indiana, a group of westerners who two years ago had not heard of Amitabha Buddha or the Western Pure Land came to chant “Amituofo” through the night. Together, they insured that there was always at least one person in the room chanting for my mother. As each new person arrived, she was quietly shown by the others what to do. The chanting continued for almost thirteen hours.

Seven days after my mother’s passing a ceremony was held at the Amitabha Buddhist Library in Chicago. I attended and brought home the peiwai—a paper tablet bearing my mother’s name. To encourage my mother to seek rebirth into the Pure Land, we repeated the ceremony in my mother’s home on each seventh days until November 26^th, the forty-ninth day after her passing.

On each of the Sundays in Elkhart, friends came to help—chanting for one and a half hours in Chinese, although none of them spoke or read Chinese. They admirably strove to read the pronunciation system in the ceremony recitation book while following the recording of the ceremony.

I do not know the words to express my admiration for these amazing and compassionate friends, several of whom came a number of times. They came to chant words they did not know how to pronounce as they sang music they had never heard, which was written in a system they had never seen.

Everyone came together to help encourage my mother to ask Amitabha Buddha to take her to the Western Pure Land. As much as we wanted her to achieve this rebirth, we did not have the ability to make it happen. We were not praying to ask Amitabha to help her; he could not intervene to do this. We were chanting to encourage her to help herself by asking for his assistance.

I said in the last entry that my mother was not a Buddhist. What I meant was that she was not a practicing Buddhist in this lifetime . It was my mother’s practice in her past lifetimes that had planted the seeds that brought about the amazingly wonderful conditions of having so many caring people—family and friends—come together to help her both before and after her passing. I know exactly what she would have said—Thank you.