Life savings spent on rare Tibetan ceremony in Queens

Tibetan prayer flags

Would you spend your entire life savings on a Buddhist ceremony? One woman, Dayangji Sherpa, did just that. Sherpa, a health care aid living in Queens with her daughter, spent her savings on a rare ceremony in which every text in the Buddhist canon is read by various lamas from morning to night. The ceremony, which involved the reading of 108 books and lasted more than a month, cost Sherpa $ 50k.

In the the New York Times piece, the monks explained, "Completing the Kangyur, the Tibetan-language version of the sacred Buddhist texts, is done as a form of prayer for peace for all sentient beings." The monks sat for some forty days in a converted church building in Elmhurst and the occasion marked the first time such a ceremony was ever held in New York.

To see photos from the rare ceremony, see here.

(Photo by Sistak via Flickr using a CC-BY-SA license.)

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