Kosmos (R.Fabian) | So we’ve only met physically one time, and that was in Findhorn at the New Story Summit. I had fractured my knee and was hobbling around making movies. I remember regretting that I did not connect with you more deeply. You were already a dharma teacher in our tradition and knew our teacher, Thay (Thich Nhat Hanh) very well, while I had just begun traveling to retreats with him. 

Cynthia | No worries. I felt you at that time and appreciated your presence very much at Findhorn. My life totally changed when I met Thay, but that’s another story.

Kosmos | I love this book; so many vivid scenes. There is a passage in Australia, where you describe how all the places you had planted the treasure vases, up to that point, lit up for you as a mandala. 

Cynthia | Going to Australia was significant because the aboriginal culture is so amazing – their perspective, their awareness, their consciousness. You probably have seen the artwork with the songlines on the landscape depicting the country, the territory, the land, in between locations and the dreaming stories. So that whole notion became integrated into this idea of the treasure vases forming a global mandala, connecting places where things happen on the land. 

When we meet for meditation every full moon, we invoke all the locations where the Earth Treasure Vases have gone, we name them, which takes a good amount of time! You get a feeling for each node over time, and it’s a way of keeping them alive. And then we imagine radiating our love and our healing intentions and all that is being carried into those nodes in the form of light as a technology of the sacred.

Through Joanna Macy, I also came to realize we are all holy vessels. It’s one thing to take this little clay pot and place it somewhere that needs healing, but we all have that capacity as holy vessels. So, then we imagine ourselves or our location as a node on the mandala too.

Each one of those places where a treasure vase has been planted is like an acupuncture needle. It’s a spot where those energies are going into the body of Mother Earth and doing whatever they’re going to do. And the rational mind can’t figure it out. There’s no way because it’s operating on another level. But that’s how acupuncture operates also, right? And the things that have happened are so miraculous and synchronous that you can’t not say, ‘oh wow, this is having an effect on some level’.

Kosmos | Yes, it is fascinating that in many places the treasure vases have catalyzed transformation. I’m thinking of your stories from Africa, in particular. 

Cynthia | Yes. One was going to Liberia, which we described in a previous article for Kosmos and in the book. After it was planted in this village, the elders said, we have just come out of this civil war and peace is our most important prayer. And an ex-combatant, rebel general suggested building a peace hut in the village, a traditional round structure where people come to resolve conflict and work through issues and cultivate the sacred. So, we raised the money, and they built a peace hut.

Since then, we’ve built four peace huts with the help mainly of Sister Chang Kong in Plum Village. She’s been so generous with supporting the work because that particular Liberian, the former general, came to live at Plum Village for three years, and then some of his colleagues did too. 

Taking the treasure vase to Liberia, into the worst fought area of the war, resulted in people realizing that they wanted to sustain those prayers. And so what did they do? They started a whole peace building program. We were working with the women who stopped the war, who are natural peace builders as well as ex-combatants and former child soldiers and community members in four regions.. So that is a huge outcome.

In Congo, a similar thing happened. I met Neema Namadamu through an organization called World Pulse. I wanted to go to Congo and needed some kind of connection to go there. And Neema said, ‘oh, yes, my sister come’. And so, we took a treasure vase there. 

I ended up doing media training with women in Eastern Congo to get them to tell their stories. And then Neema got them online – teaching them how to get connected to World Pulse. It was very powerful. That was the beginning of what turned out to be her organization called Hero Women Rising when she came to the US. 

I had this flag of the whole Earth that was kind of my altar cloth, and I set it out when we were completing the ceremony to bury a vase in the forest. I wanted to take it to the rainforest and work with the indigenous people, the Pygmy people of Congo, which Neema arranged. And when I held up the flag I said, ‘here’s Congo and here’s the United States, and the air that we breathe is generated in your forests’.

They didn’t know that. So, I connected Neema with Osprey Orielle Lake of the Women Earth and Climate Action Network, (WECAN). They started a tree planting program that is still going on in Eastern Congo. 

Neema came to the US after that trip and stayed with us off and on for a pretty long time, and she used our nonprofit as her umbrella for a while until she got Hero Women Rising started. I consider her a living treasure. 

These were the seeds that were planted and carried on. And that’s what happens, is that people discover their own deep calling, their own summons. And that’s what I feel I’m most interested in supporting. The treasure vases are filled with all these alchemical offerings and who knows? We can’t really know, but we see what happens when people take them where they need to go, and the inspiration that arises.

Kosmos | How many vases total?

Cynthia | Thirty originally. And at a certain point another forty. I call that the first and second generation. They were all made at the same time in Nepal. And I still have about five of these on the altar. In the meantime, I have gotten to know  a woman from the Santa Clara Pueblo, in the Tewa world here in northern New Mexico. She is an activist, but she’s also an acclaimed potter. She agreed to lead a retreat to teach us how to craft earth treasure vases in the tradition of her people.

We used the clay from this land in the coil method, and everyone who came to the retreat had identified a location where they wanted to take a treasure vase. There were about 30 people at that retreat. And those are still in process, the treasure vases of the third generation. So that’s our focus now. 

The two most recent ones are Washington, DC which is going to happen soon, and one that is just being dedicated to Auschwitz coming later on this year. Last year I led a retreat in Italy and its steward buried one of the second-generation vases there recently. Also, last year we did a pilgrimage to Greece and planted it on the mountain above Delphi. That story is also at the end of the book because it was a very powerful kind of culmination that happened for me while making the offering to Gaia at Delphi. 

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Kosmos | You really had a deep insight of Gaia being an embodiment of the Three Jewels.  

Cynthia | I’ve been practicing the dharma since the eighties, and have such a deep connection to the Buddhist teachings, but I always struggled a bit because the connection to the Earth seemed to be kind of a missing piece in the Dharma. I mean, not so much with Thay and all of his efforts in that direction, but with the Tibetans it’s a little bit of a missing piece. There’s also the issues that I bring  up in the book about some of the outdated, hierarchical aspects of the Dharma and the way it’s passed on, and the abuses inside the tradition. To me, the abuse of women is parallel to the abuse of the Earth. So that was a big thread for me personally. I had to grapple with a lot of things, and it was the Earth Treasure Vase practice and my connection to the Earth that was the biggest healing. Venerating Tara was a very important practice for a long time, but as I kept going with the treasure vases, I kept feeling the need to have a more personal connection to Gaia. 

And then one day, as I describe in the book, I was in retreat, and the mantra for Gaia came to me and then the visualization of the evolution of Tara into a manifestation of the Sublime Mother Gaia!  But even before that, long ago, I was writing and reflecting on how the Earth is such an incredible embodiment of the Three Jewels because you have the teacher, the teachings and the community all woven into this incredible web of Life. I adapted these Refuge Verses to express this: 

Perfection of Wisdom; Mother of Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and
all beings; nourishing, holding, and healing all; Great Mother
Earth, precious jewel of the cosmos, to you we bow in gratitude.
 
We take refuge in the Earth as our teacher, the one who shows us
the Way in this life.
 
We take refuge in the Earth as an expression of the dharma, the
teachings of interbeing, understanding, and love.
We take refuge in the Earth as an embodiment of the sangha, the
vast interdependent community of life in balance and harmony.

Living within the web of life on Earth, we dedicate ourselves to
embodying awakened awareness on the path of healing in service to
all beings.

We dedicate our lives to realizing our oneness with Gaia.

Gaia is such an amazing teacher, filled with so many remarkable teachings about being and interconnection with all the different communities of life on Earth. So that has been something I have carried for a long time, and it’s just grown. I feel the Earth is a really reliable source of refuge. Every time we go out in nature, we’re restored to our true self, we’re brought home. 

The other key moment was in Nepal when I went back to where it all began and I had been made a lama, which I was somewhat conflicted about, because I really felt by that point that my source of refuge was Gaia.  And then I fell off the mountain! 

Afterwards, I was struggling to understand how my life had been spared, because really it was a near death experience. But when I relived it, which I did over and over again, I had the sensation of the Earth grabbing me and holding me to the slope of that mountain and literally saying, ‘not yet, you’re mine’! I survived, and I felt like I had to bring out this practice of the Sublime Mother Gaia after that because I had kept it to myself. The Earth was talking to me. Then, when I was writing the book, I recalled the whole story of the Buddha summoning the Earth to witness his moment of enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, which is an image I always loved. And the fact that he touched the Earth in that moment is so significant. It is the only story where you have an awakened being relating to the Earth as the witness. Calling upon and recognizing Earth as the ground for this experience.

Kosmos | It’s beautiful – from the question you formulated going up the mountain the first time, “How can I protect the Earth”, and then falling into the arms of the Earth as you came full circle. As with most profound insights, it really is so obvious. The Earth is an awakened being and Her natural laws and rhythms reflect the Dharma. She is a vast and diverse ‘sangha’ of interconnected life forms. This is a tremendous contribution you’ve made through your lived experience and service. And I really hope this insight rings out beyond the book and beyond our lifetimes. I consider it such a profound offering, and I thank you. 

I only have one final question.  What does it mean, in your view, to protect? 

Cynthia | Well, the words I most often use in this practice are protection, healing, and restoration.

Protection is called for in certain places.  Healing is called for in certain places, and restoration is called for as well. So when you look deeply at what’s happened to the web of life, to Mother Earth, you can see that there actually are very few places left that need protection. Most of them need restoration and healing, but there are some that are still in need of protection. And so when we connect with what we love and care about most in our precious human life on Earth, (which is in relationship to the One who gave us Life), and if we look deeply at all of the cultures and ecosystems that are part of the web of life, it’s within the context of a whole living system, that everything is interrelated, interdependent, every single aspect of it is important. Before there was such destruction and such unraveling of this interconnected web of life, these living systems worked in harmony, whether they be human, animal, plants, minerals, waters, or all the elemental energies and ecosystems. 

So, the aspiration and the wish to bring protection I take very seriously. This is life and death. But I don’t think that it’s appropriate to create more conflict in the world. So, if we are defending some of these things in an adversarial way, that’s only going to create more conflict. We have to find a way to carry out this task that is not going to create more problems. That’s where practice comes in. That’s where the practice of mindfulness or the practice of cultivating awareness and deep listening and calm abiding, comes in. Because when we practice cultivating our wisdom and compassion, what happens naturally is that our reactivity settles down and our capacity to respond is enhanced. And we see the way to respond much more clearly. We see the way to respond that is skillful and effective, and it’s not contributing to more, you could say, samsara, because we operate out of our reactivity all the time. We’re just spinning that wheel, the wheel of cyclic existence. It just doesn’t go anywhere constructive. And we know this in our own lives. 

So, as Thay would say, we have to stop. Even if it’s for 10 minutes a day, and just take another breath and come back to our true nature. That gets back to our connection with the Earth. It is when we stop and come back to our true nature, we’re also connecting to this larger, interconnected web of life that is also our true nature. There’s no separation between us and Gaia.

Kosmos | I have to tell you – before this interview, just closing my eyes for a few seconds, I had an image of you. It was an image of you as this rainbow, flying around and wrapping the Earth in rainbow energy and light. I never really had an image of somebody show up like that!

Cynthia | Well, that’s exactly the visualization, not that it’s me, but the visualization that we do with the full moon meditation, visualizing this light going around the planet and bringing restoration and healing and protection to all the places that it’s called for in all the ways that it’s called for.

Each of us has an individual role to play, and each of us is a tiny little node on the whole web of life, the whole mandala. We each have our part within the whole. And so, it’s important to find our gifts, to find our offering. And it doesn’t have to be some big thing. It’s when we are acting in our lives from that place of deep caring, that is the summons, the calling that we are hearing.

Kosmos | Many blessings for your journey, Cynthia.

Cynthia | Thank you. And for yours.