Beggar's Banquet

“Beggars are a feature of every major gathering in Bodhgaya. They turn up in droves and sit 24-hours-a-day in designated positions along the outside wall of the stupa, displaying leprous or broken limbs and sick children to all who pass. Before dawn they appear as rows of grey lumps under ragged covers, but at the approach of a Westerner a low moan rises and hands are slowly outstretched. Competition between them is fierce. Local touts sell bags of small coins that many people just throw into the air in handfuls, letting the beggars scrabble for them in the dust.

One day a passing student noticed their professionally wretched faces wreathed with smiles and rare laughter shining from their eyes as they gathered around a figure in their midst. “I had never seen them look happy before. I went over and there was Lama Yeshe performing a pantomime invitation to attend a banquet he was putting on, just for them. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like a rich Westerner anymore and they weren’t relating to me as beggars either. For a moment we were all just people.”

This beggars’ banquet, which took place on February 10, [1982] had never been held before in Bodhgaya, but it became an annual event. Lama Yeshe handed the job to Merry Colony. Huge quantities of food and salads were prepared in large new plastic bins down at the Tourist Bungalow. Merry was just about to send it all to the banquet site, the park behind the stupa, when black rain clouds suddenly appeared from every direction.

Merry described what happened. “I went running to Lama’s room and said, ‘Lama, Lama, there’s a big storm coming!’ ‘No problem,’ said Lama. ‘You go. Take my Hayagriva pill. Burn the pill so there is smoke and then no problem.’ So I took a can of coals and burnt the pill, but the clouds didn’t move. I ran back to Lama, practically in tears, and said that nothing was happening. ‘You don’t trust my pill, dear?’ he said. Then he came outside and looked at the clouds. He just looked at them … and they turned about face and rolled away, as far as the eye could see. The sky turned bright blue. We fed over 2,000 beggars and our picnic was a huge success…”

~ Big Love, the long-awaited biography of Lama Yeshe written by Adele Hulse

Photo ~ Lama Yeshe giving food to some of Bodhgaya’s beggars during the the Enlightened Experience Celebration 1982. Photo courtesty of Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.