Paul Schebesta (100, p. 87) has described how one night in central Malaya in a forest encampment he awoke during a violent storm to find the Semang, a nomadic Negrito people with whom he was living, terrified and in turmoil. As the thunder crashed overhead a Semang woman agitatedly stabbed at her shin with a piece of bamboo until the blood poured from it. A little of this blood, mixed with rain water, she then sprinkled on the earth; the rest she scattered toward the skies as, in a fearful voice, she pleaded with the storm to have done.

This sacrificial act, in which blood taken from the leg is offered to a thunder-god in expiation of sin, is, as Rodney Needham, a social anthropologist, has recently pointed out in a stimulating paper (89), also found among an entirely distinct nomadic people in Borneo, the Penan. Associated elements include strict taboos against the burning of leeches and the mockery of certain animals, acts which, it is said, bring down the revengeful fury o





Does your room really have a view,
Or even a window to look through?
All I want is for you to look inside of you.
Don't be afraid to walk through the door.
Believe it or not, you've opened it.

- Chris Cormack, 1992
Source: Mind Moon Circle Quarterly, Autumn 1992, pp.21



Who speaks the sound of an echo?
Who paints the image in a mirror?
Where are the spectacles in a dream?
Nowhere at all -- that's the nature of mind!

- Tantric Buddhist Women's Songs, 8th - 11th c.