morning call from mom

Woke up by Mom's sms. It reads "da dian hua", which I dutifully did. Here's the conversation:

"Bad reception here. I'll say it quickly"mom said. And without waiting for my response, mom rapped rapidly like a machine gun shooting."the second interview K is going to this afternoon. There's absolutely no way that he could land it with his own strength. There's only one way he could get it - to pray to his rightful master and visualize Buddha Manjusri as sitting on top of him. Then he must imagine himself as a manifestation of Buddha Manjusri holding a sword of wisdom, and speak as if the Buddha him/herself is speaking." She paused and inquired, pondering my silence "did you get it? you know Buddha Manjusri, I once gave you a painting of him, the one holding a sword of wisdom." her voice raised in excitement,"You know when I visited you..." "I get it." I said calmly, "is that all?" Mom didn't believe that I didn't want to speak. She was going to repeat the "one way", but I repeated emphatically, "I get it. Is that all?" Mom said "yea." Then I said, "if there's nothing else, I'll hang up." I did.

She smsed me shortly after. The mesesage reads "must have a humble heart". Really, she should've used this as the openning line instead of that K had absolutely no way to win this contract by his own strength.

People have different ways to uphold their buddhism belief. K does not think that mom's way was proper for him. Naturally, imperfect beings as we are, we were both deeply offended by mom's openning sentence (or perhaps, it's more of my mistake to have told K verbatim). Given that the interview is only 6-7 hrs away, the last thing we wanted was a blow to our morale.

But I hope K reads this and look it in another way - an earthly and less offensive interpretation of mom's overzealous advice. It's nice to have a blow in the morning of your interview. Sometimes, it's all that takes to make us stronger.

And ya right, the beauty of buddhism is that there is no mandate on how we should believe in it. The way we believe in it is that we hold in our humble hearts love, compassion and wisdom, only the last of which mom is slightly short of in this incidence, an imperfection perhaps. But we love her dearly for it.