Brother Chen, a trader from Golmud, once told me this story. In 2005 he and a coworker were returning from Haibei after buying cordyceps. Passing a small temple by Chaka Salt Lake, they went in to ask for water. It was a monastery of the White Sect. In the courtyard a Tibetan mastiff had just given birth to a litter of puppies, all of exceptionally pure blood. Among them was one that was pure white from head to tail, without a single stray hair. Chen’s coworker grew excited and said that this was the most precious of all snow mastiffs. He at once pulled out cash and tried to buy the puppy from the lama in the temple, but the lama refused flatly. Then he offered in exchange the finest cordyceps they had purchased, and still the lama would not agree.
Seeing this, the coworker pretended that he needed to step away for convenience, pulled Brother Chen back to their Grand Cherokee, and sped off in a cloud of dust. They had not driven five hundred meters before the Cherokee suddenly rolled over on the level road, flipping end over end into the sand dunes by the roadside. Fortunately the sand was soft. Brother Chen suffered only minor scrapes, but his coworker could not move at all. At the hospital he was found to have a compression fracture of the spine, and to this day he has never fully recovered. The newborn snow mastiff was carried back by its mother, who arrived moments later. What astonished Brother Chen was that the mother mastiff did not attack them. After they returned to Xining, the coworker swore to Chen that at the moment of the crash he had seen from the left side of the car a bare red foot as large as a Liberation truck, which kicked the vehicle over with a single blow.
Across the vast Tibetan regions of Qinghai and Tibet, it is by no means rare for temples to punish those who offend the Buddha. Nor is it uncommon in herders’ homes for people who try to steal mastiffs to be bitten to death by the dogs or beaten to death by the herdsmen. What struck me as strange was whether the punishment Brother Chen’s coworker received might actually have been too light. In Tibetan, the Tibetan mastiff is called do-khyi and is said to be “the Buddha’s mount,” while the snow mastiff in particular is a sacred beast in the White Sect of Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism. Yet now, by the vulgar standards invented by those who traffic in Tibetan mastiffs, the snow mastiff has instead been demoted to a mere second rank, while golden mastiffs and gray mastiffs are treated as the supreme grade.
I asked Brother Chen to find out what his coworker had truly been thinking at the time. Sure enough, the man had not tried to steal the snow mastiff for resale. Rather, he knew that snow mastiffs are loyal by nature and had wanted to give it to his widowed father, who lived alone at home. In the continental system of criminal law, much weight is placed on criminal intent: the same criminal act may receive very different punishment depending on the purpose behind it. I suppose the Buddha understands this principle too. Otherwise that single kick would likely have sent the Cherokee straight into the salt lake.