The Kata: White scarf offered to a Lama

The Kata
The offering of a “kata”or long white scarf to a Tibetan Lama, is often accompanied by a small bow. It makes it easier for the Lama to drape it around your neck as he or she returns the gesture of gift giving with their blessing. It is also a gesture of respect for the enlightened state as realized in another and as potential within ourself. Gift giving can have many meanings and here it represents “connection” with good will, openness and especially in the case of a Lama, respect for the important knowledge and compassion that can help us reach enlightenment. A white kata, with or without auspicious symbols or a colored kata, allows one to greet another person without going “empty handed.” Emptiness in Buddhism is not really empty or void but replete with potential! One might say this gesture of giving the kata, mirrors the relational quality of enlightenment itself; the openness, richness, complexity, power and activity that awaits us as we mature our compassion and wisdom. A kata is easy to put in one’s pocket and take out at a moments notice. Much more convenient in our modern era than the yak loads of gifts, carpets, fabric, barley grain and yak butter that one would bring to a Lama to help support this dedicated person who devotes their entire life to studying teachings that bring people to enlightenment, practicing to see how these teachings work and then teaching others the process of attaining the precise goal Siddhartha Gautama attained when he realized there was something very stable and very positive to be identified in the constant ups and downs of human life.