thousands of Lepers Begging

My son and I were talking while driving right now south in Interstate 5 from Mt. Shasta and he reminded me the time in 1986 when he was about 10 years old and we were traveling with our Tibetan Lama Friend, Geshe Lobsang Gyatso. We were all feeling pretty overwhelmed by thousands of Lepers begging at the entrance to holy caves where holy men meditate to attain realizations for thousands of years within driving distance by bus from Bodhgaya. We watched geshela buy a bag of thousands of pieces of candy for the lepers and then watched him dutifully give ever single leper a piece of candy along the line of lepers. For westerners we could not even imagine this happening (either thousands of lepers often with fingers or noses or toes gone from the disease and someone giving someone like this a piece of candy each. Just from a dietary point of view many of these people might not have had a decent meal in weeks or months. And what kind of experience would this be for them. Eating candy might be like a real alternate kind of experience. And also, when was the last time anyone ever gave them candy to eat or when was the last time the had a place to rest their heads out of the sun or rain? We felt completely overwhelemed in every single way from this experience and mostly just felt overwhelmed to the point of feeling like we wanted to cry at the whole inhumanity of the situation in which maybe at that time $4 in medicine a piece might stop the progress of being a leper completely. So, it was overwhelming completely as an educated westerner to be in this poisition after growing up in a country here in the U.S. where even homeless people's lives were hundreds of times better and more humane than these people's lives. So, watching our Tibetan Lama friend give each leper a piece of candy taught us the true value of Tibetan Buddhism and religion in general to people who have no hope at all. In this situation a piece of candy from a holy man might be the best experience of their whole lives.