Pilgrim's India

by ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM

  ‘I was planning to leave Ranbajpur, but your purpose was good, so I awaited you.’ He shook his finger in my astounded face. ‘Aren’t you clever to think that, unannounced, you could pounce on me? That professor Behari had no right to give you my address.’

  Considering that introduction of myself would be mere verbosity in the presence of this master, I stood speechless, somewhat hurt at my reception. His next remark was abruptly put.

  ‘Tell me, where do you think God is?’

  ‘Why, He is within me and everywhere,’ I doubtless looked as bewildered as I felt.

  ‘All-pervading, eh?’ the saint chuckled. ‘Then why, young sir, did you fail to bow before the Infinite in the stone symbol at the Tarakeswar temple yesterday? Your pride caused you the punishment of being misdirected by the passer-by who was not bothered by fine distinctions between left and right. Today, too, you have had a fairly uncomfortable time of it!’

  I agreed wholeheartedly, wonder-struck that an omnipresent eye hid within the unremarkable body before me. Healing strength emanated from the yogi; I was instantly refreshed in the scorching field.

  ‘The devotee inclines to think his path to God is the only way,’ he said. ‘Yoga, through which divinity is found within, is doubtless the highest road, as Lahiri Mahasaya has told us. But, discovering the Lord within, we soon perceive Him without. Holy shrines in Tarakeswar and elsewhere are rightly venerated as nuclear centres of spiritual power.’

  The saint’s censorious attitude vanished; his eyes became compassionately soft. He patted my shoulder.

  ‘Young yogi, I see you are running away from your master. He has everything you need; you should return to him.’ He added, ‘Mountains cannot be your guru’—the same thought that Sri Yukteswar had expressed two days earlier.

  ‘Masters are under no cosmic compulsion to live on mountains only.’ My companion glanced at me quizzically. ‘The Himalayas in India and Tibet have no monopoly on saints. What one does not trouble to find within will not be discovered by transporting the body hither and yon. As soon as the devotee is willing to go even to the ends of the earth for spiritual enlightenment, his guru appears nearby.’

  _______________________________________

  This extract is from Autobiography of a Yogi.

  21.

  Seeking is one thing

  Annamayya (15 century ce)

  Translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman

  seeing is one thing,

  looking is another.

  If both come together,

  that is god.

  If you look for an elephant,

  he comes as an elephant.

  If you look for a tree,

  he’s a tree.

  If you look for a mountain,

  he’ll be a mountain.

  God is what you have in your mind.

  If you look for empty space,

  he appears as space.

  If you look for an ocean,

  he’ll be an ocean.

  If you look for a city,

  he will come as a city.

  God is what you have in your mind.

  If you think of the god on the hill,

  married to the goddess,

  that’s who you’ll see.

  What you look for

  is the god in you.

  What you see

  is the god out there.

  God is what you have in your mind.

  _______________________________________

  This poem is from God on the Hill: Temple Poems from Tirupati.

  22.

  Sadhus: Going Beyond the Dreadlocks

  Patrick Levy

  A contemporary French writer describes his fascination with the life of the Indian sadhu. The ash-smeared, hash-smoking, matted-haired holy man has been endlessly documented for coffee-table books, but still remains an enigma, often viewed by outsiders with mistrust and suspicion. Levy’s protagonist offers a glimpse of the spiritual calling that impels some to adopt this life of terrifying, uncertainty and voluntary ‘idleness’.—Ed.

  I loved India.

  The kindness, the vitality and the enthusiasm of Indians delighted me. It is a dirty, disorganized and chaotic country, over-populated with noisy and invasive people, but most of them are smiling and courteous. They expectorate with conviction, shout when talking, call out to each other from one end of roads and buildings to the other and private life overflows into public spaces, but their friendship is immediate and their sincerity spontaneous.

  In the narrow lanes shared with pedestrians, careless of their nuisance, motorcyclists insist on the horn largely beyond decency and necessity. Whirrs of generators, bells and amplified rituals from temples, the backfiring of autorickshaws, political propaganda blasting out of cars, the latest songs booming from CD shops’ loudspeakers, cawing crows: all this composes a continuum of cacophony, punctuated in rhythm by resounding percussions of all kinds of work; and then suddenly lit up by a muezzin who proclaims the hour of glory or the childish flat voice of a sadhu singing Ram-Sita-Sita-Ram ad infinitum.

  Holy Varanasi has discovered neon, plastic, posters and concrete. The visual realm is a mess. Electric cables weave a worrying net between the heavens and the earth. Nothing ever seems to be finished. Harmony and beauty, or simply order, do not seem to be worth even a shadow of concern. The general indifference makes a huge dustbin of the collective space. People drop anything they don’t want here, there and everywhere, without remorse … India Ma is a garbage dump. But these people can see beauty where others do not even have an inkling of finding it.

  The air is unimaginably filled with levitating dust and the dioxin fumes of burning plastic bags and garbage. The acidic smell of spontaneous urinals pervades the alleyways. Sensory faculties are stimulated to their painful extreme. The food is like self-induced arson that no amount of water can extinguish. Meals are torture. Each mouthful is a blazing inferno in which up to thirty-six types of chillies compete with flames roaring for fiery supremacy, imposing an exploration of the nuances of fire and burning upon the taste buds followed by the digestive tracts. At concerts, instruments and voices are amplified to the Larsen limit. ‘If God gave heaven to the Indians, twenty-four hours later it would be no different from hell,’ an Indian man once told me.

  Half of the people cannot read or write and illiteracy is on the increase. Ignorance is deepened by prejudices, simplistic principles learnt by heart and by persistent superstitions. And certain traditions just prolong and amplify the misfortune …

  The Indian novels I read depicted a people as materialistic as any other, living with the same anguish and jealousies as any other. People more concerned with the illusions of this world than setting themselves free of them. Just like people everywhere.

  ‘Blessed are the poor’, we, Western Christians, repeat, thinking very hard ‘Let this cup pass from me’, whilst already planning to buy whatever object we desire. Hindus do not seek adversity any more than others and have embraced consumerism according to their means. In the country of renunciants, the materialists are envious, covetous show-offs and are in the majority, like everywhere else.

  And I raged against filth and chaos, criticized conservatism, condemned its resignations, cursed the excesses and thought that one must have carried out extremely nasty things in a previous life and produced terrible karma to end up being reborn in the land of karma. But with my heart of a benevolent anarchist, I was delighted here.

  I loved India.

  If we were to calculate the average time per day different populations of the world spend smiling, Indians would rank top of the list.

  Wild and domestic animals live in cities. Not to mention wandering dogs, rats, tarantulas, lizards and cockroaches. One meets the monkeys of his local neighbourhood and offers them bananas, pats the passing buffalo on the street, gives a comforting smile to the neighbour’s goat, strokes the washerman’s donkey, receives the blessing from the temple’s elephant and greets vultures
, perched outside slaughterhouses, that seem to ogle our future corpse. The crows come up close, blackbirds are not shy, eagles perch on street lamps and peacocks bow endlessly before each other on the highest balustrades. One feels less isolated in his species, sharing the city with other beings.

  The muffled dampness of the tortuous lanes seemed familiar, as did their shadows. I savoured the coal fumes, frying spices and the omnipresent smell of cow pats. The whiffs of incense that came and lightened my steps afforded an exquisite charm. Expressing respect by bowing came naturally to me. Remaining squatted was second nature. I felt close to my remotest instincts, greeting the sun and honouring Mother Earth and her creations—the rivers, trees, mountains and fire. My genes had been doing this 5000 years ago, I was sure. I felt I knew the rituals and had sung in Sanskrit many times before.

  At dusk, I often attended the open-air puja at Dasaswamedh ghat. On a platform overhanging the river, five bare-chested pujaris in synchrony elegantly raised their candelabra of burning wicks to the Ganges and made them whirl. The yellow flames stretched in this movement and drew large circles of fire. Accompanied by drums, cymbals, conches and oboes, the slow procession of hundreds of oil lamps glided on the water. In this son et lumière show, India met with the Babylon of my imagination.

  Here I found a very moving, densely packed collision of pagan temples from ancient times with the wandering philosophers of my fantasies of Greece, oxcarts from idealized images of the Middle Ages, marble and mother-of-pearl palaces of caliphs from the Arabian Nights, maharajahs on elephants’ backs on days of festivity, colonial Anglo-Mughal architecture with domes and broad verandas, English cars from the Fifties, snake charmers, troubadours, omnipresent cellphones and cyber cafes where one surfed to the rhythm of U2 and Prince. A present with the thickness of 3000 years sliding along the thickness of a river.

  I loved India.

  In the evening, at Asi ghat, except for a distant electric light bulb and the motorcycle parked nearby, we could have been in a scene from twenty or thirty centuries ago. The appearance of these men in saffron rags, wearing dreadlocks and tilak, warming up to the fire, would have been the same. So would our conversation. Who am I? Where are we? And why? Is this world real? Is there a consciousness other than mine? We were beyond time and space in these eternal questions that have shaken, inspired and pacified men since the beginning of time and that produce a strange nostalgic feeling for the indescribable reality that precedes and encompasses speech …

  This country smells of incense.

  I loved India.

  I fell under the charm of the sadhus and their lifestyle. I often fantasized about joining these men who love life so much that they refuse to work for it, vow not to accept any wages, make a mockery of sweat and pain, and scorn productivity and competition in order to follow the various paths leading to God, love, peace, non-duality or nowhere … but from where they hope not to return, and in which each step is made of blissful laziness. The goal is the path itself.

  I saw them as Epictetus’ disciples, for this philosopher taught it was better to die of hunger, having banished worries and fears, than to live in abundance mired in anxiety and sorrow. I saw them to be standard-bearers of a kind of freedom and moderation which we have forgotten the taste of in our commercial civilization that preaches labour, consumption and economic growth, in a world that seems destined to short-term ecological disaster and demographic tsunami.

  I did not believe in liberation. I did not hate life enough to want to get rid of it whilst still alive and rejected the theories of karma and reincarnation, which formed a vision of the world deprived of mercy. It is not from existence that I aspired to escape but from its gravity, its weight. I admired the lightness of theirs. I felt attracted to their impassivity, but did not find an ounce of the guts I would need to really leave everything in the hope that destitution would grant me a light heart and that philosophy would offer me a carefree life. I hung out with them as a dilettante benefactor. Between reading Diogenes and living in a tub, is health insurance and credit cards. One does not dare believe it is possible to live without them, even if one knows, from reading Epicurus, that attachment is the root of sorrow and pain the only fruit of incessant searching for happiness.

  I glorified India as that civilization, which bestows the title of saint on renunciants, where contemplation is a divine attitude, non-action a goal and idleness a vision. She recognizes rapture in humility and the superiority of equanimity over the passions. Although eager for consumption, she glorifies simplicity. Despite her addiction to cell phones and social ambitions, she finds legitimacy in those who let go of everything.

  I admired her culture, praised her philosophical works and acclaimed her barefooted vagrant philosophers. I loved her huge temples; I was moved by the unostentatious fervour of her crowds.

  And I also considered her broadminded in spite of and because of her castes. For one can live there within the margins of common rules and more or less as one wishes, because she has created a space of emancipation in the very heart of her social rigidity, an outside that is not pariah, dalit or outcaste, but which is beyond the supposed scale of purity, which includes lunatics, lazy bums, wandering philosophers, ascetics and all the peaceful and wise men who voluntarily give her up …

  … I spent an afternoon in the Durga temple, a unique place of worship where one can sit down. I reflected on: ‘Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little’—a saying of Epicurus. Sadhus don’t just talk about it, they become it. Isn’t this the way to spend life? But I would die in three days … replied the little voice of reason …

  I summoned Shiva to inspire me …

  Maya, karma, moksha … Is there a world, a reality? Maybe that is not the right question. Should one aspire to set oneself free from it? That one neither. Am I or am I not? Not that either. The only question worth exploring is: how should I live? The answer I found was: as a baba.

  Sadhus are not instruments or guardians of theological principles. I had observed that they are neither moulded in a single faith, nor fixed in compulsory ambition. They believe what they want to believe, like each and everyone. Some perform severe tapasya but the majority do without. How many spend years meditating in mountain solitudes? How many reach the pinnacle of immobility or cross over the ocean of becoming? How many keep an arm raised up until calcification or lie down on a bed of nails? Very few and to achieve what, was my own answer. If one considers his body as a prison for consciousness, there may be some value in these painful disciplines which promise liberation. Otherwise one lacks motivation. There are many more who more modestly give up the world without completely leaving it, contemplate its movements, practise non-action in contentment, roam the roads, flaunt satisfaction as a principle, bathe in cheerful peace, and their desire is not to desire anything else. And their company is often pleasant.

  My fantasy was not about aiming for the Everest of asceticism. I did not believe I was going to learn to levitate, or to be in two places at once, nor did I hope to reach immortality. I was not anxious in my metaphysical curiosity. I did not have the heart of a hero or the spirit of an athlete. I would be content remaining in the planes of contentment. In the peace offered by the certainty: there is nothing to do.

  What does the Ashtavakra say today? Page thirty-four, he raises the question:

  The one whose mind is freed from desire and from desiring to be free from desire,

  The magnificent soul that has found satisfaction in self-knowledge.

  What could he be comparable to? (III, 12)

  To draw satisfaction from self-knowledge appeared to me an ideal. Was it possible? It did not have to be an objective, however, but an absence of struggle, action and reaction, comparison, a weightlessness, a leniency in being. I admired that in baba-life. But I would die in three days, whispered the coward.

  I thought I had come to the end of my thinking when a young sadhu came and folded his hands and asked for permission to sit down with me
. I granted him that.

  He wanted to speak to me as a westerner, but after having stated that he didn’t say one more word. I questioned him on the wandering monk’s daily life.

  ‘I serve my Guru.’

  ‘And what else do you do?’

  ‘I practise yoga asanas … meditate, pray, love, give …,’ he enumerated.

  ‘Where do you sleep? How do you find your food?’

  ‘In a temple. Or we beg.’

  ‘Is this hard? Are you ever hungry?’

  ‘Not often.’

  ‘And cold.’

  ‘Not often.’

  ‘Do you sometimes rest?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And when it rains?’

  ‘During monsoon, we stay on the mountain.’

  ‘Are you never bored?’

  ‘Sometimes …’

  He was continually laconic. This boy had never learned to speak about himself. What happens on the roads? Your asanas, what do they produce in you? Uday Baba did not understand my questions. He was nineteen years old and had lived this way since childhood. Wandering was normal life for him, and his asanas were somehow his version of school work. After a while, he asked for permission to leave.

  We met again at the parasol where I took my Hindi lessons. He would sit in front of me and look at me. He would not say anything if I did not question him.

  ‘What do you find sitting with me?’

  ‘There is nothing to find,’ he answered.

  Young sadhus go from one circle of renunciants to another during their free time. I saw some of them on Asi ghat. This one had chosen me. He took my darshan. His presence was respectful and familiar. His company forced me to observe myself and to observe myself being observed.

  One day, Uday Baba took leave and asked for my teaching.

  ‘My teaching? I don’t know anything!’ I exclaimed. ‘I am not qualified!’

  ‘Real gurus also answer this way,’ Uday insisted. He saw me as someone from a distant country, strange and not so strange after all, who though different, had surely acquired some knowledge.