Pilgrim's India

by ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM

  _______________________________________

  This extract is from Indian Travel Diary of a Philosopher.

  35.

  In the Buddha’s Shoes: A Search for Exact Spots and Complete Truths

  Zac O’Yeah

  ‘Welcome to Bihar,’ says the student who wants to shake my hand as soon as the train rolls into Patna Junction, the modern incarnation of Pataliputra. ‘I hope you will come back again many times.’

  I wouldn’t know.

  People persistently warned me before this trip: Don’t expect to come back alive from Bihar, they said. Don’t expect any roads, don’t expect electricity, they went on gleefully. So despite the hearty welcome by the student, who is on his way to his ‘native place’ by the Nepalese border, I am hesitant. I can’t help but notice how the railway platform looks suspiciously similar to a freshly ploughed potato-field. Hogs dig into piles of garbage on the main street and it has been said that the best time to visit Patna would have been in the days of the Buddha.

  I do my best to travel back in time. The head attraction at the museum on Buddha Road is a life-sized statue of a well-developed woman known as the Didarganj Yakshi, dating from ancient times. The museum collection also has statues of Buddha himself—he was so respected in Pataliputra that one of the sixty-four gates in the city wall was named after him. Perhaps he even strolled down Buddha Road, maybe he met and preached to the voluptuous model, I muse in the garden outside the building.

  If Buddha has any relatives alive, it is reasonable to assume that they live in present-day Patna. I scan the faces of museum guards and ticket-sellers, for some characteristics of my imaginary Buddha. I readily admit that I want to get a sense of contact, however minuscule: I wish to walk in his footsteps or see something that he may have looked at.

  Must fight my vanity. Nirvana is the target.

  The driver’s name is Lal Dev, which interestingly means ‘Dear God’. Like most gods he is something of a riddle: He rarely speaks, but often shoots off an otherworldly grin.

  The road is an endless row of potholes. The dry-bush landscape is dotted with grazing camels. The taxi has no speedometer so the hole in the dashboard has been fitted with a tape deck. Dear God has an assistant, who feeds cassettes into the hole, waves joss sticks before the dashboard altar and, at regular intervals, steps out to ask for directions. Usually there’s some antique uncle sitting out there, keeping an eye on the crossroads through dusty spectacles, almost as if he were waiting for us.

  This was the road the Buddha followed to Rajgir, where an enthusiastic maharajah offered the peripatetic monk half of his kingdom. That is the kind of stuff maharajahs did in those days. However, the Buddha wouldn’t let material circumstances tie him down to any one place. Yet he was to return here frequently, and his son Rahula grew up in a monastery nearby, in Nalanda, which developed into the world’s greatest Buddhist university. Now, of course, it has closed down.

  ‘What’s that?’ asks one visitor staring quizzically at a ruin.

  ‘That is a stupa. A kind of temple,’ replies the guard overseeing a huge mound of darkened tiles. The low afternoon shadow of the stupa falls across the fields.

  ‘Achcha, a temple? So where does one enter?’

  ‘You don’t,’ the guard says.

  ‘Then how is it a temple?’

  Good point, I think, because the discussion reinforces Buddhism’s differences from other religions. But wherever it spread, stupas were built to hold bone-pieces, ashes or other relics of Buddhist teachers. The Nalanda stupa contains the Buddha’s secretary’s remains—he had, among other things, been entrusted with tutoring the Buddha’s son.

  The guide claims there were 200 monasteries around the stupa, although only eleven have been unearthed. The ground floors have raised platforms for the lecturer, surrounded by corridors with thirty standardized student chambers per floor. Some monasteries were nine storeys high, according to the guide, and students travelled from as far away as Korea and Sumatra to Nalanda, which boasted of some 1500 teachers and 10,000 pupils. Eight out of ten applicants were turned back after failing the admissions test. ‘Those who cannot discuss the finer points of Tripitaka are little esteemed and must hide in shame,’ the Chinese traveller Xuanzang noted after studying here in the seventh century.

  Birds chirp and a gentle breeze rustles the trees. A Tibetan lama meditates under a mango tree. Suddenly a voice, amplified by a megaphone, echoes in the ruins: out of an air-conditioned coach a load of Japanese Zen-Buddhists tumble out—posing alone or in groups, taking snaps with their mobile phones and sending off instant multimedia greetings. No wonder the postcard-sellers seem so desperate.

  The King’s House, Raja Griha, lies ten kilometres to the south. Today it is a small bazaar surrounded by hundreds of camels leisurely chewing on twigs. In Buddha’s time the population is said to have been around 180 million. A Bihari gentleman tells me, ‘No matter what figure we name, you must always divide it by six, because we Biharis like to exaggerate and where other people double their claims, we usually multiply by six.’ I find the formula useful for estimating the kingdom’s actual population: 30 million may be quite accurate.

  The Buddha used to live on a hill known as Vulture Peak. In those days religious leaders spread their ideas travelling on foot and lived off charity. Philosophers were expected to renounce all possessions and never settle down—it was a culture on the move, a lifestyle free from the shackles of society, a bit like the hippies of the 1960s. In the monsoons when travel became difficult, even dangerous, the solution was to find a cave—cheap to maintain, no rent—and for three months you philosophized there and prepared the next tour. That is how the first monasteries came into being. Interestingly, the name Bihar is derived from the Buddhist word for monastery, ‘vihara’.

  After much climbing I stumble on the cave beneath the peak. Pilgrims have decorated the entrance with prayer flags and covered the walls with gold leaf. The cave is a low pit barely two metres deep, and I hit my head in the ceiling, sure that Buddha too bruised his bald skull here. A flat rock, which must have been the Buddha’s bed-cum-sofa, is now an altar. Usually at Buddhist sites, the sights are from centuries after the Buddha’s death and I suddenly realize that this cave is the only place that is not changed substantially since the Buddha was here.

  So this is how he lived. It is a rare experience to sit at the mouth of the cave, with my feet in his footprints. I’d like to stay here for a while.

  His birthplace Lumbini, in the lowlands of Nepal, is just across the border from India. Having entered into Nepal I check into the downmarket Nepal Guesthouse, and chill out on the rooftop terrace with local Tuborg. It is swarming with backpackers on the way to Kathmandu, none of whom seem very interested in the fact that Buddha was born practically next door.

  When I talk to the waiter at first I don’t know what it is with him that is so weird. Then I get it: each phrase is an improvised, rhyming couplet. The following morning I borrow his bicycle to go the thirty kilometres to Lumbini. A memorial column from 249 BCE and the tank where the newborn Buddha got his first bath were rediscovered here by the German archaeologist A. Führer hundred years ago.

  Buddha’s father was the chairman of the municipal council in a city-state, either in Piprahva in India or Tilaura Kot in Nepal—nobody is really sure. According to an ancient Pali text, one day the young Buddha said, ‘Suppose I shaved off my hair and beard, put on the yellow robe, and went forth from the house-life into homelessness?’ Off he went, meeting gurus and ascetics, debating with seekers, and after six years of travelling he reached—alone and dejected—a village with an inviting fig tree (Ficus religiosa), a species later to be known as the bodhi-tree. Here he decided to wait for an answer—or die.

  The horse looks like it might keel over and die any moment. The driver lashes him. The horse meditates for a while—and decides to oblige. A truly Buddhist horse, I think. Since the buses are very crowded, with passengers on the roofs, I go with this t
onga-wallah. Like a true Bihari he exaggerated as he hustled me, ‘Come, I’ll take you “Buddha Gaya” by Indian helicopter.’

  Ignoring my protests he stuffs me into the back, on top of the luggage and some other passengers. Although the Buddha mostly walked, he may have travelled by horse, and so the tonga becomes my time machine. Here and there I glimpse monks, easy to spot from afar: their skulls gleaming in the sun, their robes bright red and yellow.

  Bodh-Gaya used to be pretty much off the tourist track until 1811 when a British expedition arrived and encountered some hermits. They were told vague stories of Burmese worshippers who’d come here, but of course they’d no idea who the Buddha—by then largely forgotten in India—might be. The decorative curls on the statues led the colonialists to assume that the Buddha was some prehistoric African god, who for unknown reasons had spawned a cult following in Bihar.

  Today, however, the village has a very cosmopolitan feel to it—a reflection of the international appeal of Buddhism: Tibetan, Bhutanese, Thai and Burmese monasteries, Chinese, Taiwanese and Vietnamese temples, a Japanese Buddha-colossus, a British meditation centre, an Italian restaurant, German apfelstrudel in the coffee shops, and everything else you might wish for while waiting for nirvana. So here we are, of a zillion nationalities, chanting mantras, some 2530 years later.

  On a piece of rock I find a carving of the Buddha’s footprints. For long he was depicted only through symbols (footprints, an umbrella, a throne, an empty saddle)—suggesting that his existence had been extinguished by nirvana. So that is why we will never know what he actually looked like. Though he appears to have worn shoe-size 68.

  Nirvana! Afterwards Buddha wandered to Rishipatana, a popular recreational area near Varanasi frequented by itinerant seekers, and preached his legendary first sermon, setting the wheel of Dharma in motion. The best part was that everybody could get to know the meaning of life irrespective of caste or social status.

  Something was in the air.

  There’s always something in the air, I think to myself as I stand in Varanasi’s Chowk and negotiate with a rickshawallah. The road is flanked by the spillage of a bursting metropolis and mechanical workshops servicing the Grand Trunk Road. After a long ride we halt next to a gigantic stupa which apparently marks the spot for Buddha’s sermon.

  The tickets are $5 for foreigners, and for this price you also get to see a couple of brick piles. There’s a park with fenced-in deer being fed ice-cream wrappers by snickering children—karmic misfits if ever there were any—and a cafe with bright soda ads. While I refresh myself, I go through the Buddha’s lectures and find that many contain miraculous displays.

  I get a strange feeling that I could be reading Harry Potter: He multiplied himself, turned invisible, walked on water, read minds, and planted seeds that instantly grew into mango trees. The tricks would rope in curious onlookers, and are not as miraculous as they seem. To multiply was simple since all monks wore standardized robes—there was no dearth of doubles. By this the Buddha cleverly demonstrated the rapid spread of Buddhism. The mango-tree trick also symbolizes the growth of Buddhism, and is performed by roadside conjurers even today.

  As befits a true traveller, he died on tour. During a stay in Vaishali he hinted at the possibility that his disciples would soon take charge. Then, after having eaten some mean pork curry, he suffered severe food poisoning. Despite this he walked all the way to Kushinagar—in those days a somewhat insignificant cluster of mud huts, according to the old scriptures—where he asked his followers to make a bed between two trees, the location of which was found during excavations in 1861–62. On this spot he spoke his famous last words, ‘It is in the nature of all forms to dissolve, but you can attain perfection through perseverance.’

  After the cremation, relics were brought back to Vaishali. Before I go in search for the Buddha’s tomb, I have a non-veg meal in a seedy Patna restaurant and awake in horror at 4 a.m. making a desperate dash for the loo. During my travels I’ve suffered as many forms of tourist diarrhoea as the Eskimos have words for snow: ‘the Delhi-Belly’, ‘the Kathmandu Killer-Craps’, ‘the Farts of the Fakirs’, ‘the Calcutta Chromosome’, to name a few. This evil ‘Patna Poop’ gives off a howling wind fierce enough to blow the bathroom door off its hinges.

  Existence is dukkha, suffering (all due to trishna, craving), at least on a day like this when I have to rely on public transport, and I fully identify with the Buddha’s death-throes. The bus driver in his camouflage cap looks like Fidel Castro without a cigar. ‘Rocka-rocka,’ says Fidel and plays a video featuring gyrating Bollywood aunties.

  The bus shakes and shudders, its passengers mesmerized by the TV-set. After half a day, three bus changes and an hour of walking, I reach Vaishali. Basically just seventy kilometres north of Pataliputra, it was one of the world’s first democratic states and a place the Buddha really liked a lot. Here he stated that each person must be a lantern and shine with the power of truth, and that was his way of suggesting that he had done his job and was ready to go.

  The fields are yellowish. The houses of yellowed mud. The shops are of dry bamboo and sun-bleached palm leaves at a crossroads with no traffic. The hotel, government-run, lets out an ancient double room for 100 rupees. There’s no running water, no electricity: I am given a lantern and told to use the hand-pump in the yard.

  The walk to where the Buddha gave his last major lectures, takes me past grazing buffaloes and goats, children running about naked, laughing at me, people harvesting, threshing, or just lazing around, depending on—I suppose—what their karma stipulates or their position in the local hierarchy. As a foreigner here, one tries to look for signs that would prove or disprove the theory of karma: because one would like to know.

  Out of nowhere a pot-bellied man in safari suit joins me. Not another loud tourist guide, I sigh. Strangely, he doesn’t speak. He shows me silently around the excavation. Archaeologists have found town-walls, monasteries, coins and seals around here. Later, when I expect him to demand money, he leads me to his motorbike and offers a ride. I vaguely think, as we turn off the main road, that he might be one of those dacoits of Bihar, plotting to rob me and chop off my head. That would be really swell—to discover my karmic fate in such a gruesome manner. But instead he drives me to Buddha’s tomb in the jungle, a place I wouldn’t have been able to find without him. The burial stupa has a base built of clay and measures seven metres, inside of which the remains were found in 1958.

  The mysterious biker drives me back to my room and finally speaks, saying that some relative of his works at the hotel. Then he’s gone, before I can offer him any money. I retire for the night, the sky over Vaishali is starry and bright as skies only get in places with permanent power-cuts. I drink Old Monk from a bottle I’ve carried and spot a lantern in the distance. A boy comes with a tray of hot chapattis, potato curry, dal.

  In the midst of glaring poverty, clichéd squalor, dukkha beyond remedy, Bihar is graceful with its old-fashioned kind-heartedness and hospitality. Probably the Buddha was treated the same way: probably that is why he didn’t bother to travel very far from Bihar. There’s clearly something miraculous about this area.

  At dawn I take my bath at the hand-pump. The water is not at all cold; it is warmer than the winter air. The sun disperses veils of mist from the fields; it is the beginning of a beautiful day. Afterwards, when I am ready to leave for Patna, there’s no trace of a bus. While I am brooding, one of those typical antique uncles sitting by the road nods at a white Ambassador. The uncle says, ‘Patna.’

  The driver opens the door without a word. After a few kilometres he picks up a man. Further down the road yet another. Still without speaking. The uncles get off at different places. An hour later we reach Patna and I am dropped in front of the railway station. No explanations are given, none needed. If I wasn’t standing here on the rough earth that serves as a Patnese sidewalk, I would believe that the entire trip was a dream.

  I feel that the Buddha is watching. And
pulling my leg.

  36.

  The spring feast of colour

  Meerabai (16 century ce)

  Translated by Shama Futehally

  The spring feast of colour,

  with sprinkling and laughter,

  tastes like the dust.

  Empty the bed, the attic, the fields.

  My walk swings empty because

  what weighted my heart is lost.

  I fear to seek and fear

  to think. Counting and counting

  each day, the lines on my

  fingers are scraped.

  The drums are playing, the

  jhanjh, the flute, the one-

  stringed lute. The light rain

  of spring has begun

  but the dark one is from home.

  Says Meera, I wait.

  Life after life

  I stand by the road

  and look for a home

  with my lord,

  lifter

  of the mountain.

  ________________________________________

  This poem is from In the Dark of the Heart: Songs of Meera.

  37.

  The Saint

  Jeet Thayil

  Later, I had half a sense memory of someone falling against me in the aisle as I alighted at the depot in Panjim. My wallet was gone: expertly, brilliantly picked. The man and his partner—there would have been a partner—did their work in under a minute: the quick stumble and pocket dip, the wallet passed from one to the other, the unhurried dispersal. I imagined them going through the money (there wasn’t much) and snapshots, the press ID, the business cards I no longer needed, the laminated twelve-step Alcoholics Anonymous booklet I’d carried for more than a decade. In a way I was happy to be rid of these poor emblems of a previous life. And I admired the man’s skill.