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Copyright © 2014 by Sallie Tisdale
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Table of Contents
Great Buddha Gym for All Mens and Womens
Reading Guide Questions
About the Author
Great Buddha Gym for All Mens and Womens
I arrived in Bodh Gaya, the town that surrounds the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, on New Year’s Eve. The pilgrim’s journey to Bodh Gaya often entails some hard travel along rough roads. Historical accounts invariably describe confusion, overcrowded trains, misdirection, long waits, late buses, blistered feet, and false leads, along with the constant worry of violent crime. (The area was so lawless until a few years ago that foreigners were told not to travel at night at all.) The road from the little airport six miles away passed flat checkerboard fields of blooming yellow mustard and deep green rice. Old buses, tiny cars, and three-wheeled motor rickshaws shared the narrow road with tall trucks swaying languidly from side to side under top-heavy loads of hay and firewood. But my pilgrim’s suffering had more to do with transatlantic flights and jet lag. I’d flown into Delhi from the States and collapsed for half a night in a nearby hotel; it was one of the coldest days Delhi had seen in years, and the humid, dirty air had weight. On the way back to the airport in the morning, the taxi driver taught me to say thank you, dhanyavaad, and asked if I was going to Bodh Gaya to pray. The proper answer would be not exactly, but I said yes.
When the Buddha Shakyamuni was dying, he said to revere four places important to his life: where he was born, where he was enlightened, where he first taught, and where he died. He acknowledged that this was a pacifier of sorts, for followers who had not yet completely realized the emptiness of the Buddha himself. Either way, Buddhists have been doing this since he made the suggestion; so have souvenir salesmen, self-appointed guides and touts for fake charities. When the Buddha was enlightened, this was a remote forest; by the time he died, perhaps 9,000 of his disciples lived here. Now almost 40,000 people live here—very few of them Buddhists but all of them invested in enlightenment in one way or the other. Mahabodhi Temple, which marks the site where the Buddha found enlightenment, is a UNESCO World Heritage site now and receives millions of visitors every year, a great river of people from around the world.
I had flown across northern India in a small plane filled with Buddhist tourists: dozens from Tibet, China, Japan, Korea, and Thailand, one elderly Frenchwoman, and me. The 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorjeahe Karmapa, one of the highest leaders in Vajrayana Buddhism, was teaching in Bodh Gaya, and the group was a little high-strung and excited at being so close to their destination.
I lacked any religious imperative for pilgrimage. I’ve been a Zen Buddhist for 30 years. The idea of the sacred and the holy is a peculiar notion in Zen; everything points away from our urge to define something special here as opposed to there. Zen has plenty of rituals, but they are not meant to be concretized, and a few rituals celebrate throwing away our attachment to rituals. If one place is sacred, another must be profane, and that’s tricky territory. My good friend Thomas Bruner, who practices in the same Zen community as me, invited me to join him. In the space of two years, Thomas’s partner, father, and two dogs had died. Thomas had a clear and pressing goal: Now what? He hoped a pilgrimage might help clarify things, give him some idea of what was next in his life. I didn’t feel a spiritual need to see the Buddhist historical sites, but I was curious and interested; these are places whose names I had been chanting for 30 years, and I had always wanted to go to India.
Thomas wanted to do the sites in traditional, chronological order, starting with the Buddha’s birthplace, Kapilavastu, in Nepal. He left before Christmas. I work part-time as a nurse and had to work on Christmas Day—par for the course for an American Buddhist—and we agreed to meet in Bodh Gaya.
He hadn’t planned his way from Nepal but figured it would be a fairly simple matter—a train or two across the border and through Patna, the capital of Bihar, to Bodh Gaya. It did not prove so. Finally, counting up the days and the hundreds of dollars involved in any combination of bus, train, and plane, he hired a driver. The intermediary said the trip would be four, five, maybe eight hours, depending on traffic. Nine hours into the trip, Thomas sent me a text: “traffic is terrible! very slow.” I typed out an elaborate text response; my reply cycled for a few minutes before the error message appeared: “unable to send.”
I settled into my hotel, about a mile from the Mahabodhi Temple, and headed out. In India, horns function as turn signals, brake lights, hand gestures, prayers. I walked through an incessant choir of honking. Wisps of smoke hung in the misty air, from stinking charcoal grills and cloying incense and little fires where people huddled along the road in the record-breaking cold. Black cows with short horns stood languidly, tied by ropes to small trees, or stepped slowly along the road. Men sold ice cream from little coolers on the back of bicycles under the soft leaves of crepe myrtle trees. A line of scrawny, underdressed men played rhythm on an odd mix of plastic and tin buckets. Horse-drawn carriages and ancient bicycle rickshaws pedaled by ancient men joined the stream. The road was shaded by flame trees and sal trees, and a half-dozen soldiers with rifles directed traffic with capricious waves and frowns. The noise and the crowd were flagrant, extravagant, a kind of living mural of human diversity and creative entrepreneurship. Lines of vendors sold pastries, bananas, jewelry, cheap hand luggage, recreational spices in lines of foil packets like condoms, potato chips flavored masala and tandoori, scarves and shawls, tiny tents for meditation, fruit and tea and out-of-date guidebooks. The streets nearest the complex were tightly lined with tables and tarps heaped with Buddha statues, rosaries, prayer wheels, incense burners, meditation cushions, Buddhist key rings, Buddhist coasters, Buddhist T-shirts, and optical illusion posters of Hindu gods, with eyes that follow you around. A man was being shaved by the side of the road, head tilted back and eyes closed, as the barber scraped the creamy lotion off his neck.
I walked in a bit of a daze; the fragments of expectation I carried with me—the quiet contemplation of history, silence in the shadow of the past—disintegrated like the dry leaves under my feet. I kept pausing to look around and get my bearings in the bracing crowd. Hundreds of people were walking up and down the road, paying no more attention than the vehicles to the traffic laws. Hindu men in wrinkled white shirts over long sarongs tied at the waist stepped deliberately, as though they had walked for years, passing strolling Sikhs with colorful turbans and long beards. The women looked like a tropical aviary, in clothes of every color and style, patterns piled on and wrapped around other patterns: pleated skirts with short, tight blouses showing midriffs of every shape, or the long tunics and loose trousers called salwar kameez. In the unusual cold, most were also bundled inside saggy cardigans with heavy brogans peeking out beneath fine silk pants. Bright-eyed, skinny kids begged from pedestrians, using the universal symbol eat, eat. Here and there I saw elegant men in Ralph Lauren and the occasional Muslim woman in a dark abaya covering all but her face and hands. The throng was filled with Tibetans of all ages, a healthy diaspora wearing every
shade of red and maroon and burgundy. Many young monks walked down the road hand in hand or stood gaily in the back of pickups, holding onto the roof and laughing as they weaved through the crowd. Four adolescent boys wrapped in maroon robes stood at a cart with an air rifle, happily shooting at balloons. The Hotel Tathagata and Hotel Vipassana and Hotel Siddhartha were lit top to bottom with flashing Christmas lights. I saw signs for the Bright Career Institute, Soda Fever, the God Particle Institute for Physics and Math, and the Hungry Bite Family Restaurant. Great Buddha Gym for all mens and womens, I read from a poster tacked to a pole. Nearby, a dog with bloody genitals and three legs hopped toward a field.
Thomas sent another text: “traffic at standstill in Patna FOR 1 HOUR!” My reply—“spend the night in Patna, it’s ok”—cycled for a few minutes before the error message returned: “unable to send.”
The central, towering temple reached into the pale twilit sky. The entire temple ground is enclosed by a thick, Pepto-Bismol–pink stucco wall; on the north side where a wide pedestrian avenue leads to the gate, you can look through sections of wrought iron. Inside was a complex as textured and surprising as the crowd: the central tower, smaller temples and stupas, short sets of stairs leading up and down to walkways and altars and small lawns where people meditated and napped and talked. Under big trees, dozens of people wearing mitts and knee pads were doing bowing practice on special pallets lined up to face the center. All Buddhists do bowing practice, often full prostrations on the ground—once a day or 3 times a day or 108 times a day. It is a common practice of Vajrayana (commonly known as Tibetan) Buddhism to try to do at least 100,000 full prostrations in one’s life. At Mahabodhi, young monks in robes or tank tops and laymen and -women in T-shirts and sweatpants stood with arms overhead, then crouched, slid out on their mitts along the pallets until they were fully extended with face down, pushed back, and stood again, arms extended overhead—again and again, counting to 1,000, 100,000, in many cases, 1,000,000 or more.
On July 7, 2013, ten bombs exploded early in the morning near the central Buddha statue and the Bodhi Tree. Three more unexploded bombs were found and defused. For a few weeks the bombs were useful propaganda for the endless drama that is Indian politics, with officials of different parties accusing each other of neglect and incompetence. Then the bombs vanished from the news. The only visible effects now are the absence of vendors near the main gate and the absolute prohibition on cell phones and computer drives in order to prevent anyone from sending signals or messages inside the temple. Only true cameras are allowed. For the first time in decades of travel, I’d brought a tablet computer instead of just a notebook and a camera; the tablet was in my shoulder bag along with my cell phone, and I couldn’t go in.
I walked wearily back to our hotel in the daunting Indian New Year’s Eve, blooming with shouts and bonfires, heavy, damp explosions and the prickle of firecrackers. Distorted Indian house music squawked out of overloaded speakers competing for the attention of whooping dancers. I passed an amusement park with hundreds of lights flashing and children going round and round on teeny cars; loud music kept feeding back upon itself from a velodrome with huge speakers hung on the walls. I walked past the fires and the barbers and the man selling pieces of an enormous white cake speckled with flies, and the tin-can drummers and the Foreigner Wine Shop and a man slicing the throat of a struggling goat by the side of the road, while four small boys watched in silence.
Thomas arrived at last after midnight, dazed and shimmering from a 16-hour ride with a Nepalese driver who spoke no English and didn’t seem to understand his increasingly blunt gestures about toilets. He fell into a hard sleep in a room down the hall, but I woke several times in the night to what sounded like cannons.
Travel to new places is filled with unexpected pleasures and mysteries—like watching Pirates of the Caribbean dubbed into Hindi, followed by an American sitcom with English-language subtitles for the apparently incomprehensible English dialogue. The challenge of India started, for me, with the visa application, which requires one to have a shipping receipt number before one knows where one is sending the package. “In India it is possible to win every battle but the last one,” wrote Eric Newby.
Newby, one of the grand travel writers of the 20th century, served in India as a young man in the British Army. Newby loved and hated travel—and he loved and hated India. But he could not forget the River Ganges. In 1965, he decided to travel the length of the river with his impressively plucky wife, a trip that looked reasonable on paper and became, in real life, a quest by turns irksome and dangerous. Their boat beached 63 times in the first six days, the beginning of a quixotic journey beset by bureaucratic entanglements, endless negotiations, unpredictable storms, unreliable boatmen, and a complete lack of fish. Recounting one of many attempts to rent or buy a new boat when his own was damaged, he wrote, “We were prey to all the violent, unworthy emotions that have consumed visitors to India from time immemorial. For the inhabitants of India have a simple genius for concocting exasperating situations.” Newby continued, “One of the prerequisites of real exasperation is that there should be no one to vent one’s anger on, and there was no one.”
Getting my passport back in the mail with visa included felt like early Christmas. India is maddening government regulation. India is cannons in the night. India is light switches that change function with the barometric pressure, monkeys breaking into hotel rooms to steal underwear and Kleenex; India is rolling blackouts, coleslaw sandwiches, mongooses, relentless and more or less pointless honking, professional lepers, and six-meter-long saris in glorious colors being held up by beautiful women to dry in the wind. India is museums with no signs and stores with no shopkeepers, wild indigo, phones that can call each other from 100 miles away but not from the room next door. India is outrageous noise, outrageous beauty.
India is the fastest-growing country in the world, with 1.3 billion people. There are hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects, every major, and a startling number of minor, religions. Some anthropologists count 2,000 ethnic groups. But the Indian government, apparently unwilling to face its own spotty track record on civil rights, refuses to note ethnicity or race in its census. So Indians are smeared into homogeneity by foreign media, and the traveler must resist the urge to make any kind of generalization. Thus it has been in this part of the world all along. Two thousand and five hundred years ago, Buddhism was born in a place and time of rapid change, populated by people of many tribes and races; it arose out of struggle and war and the world’s most strictly entrenched class system.
After the Buddha died, the original community split into two sects, and then those sects divided again and again until there were 18 schools of Buddhism in ancient India. (Only one, Theravada, survives today.) In spite of division, Buddhism thrived for 1,000 years here, even as other religions appeared and grew. The aristocratic Brahman class strictly limited travel for fear of impurity and refused to cross the sea, so the merchant class enthusiastically adopted Buddhism. The religion quickly spread to what is now Greece, Sri Lanka, China, Mongolia, Bhutan, and Nepal, then Korea, Burma, Java, and Sumatra, then Japan, Tibet, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam—and a lot of those foreign Buddhists traveled to India, bringing new customs, ideas, languages, books, and questions, and taking back a million impressions and ideas.
Even as Buddhism grew, spread, changed, and thrived in every new country it entered, it died in India—the result of a top-heavy priesthood, the growing popularity of Hinduism, the invasion of the white Huns, wars between kingdoms, battles for adherents between the many sects of Buddhism, and the changing fortunes of northern India itself. Beginning in the tenth century, invading Turkish armies arrived, bringing Islam. Buddhist monks fled their approach, and the Muslim armies had nothing to stop them from destroying the remaining monasteries and burning the libraries to ash. The Mahabodhi site was left half in ruins. In 1590, a Hindu Mahant, or head priest, of the Shiva-worshiping Saivite sect took up residence. There has b
een a Mahant in residence at the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment ever since, 16 of them in a row.
In the cold, foggy morning, we walked to the temple through the murmuring river of pedestrians: the rapid music of Hindi conversation, the hails of salesmen, the faint private hum of whispered chants and prayers. The patter never ceased, like the percussion of small drums: “Ride, sir?”called old men from rusty rickshaws. “Pashmina, lady?” “Face mask, madam?” “Sir, madam, postcards?” said a handsome young man, expertly dropping a long accordion of bad photographs in front of me; none of them were of the Mahabodhi Temple. It was barely possible to cross the road without being run down by scooters and taxi rickshaws. At the small pedestrian circle, beggars lined one side of the curb and hawkers the other. A very short old man thrust a dark little cage with three doves toward me. He wanted me to buy the birds and set them free, to get good karma.
In 1893, Paul Deussen came to Bodh Gaya and noted that there was “not a single Buddhist to be found.” There are plenty of them now, visiting from Tibet, Burma, China, Bhutan, Nepal, Thailand, Japan, and Sri Lanka, along with Hindus here to do prasad, or offering, and many Indian tourists—a holiday crowd of young people, couples, families, and school groups, laughing and pushing as they waited. I could see no other white faces, no other Westerners at all. We were stopped, as we would be many times a day wherever we went, by people wanting to photograph the interesting foreigners. A group of young men approached: “One photo, please!” one asked. “Which country?” asked another. Each took a turn to pose between us, then traded cameras so the next could pose. We ourselves had no camera. I left my electronics in the hotel room; Thomas left his iPhone and iPad in an insecure-looking locker outside the gate.
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