Great Buddha Gym for All Mens and Womens

by Sallie Tisdale

  Thomas took his position, kneeling, eyes closed. A sacred space, he believed. A space outside the stream of ordinary life. No, it isn’t, I kept saying, advocate for all the rest. As easily I could say yes. No. Yes. No. Nothing, all. Thus have we heard: that one day, the Buddha sat in front of an audience of 80,000 monks at Vulture Peak. He held up a flower, saying nothing. No one spoke. But Mahakashyapa smiled. There are different silences. That day, 79,999 sat in silent confusion; one smiled in silent understanding. We drove into the sunset back to Bodh Gaya, gold leaf over the Rajgir hills, a luminous scarlet disk in a pale sky, the deep green and bright-yellow fields turning to black and disappearing in the dark.

  I had trouble keeping track of days, morning rolling into evening, night rolling into dawn. The brief sunshine at Vulture Peak passed and the weather grew colder, with thick fogs lasting into the afternoons. We found a place with decent coffee, and another with dependable food. Thomas named the stray dogs Everydog, all of them looking so alike they seemed to be one great litter, and we began to greet each one effusively: “Hey, there, Everydog! What have you been doing?” One evening I retired with a book, and Thomas spent the time walking the rice fields and drinking beer with four young men, talking until midnight.

  “You should be more ambassadorial,” he told me.

  Every day we walked to Mahabodhi, stood in line to be searched, took off our shoes, and went to find places near the tree.

  “Is it helping?” I asked Thomas one day, at the little coffee shop we’d found along the way. Reliable espresso was an unexpected treasure in Bodh Gaya, but I hadn’t forgotten what brought Thomas here in the first place.

  “Yes,” he answered. “It’s helping, but I’m not sure exactly how. Not yet.”

  The focused posture and objectless meditation that is the zazen of Japanese Soto Zen Buddhism is perhaps the most austere and prescribed form of Buddhist meditation. Zazen has been the main practice of my 30 years as a Buddhist, since long before I’d seen the more physically relaxed meditation style of Vajrayana and Korean Buddhism or the comfortable amble of Theravadans. The unexpected pilgrims’ melee at Mahabodhi was a long way from the silent zendo in which I’d learned to meditate. It might have bothered me, made it difficult to settle down. But not so.

  In part I think it was because I knew what I was seeing—I knew the meaning, I knew my place. In America, I am in a tiny minority as a Buddhist. To be in a public place around many people who considered full prostrations and chanting to be normal behavior was relaxing. I felt known by all. I am used to confounding people when I travel, fitting no simple category. In India I stood out as a white person, a foreigner—“One photo, please!” was the chorus of my days—but not because I bowed. I could say, “I am a Buddhist,” and it explained everything. I found it easy to settle into quiet, in the midst of sound.

  We lay down for a nap among scattered monks resting on a section of grass. A toothless old monk came and sat beside Thomas, who was lying on his back with his eyes closed, and pulled up Thomas’s shirt to pat his belly. Thomas laughed out loud and looked at me with wide eyes. What the heck? The monk laughed; Thomas laughed. I laughed. “What’s going on?” Thomas asked in surprise. The monk rubbed and patted and laughed and finally lay down and threw his arm across Thomas’s chest to snuggle.

  “I don’t know! I have no idea!” I was laughing so hard that I could hardly breathe.

  “Seriously, what the heck!” Thomas kept chuckling and the more he laughed, the more the monk laughed. I looked around and saw a small crowd of Tibetan women laughing, too, hiding their mouths behind their small brown hands. How strange—what to do? Perhaps he was demented; perhaps he was mad; he seemed to mean no harm, and after several minutes of hysteria, we all fell asleep, cuddled up on the lawn.

  Later, sitting by the tree again, I watched a pair of pigeons flap about on the railing, and then one flew up to a low niche and perched on a Buddha’s head.

  As we walked out of the temple into the evening, Thomas leaned toward me. “Guess what?” he said, grinning. “I got a leaf!”

  Because of the fog, many trains had been delayed, and others canceled altogether; the remaining were full of crowds heading to the holiday festivals and political rallies in the cities. Varanasi was just four hours away by express, but the only seats left were on the 3:00 a.m. train. We hired Umesh again. “How long will it take to drive to Varanasi?” we asked the hotel clerk.

  “Four, five, maybe eight hours.”

  We made good time on the highway, passing through toll stations crammed with high trucks—“BLOW HORN”—stopping a few times at gas stations in search of toilets, not always with success, and once for a meal at one of the roadside cafés called dhabas. We asked Umesh about his wife, who is a computer programmer, and what it was like to grow up in Bodh Gaya, and his marathon drives with tourists and businessmen. Empty fields stitched together in a quilt by low berms, a man defecating by the road, children standing open-mouthed in the dirt yards of small houses, a slow line of men in dusty suits walking in single file. Billboards, a crowd of low buildings.

  “I don’t like Varanasi,” said Umesh, smiling and shaking his head.

  We crossed a bridge over a shallow trickle of river, and Umesh left the highway to double back under the bridge onto a dusty road. Any trick is allowed in the jam and roar that is Varanasi traffic. The banks of the river are closed to vehicles; we could reach our hotel only by boat or on foot, but Umesh thought rickshaws could get us close. He made the deal in a moment. Quickly we climbed up on two cycles with our luggage and waved good-bye. We’d been on the road about five hours.

  When I first thought of coming to India, it was Varanasi that came to mind. Varanasi (Benares, Banāras, Kāśī) has been a city for 2,000 or 3,000 or 5,000 years, depending on how you count cities and how you count years—a daunting, cosmopolitan, renowned, and to some terrifying city. I was drawn to the Hindu rivers, as I have been drawn to religious places and devotional practices all my life. As a child, internalized and rather solitary and outspoken all at once, I imagined being a Catholic nun, an actress, a kibbutznik, a firefighter—something with a shared and bound shape, identity, and community as one. When, as a young woman, I sought (not for the first time) a functional religious path and found my home in Zen, it was something of a cosmic joke. Zen Buddhism can confound all our attempts to make ourselves a certain shape. Instead it drives us to be who we are, which is often a surprise. It is filled with formal structures—robes, rituals, ceremony, signs of shared belief—but none of them is necessary; none of them is sacred. All, nothing; yes, no. Yes. I tried to imagine growing up in a world like that along the banks of the Ganges: a community where clear lines are drawn around each and every life from birth, defining and supporting and constricting and demanding that the life fit its definition instead of the other way around. Life as a Hindu in Hinduism’s most holy place? No bartering at all. The American love of choices—endless choices, endless bartering with circumstance—can turn into floundering confusion. As an American Buddhist, I could fantasize that living in a city where everyone spoke my religious language, knew the shorthand and the body language of my beliefs, would be a comfort. In fact, I wondered how the equation balanced for each of the people I passed: the horrid suffocation of caste mixed with the blessed relief of not having to figure it out. Hinduism is extraordinarily complex, a little hysterical and mad at the ends of its long continuums of practice, gorgeous and fine and incessant. Here was life lived day by day in the shared unspoken. Everything here reflected itself. My interest was anthropological in part, and a kind of envy of wishing I could believe something I don’t believe.

  Ostensibly we’d come to visit Sarnath, where the Buddha first taught, third of the main pilgrimage sites. But really, I came because it is Varanasi, because I wanted to see this ancient strange city and visit the fabled banks along the Ganges. More than half of India’s population lives within a few hundred miles of the River Ganges—Ganga, the Mother. In Varanasi
, a stretch several miles long is divided into more than a hundred ghats, broad staircases that lead to bathing places. Along this stretch, people bathe at dawn every day, reciting prayers: “Giver of life, remover of pain and sorrow, bestower of happiness, creator of the universe, may we receive your supreme sin-destroying light: may you guide our minds to good.” People come to the Ganges to die, because to die and be cremated by the Ganges here is to be released all at once from the cycle of suffering and reincarnation. They come to do laundry, to visit, to make offerings, to flirt, to collect sacred water for home rituals, to buy fruit, to commit crimes, to gossip, to sell betel, to ride a ferry, to fall in love, eat, meditate, smoke, meet friends, get a shave and a massage, fix boats, call to the gods and answer the gods. This is the part of India I wanted most to see, and it had not been Buddhist for a very long time.

  Brace yourself, said Thomas’s Lonely Planet. Be wary, said everyone. Trust no one. Hold onto your valuables with both hands. Keep your eyes open. Beware of con men and scam artists and pickpockets. Stay out of crowds. Don’t give money to beggars or hire a guide off the street or wander back streets alone. I do not like Varanasi, said Umesh.

  We were fresh meat with luggage, and our two rickshaw drivers slowly pedaled between parked cars and the traffic toward our hotel, standing upright to get enough traction. The leader stopped and they consulted quickly, then turned off the road down a street with scooters and cycles, no room for cars, and then into an alley paved with brick and cattle dung. The stone walls were painted with signs and advertisements. Again the drivers stopped, asked a passerby, and turned down a narrower alley and around a corner, stopped, and carried the rickshaws up a step and down a narrower alley to the next corner. At last we reached an alley too narrow for the rickshaws; we paid the drivers exactly what had been agreed upon and walked up a lane just wide enough for two, to our hotel and the river below.

  The far side of the river is an empty plain waiting for the monsoon, the eternal floodplain of the Ganges; the whole city is jammed on the other bank. Varanasi has the wide green campus of Benares Hindu University, one of the great universities of Asia, and many middle-class “housing colonies” that combine shopping and residence, far from the crammed banks of the river, and a calm, tree-lined set of streets known as the Civil Lines, where the British once segregated themselves. Entire neighborhoods seemed to be under both demolition and construction at once—buildings coming apart like slow explosions, half-dug ditches, broken pavement, construction sites, piles of brick and wood and rebar. The old city piles up on one side of the river in a psychedelic tumble of sliding temples and tilted, decaying mansions carved into tiny apartments. From the river bank to my fourth-floor room was 128 steps.

  The river is dark at night, sultry street lamps making pools of yellow light on the almost empty ghats. There are always a few cows, a few dogs, a few people loitering by the water—couples, young men leaning on the steps—and a few rowboats slowly sliding by. The crowds are at Dashashwamedh, the central ghat—bright and noisy and the middle of everything, with nightly choreographed Hindu rituals performed by handsome young men who spin flaming lanterns in synchrony to the endless singing of a fine tenor in the center of a crowd of betel vendors and flower sellers and boatmen and lepers—“whose hands fluttered like leaves,” to Newby—and aimless young men and police and masseurs and barbers and cows and milling Indian tourists, many of whom seem to know all the words to the chants.

  At Dashashwamedh, on the first night, we were almost instantly picked up by a young fellow called Babu who offered to help us find a good restaurant. By way of a reference, he said, “I know Goldie Hawn.”

  Babu talked a lot. He was 20 years old, he said, a computer sciences major on New Year’s break. His family owned a silk factory, and Goldie Hawn had been there seven times. We walked together up from the river into the crowded and more touristy streets above. We were brother and sister, Buddhists on tour. That made sense to Babu.

  “I take you for no money because you are like my Mama,” he told me, in a confiding tone. “This is good karma!” With pride he pointed us to the door of the Brown Bread Bakery, which to my dismay was yet another restaurant with a sign noting that it was highly recommended by Lonely Planet. As was generally the case, it wasn’t as good as the little open-air restaurants where local people ate.

  Babu was waiting at the end of our meal and stuck with us all the way back down, past the curio shops and pashmina stalls, to the river.

  “Goldie Hawn come seven time to my shop,” he told me. “Because our silk is made by hand. I take you to the factory. Goldie Hawn is Buddhist, she talk to Dalai Lama.” He pulled out his phone.

  “I have photo, I show you.” After a few minutes of searching, he put the phone away. “I have photo at home.”

  “Call me tomorrow! I take you the factory! I take you for no money! Good karma!”

  Every morning was cloyingly cold, mist blanketing the lungs; dawn was a fuzzy pixilated white through the thick fog glowing faintly from an unseen sun. From my balcony, protected by wire mesh from marauding monkeys, I could hear the early muezzin, the rattle of delivery trucks, shouts and barking dogs, and somewhere near in the carpet of mismatched buildings, a man hacking and hawking and spitting and coughing for a long time. In the afternoons, when the sky cleared for a few hours, flocks of pigeons tossed themselves into the sky like buckets of water thrown from the roof. They joined the dozens of kites flying from the steps and rooftops, swooping and darting and pulling with vigor into the faint sunlight, straining to escape.

  We walked up the ghats and down the ghats, from one end to the other, and hired rowboats to see the ramshackle confusion of the city at twilight, leaning toward the water like a crowd of happy drunks. Assi Ghat, the southernmost, was nearly buried in months-old mud; dozens of men squatted there, digging out the soil by the bucket like ants taking apart a wedding cake.

  “Madam, boat?” “Boat, sir? Madam?” “Boat?” The boatmen lounged against the pilings, desultory, waiting while their agents calmly patrolled the ghats. Boats could be had at any spot along the way, for an hour or a day, to go up and back, cross the river to the floodplain where the occasional cremation or ritual was taking place, or to sit in the water by the formal ritual sites in a dense line of tourists of all nationalities. Prices were open to negotiation and varied widely, depending on the current, the weather, the crowd, the time of day—dawn and twilight rides always the most popular—and the boatman’s mood; many seemed to hope that negotiations would fail.

  Miles to the north, at the end of the ghats, an abandoned boat lay on its side in another drift of mud. One day, there was laundry everywhere, as though the city had agreed to get it all done on a particular day—sheets and tablecloths and Calvin Klein boxer shorts and saris and towels and T-shirts hung on lines and draped over walls. Men whacked clothes on the rocks in shallow water, wrung and washed and slapped the wet cloth on the stones with a pleasant slow percussion, in the filthy Ganges water, which many Hindus believe cannot be dirty and is incapable of causing disease. We passed ghats with ritual bathing platforms surrounded by bamboo scaffolding and niches for deities visible only from the water in dry season; a ghat always crowded with children, another where men played cards in big groups, another with milling goats. Like most Western visitors to the river banks, I wanted to see the two burning ghats, dedicated to cremation. (They are hard to miss; “Boat, sir?” is sometimes followed by “See the burning ghat?”) They were busy and casual, with dry-eyed mourners and a thick soil of ash on everything, and enormous towering constructions of firewood. Throughout India and Nepal, there are 7 million open funeral pyres every year, burning between 50 and 60 million trees and forming a significant fraction of the particulate pollution. Giving it up seems a complete impossibility in this internally logical world.

  Everywhere, the bathers, mingling in the extraordinarily controlled tyranny of caste; like all tyrannies, its main tenet is that you have no choice. Caste is karma;
to stay within one’s caste is a religious duty. So caste controls marriage, family life, neighborhood, and career. The Untouchables, or Out-Castes, are most strictly controlled. Today’s Untouchables are usually called Dalits, a term they chose; it means “a broken people.” Dalits eat, sleep, work, and go to school physically segregated from other castes; they are forbidden to use a shared source of water; they are variously abused and bullied and victimized and are disproportionately victims of violent crime. (Urbanization has not usually been good for poor people, but it has helped the Dalits; in a city where one may live and work among strangers, it is possible to hide one’s caste and, especially, one’s untouchability.)

  In 1891, the same year that Angarika Dhammapala arrived in Bodh Gaya to find the shocking ruin of the great site, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was born. He was an Untouchable of the Mahar caste—the 14th and last child. As sometimes happened, an upper-caste Hindu took notice of the bright young man and sponsored his education. Ambedkar was one of the first Dalits to go to university, graduating in 1912; the next year, his mentor sent him to Columbia University, and he became the first Dalit to be educated abroad. After New York, he began to study for a PhD at London School of Economics. But when he returned to India as the military secretary to his mentor, the Maharaja, Ambedkar was still Untouchable. He could not eat at the same table or drink from the same well as his peers. His assistants would toss papers onto his desk to avoid his touch. He finished his PhD and qualified as a barrister; he joined the Bombay Legislative Council and lectured at the law college, and he was still Untouchable.