My only complaint about Buddhism is that the Dalai Lama has always been a man. You don’t see the monks assigned to scour the countryside for the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama looking into the souls of any young girls, not even a tree-climbing tomboy. Thus there will be no Dalai Mama or Lama Mama, and this sends the wrong message to girls—that men are closer to god/truth than women, and for all its promise of hope and healing, this religion’s top job can never be yours. Young women already have enough catching up to do, especially in that part of the world. From my lips to the leader’s ears—the current but retired Dalai Lama has stated that the next Buddhist leader could be a girl. (Get the Pope on line one.) Otherwise, for better or worse, Buddhism does not appear to be a religion that inspires much musical theater along the lines of Fiddler on the Roof, Nunsense, or The Book of Mormon. Come to think of it, I haven’t even heard a Buddhist joke since fifth grade, when this thigh-slapper was making the rounds: “What did Buddha say to the hot dog vendor?” Answer: “Make me one with everything.”
One last thought regarding Buddhism: Can a religion be too passive? When traveling in Cambodia after their civil war, in the seventies, I stayed at a hotel with a swimming pool that had, up until several weeks earlier, been filled with dead bodies. A foreign correspondent from Dallas leaned over and said that the reason mass murder on such an enormous scale (2 million people) happened in the first place was because the Cambodians were too submissive as a result of their Buddhist beliefs. He insisted that none of this could have occurred in Texas, because the first person the Khmer Rouge approached would’ve taken a handgun from her purse or a shotgun from his roof rack, blown the guy’s hat off, and carried on down the highway to the armadillo races, thereby nipping the whole genocide thing in the bud.
Interestingly, a lot of Hindus jump ship for Buddhism because Buddhism doesn’t maintain or recognize the caste system, and therefore in one fell swoop a person can cast off generations of caste. Buddhism also seems to be the practice that appeals most to Westerners, in particular twentysomething New York Jews requiring a change of religious scenery before getting married and having children and rejoining the faith of their forefathers, or else heading over to the Society for Ethical Culture. It also appealed to German composer Richard Wagner, who incorporated Buddhist themes in his operas Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. As for the general populace dashing off to the nearest monastery, no less than the retired Dalai Lama himself has concluded that it’s easier to stay put. “Better not take someone else’s religion—it is better to stick with the wisdom traditions of one’s own land than to run from them, pursuing in exotica what was under your nose all the time.”
Jainism is distinct for its self-discipline, its tradition of scholarship, and, most famously, its belief in nonviolence toward all living things. On top of being vegetarian, Jains don’t eat root vegetables such as potatoes and onions, since the bulb is considered a living being, and they don’t use honey since the collection process is considered to be violence against bees. They aren’t supposed to smoke or use any addictive substances, including alcohol.
In addition to the hospital for birds in Delhi, the Jains operate shelters for cows and even a home for insects in the city of Ahmadabad. One faction of Jain monks cover their mouths to avoid swallowing bugs and sweep the paths in front of them so as to avoid stepping on any creepy crawlies. Oddly enough, for a religion that’s so absorbed with preserving life, Jains have one of the highest gaps between giving birth to boys and girls, which means about 15 percent of the girls are victims of infanticide or gender determination followed by abortion. Oops.
Zoroastrianism is a religion and philosophy based on the teachings of Zoroaster, also known as Zarathustra. It entails the belief in one god, Ahura Mazda, along with a very Star Wars-like concept of light and dark where focusing on good thoughts and deeds is necessary to keep away chaos. Practitioners of the faith are also known as Parsis, since they originally came from Persia, now Iran, to escape persecution by Muslims. The main thing to remember about Zoroastrianism is that Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the rock band Queen and composer of such hits as “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “We Are the Champions,” was a Parsi originally named Farrokh Bulsara. Often referred to as Britain’s first Asian rock star, Mercury was born in Zanzibar (Tanzania, Africa) and was raised there and in India before moving to England at the age of seventeen. India hasn’t capitalized on Freddie Mercury tourism the way that Zanzibar has, where you can go on all-day pilgrimages with people wearing red leather pants, silver-studded belts, and aviator glasses while “Barcelona” blares through the minivan speakers. Tours conclude at the beachfront restaurant named Mercury’s, which features memorabilia, music, cocktails, and a full menu, including Freddie’s Fruit Salad. One theory on why a full day is necessary is because service at the restaurant is so slow.
When European priests arrived in southern India during the 1500s to introduce Christianity, they were surprised to find that someone had beaten them to the task. None other than Saint Thomas, one of the original apostles (a.k.a. Doubting Thomas), had supposedly converted the first Indians after arriving aboard a Roman trading ship in 52 CE and was buried in Madras (now Chennai) after possibly being crucified. Ancient scrolls have Jesus living in India not once but twice, the first time between the ages of twelve and thirty, and again after the Resurrection, teaching the gospel in Kashmir. There aren’t any reliable accounts to confirm such early history, but academics and theologians agree that Christianity has been in India almost as long as the religion has existed, and that the subcontinent is home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Approximately 25 million Christians live in India, making it the country’s third-largest religion.
I hope you’re sitting down. Because there are actually several dozen congregations of Unitarian Universalists practicing in Mother India, which just goes to show that the country really can produce a few of absolutely everything. (Although being one of nine thousand congregants in a country of 1.2 billion makes being a UU in India rather akin to being a Sufi in the United States.) In India, the UUs tend to do more with a tribal god and all-day worship services, while American UUs are more concerned with getting out the vote and making it to brunch at a reasonable time, where an everything bagel easily passes for Holy Communion. Likewise, congregation names in America tend to be longer than those of Spanish kings and sound reminiscent of a 1970s band featuring the African thumb piano, such as The Congregation of Earth, Wind, and Harmony—an All-Inclusive Fragrance-Free Community Embracing the Dignity of Difference. However, the Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson was influenced by both Hindu and Buddhist scriptures while tweaking his beloved transcendentalism, a philosophy so difficult to explain and understand that hardly anyone remains interested in it for very long or can even remember what the heck it is. Matters weren’t helped by the fact that notable nineteenth-century transcendentalists couldn’t agree on exactly what it was, and in his 1842 lecture “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson suggested that it was actually impossible to attain in practice. That said, when I was growing up there wasn’t a UU terrarium-building party that didn’t feature Indian musician and composer Ravi Shankar playing his sitar, especially “Song from the Hills” and “Twilight Mood,” which, by the way, are now available as cell phone ringtones.
Fun fact: Ravi Shankar is the father of the lovely and talented singer-songwriter Geethali Norah Jones Shankar, who officially changed her name to Norah Jones right before becoming a best-selling recording artist and multiple Grammy award winner. However, Ms. Jones doesn’t like to talk about her father, because her folks split when she was young and she was raised by her mother in Fort Worth, Texas.
Let there be no misunderstanding, a political party of activists wants to make India a Hindu country the same way special interest groups want to make the United States a Christian nation. Meantime, bordering nations Pakistan and Bangladesh don’t have much tolerance for those who aren’t Muslim, and forget about Jews. I rec
ently read that there are fewer than one hundred Jews in both Iraq and Egypt, and only one Jew left in Afghanistan. One Jew! You can’t even create a sitcom with only one Jew, and forget about a stand-up comedy club. However, India has a thriving community of approximately fifteen thousand Jews, one quarter of whom live in Mumbai. And at the city’s popular Indigo delicatessen, you can order bagels and lox with a shmear of cream cheese, onions, and capers on a toasted poppy-seed bagel (spelled bahgel) or a Reuben sandwich—cured pastrami, sauerkraut, and Swiss cheese on rye bread with Thousand Island dressing and gherkins. All that’s missing are specialty dishes named after famous comedians or Broadway shows and waitstaff with an attitude. Although you do have to bring your own pickled tongue.
Otherwise, I didn’t meet anyone who’d admit to being an atheist in India, though they are rumored to be out there, including some Communist Party members in the South. However, this is the kind of thing you’d want to keep under your hat, as you’d miss out on time off for dozens of holidays.
In addition to religion, astrology plays a powerful role in daily life. As a matter of fact, astrology carries such weight that Independence had to be brought forward a day, and hence you have Midnight’s Children rather than Twelve Noon’s Kids. Even today, many newspaper ads for brides and grooms request individual astrological charts, and people consult astrologers to find good travel times and especially auspicious days for weddings. This is a job for highly trained professionals, since the practice is filled with nuances and subtleties. For instance, a chirping cricket can be considered an omen of good luck or bad luck depending on the day. Astrology is also used in weather prediction, which could be why you often see television footage of people evacuating two days after the flooding. Along similar lines, before earthquakes and tsunamis, UFO sightings are reported to rise, and it’s been suggested that the UFOs are trying to warn us about planetary positioning effects on the earth’s tectonic plates and crust, or else may actually be causing the disasters. Wait while I go find my mood ring.
Superstition also runs rampant in India. It is believed that if any members of the Boya tribe remain overnight in the village of Pyalakurthy they won’t wake up in the morning—the result of an ancient curse placed following a supposed killing spree. As a result, Boyas come to visit, do business, or work in the fields during the day, but make sure to bed down in a neighboring village. Meantime, in the sleepy hamlet of Aalavizhaampatti, it is widely believed that great misfortune will fall upon anyone who drinks liquor; the result of a long-ago promise made to some traveling gods. And it’s a safe bet that if outsiders drink too much they won’t be able to say the name of this village.
Furthermore, many Indians worry that someone might cast an evil eye or nazar upon them and take precautions against such an unwelcome occurrence. For instance, construction sites often display a demonic figure to ward off evil spirits. People also employ rings, bracelets, charms, necklaces, and body markings to cancel its effects. Women might wear a particular gemstone or an amulet shaped like a fish, an eye, or the infinity symbol. Good luck charms can often be found under the front fender or below the rearview mirror of even the most expensive automobiles. A pandit (Hindu priest) is often consulted to select favorable letters for parents to use to start a baby’s name. Meantime, said baby often has black dots placed behind each ear, in the middle of the forehead, on the temples, and on the soles of his feet so that people won’t notice the beauty of the child, which is considered to be bad luck. These markings are often maintained for a year. So don’t worry that any black-polka-dotted babies you might see are carrying some sort of plague. It’s more like a nationwide game of pin the dot on the baby.
Caste Away System
The Hindu caste system affects all aspects of Indian society, from the social to the political. Even though discrimination based on caste is now illegal, in many cases it’s still used to determine who gets what job and who can associate with whom. There are all kinds of medieval tenets, such as that a high-caste person must be on a platform to address a low-caste person. When two young lovers of different castes elope and get caught, they’re often murdered by the men in their families, sometimes set on fire, or cut up with knives. (Where is Mom? one has to ask.)
The caste system arrived with the invasion by Indo-Europeans (usually called Aryans) from the Caucuses (the border of Europe and Asia) in 1500 BCE. It’s said that the four castes—Brahman, Kshatryias, Vaishyas, Sudras—were produced from the body of the god Brahma and later branched out into hundreds of subcastes that vary from region to region and were based on what type of work was done. The underlying idea here seems to be that it’s easier to accept your lot in life if there’s an explanation, particularly one so absolute as the will of the gods. My favorite caste nomenclature created by the central government is Other Backward Classes, to distinguish lower castes from the higher Forward Castes. Lower castes are broken down into backward, somewhat backward, and very backward, as opposed to the more Sesame Street-friendly low, lower, and lowest. The untouchables (also known as Dalits, meaning “the oppressed”) are called Scheduled Caste instead of Outcaste, which is how they were historically viewed and treated. As a result of some bad karma in previous incarnations, untouchables were condemned to spend their lives emptying chamber pots, cleaning latrines, picking up trash, and dealing with corpses.
Mahatma Gandhi gave the untouchables the name Harijan, which means “God’s people,” as he was not a proponent of caste discrimination. Harijans shouldn’t be confused with hijras, a nonhereditary grouping, or what we might call an alternative lifestyle, that includes transsexuals, transvestites, eunuchs, and intersexuals from every caste and religion. And this brings us to the conduct and treatment of another marginalized group.
The hijra have a social network second only to Facebook to find out the time and dates of weddings and childbirth celebrations (mostly for boys because a girl is considered to be a large financial liability and usually no cause for merriment) through a series of informants comprising sweepers, midwives, and dhobis (laundrymen). Hijras put on makeup, dress up in saris, and arrive uninvited at parties to dance and bless. What amazes people is that no two groups show up at the same function, since various clusters of hijras have managed to divide up the whole of India like competing Mafia families and apparently settle any territorial disputes privately. The performances are a shakedown for money, and the hijra won’t stop swaying and blessing until enough rupees have been ponied up. If you don’t pay, they threaten to remove their saris (but not makeup) and dance naked. Everyone pays.
In 2009, homosexuality was decriminalized in India, much to the chagrin of Muslim clerics and Catholic clergymen. Funnily enough, lesbians were rarely prosecuted under the 148-year-old law. Every once in a while it actually pays to be overlooked by society. With regard to being gay in India today, it’s pretty much the same as in America. You don’t worry about walking hand in hand with your partner or kissing in public in San Francisco or Chicago, but you might think twice about it in Alabama (where studies shows that 44 percent of gays are assaulted by their own families).
A recent PBS documentary praised the caste system because “everyone knows their place.” It seems to me that the caste system is wrong. As Sam Harris argues in his book The Moral Landscape, you can’t excuse certain traditions as part of the culture if they have a negative impact on some individuals’ well-being, like genital mutilation and the forced wearing of burkas. When you hear about today’s young people being murdered for associating with partners from different castes, it’s just plain barbarism.
But do we have a caste system in the United States? Those with better insurance get better healthcare. Many American Indians are living in squalor and poverty on reservations. Costly country clubs decide who is and who is not worthy of membership, just as sororities and fraternities and private clubs do on university campuses. What about legacy candidates who are accepted into top colleges because relatives went there and make healthy donations, even though
the applicants’ grades are below the requirements? Elite schools may offer some scholarships, but those don’t exactly include allowances for yacht club couture.
Likewise, America is certainly not a country without prejudice. The last lynching was in 1981. In Mobile, Alabama, an African American named Michael Donald was strung up by two Ku Klux Klan members who kidnapped him, beat him, slit his throat, and hung him from a tree. However, many consider James Byrd Jr. to have been lynched in 1988 when two white men in Jaspar, Texas, wrapped a heavy chain around the African American man’s ankles and dragged him about three miles in a pickup truck until the truck hit a gutter and Byrd’s arm and head were cut off.
More recently, we had the Florida preacher who wanted to burn a copy of the Koran, Islam’s holy book. President Obama, defense secretary Robert Gates, and General David Petraeus all went public to say that this was not a good idea for so many reasons, endangering the lives of US troops being among them. Still, the threat alone was enough to result in the torching of Christian schools in Kashmir. Six months later, the pastor carried out his Koran burning, with the upshot being that twenty-four people were killed in Afghanistan and many more injured. Such idiotic behavior at home greatly increases the chance that tourists traveling to the Middle East and North Africa will end up starring in terrorist videos prior to having their heads chopped off. And when people can no longer explore beyond their immediate horizons, cultures are bound to turn inward, away from the unfamiliar, which only exacerbates our differences.
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