‘We take a handful of
sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us, and call that handful
of sand the world.’
-
Robert M. Pirsig (Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
….After all, Christianity is an Eastern religion that just
happens to speak Greek
-
Charles Foster
‘The truth knocks on
the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes
away.’
-
Robert M. Pirsig (Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
The Self, said the Buddha, is the source of illusion, and
its creatures. Destroy it, and one has cleared away the scum on the lake of the
world. Then one can see Reality, glittering sharply, with fabulous multifaceted
beauty, at the bottom of all experience. ‘Now I have found you,’ said the
Buddha, when he burst through Enlightenment. ‘Never again will you build the
house of Self.’
Sleep was elusive; I chased it and it wore me down.
He vomited as tidily as any duchess as we lurched round the
bends into the clouds
The gardener stomped muddily down the corridor and kicked at
my door ……showed me his earwig trap behind the potting shed. I was grateful, of
course, but it was a flimsy foundation for friendship.
I sat, throwing out the thoughts as I’d been taught, and
again, never wondering who was throwing them out.
There’s no question, though, that aloneness is a fine tool
for exposing the multifacetedness of things: you simply have more time to turn
over and over the toys we call facts. You can see how they glitter in the light
of quiet.
That patch of sky over india had a musty, homely smell, like
an old exercise book. It should have had inkblots and spelling corrections.
Pulling on a crumpled roll of marijuana in Varanasi, a sadhu
said: ‘The truth is within you. Everything you search for is there. Its your
own obsession with the “I” which blocks your view of those truths. Why do you look
outside?’
‘What could anything on paper ever tell you that the tree
which has been destroyed to make it could not? Nothing. Nothing at all.’
There are four life stages in the Vedic ashram system. The
first is Brahmacharya, the stage of
dedication to the great quest – to realize Brahman in oneself. It is entered
into by bright-eyed youths……Then there is Grihastha
… the stage of settling down. Wives and mortgages are acquired, children are born,
cars are polished, lawns are mowed, businesses grow, fortunes are made. Then when
the children fly the nest, the wives sag, and the machinations of the firm
become unbearably grey, there is Vanaprastha.
The Hindu goes into the forest, and begins to prise from his soul the deadly
things that have stuck to it over the years of domesticity. He pays off his
debtors, and tries to pay off the demons too. He has been dying since he was
born, and now is the time to do something about it. The house is sold, the
business is given to the sons. He takes with him into the forest only the
sacred fire, the cultic implements and, optionally and unusually, his wife. He
lives off wild food; his hair and nails go uncut; his capacity for delusion is
gradually ground down by austerity and meditation. Eventually he may see
clearly enough to go into the final stage – sannyasa.
Then he will wander alone through India, begging. The ties with the old life
and the old self will have been severed, he will be teethering on the edge of
enlightenment, or living in it……..
It is a stern system, now rarely followed. It has generated
immense spiritual wealth.
‘I think what I really
mean when I speak of the unconscious is the substance of the soul, the “centre”
where all the faculties, sense, feeling, appetite, imagination, intellect,
will, have their roots. Here all are merged in a deep, simple unity, open at
once to God and to nature. Primitive man lives from this centre and that is why
he is so “natural”. With so much grace and spontaneity in body and soul, so
open to God and to the infinite, and yet so readily turning astray into
immorality. As the faculties develop, especially the intellect and will, man
grows out of this centre; he becomes specialized, one part is repressed at the
expense of another, he becomes “unnatural”, complicated, disunited, yet
develops a strong “moral” character to keep things in control. (This is typical
of the British in India) ….’
-
Bede Griffiths (Letter,
1956)
She sat on a rock for an hour in the lotus position,
completely still, and brought the stillness back with her to the hut. It was
not the sort of stillness that you interrogate, but the sort that interrogates
you.
There was sun somewhere up there, but so far away that it didn’t
seem to matter. Eventually it went away, and then it did matter.
Santoshi Mata is a new Hindu goddess………. She was cheap to
propitiate, and needed no elaborate rituals or professional priests. She was
intensely practical. She did not insist that busy housewives stop scrubbing
their potatoes and work instead on understanding that they and the potatoes
were identical with Brahman. She responded quickly and sympathetically to
requests for electric mixers, sons or television sets.
Many people sat and looked at a cross that sweated blood
during Mass several times between 1551 and 1704, and waited for something.
India is superb at waiting.
‘Who sees all beings
in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear. When a sage
sees this great Unity, and his Self has become all beings, what delusion and
what sorrow can ever be near him?’
-
Isa Upanishad
…..Upanishads…..they are the products of well-integrated men
– powerful codifiers, adept in linear logic, but sublime poets and
frontier-pushing mystics too. There have never been many such writers ………The
earliest Upanishads were composed between 800 and 400 BC. Most of the
Upanishads are later thatn the four Vedas – the foundational texts of Hinduism.
The Vedas are hymns containing detailed accounts of Hindu mythology, passionate
exhortations to religious observance, bleak verdicts on the irreligious, and
dazzling, kaleidoscopic performances by writers schooled in ecstasy and close
to the heart of joy……
Literarily wonderful though they are, the Upanishads are
rathe sniffily middle class towards the Vedas. They see the Vedas as the province
of the uneducated and unwashed peasants who would never dream of listening to
Bach or reading the New York Review of
Books. They are plainly embarrassed that many Hindus take the colourful
myths so literally, and want to put them right. The authors clearly regard
themselves as having been favoured with special knowledge, which they might
well have been.
The authors of the Upanishads were religious revisionists.
They were the early Cromwells of the Hindu world…..systematically smashing up
the idols of the Hinduism that they saw as outdated and primitive. ……….Give me
wild Vedic Hinduism any day instead of the slightly self-satisfied University
Hinduism of the Upanishads.
Hinduism can and should remind
the Christians what their faith is meant to be about. Probably most worthwhile
learning is actually anamnesis:
unforgetting. Hinduism can help to remind everyone, eloquently and beautifully,
that there’s a massive part of ourselves which we neglect at our peril, and
which Christianity has neglected to its peril. It’s a detailed map of the
seething Unconscious; of the raging sea of the psyche; of the myths from which
we can never escape. It’s the book of the elemental.
Can anything be a ‘satisfactory blueprint’ for something as
majestic as the whole of a human life?
The answer, obviously, was no. Existence is far too big,
colourful and complex to be capable of being governed by any statement of
belief. The greatest Christian creeds have explicitly recognized this,
acknowledging …..the dismal inadequacy of language and accordingly creeds
themselves…..
All great creeds end by asserting that creeds won’t do. That’s
what you’d expect. If they cant even tell us satisfactorily what God is like,
they are bound to fail to tell us adequately how to relate to Him, Her, Them or
It.
…..the great Ranganathaswamy temple….. You feel the
competition for temple colour and temple size between neighbouring villages.
They are a lot more interesting than the thatched huts in which everyone lives.
Regardless of my theology, if I lived in one of those villages, my eyes would want to go to the temple
everyday for some relief. The temple statues speak of epic possibility in a world
where there’s no possibility at all. Their attraction at all levels must be
immense.
Kanyakumari’s a happy, tacky, carnival place. Most people
are on a holiday lightly disguised as a pilgrimage
‘I see you looking at my book. Perhaps you are searching?’
‘Aren’t we all?’
‘Very true. Very true. What do you look for? Perhaps I can
take you there?’
I came to like this very much indeed about India – that you
could go in a single sentence from asking a name to asking one’s life purpose.
In London it would have taken years and a dozen drunken dinner parties.
………India’s a theatre of cruel slapstick. Wherever you look,
emaciated men in loincloths are falling off bicycles, vanishing down holes in
the road, being pulled screaming behind auto-rickshaws, absent-mindedly putting
their hands into flailing machinery, being savaged by dogs or stepping barefoot
in the piles of human dung that are everywhere.
On the bus going out of Kanyakumari there was a dazzlingly
lovely girl with flowers in her hair, immaculately made up, earnestly
highlighting a handwritten handout called ‘Human effluent: the basics’. Its
impossible not to like this country very much indeed.
So why are all the long-term Western travelers here worn,
harassed and running in a way that’s unusual
amongst travelers in Asia? There’s more transcendental calm in Disneyland than
in the backpackers’ doss-houses backing onto the big pilgrimage sites of India.
Whatever they’re looking for, they haven’t found it, or if they have, its not
doing them much good, and they’d be better off asking in a New Jersey mall.
I sat on the laughably named Super-Express Deluxe bus,
watching fat men woo and win beautiful women on the subtitled video. ‘If she
becomes an ice cream,’ counseled one singer, in quarter tones, ‘become a spoon.’
‘A satellite knows about the earth’s fertility,’ a moustachioed Romeo assured
his beloved, as he leapt unwisely between some Mogul battlements, ‘my palm
knows your features.’ It seemed to work as a chat-up line, for she immediately
urged him, ‘Come to dash your nose with mine.’
Randy…….clambered onto the bus and slung himself beside me.
I pretended to be asleep, but the video was too fascinating, and he found me
out. A few miles down the road he tried to rummage through my soul, and when I said
no, took his out and started talking me through it.
He’d been in India a good deal. He knew a lot of the
language of Hinduism, and sprayed it incontinently around.
………I looked longingly at the video, where a couple were
skipping round a tree singing, ‘You are my first rain. You are the first tide
in my heart, I was a dry leaf until you touched me. When you touched, I grew
wings.’………. The video relationship had hit rocky times: ‘We asked for flowers,’
the weeping girl was moaning, ‘who threw these pebbles? I want to pull down the
cloud, spread it in a basket, and sleep in the sky.’ I knew how she felt.
…The bus stopped at the Asia Big Chicken Centre, a roadside
shack that sold tea and bananas, but not chicken.
……He swelled with the peculiar, and peculiarly emetic, pride
that that comes when someone is about to be humble and self-deprecating.
……the video couple were united…..They had given way to a
sterner, more philosophical pair, who were assuring one another……..that ‘our
caste differences are because of our ancestors.’ Once they’d got that out of
the way, they felt able to move on quite quickly to the magnificently mixed
romantic metaphors of Tamil cinema: ‘A flower comes with swaying arms. Your
eyes started to blaze. Why this heat in the vicinity of your eyes?’ And then to
the very legalistic bottom line: ‘If you give consent we can exchange our
bodies.’
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