A Pilgimage to India, February 2009, Brian C. Taylor
A Pilgrimage to India
February 2009
Brian C. Taylor
As I write up my notes from this pilgrimage, I am aware of how little I understand India. I am anything but an expert on her culture and history, or Hindu theology and practice. Before going on this trip, I read a few books on these subjects and then spent only 3 weeks in the country. I have merely dipped my toe in the water, and offer these initial responses on how it has affected me thus far.
The draw of Hinduism
The decision for a trip to India was based partly upon how India has always loomed in the back of my mind as a place that, at some point in my life, I wanted to experience. People had said to me that when you go there, “India happens to you.” They’re right, and I felt ready to let India finally happen to me.
In addition, Hinduism has called to me for the last year or two, offering these attractions, below. I wanted to see how these attractive qualities, viewed from a distance, might look closer up in their native land. I also wonder what Christianity or America would look like if it were similar in some of these ways:
- One God but an infinite number of manifestations of God and variety of religious practice. This allows freedom for devotees to find their own path within these infinite options. It shows a complete unconcern with orthodoxy and heresy and an inherent trust in the individual’s capacity to find their own way in God.
Do you need a compassionate diety, or a fierce destructive female, or a lusty cowherder? Do you need to chant God’s name, study the Vedas, or sit in a cave? Whatever. Go for it! (If we’re honest, we Christians do this, too: evangelical, high church, this or that parish, contemplative, intellectual, charismatic, social activist, whatever. Go for it!).
Gurus, ashrams, temples, religious orders – they’re each on their own, but still accepted by all as part of the same family. No hierarchy or institutional structure, just a loose amalgam of relationship. This contributes towards a mainly tolerant society of Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, etc., with these traditions represented at the lowest levels of neighborhood and the highest levels of government. (This is not to ignore the terrible reality of intolerant violence and genocide against religious groups, by religious groups – as some say, “Whatever you can say about India, you can also say the opposite”).
- avatars (divine/human beings such as Christ, Rama, Krishna, Buddha, and Ramakrishna in modern times), who appear when needed:
Whenever sacred duty decays
and chaos prevails,
then, I create myself, Arjuna
To protect men of virtue
and destroy men who do evil,
to set the standard of sacred duty,
I appear in age after age.
- Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 4 vs. 7-8
When you worship and devote your life to the incarnation or avatar of your choosing, he or she lives in you, and you take on his or her qualities: a transformative inhabitation, taking place through devotion, not moral rectitude or intellectual orthodoxy (cf Paul’s “It is no longer I who live, but Christ in me”).
- a wide-open freedom to be completely “weird” in public by Western standards – holy men in the street with ash all over their head, half- (or completely) naked, barefoot, with dreadlock hair and beard, chanting and covered with beads – they’re accepted, respected, not ridiculed or feared as they would be here. Or the hijras, a “third gender” of transgendered men, an historic and integral part of society, living in community with their guru. Heavily made up, in saris, jewelry, swishy mannerisms, people giving them money in the hope of the good fortune that is promised by their appearance.
- acceptance that Hindus can be devoted or not, recognizing that everyone is where they need to be along the karmic pathway that will ultimately lead to moksha, freedom. You may be as dedicated as a sadhu or sannyasin or monk in an ashram, or you might be a family dropping by the local temple to pray for prosperity in your business. It’s all good. No one will try to convince you to be different. No zealous evangelists, eager to convince you of their truth. If you’re headed down the wrong pathway, if you’re indifferent to God’s ways, you’ll experience your own consequences through karma in this life or the next. You’re on your own.
- wholeness: it has ethics, philosophy, myth, meditation/detachment/inner peace, service, sacred sexuality (the trantric path), animals (Ganesh the elephant god, Hanuman the monkey god, sacred cows), psychedelic drugs (soma), physical practices, diet, light and dark, masculine/feminine, creation and destruction, earth/water/fire/air…
- a sense of historical eons and the harmony of the universe in the present moment – that we are a small part of the grand sweep of history, right now, with all things balanced in a cosmic harmony, expressing divine order in the complexity and interrelatedness of all.
- a non-verbal, non-intellectual approach to religion – through chant, yoga, improvisational music of sitar and drums, vegetarian diet, devotional ritual in temples and home altars, wearing beads, saffron colors, and red-circled bindis on the forehead…
Welcome to flowing chaos
How is it that India functions? It is so wrecked on so many levels – garbage, human waste, extreme poverty, crumbling buildings, dangerous tangles of electrical lines, animals in the streets, choking traffic and pollution, constant honking of horns, and crowds everywhere: picture 3 times as many people in 1/3 of the space of the United States. That’s a 9-fold increase in intensity.
And yet at times it is beautiful, dignified, kind, wonderfully varied, and somehow the chaos all flows together in a harmonic dance. I kept expecting it to break down, but it keeps flowing. Hinduism seems to be like that – totally out of control, way too comprehensive, but somehow hanging together as a whole, beautiful, and working.
Some impressions of this flowing chaos:
The colors, deep and rich. Holy men and scores of saffron-robed monks on the riverbank saluting the dawn with conch shells and incense. Rats and cows mingling with bundled human shapes on the train platform in the middle of the night. Dense crowds and exhaust and honking horns everywhere. Subtle spiced food tasting centuries old (in a good way). The monkey-god Hanuman's temple, with hundreds of monkeys scampering around the pilgrims, lotus flowers being offered, chanting. Gandhi's hushed assassination site with swarming schoolchildren learning of their liberation, his glasses, prayer beads and bloodstained clothing on display. Men being shaved with straight razors on the sidewalk, barber and client sitting on the ground. More Arab than I knew, smiling children at the mosque leading me on a guided tour of the dark back stairway up to the roof. The Taj, seeming to float lightly in white marble, a still and perfect dream. Down tiny alleyways in the Old City, in Varanasi's Golden Temple, Hinduism's Mecca/Vatican, Shiva's phallic lingam rises out of the earth, bringing all things into life, but the site is closed to non-Hindus and non-Muslims (side-by-side mosque and temple) and surrounded with armed and watchful soldiers. We peek over the wall. Beggars everywhere. Constant badgering from shopkeepers and bicycle rickshaw drivers. A feeling of calm in the midst of the storm, gentleness and acceptance between people, men holding hands and speaking affectionately, women in saris, burqas, modestly guarding their eyes.
It is a different world.
Hindu temples
Part of the retreat portion of our trip was time spent in Hindu temples, some of them used continually for the last 1,000 years as lively centers of daily devotion. There were times in these temples when I felt that I had been transported into another world, another dimension. Medieval.
Crowds of barefoot pilgrims wander in and out and around all day. They bring offerings of food, flowers, money, give them to the Brahmin priests, who take them in to one of the deity statues, place them on the idol, circle it with ghee-butter lamps, and then bless the people with the fire and red, ash, or yellow-colored powder on their foreheads.
In the larger temples - a company of young Tamil students doing sacred dance, men sitting in meditation chanting, a loud bell clanging from time to time, families eating a picnic lunch (shared w/the gods) on the floor, a little procession of drummers and loud double-reed Middle-Eastern oboe-like honkers blasting what sounded like a blues improv, old ladies standing immobile before an obscure, black medieval idol carved into a stone pillar, incense burning everywhere, rising up around dozens of shrines to the one God who is manifested as elephant, monkey, terrifying warrior woman, flute-playing cowherder, or as a primitive stone phallic shape. Brahmin priests walk around in white sarongs, no shirt and the front half of the head shaved, the sounds of spoken prayers echoing around the vast halls...just another ordinary Wednesday afternoon at your local house of worship.
The whole circus goes on at once in a massive labyrinthine complex - a little city, really - with 4 or 5 rings of buildings separated by wide columned halls with 30-foot high stone ceilings. The scale of it is stunning. I felt as if I were transported back a thousand years into an ancient Mayan world, sort of - to put it crassly - like Indiana Jones.
We had entered the mythic realm. Because it was so unfamiliar to me, it sometimes felt like some dark, unfathomable, medieval underworld. The effect was a change in my consciousness. Walking out into the sunlight, I was aware of another dimension, knowing that our neat little material world is infused with a timeless, divine mystery.
Poverty and privilege
Some scenes, every day:
Walking at night down dark streets to the Arab restaurant in Old Delhi, past men in bicycle rickshaws sleeping – this is their home. Dirty, barefoot 6-year old children doing contortionist acrobatics at the crosswalk hoping you’ll give them a few rupees. Families sleeping in the bushes of a 10-ft-wide median in a busy 4-lane street, traffic rushing by 24 hours a day. Very thin, wasted old man standing beside your motor-scooter auto-rickshaw, very still, speaking softly in Hindi, with hand extended, looking you in the eye. A little homeless boy sitting on the curb playing distractedly with some scraps of paper in the gutter as busy pedestrians step over him and trucks thunder by. A man defecating on a busy sidewalk in broad daylight.
People become the same color as the sidewalk - stained, dusty, gray, seeming to disappear, like shadow people. This is their life; there is only the search for the next meal; no respite from the intensity of street life.
I had three conversations with very different Indians about those who are poor. Granted, all were middle-class and educated, but one was female and studying for a social work masters’ degree (including field work with the poor), one was a young male university student, and one man was a retired tour guide.
They all said “The poor in India are happy.” What? Say that again? Surely I can dismiss this as the voice of privilege, a convenient excuse that allows them to turn their head away from what might otherwise be an overwhelming reality in their daily lives.
And yet, as they spoke, there was something that I suspect might be true. There is a kind of acceptance that comes with karma and caste: you’re here, living the particular life you have been given to live, and you have to experience it as it is and make the best of it. There doesn’t seem to be the alienation that arises out of the gap between what is and what is desired, since there isn’t any possibility of getting anything different. And there are smiles for the human things – affection, improvised kites, their photograph displayed on my digital camera, enough begged rupees to buy something to eat.
But I wonder. I didn’t ask an old homeless woman on the street if she was “happy.” I don’t know if she’d know how to answer. This question may be something only the privileged ask themselves.
This place is a complete mess, on a colossal scale. For a person of privilege like me, driving or walking through this flowing chaos and poverty all day long – well, the only parallel experience to this I can think of is day 5 of an 8-day Zen sesshin, where you're staring at the wall for the 6th hour of the day, your frantic little brain screaming like a banshee, sweat dripping off your nose, legs aching, and no end in sight.
But thanks to our credit card and the help of a parishioner's cousin, we have stayed in two heavenly places, like real colonialists. Sinking into luxury and gazing down over the teeming masses, relieved to be under a fan with Bombay Sapphire gin in hand after a massage and dip in the pool, we know that we wealthy westerners are pathetic wimps. We just can't take it. And it is no wonder they all come at us like iron filings to magnets when we step out of our hotel, eager to become our new best friend, to sell us anything and everything. We're dripping with money. It falls off of us, trailing behind like comet dust. I don't really feel guilty, just a renewed sense of how damned lucky and privileged we are, and therefore how responsible we are to the other 95%.
A holy people?
Staying for a few days with Jack and Bob’s friends Mark and Yoo-mi in Pondicherry, the old French colony in the south along the Indian Ocean, we got to talking about the effect of Hinduism on the Indian people.
Mark says that India is the least spiritual country he’s ever seen, if you look at the behavior of the people. He called it a “Me-first” culture. People butt in line in front of you, cut you off in traffic, hassle you for whatever they think they can get from you. Tourism is a carnivorous sport, and you’re the prey. Susanna, alone and confused before a rude and indifferent railway agent at the station, was ignored by many who probably spoke English well enough to help her.
Mark claims that when Indians equate India with the ancient culture of Hinduism, it is a convenient mask. The values aren’t integrated. They don’t walk the talk. Religion certainly can be an inoculation against the God virus. Take just a little bit of it and the whole thing won’t be able to get you. Jesus had a few things to say about this. When the light in you becomes darkness, woe to you.
But every religion has its true devotees and its charlatans. Hinduism is no different, and an idealized view of the country is an illusion. Keeping this in mind, it is refreshing to see spirituality in public. In our country, all we have are fat, silly friars in television ads, raving hellfire-and-brimstone preachers, and our obsession with “separation of church and state” that goes way beyond state support or limitation of specific religious groups: it wants to forbid any mention or display of God in public, as if religion can only be hidden, individualistic, private.
In India, posters on telephone poles advertise a coming darshan evening with a visiting guru. Bells ring out from temples, muezzins call the faithful to prayer from minarets, and incense floats up from marigold altars at roadside food stands. The swastika, a symbol of Nazi horror in the west, adorns lintels everywhere as the auspicious sign of Brahma, the creator. The symbol for Om, the sound of the energy of the universe that brings into being and harmonizes all things (our “Word”), is spray-painted on walls as graffiti. Prayer beads are sold as ubiquitously as Coke. Colorful gods are carved into rooftop and roadside shrines, where people stop for a brief devotion. People pour in and out of temples all day long, every day, and there is no “Sunday” where worship is ghettoized and kept out of sight. In India, God is a welcome presence in everyday life.
Yes, there are Christians, too
We wandered in to Fort Cochin's most famous historical church, St. Francis. Built in 1517 by Vasco de Gama's people, they claim it as the earliest Christian church building that remains today in India, in fact in all of Asia. The church has been under the oversight of Cochin's many conquerors through the years - first Portuguese Roman Catholic, then a warehouse for the spice trade during the Dutch Reformers' days, then Anglican, and now Church of South India.
The CSI is an ecumenical union of Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians and others who merged in 1947, but it sits under the umbrella of the Anglican Communion and for all intents and purposes, seems thoroughly low-church Anglican to me. Father Jacob, the Malayalam priest, invited me to preach and concelebrate on Sunday, about two minutes after having met me.
A couple of stunned heartbeats later, I said "sure." I guess my sermon went well enough at the 8am English service for Fr. Jacob to then ask me to preach again at the 9:30 Malayalam service, with a translator quickly pressed into service. I shortened it, simplified the language, pausing every sentence or two for translation. Their hospitality and kindness was overwhelming. It is as if they don't have any armor on; they're loose, open, and sweet. Everyone is barefoot, just as they are in temples. By contrast, the stiff, protected individualism we westerners carry around is painful to see, especially in church.
In 18 months, I hope to go on sabbatical with Susanna, perhaps somewhere in Latin America. I've wondered what it would be like to serve as a priest here and there during that time, and this morning taught me that, on one level, it would be easy. As a priest, I can immediately slip into their culture and their friendship with a respected and clearly-identified social role, do things I know well how to do, and learn much from them. Even though things here in this church atmosphere are so different - more basic, human, and slow-paced - in other ways they are not. People are people, and the church is the church.
Re-entry
I’ve been drinking water at a fire hydrant. It will take some time for these memories to sift out. In the meantime, I feel that India was for me a plunge not only into its strangely harmonious chaos; it was a plunge into my own unconscious. I asked for this to be a true pilgrimage, and lo and behold…
I have an image of sediment deep down having been stirred up, now floating around at the surface - stuff that has to do with early childhood, a split-off father (and with him, parts of myself), and lifelong, limiting habits. Disturbing, but offering the promise of transformation.
The pilgrimage has just begun.