Order out of Chaos
After ten days in Delhi, James and I were more than ready to get out of the city: a megapolis of 12.25 million people, who overflow into the streets – sleeping, pissing, sweeping, begging, and making little fires on the pavement to brew chai (milk tea) – or who overload bicycles, motorcycles, scooters, three-wheeled taxis, automobiles, buses, and trucks with extended family and baskets of their wares. The traffic is overwhelming, and even in Shashi’s apartment we could not completely escape the belches of exhaust smoke and cacophony of honking: from sickly Roadrunner beep-beeps to ear-splitting blares, blasts, toots, squeals, bleats, and trumpeting howls each trying to outroar the other. Amid the fracas wandered humpbacked cows – millions of them, too – who, despite their divine status, were left to forage the garbage in the streets, many of them strangling from ingesting too much plastic. Counterpoised to polluted, teeming Delhi, our pilgrimage had dubbed India the realm of Aether – a spiritual land – and I fully realized that Delhi was part of that. It could be argued the human condition is, in actuality, central to that. All the same, we were glad to board the train out of town, to discover the milieu that has brought so many religions into the world.
Starting in Neolithic times, the Vedic pantheon and fire ceremonies merged with indigenous Dravidian gods and Earth worship over the course of thousands of years on the Indian subcontinent. Out of those woven traditions, the Tantric philosophy emerged at the start of the first millennium (4-7 CE). Earlier, Gautama Buddha had pursued his enlightenment here, and upon attaining it, founded a religion that would eventually define Asia. Contemporary with the Buddha (sixth century BCE), Mahavira founded Jainism, a more ascetic and dharmic religion that currently has nearly 5 million followers in India. Sikhism, which recognizes one (albeit indefinable) God, attracts pilgrims to its famous Golden Temple (Harmandir Sahib) in Amritsar. Islam, which has common monotheistic roots with Judaism and Christianity, reigned in India for over 500 years, beginning in 1192, and left not only formidable Mughal architectural monuments but also deep cultural influences. Nearly a third of the world’s Muslims live on the Indian subcontinent. Christianity probably arrived with St. Thomas in 52 CE, though some speculate that before that, during the “missing years” of Jesus Christ’s life, he was learning from gurus in India, possibly in Kashmir. Christianity took a firmer hold when the colonial powers (the Portuguese, French, and British) set up trading centers, which, in the case of the British, extended to outright rule by the 19th century. Mother Teresa is the most widely known icon of Christian missionary work in India. How so many (and I just mention, very simplistically, the main ones above) diverse and even opposed religions could coexist in one place is a tribute to the flexibility of the predominant religion of India: Hinduism.
Without any central organizing authority, it allows a wide range of personal interpretation; some Hindus believe in a supreme God while others do not. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the second Indian president, stated that, for the Hindu, religion “is not an idea but a power, not an intellectual proposition but a life conviction. Religion is consciousness of ultimate reality, not a theory about God.”136 In the temples and shrines that James and I visited during our time in India, we primarily witnessed people doing their own puja at an altar, reminding me that this was a religion mainly practiced in the privacy of people’s homes. The homespun altars, I might add, are generally tended by the women of the family.
What ideas do most Hindus hold in common? Karma is a central concept — the idea that our actions have effects. A belief in reincarnation flows from karma – its first mention is in the Upanishads in the seventh century BCE. Since your actions in this lifetime will bring you consequences in the next – and you do not want your arrogance and cruelty now to land you into a lifetime as an ox with the whip constantly on your back – then better to cultivate positive karma: practice ahimsa (harm no one: hence Gandhian nonviolence and Hindu vegetarianism); meditation to feel the god within; yoga to stay balanced; and living life according to dharma (what is right, according to universal law; hence an ethical way of living that includes spiritual discipline). Darshan (“vision,” “sight” or “beholding”) is important in the sense that the devotee wants to catch “sight” of divinity either from a statue in a temple, in the presence of the guru, or while in meditation. Once samsara (the cycles of death and rebirth) is broken through, and self-realization is experienced, then the practitioner attains moksha (liberation) from the ever-rolling Wheel of Karma.
What happens, then, if you choose not to live your life according to the dharma, and you accrue “bad” karma? Well, then, next lifetime, you just might be born as a poor cripple, or dark-skinned Untouchable... or a woman. This leads us to how the notion of karma has inflicted its most egregious harm on people for millennia: the caste system. A hierarchical ranking of humans, the caste system determined how people were treated based on the class into which they were born. The Vedic culture of patriarchal, aggressive, and nomadic cattle-herders and raiders, which began its rise to power in the Indus River valleys after 1700 BCE, brought with it an efficient, organizational mindset. All people fell into the following castes:
Brahmins – priests and teachers
Kshatriyas – warriors, rulers, nobles
Vaishyas – farmers, merchants, artisans, commoners
Shudras – laborers, servants, slaves
Outside of this pyramid fell the “outcastes” (the Untouchables, the Dalits) to whom fell the dirty work of disposing of waste and the dead.
The Sanskrit word for “caste” is varna, which means “color” – and as I already mentioned – the higher you go up the ladder of caste, the lighter the color of the skin. Varna was outlawed by the British colonial government, as well as by the present Indian constitution, but to our shock, we found most Indians we met were still dealing with one another based on their caste background. The five basic divisions of class are subdivided into a rigid hierarchy of 3000 castes, which determine your job, where you live, whom you marry, and even the color of your sari or turban. “Everybody in their proper place” is a bedrock belief of the traditional mythic mindset. As William Dalrymple explains in The Age of Kali, “To rise out of your caste does more than just rock the foundations of society, it breaks the cosmic cycle and defies nature.”137 Indeed, it seemed to be most people’s opinion that if it were not for a caste consciousness that dictated where everyone should be and what was expected of them, the burgeoning chaos of India’s 1.17 billion people would explode into unbridled anarchy.
I bring up the topic of caste because it is relevant to our social interactions in India. For we came here not just to pay homage to the religious arena in which Tantra had been born, but to learn from the land and its people in real time. Whomever we met, whenever we talked about gender and sexual relations, the reality of the caste system with the value it gave ranking was always present, as if Indra, the old Vedic war god, looked down from his perch in the clouds ready to come down with his mighty sword upon anyone who defied the “natural order” of things.
The caste system notwithstanding, the philosophy of Hinduism and the science propagated by the Vedas (from physics on the origin of the Universe to Ayurveda, a comprehensive system of medicine) is known far and wide in India. Eighty percent of Indians identify themselves as Hindus.138 Sri Swami Sivananda states: “It is in India alone that every man knows something of philosophy. The cowherd who tends the cattle, the peasant who ploughs the fields, the boatman who pulls at his oar, sing songs replete with philosophical truths. Even the barber repeats OM NAMAH SIVAYA, SIVOHAM before he takes up the razor.”139
Varanasi: Got the Ghats
If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions, I should point to India.
~ Max Mueller
Sitting on the west bank of the Gang
es River, Varanasi – which the British called Benares and Hindus call Kashi, meaning the City of Light – is one of the holiest cities in India.
When James and I first found our way to the ghats, the steps and platforms along the Ganges River, we soon came upon the charnel grounds. As we stood there beholding several funerals in progress, a dark-skinned Dom struck up conversation with us. He was a Dalit, a man from the Untouchable caste, people “low” enough to handle corpses. Making the best of the position, the Doms charged for the wood, the sacred flame that they have tended for hundreds of generations, and all the arrangements. With all his gold necklaces, he looked like a Puerto Rican loan shark, but that he had dyed his hair orange, which matched his teeth (turned reddish from chewing betel nuts). As he explained the funerary procedures, the sun was setting into the smog of the city, casting a sickly orange glow onto the charnel grounds. James and I witnessed corpses in various stages of demise: from the man whose relatives sprinkled him with Ganges water before lighting the pyre underneath him, to a barely-discernible corpse in a roaring fire, to red embers of a body totally consumed. We also saw a body wrapped in yellowish-orange cloth and marigolds rowed out to the middle of the river, tied to a stone, and dropped overboard (this burial reserved for saddhus, holy people, children, pregnant women, and others who did not need the purifying force of the fire for their souls to depart.)
As the dead man’s face was covered with gauze, the rituals performed, and the fire lit, his body slowly was engulfed in flame. I could hear sizzling and popping, and the smell of the smoke changed … more acrid. Ash fell on our shoulders.
“Burning … is for learning,” the Dom proclaimed.
James and I stood there transfixed by the scene. On loudspeakers, a woman sang in a high-pitched lilting voice to Mother Ganga (the Ganges goddess), constantly repeating the refrain, like the ever-returning flow of the river. There was neither crying nor wailing, “so not to make the soul want to stay,” the Dom explained. I asked why no women were present among the mourners (if you can call them that). “Women are not allowed because they cry.”
“They cry,” I repeated. The Dom nodded. I felt myself bump up against what must have been a whole mountain of assumptions about women.
He went on, “Also, sati is now illegal.” He was referring to the old practice of burning the widow when the husband died.
“I don’t think too many widows would want to throw themselves onto the fire, do you?” No response from the Dom. “Do you mean the relatives might throw her on?” I asked.
“Maybe!” he said, flashing his orange-rimmed teeth. “It’s better the women stay up there.” He pointed up the ghat to a terrace high above. Glancing up, I saw a huddle of women in white saris peeking out of the white scarves that covered their heads at the fire just below us that crackled and smoked. Saying goodbye to the kind Dom who stood with us, James put his hand out, saying, “You’re not untouchable to me. Thank you for talking with us.” They shook hands, the Dom’s smile bright against his chocolate brown skin.
From a Tantric perspective, death was simply an event that happened in the overall process of existence, one stinging instant in the cycle of birth-transformation-death-rebirth, an opportunity to broaden the lesson of our infinite identity, our divine beingness. It was something against which to measure the ego. Tantra’s association with death and sex – the traditional worship of Kali, that black, death-dealing goddess adorned with bloody heads and arms; the fascination with night-flying dakinis; and the secret maithuna ritual – held in a graveyard, where a goat would be killed, then its meat eaten, and a skull the centerpiece of the meal – led to Tantra’s image as savage, dangerous, and fearsome. Here in Varanasi, we saw saddhus sitting among corpses and ashes of the cremation grounds. What better way to get down and dirty with death than rubbing your skin with ashes, or drinking from a skull bowl?! As André Van Lysebeth says in Tantra – The Cult of the Feminine, “...for Tantra, death is the supreme guru.”140
Leaving the charnel fires, James and I hired a boat to row us downstream. In the twilight, a fog, cold as death, gradually obscured the horizon. The broad Ganges blended into the sky, the temple spires and ghats seemed to float in space, and every candle and light made dancing reflections on the water. “I feel like we are on the River Styx,” I said to James, as we glided over the water. All reference points blurred; we traveled between worlds.
The oarsman rowed us to Dasashvamedha, the main ghat, where an elaborate puja (ceremony) was underway on the platforms above the water. Brahmin priests draped in red and yellow cloth rang bells, twirled candelabras, and led the packed crowd in chants. I joined in as I could and clapped in beat to the chanting. As I understood the fire ceremony, the offerings tossed into the fire symbolized thoughts or feelings that needed to transform, be carried to the gods, or be reduced to ashes. I also knew that the fire god Agni was one of the earliest Vedic gods, and that the Bronze Age migratory herder-warriors had to count heavily upon the Brahmin’s ability to commune with the gods via the fire ritual. Amazing how these practices had been passed down for over 3,000 years, providing a mystical participation with the element of Fire, touching Earth and Heaven. Reflections of flames glimmering on the Ganges cast a spell, banishing the dank chill of the winter’s night.
Soon our little skiff was hemmed in by larger boats, which were all filled with Hindu people uniting with the puja. The Brahmins twirled large censers in unison, and we were enshrouded in frankincense smoke. The night felt eternal.
That was how James and I spent the first evening of the New Year.
Some days later, I hired a boat one morning at dawn to row me down river. We glided past naked saddhus with painted bodies and wild dreadlocks performing puja, old and young soaping up and dipping or making offerings to the river, the washerwomen and men beating clothes on washboards at the shore, and groups of people doing yoga (I especially liked it when they shouted “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”: laughter yoga!). When we got near the Narad and Raja Ghats, where one legend has the Buddha receiving enlightenment under a tree, he put in ashore so I could do my own puja. The barefoot oarsman seemed very happy to accommodate me, waiting patiently. I had brought with me three little bottles of water: from icy Lake Wai-au high atop Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawai’i; from Sacsayhuamán, the megalithic stone ruins in the Andes; and from the Río Pueblo de Taos, the sacred waters from Blue Lake. Bringing blessings from these holy places to mingle with the Mother River of India, I poured them in, envisioning the unity of water that we all share (being 70% water ourselves), and thanking the waters for sustaining life on the planet. If Dr. Masuru Emoto’s research is correct [that human emotions can affect the structure of water], those waters had a lot to communicate with each other. During my little ritual, standing in the Ganges, I really got the feeling of gratitude for this grand river who gives so much to the people. As polluted as it must certainly be, it somehow seemed like holy water to me, too, purified by a million daily prayers. Blessed Ganga Ma.
I spent our days in Varanasi wandering the ghats. James, still recovering from surgery, was often resting, done in by all the steps. I donned my full Punjabi garb, covered my head, and put a bindi on my forehead. This seemed to increase my invisibility by tenfold. Hardly any touts hassling; instead men calling me “Madame-ji,” “Auntie,” and “Punjabi,” and women meeting my eyes for a change. I walked, I sat, I took it all in. One morning on the ghats, I sat amid a knot of people listening to a holy man teach. Although I could not understand what he said, the passion of his belief carried me along. With a small mouth overgrown with a mustache and beard of white wiry hair, he pronounced each phrase like a prayer, his brown eyes aglow with loving-kindness.
Varanasi was like nowhere else I had been on Earth. Along the banks of the Ganges were people talking, praying, selling, shitting, pissing (but not directly in the water), giving massage, beating drums, teaching, chanting, burning, playing cards, reading palms, wrestling,
resting on dais, patching boats, washing clothes, making cow patty pies (for cooking fires), herding cows and goats, charming snakes, wailing to the gods, flying kites, shaving, and of course: bathing.
Here in India James and I had witnessed filth, squalor, and human decrepitude, but Varanasi won the prize in all categories. Even though many people walked around barefoot, I felt like I should have been wearing a haz-mat suit. People believe that to die in Varanasi allows the soul to achieve moksha (liberation); therefore, sick and old people congregated here. Locals we talked to considered themselves fortunate to live in “the holiest place on Earth,” and in spite of all the nastiness of Varanasi, I could feel what they meant. So many prayers, so many rituals, so many blessings given over these waters...
The saddhus were here – half-naked ascetics who covered themselves with the ashes of the dead, who had renounced all worldly attachments, who would perch cross-legged on the ghats and give teachings. There were thousands of pilgrims who came to bathe in the holy waters of the Ganges. Some sat at the shore chanting their hearts out. There were a few raving lunatics, too, with wild eyes and staggering gait – or were they in some kind of religious altered state that I could not interpret? Lepers who pointed their stubs of appendages at us, and women in dingy saris with kids on their hips who gestured at their mouths (“Feed me!”) begging for rupees. Children chasing through the cows and goats, monkeys climbing the temple spires, mangy dogs running in packs at night, growling and fighting... all here.
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