Climbing Chamundi Hill

by Ariel Glucklich

  As soon as these words were spoken, the husband sprang awake from his deathlike trance. He stared at his wife in disbelief, then turned and went to join his guru.

  “Well, my friend, how do you like this joke?”

  The story was predictable, I thought, but his telling of it was a riot. He had contorted his wiry body—face included—into a ridiculous position and hopped on one leg as he told it. “It’s cute, very cute. But is it even about yoga? I mean, it seems like a story about false love.”

  “Yes, good. But that’s precisely what yoga is, no?”

  That’s it. He was doing it again! He was observing the pattern of my thinking just so he could use it against me. It was always a surprise—but I always resented it too. “I thought yoga was about mastering the body—where’s the false love?” I struggled to keep the tone of my voice even.

  “In a secondary sense, yoga is about controlling the body. But the goal of yoga is to still the mind, stop its fluctuations, its nervousness. And because the body is the mind, it is a body in the mind—do you understand?—controlling one helps the other. That’s what the story is about.”

  “I don’t understand that at all.”

  It felt like the old man was actually trying to confuse me. It was really a simple little moral parable. He calmly explained. “The story seems to be about discovering that your wife does not really love you and that therefore you are free to leave her and renounce. That’s too sordid—don’t you think?—even a bit silly. Would you prefer to think that if she did love you, then you would not be free to practice yoga? Hardly, I should say. The wisdom of the little joke here is that the man’s idea of what constitutes practice, whether it is learning physical contortion or spending time with a renowned guru, this entire method can be the worst obstacle to realizing the truth. The wife’s love in the story is the symbol for the thought that accompanies practice. If you meditate or practice yoga, thinking the whole time, ‘If I just do this correctly and long enough—and hard enough—the reward will appear around the corner.’ That thought, that mental construct—that’s what the love of the wife represents here. You need to get rid of that before the most difficult technique comes to mean anything—if in fact it ever does.”

  That seemed reasonable enough to me. I’ve been to yoga classes with people who were full of great ideas, or worse, full of themselves. “Okay, I see the point. It makes sense, but I don’t read the story that way at all.”

  As usual, the old man remained completely composed in the face of my stubbornness. “That is perfectly fine with me. Why don’t we rest some more. This is a nice cool spot.” We sat quietly for a few moments, and then he spoke again. “Perhaps that story was too brief and ambiguous. Let me try to clarify by telling you another story about this theme.”

  MY UNCLE IN HELL

  A very long time ago, when my grandfather was only a boy—perhaps sixteen—the most important man in his life, his maternal uncle, died. Nupur had been one of the leading knights in the king’s court in the capital of Kuru, where my family lived before they moved south. Kuru in those days was densely forested with banyan and nim trees, and it was crisscrossed by the many tributaries of the Krishna River before it begins its long meander through the coastal plain. It was a magnificent country where the sun and water conspired to satisfy every appetite—from the lowliest ants to magnificent tigers, and from daring hunters to meek old herbalists.

  Nupur taught the boy how to handle and ride horses, even in the forest where they get so easily frightened by animal sounds and by ghosts. He also taught him how to shoot, first at targets, then at animals, although the boy did not share his uncle’s thrill in hunting. He preferred to practice the other skills his uncle had taught him, such as identifying plants and mastering their qualities. The boy quickly learned how to distinguish renuka leaves from the leaves of winter cherry with its horse aroma. The first would kill you in half a minute while the other would help you gain weight or would take away the ache in your knees if you’re old. Before long only the sprites of the woods, the rakshashas and the nagas, or the rare surviving old demoness knew the plants better than the boy. Everything he knew that was important to him came from his uncle. Nupur was closer to the boy than his own father.

  The sudden death of his uncle threw the boy into deep grief. Immediately after the funeral rites were completed, securing for the deceased a safe passage to other worlds, the boy retreated to the woods. He spent weeks living on roots and berries, revisiting the places his uncle had shown him, spending hours in hazy meditation in which his few years dissolved into endless present moments. At times he wished to join his uncle, imagining what the afterlife might be like. In his despair he sought to imitate his uncle, so he took up Nupur’s weapons in order to hunt in the dense forest.

  One day, while halfheartedly hunting, he spotted a chital stag feeding on darbha grass at the edge of a forest clearing. The boy was downwind and had a clear shot. But as he raised the bow, a figure suddenly obscured his view of the animal. The boy lowered his weapon and squinted in disbelief—it was his uncle! He stared dumbly, shook his head, and mumbled, “Have I gone crazy?”

  “No, you’re not crazy. It’s me, your uncle,” came the words from the figure.

  “But are you not dead? Does this mean that I have suddenly died?”

  “No, my boy,” Nupur smiled. “You have not died, and you will not die anytime soon. You see,” he added after a pause, “as soon as I reached the other world, I began to look for the guard, and after pestering him to distraction I received his permission to visit you. All is well, my boy. Don’t be sad, and stop thinking about death.”

  “Oh, Uncle, it’s wonderful to see you!” The boy ran to embrace his uncle, forgetting that the man was dead.

  When he closed his arms around Nupur, the figure dissipated like fog. The boy stepped back in shock and watched the vapors reconfigure into the shape of the man. It made no sense. “Uncle, I can see you and hear you—I mean, you are standing right before me, so why can’t I touch you? Are you a mirage or are you there?”

  “Don’t be surprised that you can’t touch me, son. The amazing thing is that you can actually see me. I am, after all, dead—a resident of hell. But trust me, this is not an illusion.”

  The boy’s excitement deflated. His dear uncle was in fact gone. This was just a chimera, a wisp. He lowered himself to the ground and sobbed quietly. After some time he asked his uncle about the afterlife, about hell. His uncle faced him and spoke to him about his new world. “Hell is not one place, child. I believe there are hundreds of them, or perhaps hundreds of regions in one world. There is no way for me judge which it is. Each hell is perfectly matched to the people who occupy it. I have not been there long enough, but I heard plenty from a man called Bhrigu, who claims to be the son of the god Varuna.

  “He tells me he has seen several of these hells. In one he saw a man cut another man into pieces and eat him. That was the victim’s punishment for chopping trees in order to fuel the sacrificial fire without the proper attitude. Those trees then become the cannibalistic men of that hell. In another hell a man tore apart another man, who was screaming while being eaten. This hell was also a place for punishing mindless sacrificers, people who slaughtered and fed on screaming sacrificial animals without the proper reverence or knowledge.”

  The boy interrupted the description. “That’s so strange, Uncle. Is hell just a place where sinners become food?”

  “Oh no, my boy. That’s only Bhrigu’s experience. I heard of other hells with other tortures. In some, victims are burned by scorching sand or are torn apart by crows and owls. In some hells people are boiled in pots, or chopped up in total darkness, or slashed by sword leaves in a torturous forest.”

  “What are sword leaves, Uncle?” The boy asked this more out of curiosity than alarm. Although the hells sounded gruesome, they were remote, and he could never imagine himself there.

  Nupur sighed. “Well, you see, people make their own hell. I don�
�t think you come to a preexisting place. You make it. Or possibly, it exists but you animate it when you get there. People who are attached to sensual pleasures—insatiable sexual infatuation—go to the Forest of Sword Leaves. There they see their beloved, who beckons to them seductively. The condemned chase after the beautiful woman who quickly climbs a tree and calls from the top. Now they can’t help but follow their passion. They spent all their life giving in to their desires, so they are now completely at the mercy of this erotic drive. They follow the beauty up the tree, and as they do, the leaves—razor sharp—cut their skin and flesh to slivers. Every cut stings like a scorpion bite, the pain in every inch of the body is beyond endurance, but up they go, driven by a mad lust. When they finally make it to the top, reaching desperately for the woman, she vanishes. Suddenly they hear her voice calling from below, where she stands smiling sweetly and tantalizing them to climb down. But when they do, those leaves cut them again, and the pain is as fresh as the very first slice. And so it goes, in an endless cycle of seduction, desire, and torture.”

  The boy sat quietly, fingering a blade of grass. He had never felt a longing for a woman, but the sorry absurdity of this punishment captured his imagination. He thought about those few times, earlier in his childhood, when he had tortured a fly by removing one of its wings. Then he remembered something else.

  “So you need a body in hell, right? I mean, how could you feel the pain if you didn’t have a body?”

  “Yes, boy.”

  “But, Uncle, you don’t have a body! I mean, you’re more like smoke than anything else…How can you be in hell?”

  “That’s what I came to tell you. It is possible to cross the threshold between life and death, or even between men and gods. But what serves as a body in the other world is merely smoke here in this life. Don’t let that frighten you, because crossing is the key to immortality. Learn to do this, boy, and your fear of death and your longing for me will be overcome.”

  “How can I do this, Uncle?”

  Nupur told the boy about a Brahmin who had known a secret chant and had sung it for him. Only Brahmins possessed the spiritual power to actually sound out the words, and Nupur was only a Kshatriya. The boy too was a Kshatriya, which meant that he would also have to find a Brahmin who might sing the chant for him. So Nupur taught those powerful words to the boy and sent him to locate such a Brahmin who would sing them. “If you do this properly, you’ll be able to cross the boundary of death at will, my son.”

  The boy set out immediately in search of a Brahmin. He returned to the capital of Kuru and approached a group of men who looked like Brahmins: they seemed important, and aware of it. “Sirs, I am going to perform a special sacrifice that takes twelve days,” he told them. “The mantras will be recited in reverse because I am not permitted to say them. Because you are learned—you look spiritually superior—you should be able to recognize the chant and sing it for me. Would any of you do this?”

  The Brahmins stared at the young man in silence. They neither knew the chant nor cared to learn something that reeked of sorcery, or at the very least unorthodoxy. The boy took their silence as fear and moved on. He searched throughout the city, going from one Brahmin to the next, with no success. He began to despair of ever seeing his uncle again, when at dusk he came to the cremation ground on the banks of the Krishna River. It was nearly dark and the burning ground was abandoned to its shadows. Suddenly the boy spotted a wild man, covered in ashes, sporting long matted hair and a beard. He was holding a skull in one hand while mumbling spells as a dog licked something out of the other.

  The boy cautiously introduced himself. He learned that the ascetic was a Brahmin named Pratida Bhalla. The Brahmin was a follower of a secret path to salvation, a dangerous and defiling discipline that other Brahmins deplored. Not only did he know the chant; he was actually eager to say it. As soon as the boy told him what he needed, Bhalla shrieked joyfully like a mad hyena, then promised to sing the chant during the twelve-day ritual.

  The other Brahmins were jealous; they resented the fact that they were not permitted to observe the preparations for the ritual. Showing their petty side, they warned the boy to stay away from the filthy Brahmin. “He’s a mischief maker,” they said in a chorus, “a sinner. Be careful, boy, or he will take you straight to hell.” But the boy would not be deterred, and the ritual went off as planned. The words came alive in the raspy singing of the wild Brahmin, and their subtle power began to work immediately. As the ritual progressed, the boy came to learn that mastery over death—even the conquest of immortality—required that he team up with a man who lived on the boundary of civilization and sanity. Perhaps he himself might have to abandon the values he had always been taught to respect. But seeing his beloved uncle made it worth the risk.

  Just as he finished telling this story, I heard thumping sounds behind us. I turned, facing uphill, and listened. The sound grew louder, like two drums on parade. Then, suddenly, two teenage boys came flying down the steps, arms flailing wildly, tongues stuck out as their eyes were focused on the steps with a strange magnetic horror—in an instant they were below us and out of view. When only a faint tapping remained of their violent display, I whistled and exclaimed, “That was insane!”

  The old man laughed loudly, then reassured me that anyone could do it. To emphasize the point he quickly changed the subject. “How did you like the story?”

  “It was a wonderful story. I really like the mood: dark, a bit surrealistic, and sad. But what does it have in common with the previous story? I mean, why did you connect these stories?”

  The old man was poking at the ground with his walking staff, bending down every now and then, but he heard me. “Well, the two stories share nothing at all of course, other than what one is able to discern. Here, try one of these.”

  From his bag he handed me a broken carob fruit that was much darker than the ones I had previously seen. I wiped it on my shirt, took a bite, and said, “You need to help me with the story. I don’t get it.”

  The old man toyed with his own carob, but he did not eat. “In the previous story, if you grant me the arbitrary meaning I gave it, the love of the wife represented the thinking of the practitioner: ‘This practice is wonderful. If I do it just right, I can expect great rewards.’ In the second story we see a contrast between a very rigid notion of the afterlife—hell—and a rather vague view of immortality. By immortality I mean the capacity to move across boundaries of existence and nonexistence, the type of ephemeral power achieved by the uncle. It’s an extremely old story, my friend, and this is an obscure way of speaking about the liberation of the self.”

  The carob was sweet and fleshy, with large pits that were easy to find and spit out. I felt elated. “That’s very confusing.”

  “Yes, of course. Look, in my tradition the Brahmin usually represents the highest spiritual values—it’s the Brahmin who possesses the knowledge that leads to salvation.”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “But in this story the ‘proper’ Brahmins were useless. They were ignorant of the special chant, perhaps even afraid to approach the topic. The only man who had both knowledge and courage was regarded as polluted. He was dangerous. Do you know what kind of a man this is?”

  “A sorcerer, I suppose.”

  “Close. He’s a Tantric ritualist, or perhaps an Aghori—a mystic who follows in the footsteps of Shiva by living in the cremation grounds, where he immerses himself in secret practices that the orthodox Brahmins find dangerous.”

  “Would it be fair to call him antinomian?”

  The old man now bit gingerly into his carob with his eyes closed, but he answered the question. “If you mean like those Christians who break religious laws to achieve mystical goals, then yes—and no. The concept you mentioned is too dualistic: good versus bad, sacred versus profane. Think of this man or woman as someone who transgresses against all dualism, against thought itself, which is dualistic by definition—‘binary’ is the word philosophers
use. What makes our chap seem dangerous is that in straddling boundaries he questions the way we have sorted out the world: ‘This is mine, that is yours’; ‘I want this, I hate that.’ There is nothing unlawful about what he does, and in India he has never been pursued by religious courts. We don’t have your penchant for inquisitions, you know.”

  “So all of this connects to the previous story because giving up the thought of a goal is part of it?”

  “Yes, excellent. But there is more. You go beyond giving up the thought that accompanies practice, but you also go against the very fiber of religion. It is one step further along the path—if you’ll pardon the metaphor. Give up thinking about practice; go against entrenched values or desires. At the very head of the list, the most prestigious value, of course, is moksha—spiritual liberation. How I hate that word. You, young man, if you’re a pilgrim on the path to Shiva, then you are also a seeker of moksha, are you not? Well, give that up. Abandon all thought of moksha.”

  I didn’t really know whether I was a pilgrim or not. On that day I had no intention of performing a pilgrimage to Shiva; I was merely exercising and drying my shoes. But I was then living in Varanasi—the city of Shiva—and I cared about his river, the Ganges. I didn’t know what constituted devotion or a search for knowledge—I still don’t—but I was no mere tourist either. I felt pretentious but not hypocritical for speaking about such things as moksha.

  But that made no sense. “That’s absurd! How can I give up thinking about moksha if I’m after it? I mean, it’s very clever as a paradox and all that, but it makes no sense in practice…”

  “You have it in reverse, my friend. It makes no sense in theory, but works in practice. Come on, let’s walk some more and see what we can make of the next story.”

  THE KING WHO BECAME A WOMAN

  Deep in the forest at the northern end of our state once lived a king named Bhangaswana. Endowed with all the good qualities of a true monarch, he was handsome and wise, a follower of the law who ruled over a peaceful and prosperous country. Despite all his virtues, however, King Bhangaswana was unable to produce sons. He wed no less than seventeen women and was fortunate enough to father a few girls—but no sons.