by Vilas Sarang
But most of all, with cows and with many other animals, it is their way of sitting, or stretching rather, that makes a difference. Humans are not used to stretching in this manner. Stretching your body like a cow blesses you with an out-of-this-world feeling. I learnt to stretch my body like a cow. In the beginning, my sides used to ache but very soon my body stopped complaining. I could stretch for long stretches of time. Stretching like a cow, chewing a mouthful of grass interminably, staring vacantly into space—all this created a divine sense of tranquillity and serenity.
One problem that I had to solve is what I call the problem of mooing. I found out that it was extremely difficult to moo convincingly. Countless times I had to repeat the exercise before I came anywhere near a passable moo. I was determined to excel in this most difficult of arts. When I attained what might be called a passable imitation of a real cow’s moo, my joy knew no bounds. A cow’s mooing is the most beautiful sound in the world. So sweet and honeyed, and peaceful. I wonder if any other animal has as soft and euphonious a voice as does a cow. Forget the terrible sounds: that of the tiger or the lion or the elephant; but even in the sounds of the goat, the wild deer, the dog (dog!), the pig, the frog, the cat, the monkey or the sheep, you cannot find anything comparable to the mooing of a cow. The only comparison to the quality of the mooing of a cow can be made in the bird kingdom. Even among birds, think of the crow, the hen, the rooster, the duck, the kite, the owl (the owl!) the vulture—you may turn up your nose at these (metaphorically, cows do not turn up their noses). Songbirds are a different matter.
So, when I graduated to respectable mooing, I felt very proud. And happy. Sometimes I mooed for the pleasure of it. But not too often. Have you ever heard a cow continually mooing, like a dog which keeps barking and barking?
My fellow cows would be taken out to graze in the day by the farmer’s younger son. I, too, tried to go with them. I used to lag behind. Then I would moo in a plaintive voice. My fellow cows would look behind and halt on the road until I caught up with them. I was always grateful for that kind gesture. On the grazing ground, the cows used to graze in a leisurely fashion and I used to chew a mouthful of fresh grass. I enjoyed the heady smell. The boy who looked after us loitered in the shade of a tree. Sometimes he played the flute. It was a sweet sound. At noontime, the boy ate his lunch: a couple of rotis and some dry fish. He gave me a piece of the roti, which I ate gladly. As evening came on, all of us turned home. We went to our pen and sat contentedly. I enjoyed this daily routine; it gave me good exercise and kept me fit.
There were minor nuisances too. Down the road, an ascetic had become a dog. He didn’t have much paraphernalia except for an artificial tail. He, too, used to lie down like a dog. The trouble is, he barked incessantly. I found it annoying. Since he sat in the same place and barked, some real-life dogs started giving him company. A man used to come and give the dog-ascetic some rice or roti. He started to give food to the other dogs also. When the ascetic barked, the other dogs barked too and created quite a racket. Dogs will be dogs.
I was always conscious that I was a cow, a sacred animal. I tried to live up to my dignity. Humans believe that in a cow’s belly, thirty-three crore gods reside. This, after bearing the burden of cowhood for so long, must apply to me as well. Indeed, since assuming cowhood, I have felt a certain heaviness in my stomach. Gods in my belly! It was an awesome, humbling thought. A rare, supernatural sense of peace prevailed over me, a sense of peace that would not be too much to describe as divine.
When I look back at my distant past, I remember how my life as a human used to be utterly miserable. Not that I lacked money or means, but I was constantly irritable and depressed. As a last resort, I decided to be a cow. Now, I am a cow. The cow that I am experiences nothing but happiness, and, above all, peace, peace, peace.
A few days ago, I had an unusual visitor. He was a tall, young man, with a royal look on his face and in his bearing. He was accompanied by a royal official and a bodyguard with a spear and, in his belt, a sheathed knife. I guessed that the royal personage was the prince, though I had never seen him.
‘This is Prince Siddharth,’ the official said. ‘The prince wishes to talk to you.’
‘How are you doing as a cow-ascetic, reverend sir?’ Siddharth asked me.
I was in a quandary. Being a cow, I do not talk in human speech. So I only made a mooing sound.
‘Old man, you can talk to the prince as an exception. The prince’s wish must be fulfilled,’ the royal official said.
Intimidated, I spoke in the human tongue. It was somewhat difficult, for I had not used human speech for years.
‘Hail, O prince! I am honoured that you have come to meet me,’ I said.
‘Dear man, or should I say cow, how do you find being a cow?’ The prince asked.
‘Oh, divine! It is divine to be a cow. I am proud to be a cow.’
‘You find peace in this existence?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘It is peace that I searched for as a human. Now, as a cow, I have found true peace.’
The prince asked a few more questions, about my food and my daily routine and so on. He seemed satisfied.
‘Your highness,’ the royal official said. ‘Down the road, there is a dog-ascetic. Maybe your highness would like to meet him.’
The prince assented.
The retinue went to the dog-ascetic.
‘Hail, O dog-ascetic!’
The dog-ascetic, like me, was a bit flustered to see these unusual visitors. Out of habit, he simply barked. The other dogs also had the impulse to bark. But, in the presence of this imposing company, the dogs stayed quiet. They all sat around, and silently wagged their tails.
As with me, the royal official explained to the dog-ascetic that, as an exception, he had permission to talk like a human.
‘O dog-ascetic, how do you find your changed existence?’ the prince asked.
‘Oh, I have forgotten how to be a human. Bow wow!’
The prince mutely smiled.
‘Pardon me, O prince! “Bow wow” is a greeting in doglanguage. Do not take it amiss.’
‘Not to worry, O dog-ascetic. I respect your doghood.’ Then he said: ‘But why did you choose to be a dog, if I may ask?’
‘Oh, before this existence, I had a family, a wife. My wife and I used to constantly quarrel, sort of barking at each other.’
‘So?’
‘So I thought, why not become a dog and bark to my heart’s content? I put the idea into practice. In the beginning, whenever I thought of my wife, I used to bark till I was exhausted. Now, after so many years, my wife’s memory is faint and it doesn’t matter to me any more. But I still bark, simply for the pleasure of barking. Also, I have these dogfriends I have collected. We enjoy barking at each other. If a stranger passes by, we all bark at him till he walks away … bow-wow!’ He added: ‘I tell you, your highness, barking is the best thing in the world. Your highness, allow me to suggest that you, too, try barking once in a while.’
‘Thanks for the suggestion, O dog-ascetic!’ Siddharth said.
Young Siddharth had become curious about the ascetics in the city. He had visited just the two varieties described above. There were many diverse forms of asceticism and such ascetics were to be found in every town and city. It seemed that in the sixth century BC, India was swarming with ascetics of all kinds. Actually, these people are still to be found today in this country. If you go to the holy towns of north India, Varanasi and other towns along the course of the Ganga, you will find exactly the same forms of ascetic practices that maybe existed 2500 years ago. There is something in the genius of the land that drives people to such behaviour. And it can also be said that it is this genius that outlines the limits of Siddharth’s quest and his enormous achievement. People are forever dissatisfied and forever looking for succour and solutions.
A young royal employee named Nagadutt accompanied Siddharth on these excursions. There was an Ascetics Lane a little distance away from the city where many of thes
e ascetics were to be found. Citizens, who respected these sadhaks, these questers, used to provide food to the sadhak they liked the most. Some of the ascetics were quirky about their food habits. Some ate only fruit; some, only food that grows beneath the earth’s surface; others consumed only liquids. Nagadutt took Siddharth to an ascetic who, from all appearances, looked ‘normal’.
‘What’s so special about this ascetic?’ Siddharth asked.
‘The peculiarity of this sadhak,’ Nagadutt said, ‘is that his food depends upon the moon.’
‘The moon?’
‘Yes, he eats nothing on the new moon. From then on, till the full moon, he eats one additional mouthful each day. Then, as the moon becomes smaller each day, he reduces his food accordingly till the next new moon.’
‘That’s fascinating. But what is the logic behind this?’
‘I don’t know. You could have asked him but he doesn’t talk. He has taken a vow of complete silence.’
Siddharth stared at this ascetic for quite some time. Then he moved on.
‘Tomorrow I shall take you to the “five-fire” ascetic. He sits at the other end of the town,’ Nagadutt said. The ‘five-fire’ ascetic sat between four fires with his eyes turned towards the fifth fire, the sun. He had long since gone blind from staring constantly at the sun. There were some devotees who religiously offered sewa, or service, for the ascetic. They kept the four fires burning. Many devotees offered him food: fruit and other things. What Siddharth found irresistibly hypnotic was the ascetic’s face. His skin had become extremely dry because of the fires and because he looked at the sun constantly. And then his eyes: wide open but blind; fixed upon the sun. Siddharth couldn’t stop looking at them.
Nagadutt then suggested that they visit one or two other ascetics who were close by. But Siddharth had had enough. They went back to the palace.
That night, Siddharth could not sleep for a long time. When he closed his eyes, he saw the vacant, wide-open eyes of the ‘five-fire’ ascetic. It is as if the five fires were blank: dark, dark, dark. ‘Why do men do such things? There must be some deeper reason behind the one that is visible,’ Siddharth said to himself. Not only the ‘five-fire’ ascetic, but all these ascetics were like blind men, groping helplessly. They needed someone to show them the true, meaningful path. But who would do that?
There were some other ascetics to visit, and Nagadutt did his duty conscientiously. Self-mutilation was very common, such as cutting off a limb, or breaking it and allowing it to grow at an unnatural angle. Siddharth saw an ascetic who held his right arm perpetually aloft so that the arm became wizened and stunted. ‘Why would a man do such a thing?’ Siddharth asked himself. Was it a protest against being human, a condition the ascetic found inherently deficient? Being a human being was a fundamentally stunted, pathetic condition, and the ascetic was mutely raising the flag of this miserable, wretched human condition. ‘Pitiful, pitiful.’
A still more horrible, and painful, practice was boring a hole through one’s foreskin and attaching a weight to it. Siddharth saw this as a mocking, a scorning of man’s manhood, publicly proclaiming its wretchedness. ‘Here. You flaunt it as the great prize of your existence, a great source of pleasure, akin to the pleasure of Brahman? Look, this is what I think of it. A mere useless, contemptible appendage, that’s what it is.’
Siddharth saw all this as a glaring indictment of human dignity.
The visit to the ascetics raised profound questions that Siddharth ruminated for days on end.
According to all authoritative sources, Siddharth began his quest for enlightenment with his momentous leave-taking, his farewell to home; but, as we see in his keen interest in asceticism, Siddharth had begun his quest even earlier. He took interest not only in the practices of the ascetics, but in the prominent religious dogmas of the time. Apart from the somewhat shadowy world of asceticism, the main dogma of the sixth century BC was the Vedic sacrificial cult. It had begun as a fresh, enthusiastic breakthrough but that was a thousand years before Siddharth. Naturally, it had become crusty, having long lost its youthful vigour. A thousand years ago, the Vedic sages groped to make sense of the world. And in the process, they spontaneously voiced their thoughts and expressed their feelings. Their observations about nature, and their budding notions about gods were so free, so unconstrained, that very often we find them puzzling. The first Indo-Aryan seers inscribed their thoughts and feelings in what came to be known as the Vedas. Looking at these works that were completed 2500 years ago, it is possible to detect a sensibility that is authentically youthful, innocent and enthusiastic—full of the sense of wonder.
Non-being then existed not nor being.
There was no air, nor sky beyond it.
What was concealed? Wherein? In whose protection?
And was there deep unfathomable water?
This is from the Vedic ‘Hymn of Creation’. Wonder, perplexity and helplessness before the complexity of creation is further expressed in these lines:
You will not find who produced these creatures: another thing has risen up among you.
Enwrapt in misty cloud, with lips that stammer, hymn-chanters wander and are discontented. But, by the sixth century BC, the Vedic way of thought was already a thousand years old. By Siddharth’s time, the freshness of the original sacrificial chants and hymns had long vanished. The sacrifices had become more complicated and prolonged.
When Siddharth was sufficiently grown up, he expressed a desire to visit the sthandil, the yagna site where the sacrifices were performed. This desire was conveyed to the raj purohit, the royal priest.
‘Hail Prince Gautam!’ The priest bowed.
‘I wish to visit the main royal sthandil, O priest!’
‘It will be my pleasure to show you around, prince. Today is Thursday, the day of the planet Guru or Jupiter, a good day to pay a visit. I am glad, O prince, that you have taken such interest in dharma so early in life. Bless you, O prince!’
The royal carriage was readied. Siddharth, a royal attendant, a bodyguard and the priest left for the sthandil.
As they approached the site, the smell of the burnt offerings; ghee, grains, flesh, became quite overpowering. Sheep, goat and, on bigger occasions, buffaloes were sacrificed. Human sacrifice must have doubtless happened until a few centuries ago. There was a rumour that King Shuddodan had sacrificed a boy so that Queen Maya could have a child but it was only a story, and nobody wanted to talk about it. Siddharth’s secret wish behind his vist to the sthandil was to see the place—if the rumour was true—where the boy might have been sacrificed. Siddharth found the idea horrible and repugnant. He tried his best to suppress it, but it kept popping up like a ghost that cannot be smothered.
The sthandil stood about an arm’s length from the ground. The royal priest was explaining the intricacies of a yagna.
‘All this is laid out in accord with the Brahminical texts,’ he said. ‘To the west of the altar platform burns the fire on which the sacrificial food is prepared.’
‘And what is that over there on the east?’
‘That, O prince, is a square hearth, where the sacrificial food is poured into the flame so that the god Agni can carry it to the heavens.’
The priest moved a little bit, and pointing his finger, said, ‘On the south here is the third fire which represents the moon.’
‘What’s it there for?’
‘This third fire is meant to keep away the demons, to prevent them from interfering with the sacrifice.’
‘The sthandil is there, and right next to it is the fire to scare away the demons and the ghosts.’
‘Right. O prince!’
‘Men are afraid. Men are forever afraid.’
Not sure what Siddharth meant by these words, the royal priest said, ‘Everything is done according to the shastras.’
‘Or maybe you are worried about the ghosts because so many animals are killed here.’
‘Everything is done according to the shastras.’
&nbs
p; ‘Or maybe the separate fire is to give another priest a job?’
Sensing the irony in the young man’s words, the priest kept quiet.
The visit to the sthandil was over. But what remained in the young man’s mind was the strong, charred odour of burnt ghee and flesh. ‘This is not what dharma means to me,’ Siddharth said to himself.
Later, Siddharth attended one of the yagnas. He couldn’t decide if the smoke of the sacrificial fire was more irritating or the continuous, loud chanting in Sanskrit more nerve-racking. It was all meaningless abracadabra. He could see the arrogance on the faces of the priests and after the yagna was over, their greed for money. The Brahmin who performs the yagna, who knows now exactly how to perform it, is superior even to the gods. Because, without his knowledge, the gods are helpless. To pronounce the lines of the Vedas and the Shrutis, to pronounce them with proper intonation and inflection was only the Brahmin’s prerogative. The rank of ceremonial Brahmin was only gained by doing apprenticeship in the house of a Brahmin guru for twelve long years, learning the technicalities of lighting and managing a yagna fire, learning the hymns, mantras and rituals and leading a life of strict brahmacharya. Only at the conclusion of this training could the young Brahmin become a professional priest. No wonder that these Brahmins—select men from a select caste—became haughty and arrogant.
By the sixth century BC, the practice of yagna was degenerating and had become a meaningless, mechanical ritual. Siddharth was in his late teens and was forming his worldview—he envisaged it essentially as an existential quest—and a religion based on yagna practices was quite antithetical to his ideas. In those practices, he could see no possibility of finding answers to the questions that were knocking about in his head. Siddharth lost all interest in Vedic yagna-based religion. Once or twice his father Shuddodan asked him to host a yagna, but he flatly refused. ‘I get a terrible headache with these yagnas!’ he told his father.
Even the ascetics were more alive to existential problems than proponents of the Vedic dharma in Siddharth’s time; but asceticism was formless and instinctive rather than rational; it was blind groping. At best, it was an autonomous, primitive psychiatric healing.
