Dr. Ambedkar became the primary author of the new Indian constitution, which proclaimed equality for all its citizens, gave all adults the right to vote, and outlawed untouchability. But untouchability did not go away. Believing that caste was the core quality of the ancient Brahmanic culture and religion, he publicly burned the Manusmrti, the Brahmanic caste code, and began to study other religions. After 15 years, inevitably—it seems now—Ambedkar chose Buddhism, because it seemed the most appropriate for an Indian and the least superstitious, and above all, the most egalitarian of religions to him. The 1951 census had counted a total of 2,487 Buddhists in all of India; to become a Buddhist took a little consideration.
By then, Ambedkar was revered by millions across India. On October 14, 1956, he stood in front of 400,000 Untouchables and converted to Buddhism by taking the Five Precepts. Then he turned and offered the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts to the enormous crowd. He added 17 vows he’d created about renouncing Hinduism belief and practices. And then there were 402,488 Buddhists in India. Buddhism had thrived in India for more than 1,000 years, and then disappeared, and then returned. In many houses, Buddha is enshrined as a Hindu deity. In other houses, Buddha and Dr. Ambedkar sit side by side on Buddhist altars. Today there are millions of Buddhists in India—the Ambedkarites, almost all of whom are Dalit, and Tibetans and Theravadans—7 or 8 million, according to the Indian government; perhaps 50 million, as many Tibetan leaders claim. No one can be sure, because Buddhism is still a political issue here. The state of Gujarat has classified both Buddhism and Jainism as branches of Hinduism. Several states in India have made it illegal to do mass conversions.
Before his enlightenment, the Buddha practiced six years of mortification—near-starvation, going without sleep, and other extreme practices. Five others practiced near him. When he decided that asceticism was not going to bring satisfaction—as luxury and wealth had not when he was reared a prince—he took a bowl of cream from a young girl. The other ascetics, shocked at the indulgence, left for Sarnath.
We rented a motor rickshaw for the day, to drive the ten kilometers. There had been few chances for quiet in Varanasi, on the road, in the odd dense meditations of Bodh Gaya. My map of Varanasi showed Sarnath at the end of a winding single road in an empty section north of the main city—in my mind, an oasis, a park, a respite from both the noise of the city and the flagrant complexities of Hinduism. It is also called Isipatana and colloquially is often known as the Deer Park, because the Buddha lived more than one former life as a deer and because deer have always been protected there. We drove by stuttering half-blocks: darting between bicycles and scooters and past the semiruins of unfinished buildings, along streets under six inches of muddy water, for almost an hour. Suddenly our driver said, “This is Sarnath,” although we had not left the city.
“Do not take a guide,” he added. “They do not know what they are doing.” As soon as the rickshaw stopped, several guides peered in, smiling, but left when we firmly said no.
The sutras say that the Buddha “sat in joy” for a week after his enlightenment. Then he moved a short distance away, where he could gaze unblinkingly at the Bodhi Tree for another week; then he walked slowly back and forth near the tree for a week, while flowers bloomed in his footsteps; and then, for weeks more, he sat in meditation alone. He had no desire to mix with people and felt weary at the idea of trying to explain his understanding. But in time he believed he should try to share it. At last he rose and walked to Sarnath. The five ascetics refused to acknowledge him at first, but he drew the eye like a magnet, and they gathered around.
He talked for only a little while. He said that he had found an answer that “tends to calm,” and said a little about the causes of suffering, the relief of suffering. When he was done speaking, the ascetics felt their hearts open and “the earth-dwelling gods raised a shout: ‘This supreme Wheel of the Doctrine has been set going by the Lord at Benares at Isipatana in the Deer Park, a Wheel which has not been set going by any ascetic, brahmin, god, Mara, Brahma, or by anyone in the world.” More gods took up the cry, and more, until “the ten-thousandfold world system shook, shuddered, and trembled, and a boundless great light appeared in the world.”
When Hsűan-Tsang, a Chinese monk, came to Sarnath in the seventh century CE, there were more than 1,500 monks living here. Archeologists have found the evidence of a great fire, a catastrophic conflagration fusing the bones of monks to the timbers and statues in the ruined monastery buildings. Excavations found cakes uneaten, as though the monks had rushed away from a meal, from a fire risen so fast they had no time to think. One thinks of torches, invaders’ hands, a circle of enemies.
Today the main temple, a tall pagoda, sits at the end of a wide walkway lined with rainbow-striped Buddhist flags, surrounded by grass. A coarsely painted statue of Dr. Ambedkar stands near the pagoda. Behind the temple is a tired little zoo. There have always been small lakes at Sarnath; one was supposed to have been used by the Buddha to bathe and launder his robes—a pure, deep lake where a dragon lived, and crocodiles who would attack only men of bad character. When we were there it was dry season; a concrete reservoir lay empty beside the pens of a few desiccated crocodiles who looked as though they couldn’t attack a cat, a couple of pelicans and storks, and, on the other side of an unused boat canal with a few inches of scummy water, a herd of spotted deer.
The wide street was lined with dozens of vendors selling the same key rings and rosaries and cheap luggage we saw in Bodh Gaya, and down the block, entrance to the ruins and the stupa built by Emperor Ashoka. The excavated brick walls and stupa foundations were rounded and soft in the afternoon sun. There were warning signs—“Do not stick gold foil on the monument”—but the ruins were streaked with gold foil and drips of candle wax. Everydog was there, too, standing in the center of the ruins like stone. People ate picnics in quiet family groups; under the small trees, couples cuddled and teenagers texted and took selfies.
The great haystack stupa that is said to mark the spot of the first teaching rose above the quiet grounds, surrounded by bamboo scaffolding. Four Westerners listened earnestly to an inaccurate lecture on Buddhism by a Hindu guide. Two Chinese nuns chanted in the shade; three Tibetan men casually circumambulated in silence.
Signs at the ticket office stated that it was forbidden to beg or sell inside the complex. But several young men walked past us, holding out small Buddhas and singing bowls. I was irritable with them. “It is against the rules to sell here, stop it,” I said to one, and he veered away. In the temple, many prominent signs read “Please keep silence” in both English and Hindi. But the guides and their tour groups talked in loud voices, echoing in the long room. I wanted to tell the loudest guide to be quiet, but I didn’t—thinking, This is his country, his culture, not mine. But sitting on the grass near the massive brick structure built by an emperor to honor a Buddha, a building that had stood for thousands of years through invasions and arson and war, I thought, It’s my religion, not his.
Thomas wandered around the softened rust-red walls, and I fed crackers to Everydog and glared when a boy approached with a statue on the palm of his hand.
Finally, I opened the copy of Shantideva that I’d found on the free shelf of books at the hotel, and by happenstance read this: “And my hatred towards those who damage sacred images and stῡpas or who abuse the true teaching is inappropriate, since the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are not distressed.”
Modern travel is fraught with complex morality and a certain amount of selfish rationalization. I may never sort out the ethics of human-powered transport; I avoided bicycle rickshaws when I could, but when I could included except when I was really tired and didn’t want to walk and couldn’t get a motor. I wanted to see the city from the river; I didn’t want to be rowed against the current. I gave money to beggars. But the cost of my plane ticket? That was for me.
In the midst of beauty, sorrow. Beside joy, a racking sorrow. Outside the gates that protect the Bodhi Tree, an adol
escent girl with no legs and only one arm scooted on her buttocks. Skinny old women held out their hands to me, murmuring, eat, eat, as I walked by in well-fed American health. Seek the unvarnished truth, and simple suffering is sometimes what you find. “I can’t go to India,” a friend said to me as I was leaving; “I can’t bear to see the poverty.” As though not seeing means it is not there, or not borne. Pity is an impassable abyss, a wedge of separation.
The enfolding of suffering and compassion requires the willingness to look: at the leper, the girl, the cost of my plane ticket. We live our lives mostly in sets, bounded, separate; now and then my set encounters yours, and for a moment there is a brief Venn diagram of being: you and me, in the same set. Here we are. Form—reality—is not obstructed by itself; like ghosts, we can walk through each other. There is no real separation, no boundary, no “me, not you” that can be found. Sometimes the best I can do is see. (Often I can do more than that; I am not always willing to do more.) Every moment is a siren song: distraction, fantasy, intoxication, pretense. Right here, plain and unvarnished: outrageous noise. Outrageous beauty. Outrageous life.
Before we left for Varanasi, Thomas wanted me to promise not to give any money to beggars. He was following the instructions of everything and everyone from his travel guide to the hotel clerks, all of whom predicted that to give money to one person would bring a mob of many more hands. Still, I put money in my pocket every morning to give to beggars, and I put it in the lepers’ hands, touching the untouchable, and I was not mobbed. But Babu had a tracking device; he appeared again and again—in alleys, along the river bank, outside restaurants, near the public bathroom. “Hello, madam!” he said, falling into step with us. “Come to factory today!”
Maddeningly, Thomas said, “It’s your fault. You were too friendly.”
I protested. “I was being ambassadorial!”
Along the river, I was always getting offers—for boats, for pashmina, flowers, incense, guides. The children selling little floating baskets with a few marigold blooms and a candle were most demanding. “Good luck to you, your mother, father, sister, brother, husband, all family, good luck,” rattled one urchin, long ago taught not to take no for an answer. “I have nice candle, good luck to your family. Flower put in Ganga, good luck to your family. You have anyone have problem, say Mother Ganga, good luck.” Every tourist town is built this way: a torrent of things to buy that one does not really want, the impossibility of finding things one really needs. Such is the call and response of salesmanship; the rhythm of peddling is the rhythm of survival, of getting by. In Varanasi, the irony is that tourists driven by fear-mongering Web sites and guidebooks congregate where they are told to congregate; they are only exposed to what is designed for them, and there one finds the most insistent touts, the scams. The stores sell dross instead of silk, on ugly mannequins with Western features.
I spent many hours walking alone and unmolested in the narrow pedestrian alleys that wind in bewildering mazes, the descendant passages of thousands of years. People live and work and shop here at little counters that sell tin boxes, spice packets, sitars, cell phones, potato chips, CDs, bananas, tiny sparkly skirts for your home deity, dosa and korma and salad. There are shops that seem to sell nothing but soda. The offers are quiet, made by polite clerks who never rise from their comfortable seats, and easily smiled away: Scarves, madam? Whatever I needed—change, tea, directions—was easy to find. I never tired of the brightly lit silk rooms: white cotton futons covering the floor and stacks of neatly packaged fabric lining the walls. One slips off shoes, kneels on the futon, and waits for the clerk to bedazzle you with cottons and silks in every color and combination of colors, spread out and running across the floor like a river of rainbows.
We bought tiny bowls of ice cream at a little shop so we could each flirt a little with Sunil, the handsome owner with a Bollywood mustache and tailored shirts.
One day a customer asked, “Where you from?”
“United States of America.”
“I know America!” he beamed, arms up in delight. “I go to Miami many times! Miami is a beautiful city! Many celebrities there know me—Goldie Hawn, Michael Jackson, they know me.”
“All my Indian acquaintances seem to know Goldie Hawn,” I said.
“No, no! She only knows two people here. Me and my cousin brother. I have photo. Proof!”
The fog was thick, the political rallies continued. We hired Prem for the 120-mile drive north to the rural town of Kushinagar, where the Buddha died, hiking out to his car behind a line of hotel staff carrying our luggage like porters up a mountain. How long will the drive take? “Four, five, maybe eight hours,” said Prem.
The two-lane road was usually only one lane in fact, with near-constant swerving, down-shifting, and careful negotiation of obstacles. We crawled past breakdowns and torn-up tarmac, waited for freight trains, slowly climbed an abandoned pile of bricks, dodged huge potholes, rolled over inexplicable speed bumps, and idled through many busy market towns filled with the usual crowd of motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians, dogs, and cattle. In Gazipur we had to double back and take a detour three times. Prem talked and muttered to himself, as drivers do, making complaints and reciting prayers. He talked on the phone often, driving then with one hand or tucking the phone under his ear so he could shift. I sat beside him as though in a video game. With a bus ahead, a bus behind, a truck full of sugarcane coming toward us, and three motorcycles darting between, what will he do? And every time he found a small hole and we slid through. Four, five hours. Eight hours.
I asked Prem about his family. “I have 11 children!” he said, then laughed. “No, no! I have 2!” Then he called his wife again, as he did almost every hour.
We talked, then we talked less, then not at all. We read, watched the scenery, dozed. We hit Gorakhur in the dark and then it was freeway, the great east-west corridor that could take us to Bangladesh or Assam if we wanted. The deep night fog was strange and pretty as we sped down a freeway with big painted trucks, “Blow Horn,” on what will always feel like the wrong side. The freeway ran right through towns without guardrails, and people, cattle, and dogs wandered across at will. At last we left the freeway for another dark country road, wending through a still town surrounded by black fields. We had traveled 120 miles in ten hours.
Thomas and I were the only guests in the Hotel Imperial, in rooms side by side at the end of the hall. In the big shiny lobby, three men waited for their next task while one painstakingly filled out forms by hand, as the Internet was down. The hallways had stone floors, and every step and word echoed. When we wandered down to the dining room for a late supper, we found it lit up with a single table set for two and three waiters standing in anticipation.
Kushinagar has always been rural and poor. When the Buddha announced that he would die there, Ananda tried to discourage him; the town seemed unworthy. Once it was a great city, said the Buddha—“a mighty city encompassed by jeweled walls twelve leagues round”—where the Buddha had been king. And so he stayed.
The next day was cold, with cottony fog in the morning and spotty rain showers. The electricity was off most of the day all through town, and we visited the sites in shadow. The Mahaparinirvana complex that marks the spot where the Buddha died includes excavated brick monastic ruins, a white beehive stupa built by Ashoka, and a small white building where a very old, 20-foot reclining Buddha statue is kept. He lay on his right side with eyes closed, head to the north, covered tenderly with a frayed gold lamé blanket. The low wall around the statue was covered in flaking gold seal. A few old Burmese sat in meditation in the cold, dim room on sections of dirty red carpet. “Lift my leaf and mix me with the wave,” wrote Sir Edwin Arnold in his epic poem of the Buddha’s life, The Light of Asia. “The sunrise comes! The dewdrop slips into the shining sea!”
That afternoon, a large bus of Japanese tourists arrived at the Imperial. They dropped off their luggage and climbed back into the sleek bus for the short drive up and down the e
mpty road to the stupas.
We walked along the quiet road to the Buddhist Museum, where we paid ten rupees and were the only visitors. “The Museum Is Under Renovation,” said a big sign. There was no power, no docent, no security, and piles of bricks and tools and dirt scattered about. When I was in the room of “Buddhas in Various Postures,” a jackhammer pounding started up on the wall outside, and great chunks of plaster and cement fell, one nearly toppling a seventh-century stone Shakyamuni doing battle with the armies of Mara. On the short shopping street—the usual potato chips, soda, jewelry, cheap hand luggage, Buddhist rosaries, optical illusion posters of Hindu gods with following eyes—we met a few Indian tourists and groups of high school students who asked for one photo, please. Tiny, vigorous Burmese women dashed about. But the hotels were empty and still.
At 4:10 in the morning, I was awakened by a cacophony of shouting and slamming doors and feet dashing down the hallway, echoing across the wide, stone floor. The Japanese were already on their way out of town.
I remember Bodh Gaya: the afternoon light is opalescent, like pearl, as though painted with a pale watercolor wash. A young Korean man kneels beside the fence to have his head shaved by a monk; he is being ordained, and behind him his excited, nervous mother waits, holding his new robes. Birds sing unconcernedly, tidy brown seed-eaters darting among the leaves. I look at my hand and it is covered with tiny specks of gold. After dark, the great temple is lit from every corner; small lights illuminate the stairs and walks; butter lamps and candles flicker here and there; tiny strings of colored lights lie in patterns along the walls. Pilgrims walk, humming their chants, a sea of color.
Great Buddha Gym for All Mens and Womens Page 4
