Holy Cow! an Indian Adventure

by Sarah Macdonald

  Luckily there’s no need to hurry with Buddhism; it’s going to take eons for humans to gain freedom. Our delusions are powerful and mushrooming every moment which means most of us will have to return for millions of more lives. Buddhists believe there are one thousand enlightened Buddha beings and Gautama, the Indian founder of the faith in this age, was only the fourth. The next manifestation of Buddhahood in human form, Maitreya (the Buddha of loving-kindness), will appear when humans are stunted, have a ten-year life span, and spend their time killing. Western Buddhists are raising funds to build a one hundred and fifty-two metre statue of Maitreya in Bodhgaya that they hope will last the thousands of years until he arrives. They also hope it will generate enough great karma for them to be reborn at that time. Three times bigger than the antenna on the Empire State, it will certainly put India back on the map as a Buddhist heartland.

  It’s easy to become entranced by the science fiction quality of Tibetan Buddhism with its visions of endless time, endless universes and endless beings in endless varieties of forms that are as trippy and alien as Hinduism’s multi-armed blue beings. But while some travellers love paintings of the web-fingered Buddha with long ears and the scary green wrathful-looking female Buddha, Tara, I’m more interested in Buddhism’s inner work. It doesn’t seem relevant for me to surround myself with Tibetan art or to bow, prostrate and make offerings to the Buddha when he insisted he never be worshipped or deified. Other spiritual tourists here don’t have that problem.

  I share a cafe table one day in Dharamsala with Simon, a lanky, greasy-haired American wearing pajamas. He says when he first saw a Buddha he dropped to his knees and prostrated.

  ‘It was just so right, it was all familiar to me, I’ve obviously been Buddhist in many past lives; you probably haven’t.’

  I must look sad.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ He pats my arm. ‘Stay cool in this life and you may be born in a Buddhist family next time.’

  I feel that may be possible, for I’m doing okay at the Buddhist dharma. The Tushita course has another week to go and Jonathan is stuck in Afghanistan battling with Taliban officials who make his every move almost impossible. I’m not keen to go back to an empty home in polluted Delhi; I’m loving the mountain air, I’m meditating, I’m thinking a lot about death, I’m detaching from fear, I haven’t become angry for days and when I hear about major predictions of earthquakes I joke about it.

  ‘I’m staying on, this is a good place to die,’ I tell Simon.

  ‘Or be reborn,’ he replies.

  ‘Amen,’ say I.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Trading Places in the Promised Lands

  A few days on and I’m suffering from suffering overkill and emptiness overload. The Buddhist philosophy may be rewarding but it’s heavy going. After we spend eight hours in the Tushita course grappling with the concept that everything is intrinsically empty because it cannot exist in its own right, my brain begins to ache. I dodge a class on dying to follow the signs of life to the small town of Dharamkot down the hill.

  The sounds of badly played tabla and distorted techno draw me to a restaurant that smells of pot, pizza and patchouli. This is the scent of India’s most ubiquitous travellers – Israelis. After hanging around monks for weeks I feel shocked and stirred by the sensuality surrounding me. The scene oozes sex. Israelis are the nubile young gods of the Lonely Planet scene – spunks with hazelnut tans and healthy glows, luscious lips and shiny hair, bursting bosoms and big muscles. They’re stylishly pierced, bindied, dreadlocked, and dressed; with chunky rings on their fingers and toes, they make music wherever they go.

  The Indians don’t really like the Israelis, for they travel in packs, they’re loud and they demand cheap prices (some will bargain for hours over fifty cents). A few hotels here even refuse the backpackers admission. But I’m drawn into the Israeli circle by the pull of passion so absent from my Buddhist being. I am meant to be cultivating detachment from the peaks and troughs of emotion, but showing restraint and being stable can be slightly boring. I miss passion. The Israelis pull me into deeply personal and intense conversations that flow with life.

  Within an hour a girl called Moran leans forward to touch my knee and says in a thick Hebrew accent of warm honey, ‘Sarah, you are knowing ve have just met, but I am feeling very powerful, strong, such feelings I can not express.’

  I gasp, feeling rather Methodist among all this Jewish hippie hipness. Here everything is about feelings and the favourite feeling is shanti.

  ‘You are very shanti’, ‘I am very shanti’, ‘India is very shanti’ ‘the hash is very shanti’.

  Shanti is Hindi for ‘peace’. I find India anything but shanti –in fact I find it loud, intrusive, brash, impatient and confronting. But then I’m not stoned most of the time. Baby-faced and beautiful young Irit says it’s more than the pot.

  ‘We have to grow up young in Israel, we’re in the army before we turn eighteen, there’s no time to rebel, this is the place we can rebel. We feel like we’re in Wonderland here.’

  Irit and I define Wonderland differently. To her and her friends, India is a theme park of cheap thrills and easy drugs away from a country constantly at war with itself. India has cost me dearly in terms of health and hair and I’m still a confused Alice-child constantly confronted by creatures beyond my comprehension.

  While India makes me feel powerless, it strengthens many young Jews by giving them their first taste of freedom. Two months ago, twenty-two-year-old Avishi loaded up his noisy Enfield motorbike and travelled from Varanassi to Manali then to to Rajasthan, and last week to Dharamkot. He’s an intense, angry, brooding bloke dressed in black, his beard is twisted into devil peaks and his body is as tight as a spring. He rants and raves at me as his pizza gathers flies.

  ‘Here in India, I feel like I’m king of the world. I’m king at the chai shop on the side of the road, I’m king when I drive up to a hotel and I yell and they come running. I say bring me drugs, they do. I can get hash, pot, LSD and ecstasy. I say bring me food, they do; a bucket, they do. I have total freedom. In Israel I was in the army, the big system, it was fucking with my head. Now I do what I want.’

  His intensity freaks me out and I decline his invitation to a full-moon rave at the waterfall next weekend. I even decline an offer of free ecstasy – I’m feeling too purified from the meditation in the gompa to cope with chemical highs and doof. Maybe I’m more shanti than I thought.

  The only words that approach the frequency of the word shanti in Israeli conversations are the words ‘army’ and ‘shit’ and they usually go together. Most of the travellers here have just finished their compulsory service (boys do three years, girls do twenty months) and they all seem resentful and angry about a spiritual homeland that trains them to kill.

  Michal’s shanti falls like the ash from her spliff as she spits, ‘The army is bullshit. You are paid fuck all … the office work is shit, but if you go to Lebanon you die – we all know someone who has died – and when you finish, they don’t give you nothing … we are fucked up, that’s why we come here, we have hash and here we are shanti. When I go home, I might go crazy – three of my friends have ended up in the loony bin.’

  She takes another deep suck to restore her calm, pats my hand and strokes my leg.

  I’m fascinated by the Israeli psychology. I head back towards the Ladies Venture via another restaurant. Only metres away from the Dalai Lama’s Palace, perched high on the hill is the Khanna Nirvana cafe – another Israeli hangout. I share a table with a charming thirty-six-year-old American who covers his ponytail with a beret rather than a Jewish skullcap. Azriel is actually here to help Israel’s ex-soldiers enjoy their Indian R and R without going off the rails. In a soothing drawl with a lisp he tells me that many of the travellers arrive here traumatised by living in a country with a deeply wounded psyche.

  ‘They’re brought up with the Holocaust and the phobia is continued. They believe all their neighbours want to wipe them off th
e face of the earth. There’s always a continual crisis facing the country … so the young are searching for some relief and escape from that world.’

  Yet many young Israelis are also escaping a state suffocated by a faith they don’t revere. Obviously a lot of the young Jews here are breaking some holy commandments – craven images of idols stretch tight across t-shirts, other gods are adopted and there’s a lot of sex happening. Irit walks in and we chat as three. She openly admits she’s coveting India’s freedom of faith.

  ‘Yes, I’m jealous. Israel is so strict, if you are a bastard or you have tattoos you need to be buried outside the cemetery walls … We’re not worthy to say God’s name, Judaism is full of guilt. In Israel you have to be really religious or not at all. Here you see free faith.’

  A girl slumped in the corner, so ripped she’s almost catatonic, comes alive to comment.

  ‘Religious people sit and pray and get money from the government to wear black. They don’t do army, they spit on me on the streets and say I’m not a real Jew because I wear pants and have short hair. In India you can be any religion and no-one cares. In my country, Palestine isn’t the problem, it’s the brothers inside that are.’

  But what she doesn’t know is that some big brothers are here. Azriel’s organisation, Ohrolam, is funded from Israel. Azriel doesn’t want to spy, but he keeps a loving, watchful eye on fellow Jews. He tolerates the mass worshipping of weed and techno, but tries to bring the travellers back to respecting the sabbath by giving free food to all those who keep it holy. Brought up in a strictly Orthodox family, he was inspired by the way the Dalai Lama updates and translates the ancient wisdom of Buddhism for westerners. Azriel has set about to rediscover the depths of Judaism with fellow Jews and share it with gentiles like me. I’ve always felt Judaism rather exclusive, and I’m touched when Azriel invites me to Shabbat on Friday. Besides, my Tushita Buddhist course leaves nights pretty bare and I’ve always wanted to check out a Jewish feast.

  Friday sunset I return to Khanna Nirvana for Azriel’s Shabbat ceremony. Shabbat is a family ritual that ushers in the holy day of rest and connection to the Creator. Perched above clouds painted pink by the sunset, a small group of Americans, Australians and a lone Israeli girl (who has just taken the vow of a Buddhist bodhisattva) sing, clap and do a group meditation on the gifts of the past week. It’s a low-key, friendly sharing of a sacred space. I walk back to my hostel in a peaceful trance, pausing to notice groups of Israelis watching Chicken Run and playing pool.

  Perhaps they’ll be more interested in Passover or Pesach. This is a major event on the Jewish calendar – a spring full-moon festival that celebrates the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt and the beginning of the Jewish nation, Israel. I remember this part of the bible and I’ve even climbed Mount Sinai in Egypt where God came to Moses and told him he must free his people from slavery. Egypt didn’t let me go without putting the plague of diarrhoea on me and clinical depression on my friend, but when it wouldn’t let the Jews go, God came to the rescue. He put ten plagues upon the Egyptians; the Jews fled, the Red Sea parted, God’s people crossed into the desert and wandered for forty years. At Mount Sinai, God and the Hebrews made a deal. In return for their rescue, and deliverance to the promised land of Israel, Jews would follow only one God and His law as outlined in the Ten Commandments and the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament).

  My Buddhist course is not finished and it shouldn’t be mixed with partying, but Passover comes but once a year and I figure I may never be invited to such an event again. Being able to take up such opportunities is one of the great privileges of not working – I love not having plans. In Sydney at our wedding people kept asking me ‘what do you do all day in India?’ I felt almost embarrassed saying, ‘travelling’, as it’s not something valued much in my homeland. But I’m growing increasingly happy with my choice to go with the flow in life. It’s liberating and exciting.

  It was the Dalai Lama who encouraged the first Passover festival in this town full of exiled Buddhists. In 1990 His Holiness invited a group of Jews here to ask them how they preserved their religion in exile. A bloke called Roger Kamenetz wrote a book about the event, The Jew in the Lotus, and he’s now back for Azriel’s festival. We meet at the Khanna Nirvana cafe (which has kind of become my night hang). Roger looks and sounds like a goofy George Clooney. I ask him what advice the Jews gave HH. He excitedly explains that after exile the Jews democratised their traditions and made the faith practical; Judaism is a religion of ‘doing’, of eating kosher, keeping the sabbath and observing festivals such as this.

  ‘After the Romans destroyed the Jewish temples, our people had to put the elements of worship into everyday life; the home is the temple, the family table is the altar and eating is divine communion.’

  Eating as worship! Sounds like my kind of faith.

  Yet this Passover is essentially a Jewish Reform event and Azriel warns that the two-day communion will also involve lots of ‘communication’. I try not to roll my eyes, for I’ve always been rather cynical about such group activities and New Age bonding. I steel myself and follow a group of Californian Rock and Roll Synagogue Jews to the community hall. As darkness falls we open the festivities with a drumming workshop. Uncle Steve, a South African with a ponytail, climbs on a chair and pulls faces like Charlie Chaplin as he directs us to bang plastic sticks. It’s quite a scene – Californians in stone-wash jeans and cheesecloth shirts, robed Tibetan monks and Israeli freaky ferals unite in a frenzy of beats. This is the cool Kabbalah crowd – Jews who want to reconnect with their more mystical traditions. The Kabbalah is to Judaism what Sufism is to Islam; it’s the inner or esoteric counterpart to the outer canonical doctrine of the Torah. It was handed down by word of mouth until the twelfth century and teaches about self-transformation and the spiritual laws of the universe. It was once ruled that no-one under forty should study the texts but since Madonna tried it out a couple of years ago it’s become rather hip.

  Kabbalah aside, the practical laws of the Jewish faith must still be fulfilled. We make the communal kitchen kosher by scrubbing it clean, keeping the milk well away from the veggies on the other side of the room (we’re going vegetarian so we don’t have to get kosher meat), and the work is inspected by a rabbi. I scrape carrots with a group of girls who are thankful that no-one checks about women with periods being near foods (a no-no for some Orthodox Jews). A girl called Donna holds up a carrot and proclaims, ‘Let’s cleanse our truly dirty bits, our psyches.’

  All the other girls yell as one: ‘Alright – you go, girl.’

  Sometimes I love Americans.

  Guitar in hand, a big woman with a thick plait, long skirt, bright red lips and big Reebok shoes leads the cleansing. Mimi bubbles with American confidence and Israeli knowledge and radiates the joy of a woman at one with divine love. She leads us in a search for ten pieces of bread that have been placed in different parts of the room. The search doesn’t take long; the room is bare and the bread has been unimaginatively placed in corners and on chairs. The slices signify the ten plagues God brought upon Egypt. I’ve always hated the Old Testament. It starts badly with all that boring begatting business, and the rivers of blood and slaying of children stuff scared me more than Poltergeist. I grew up thinking God was a jealous, possessive and vengeful character that I wanted nothing to do with. But Mimi is making me realise I’ve been taking the Bible way too literally. Jewish Reformers see the Torah section as the story of the soul travelling through hardship towards a relationship with God. So the plagues are not just punishments but physical manifestations of what’s inside us. The first, the plague of blood, is anger; we find the bread and consider what sets us off and why. The second is the plague of frogs – about exaggerating and being far too dramatic. By the time the collection is over I’m thinking about my judgement, my wicked thoughts, my arrogance, pride, stinginess, lust and stubbornness. My crash course in Buddhism has helped me meditate these states away to emptiness, but the Jews try
to help me kill them off. I leave feeling lighter.

  I’m back early in the morning to help light a fire and throw in the bread or chametz. We add our own personal plagues to the flames. I watch my words ‘fear and doubt’ implode, the girl next to me throws in a photo of her ex-boyfriend and hums ‘burn baby burn’ from the song ‘Disco Inferno’. At sunset a huge fat white full moon squats like a bullfrog on the mountain peaks and as it leaps into the sky, we are welcomed into a community hall with a hug and a kiss. Cushions stuffed with newspaper ring tablecloths decorated with candles and plates made of leaves. We are a motley crew of about two hundred sharing our first and our last supper together. The Californians are dressed up in white flowing dresses or saris, the Israelis are wearing glow-in-the-dark rave gear, the Indians in jeans look bemused, the Tibetan monks seem confused, and some scrawny Australian backpackers just look hungry for a free feed. We unite in a cheer when Azriel welcomes us with a promise of liberation.

  ‘Tonight friends, through the story of exodus we will re-experience our own internal slavery and redemption.’

  Seder – the ritual we are about to share – means order, and the evening must be carried out according to a strict regime; and all the translation from Hebrew to English and the explanations for us non-Jews means the evening moves rather slowly. The Pesach party begins with prayers, songs and the lighting of the candles. Then there’s drinking of fermented grapefruit juice (as close to wine as you’re going to get in backpacker India). Our hands are washed and as we dip bitter herbs in salt to represent the tears of the slaves, we’re told to make friends with our bitterness and to eat the bitter sprig in life so sweetness can come. The Californians then break out the special matza bread they’ve lugged all the way from home. The matza represents simplicity as the way to freedom; and as we crack it we acknowledge and embrace the brokenness in our lives. Like good children we then sit quietly for some storytelling, and then like good adults we show compassion for our enemy by pouring out some fake wine from our full cups – a drop for each plague brought upon the pharaohs.