Saturday, May 30, 2009
Endangered Species of Ayurved
Top image: Bishunath Karmacharya, traditional baidya and head of the Banepa Ayurveda Sangh (association). He wants to pass the tradition on and is willing to teach anyone willing to learn, at no cost. On the floor in front of him is a box of Yarchagumba.
Lower image: Keshab Baidya, a traditional Ayurvedic doctor/pharmacist in Banepa, Nepal. With his son pursuing a different career, Keshab is the last of his lineage. Above his right shoulder, a jar of shuddha paro, purified mercury, is visible.
Yesterday I took a long-overdue trip to Banepa, a sleepy Newar town slowly transforming itself into a modern city. In other words, it’s a lot like what Kathmandu must have been like in the seventies. The main strip, all that most tourists ever see of the place, is all traffic and bustle, with the usual assortment of shops, fruit peddlers, pan-spitters, etc. But head ten yards off this long, straight, dusty thoroughfare and you’re in another world of quiet brick-paved streets and brick-and-woodwork houses. Ducks puttering around the streets, and women scrubbing sudsy clothes just outside their doorways.
My mission was to meet with a couple of the old-timer Baidyas I’d met once or twice before, men who still practice (or if not, still know how to practice) rasa shastra. They work with minerals, metals, and animal parts like deer musk glands and conch shells as well as countless herbs from India and from the Himalayas. They are clinicians, too, but what separates them from so many other practitioners is their skill and knowledge of medicine-making. The first baidya I sought was Keshab Baidya (his last name indicating that his family have been Ayurvedic doctors for generations). I’d spent a wonderful couple of days with him during the winter watching him make medicine and tend to the few patients who came into his pharmacy-room, crowded with hundreds of jars of raw ingredients and finished compounds. This time I went straight up the back way to his herb room and got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach when I saw it was cleaned up, practically empty. Could he have fallen ill and died so suddenly in a few short months . . .? A possibility that seemed all the more real and disturbing because of the recent, sudden passing of another old man I had loved, on the other side of the world. But going around to the main entrance of his house, I was greeted by his daughter-in-law who explained the herb room had just been moved down a few flights. My worries weren’t entirely unfounded, though: Keshab-ji wasn’t well. He was suffering from a failing heart. The move was to make it easier to access his work without having to climb up flights of stairs. Just now he was resting, and I sat amongst the hundreds, thousands of plastic jars and waited for him to appear. When he finally did I barely recognized him. It was his presence more than any specific physical characteristic that had changed: he seemed such a thinner, slighter figure than the engaged, lively man I remembered. After exchanging 'namaste's we just sat there, not exactly looking at each other but acutely aware of each others' presence, for a good 5 minutes. Something in the man’s eyes had changed, too—instead of a lively sparkle there was a dull sadness, a sense of resignation. It wasn’t hard to guess what this might be about. Finally he broke the silence by asking me, in his typical style, 'what would you give for hepatitis B?' I'm never sure when he does this if he's quizzing me or if he’s genuinely curious what herbs a foreign ‘baidya’ would use. But somehow, that's what I seem to be both to him and to another, salty baidya I’ve been hanging out with. Not a peer, really, but in some sense one of their own. The salty baidya, Shyam Man Shrestha, referred to me recently as a 'kaviraj,' an almost embarrassingly high compliment meaning something like 'king of doctors.' Then yesterday dear old Keshab Baidya said in Newari, when another old Newari man came in gestured at me, grunting a question, that I was an "American who knows everything about herbs." This is hardly true either, but the thing that really struck me yesterday is I may be the closest these old baidyas have to an apprentice, someone to carry on the tradition. And i'm very far from that, really. But in Keshab's case it's so clear that that is what's missing, the next generation. That’s what’s behind the dullness in his gaze, the resignation in his movements. Eventually I broached the subject with him by asking if the boy I'd seen once helping him by grinding some herbs was still coming. Nope, not really . . . all of sudden he said straight out, “after I go, my kids'll wait a few years maybe and then they'll say, ‘look at this mess, we could put this room to a better use . . . and they’ll throw it all away. All this tens of laakhs worth of medicine.’” There’s no one to carry it on.
One of the reasons i'd come back was to buy some bhasmas and other medicines from him to bring home. I didn't want to suddenly start talking business, but I brought it up by asking what he thought the most important bhasmas and non-perishable medicines were. We compiled a list of 10 or so things (shankha, abhrak and mandur bhasmas, shilajit, some guggulus . . .), and I said I would like to buy them from him. He told me to give him a week before I come and pick up what he puts together for me. Leaving his place, having arranged this, I felt some of the weight of tradition settle on my shoulders, and let me tell you it was a strange feeling. I have a chance to carry on parts of their lineage, in however small a way. Later, at the Nawaranga guest house in Dhulikhel amongst people who feel after 8 months like old friends, thinking about the whole scene with Keshab brought a tear to my eye. I could feel the pain of this old man, bearer of such a proud and venerable tradition, watching it come to a dead end.
Of course Ayurveda is not in danger of dying. By some estimations it may be more popular than ever. But it’s losing it’s old-growth, it’s deepest-rooted lineages, as the younger generation pursues easier, more lucrative and more prestigious occupations. In flirting with the New Age it is in danger of severing its links with the past.
For my Ayurvedic student friends: there is still an opportunity in Banepa to come and learn the techniques of classical rasa shastra hands-on. Bishunath Karmacharya, a first-rate baidya, is willing to teach whoever wants to learn, for free. The catch is that he has no longer has a workshop. An interested group of students, though, could come to Nepal and study medicine-making intensively for months with a rare teacher for little more than the cost of building a rudimentary workshop/lodging (plus food and airfare of course). If anyone is interested in such a possibility, contact me!
Thursday, May 21, 2009
surrendering to verse
is a fair description. having caught the poetry bug (from the likes of my mother, I suspect--a hereditary susceptibility) I find myself uninterested, for the time being, in prose.
Rainy morning in Sipadol
In this monsoon deferred, hard to avoid the feeling
It should have rained harder, or not at all.
Not wrong to look for drama in the weather
And scorn the steady drizzle that breeds
Fibonacci series of cups of milkless tea
and games of scrabble.
Pole of this place, the towering Pipal
Danced to the tune of the breaking storm
Creaking bows flash-illumined in violet
Greeting my sleep-muzzled head at 6:00.
Like an egg from the heavens it should have exploded,
this 'weather event', in a goo of white and yolk, shard of shell.
Messy little encapsulation of life & death
And the embryo-smudge shades between.
Instead I sip my tea, hot and gingery
As the albumin drips down, static, numb
Onto the village spared and cheated of
The fecund violence, its due.
What gods
soft, dusty feet find their way
to a shrine in the woods
what gods of this place
I know not
simple stones massively tika’d
stick of incense wedged between old bricks
a naked lightbulb miraculously lit
its wire snaking away through the trees
bells and vermillion
Kathmandu scenes
An unearthly blossoming
Purple of play-doh or steaming entrails
On tree after urban tree
Makes me question my vision:
Maybe a sensory fuse is blown
And the grass isn’t really
That flat green, either—an improbable color.
And sky? Shell grey?
I doubt.
But less likely things have happened
Here in Kathmandu. Just last week
I merged with an orange crowd
Everyone dusted with the fine powder
by mid-morning
ringing in the new year
and taking the gods out for a stroll on careening palanquins
under twirling parasols ornate as tiny lawn mushrooms
and stealing my wallet.
Not long ago I glimpsed, from the corner of my eye,
An old woman, wrinkled and browned
Sitting implacably on the sidewalk
Trimming her toenails with a buck-knife.
Really? This is double-take material, after all
And I look again, or never stop looking,
Until my foot finds a foot-sized hole in the street
My right leg vanishes to the thigh
Into the Baluwa Tar gutter.
Unsheathing myself from the gunky trap
I’m missing some shin-skin
(Traded in for grit-shit).
But I get to keep the fish-shaped scar,
Memento of the time this inscrutable city
Tried to swallow me.
The Pines
The pines were calling. Too many words.
I strode, rubber-shod, up the dirt track
Past sprouting maize and cucumber trellises
Awaiting tendrils’ curl
Past the quiet rhythmic work
Of threshing grain
Past cud-chewing cattle
To the dusty road etched into the hillside
Remnants of field terraces still discernible
A vertical labyrinth blanketed in long, rusty pine needles
Slippery underfoot
And smelling sweetly of decay
Perched on that dry-slippery slope
I squatted, dug in my heels
There’s nothing to tell:
Wind and sun
And thoughts like doves
Quiet but insistent
Taking flight
I came down from that high place
Past cabbages and incipient beans
Rubber sandals in hand
Dust between my toes
Still trailing words.
Three Ayurvedic Riddles
Ojas
The essence
Lube of life
White-gold as ghee
Sweet as honey
Fragrant as paddy
Eight drops only
Tejas
Finest fire’s
Subtle refiner
Keeper’s finder
Luster-miner
Prana
Flash
without sound
Signal
no ground
Breath
all around
Rainy morning in Sipadol
In this monsoon deferred, hard to avoid the feeling
It should have rained harder, or not at all.
Not wrong to look for drama in the weather
And scorn the steady drizzle that breeds
Fibonacci series of cups of milkless tea
and games of scrabble.
Pole of this place, the towering Pipal
Danced to the tune of the breaking storm
Creaking bows flash-illumined in violet
Greeting my sleep-muzzled head at 6:00.
Like an egg from the heavens it should have exploded,
this 'weather event', in a goo of white and yolk, shard of shell.
Messy little encapsulation of life & death
And the embryo-smudge shades between.
Instead I sip my tea, hot and gingery
As the albumin drips down, static, numb
Onto the village spared and cheated of
The fecund violence, its due.
What gods
soft, dusty feet find their way
to a shrine in the woods
what gods of this place
I know not
simple stones massively tika’d
stick of incense wedged between old bricks
a naked lightbulb miraculously lit
its wire snaking away through the trees
bells and vermillion
Kathmandu scenes
An unearthly blossoming
Purple of play-doh or steaming entrails
On tree after urban tree
Makes me question my vision:
Maybe a sensory fuse is blown
And the grass isn’t really
That flat green, either—an improbable color.
And sky? Shell grey?
I doubt.
But less likely things have happened
Here in Kathmandu. Just last week
I merged with an orange crowd
Everyone dusted with the fine powder
by mid-morning
ringing in the new year
and taking the gods out for a stroll on careening palanquins
under twirling parasols ornate as tiny lawn mushrooms
and stealing my wallet.
Not long ago I glimpsed, from the corner of my eye,
An old woman, wrinkled and browned
Sitting implacably on the sidewalk
Trimming her toenails with a buck-knife.
Really? This is double-take material, after all
And I look again, or never stop looking,
Until my foot finds a foot-sized hole in the street
My right leg vanishes to the thigh
Into the Baluwa Tar gutter.
Unsheathing myself from the gunky trap
I’m missing some shin-skin
(Traded in for grit-shit).
But I get to keep the fish-shaped scar,
Memento of the time this inscrutable city
Tried to swallow me.
The Pines
The pines were calling. Too many words.
I strode, rubber-shod, up the dirt track
Past sprouting maize and cucumber trellises
Awaiting tendrils’ curl
Past the quiet rhythmic work
Of threshing grain
Past cud-chewing cattle
To the dusty road etched into the hillside
Remnants of field terraces still discernible
A vertical labyrinth blanketed in long, rusty pine needles
Slippery underfoot
And smelling sweetly of decay
Perched on that dry-slippery slope
I squatted, dug in my heels
There’s nothing to tell:
Wind and sun
And thoughts like doves
Quiet but insistent
Taking flight
I came down from that high place
Past cabbages and incipient beans
Rubber sandals in hand
Dust between my toes
Still trailing words.
Three Ayurvedic Riddles
Ojas
The essence
Lube of life
White-gold as ghee
Sweet as honey
Fragrant as paddy
Eight drops only
Tejas
Finest fire’s
Subtle refiner
Keeper’s finder
Luster-miner
Prana
Flash
without sound
Signal
no ground
Breath
all around
Monday, May 4, 2009
Official Disclaimer
Due to a juicy new tidbit of U.S. policy, I have been prompted to make the following clarification with regard to the nature of this weblog:
*that contrary to all appearances, Ill Wind is not a U.S. Department of State or Fulbright Program website.
*that any similarity in content between the views expressed here and official U.S. Government foreign policy is purely coincidental.
*that all views expressed here are my own, except where attributed to others or vaguely plagiarized from the cybermind stream of consciousness to which I may be susceptible.
I hope this clears up any confusion that may have been plaguing the hearts and minds of my readers.
*that contrary to all appearances, Ill Wind is not a U.S. Department of State or Fulbright Program website.
*that any similarity in content between the views expressed here and official U.S. Government foreign policy is purely coincidental.
*that all views expressed here are my own, except where attributed to others or vaguely plagiarized from the cybermind stream of consciousness to which I may be susceptible.
I hope this clears up any confusion that may have been plaguing the hearts and minds of my readers.
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