Holy Shit

Another day in Varanasi.  The sun rises red on the far side of the Ganga; down by the Ghats, boatmen ply their services to groups of pink-faced tourists whom they lead down the grimy steps between bodies in repose to the water's edge.  Ah, the water's edge.  The broad sweep of the ghats and their steep stone stairways, the boats boring their way upstream or floating serenely down at dawn and dusk; multitudes of pilgrims bathing their sins away in the turgid drink--these are the images that Varanasi has impressed upon the psyche of generations of visitors, domestic and foreign, from Lord Rama to Mark Twain.  There is a great deal more to the city than the river, of course.  But not for nothing is a twilit Ganga scene the memory millions of visitors will take home with them.  The river at the liminal dawn and dusk hours is a fitting encapsulation of this place, of its simultaneous subtlety and grossness and all of its other contradictions.  Let the image linger: legions of devout purifying themselves in a mighty river of filth.

*    *    *

As I write this, I can feel the shit drying on my heel.  This is the price of a moment of abstraction in the twisting lanes of the old city--and this is An Old City--a mis-step into a mass of cow mess.  To call it manure is optimistic, when it will fertilize no more than an algal bloom in the river 30 yards away, and when the cow's diet consists of what it can forage from trash strewn along the roads and--gods' grace--the occasional sweetmeat or dosa.  It is shit.  And it is in fine company: the narrow alleys are smeared, plastered, and adorned with excrement of all sorts.  It is so ubiquitous that one quickly grows used to regular, garden-variety crap; it is the diseased stuff that continues to horrify.  That, and the stuff that looks like it might have come from a human. 

But between whiffs of fecal matter wafts the aroma of flowers.  Marigolds, jasmine, garlands in orange and white; the streets are decked with blossoms.  Every petal is destined to be placed lovingly around the neck of a god, draped across one of the city's thousands of Shiva Lingas.  This, after all, is Shiva's city, the City of Light.  At night especially the whole place glows,and no beacons burn brighter than the multitudinous temples.  The maze of alleys around Vishwanath temple, site of the most famous of the 12 Jyotir Linga--lingas of light--blaze like a carnival.  To the eagles that circle above the city, this district must appear as a network of multicolored glowsticks arranged end-to-end.  At street level, the effect is dazzling.  But not all the luminosity comes from the god-houses.  Looming equally large in the minds of masses are Banarasi sarees, silken ones with metallic threads worked in.  And bangles, yes, bangles in teetering stacks, colored and shaped for every woman's wrist.  Other stalls hawk metalwares, fried and spiced snack mixes, you name it.  Benares, they say, is not just the best place to die.  It is the best place to live!  The betel leaf mixture called paan is legendary here, the sweets succulent and profuse, the perfume and attars sublime.  Surely Benares is the best of both worlds!

But a casual visitor could be forgiven for thinking that religious matters have been forgotten altogether out on the main thoroughfares.  The bustle and din here is unbelievable: it's the usual Indian mash-up of cycle rickshaws, pedestrians, three-wheelers, bullocks, and swarms of pedestrians all inching their ways along.  Along either side are hundreds more fabric shops, bank branches (with ATM), and snack vendors.  Indian society (by some measures, apparently) is the most materialistic on earth, and in the City of Extremes the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming.  On closer inspection, though, one of the little shops is found to be a "government shop," i.e. the official distributor of sacred marijuana products: powdered "pollen" mixed (for locals) or unmixed (for tourists) with holy Ganga water.  Less officially but no less visibly, the lassi sellers at the corner offer a conspicuously green "special lassi" that is likely to offer a great deal of bang for the rupee.  Shiva-ji loves his bhang, or at least his devotees do.  It's not just the ash-smeared saddhus who partake of this sacrament; so do most of the foreign tourists, and plenty of shopkeepers I've run into in the Bengali neighborhood I'm staying in.  The flute teacher who sits in the doorway of his music shop-cum-opium den, and the two equally-stoned proprietors of a dosa-and-idly restaurant a few doors down.  The City of Light has a decidedly cloudy side.

Piercing the haze are the ever-sharp eyes of the beggars.  Religious mendicants sincere, charlatan, or in between; old women and lepers; undersized children slipping barefoot through the labyrinth they know better than the minotaur.  And bovines.  As a rule, locals ignore the children, mischievous or desperate as they are, give an occasional coin to the helpless, may hand out regular alms to the sannyasi, and feed the beloved cows lavish treats.  The ever-resourceful children (the others have been culled by natural selection by now) have learned to solicit the foreign faces, unused to such stark inequalities.  And who can say no to a grubby, bright-eyed boy who knowingly takes you by the hand and leads you to the store where your 24 rupees (75 cents or less) can buy him enough biskoot for him and his little sister, too?  My own guilt-assuaging strategy has been to sit these kids down in the restaurant with us and get them some real food rather than put coins into outstretched hands.  On a larger scale, the city is a hotbed of charitable organizations, which may for all I know attract more of the destitute.  The city is a magnet for rich and poor.

For sinners as well as saints.  And what more attractive place for the rogue with the slightest religious tendency than the city that promises to wipe out the accumulated karma of all who so much as bathe in the holy river?  Dying here is better still, which is why, according to Diana L. Eck in City of Light, the truly devout take a vow never to leave the confines of the old city even to venture to Benares Hindu University a scant few yards South of the official line.  The greater the negative karmic load, the greater the incentive to stick around the maze beside the river and thus end up on a pyre at the burning ghat.  Less sinister but more menacing are the touts and hecklers at every turn, those who at the sight of fresh tourist meat may go so far as to try and lead you bodily into their trinket shop.  Here as everywhere else, the thin get thinner and the fat fatter as the wheels of commerce grind on.

Up another narrow galli from the touristy Bengali Tola lane I have found a bastion removed from worldly concerns, at least if one can get past the 100 rupee ticket: the grandiosely named International Music Ashram.  Twice a week a modest crowd of mostly (indeed) internationals gathers to have the latest generation of classical Hindustani musicians lull them into an intoxicated state without the use of any chemicals save those produced in our brains at the prompting of sitars' microtones and tablas' polyrhythms.  The ceiling fans blow, the sweat drips, the mosquitoes bite, and I don't care.  The trio seated cross-legged on the white-draped little stage has rendered me one-pointed.  Another day in Benares, redeemed.

*    *    *

The Ganga flows on as rivers are wont to do, swollen now by the monsoon and carrying along with bits of vegetation votive offering of flowers and ghee lamps.  In the depth of its channel, the unburnable bodies of pregant women, children, lepers and animals must be scuffling along, inching closer to the Bay of Bengal.  The bathers, whose rank I will be joining tomorrow on my last day in the City of Holy Shit, pay no heed to this or to the fact that open sewers continue to empty themselves into the great river, but continue placidly to wash themselves.  They may have noticed a striking fact: despite the feces, the chemical load that must permeate these waters, and the corpses burning around the clock, down by the Ganga there is not a trace of a bad smell.

Puri

{Photos!  I've just gone back and added images to a few of the posts from the last 2 months, and I'll catch up to the more recent ones soon.} 

Coming from the Bhubaneshwar, Orissa's capital city, Puri was a bit of shock.  From the bus park we rickshaw'ed to the backpacker enclave on CT Road--we, too, wanted a piece of beach to twiddle our toes on--and even before we began to scrutinize housing options my heart had fallen.  I recognized all the telltale signs of a tourist ghetto: gaudy signs for oddly-named restaurants, "adventure" and "tribal tour" outfitters' offices, the vaguely malignant vibe of the local workers on the tourist strip, dependent on the whim of affluent foreigners to make a living.  No surprise here; Puri is a modest destination for foreigners as well as a famous Hindu pilgrimage town.  The city, one of the holiest in India, hosts the annual extravaganza of the Rath Yatra, when lakh upon lakh come from around India to watch a massive wooden chariot being pulled through the streets from its home in the enormous Jagganath Temple. 

But CT Road and the beach are another world entirely, or rather two other worlds: parallel tourist realms, one for foreigners, one for honeymooning Bengalis.  Having settled on a guest house and haggled out a price for a seafront room, we took off to explore the beach.  What we found must come as a rude awakening to many a foreigner looking for an exotic beach destination vacation.  This is the beach.  But it's also India.  The sand is dotted with garbage, the ubiquitous little foil plastic packets fluttering in the sea breeze.  Mangy dogs wander about and deposit their diseased excrement at intervals, to join the variety of feces already speckling the sea scene.  There is a certain odor about the area.  To one side, just beyond the range of budget backpacker haunts, local fishermen sit under the shade of tarpaulin sails and work on their nets, while others launch hollowed wooden boats into the breakers.  Their village lies behind the beachfront: low cement houses crowded together, pungent with fishy smells, children running naked through the sand...

Rather than the reverse, we find ourself needing to escape this constructed holidayland to dive back into the real city that co-exists in another dimension but only a kilometer or two away.  This city is centered on the massive Jagganath Temple, forbidden to non-Hindus (or, in practice, to light-skinned folk).  The streets are lined with stalls selling religious memorabilia, with "pure veg" restaurants for the Hindu devout every dozen yards.  Yes, two separate towns, we agreed...or, as we discovered, three. 

Note: I was intending to come back and finish describing Puri, but life pulled rudely ahead of letters and my recent attempts to wrap it up felt lackluster.  Enter Thandiwe to save the day: a recent mass email of hers fills in the gap quite nicely, I think.  I quote:

Jon and I had a bit of a funny time leaving Orissa. We actually missed our train because we had changed the date of our ticket to a couple of days early and assumed that we were on the same train leaving at the same time and didn't bother looking at our tickets (I know - stupid) until we actually got to the train station at 11:30 for our 12:15 train and Jon took out the tickets and asked, "Why does it say departure 1055? Wry smile. Anyway, we decided to turn our lemon into the best lemonade ever, sucked it up and paid for tickets for the next train out of Puri at 9:50pm, giving us the entire day to bum around the town. We checked our bags at the train station and headed to the old part of town and the Sun Temple to check it out again. Good times and some cool photos taken of all the pilgrims there. We had some lunch then decided, upon my request, to splurge and spend the beautiful day at a swimming pool where I could swim in a bathing suit (as opposed to the full-length mumu/nighty/dress that I wore in to swim in the ocean near Konark). So we went to a hotel we'd read abuot in a guide book, but their pool was being cleaned. They recommended another place called Hotel Hans Coco Palms (I know, hilarious name!) that was across town. We hopped into a rickshaw and headed over there. It turned out, we had missed half of Puri!!!! The area the rickshaw drove us through was jam packed full of hotel upon hotel built for Indian (primarily Bengali, I think) tourists! There must have been 2 solid miles of hotels two or three deep across from a promenade and the beach. The hotels were generally larger, shinier and overall more expensive looking than the backpackers' lodgings over on the side of town where we had stayed. Saari shops boasting Orissa hand-woven saaris and mens' churidars filled in the spaces between the hotels, and the restaurants clearly catered to an Indian clientelle. As we drove in, the beach was lined with covered carts, and I mused as to their opening in the evening. We figured the swim was going to be worth it just to have witnessed this other part of town which, so it seemed, most Westerners (including us, almost) missed entirely.


On our way back to the train station we had a chance to stroll along this beachside promenade, and sure enough, it came to life.  Carts selling 'Chinese' deep-friend crabs and prawns, an infinite array of handloom shops and restaurants, religious paraphernalia, even some small Ferris wheels.  It was nothing less than a carnival, and we the only Westerners in sight.  That's what gets me: the Lonely Planets that serve as bibles to practically every backpacker I meet writes off the whole area!  Sure, Westerners expect certain amenities and have certain, uh, cultural needs, but not to even mention this perpetual pulsating carnival by the sea?  Madness!  Guidebooks are a double-edged sword at best, a lesson that's being driven home here in Varanasi...but that's fodder for another post.

A Trip to Sikkim (or, Leeches, Lamas and Sacred Lakes)

In Kathmandu last year, questing around for instruction in the ways of Ayurveda, the venerable and expansive Southasian “knowledge of life,” landed me in some memorable situations. There were the rural health camps, where villagers would come for cheap treatment and where Sarita Shrestha, the mastermind and diminutive head doc, would periodically kick all men off the premises so she could get down to work in her field of expertise (gynaecology). There was the out patientclinic at Naradevi Ayurveda Hospital where, as a fly on the wall, I observed a peculiarly post-modern hybridized medicine being passed on
in the name of both progress and tradition. There was the dispensary and former laboratory of an alchemist-pharmacist, the last of his lineage, who made medicine out of everything from rare herbs and seashells to poisonous minerals. What I was most thirsty for, though, I didn’t have so much luck at finding:
instruction. Of course I learned plenty, but in the way that a participant observer learns, not the way a disciple does. Consciously or otherwise, I wanted a guru. In retrospect, the problem was I hadn’t molded myself into a suitable vessel. Maybe I was too full of the Ayurvedic knowledge gleaned under Dr. Lad at the Ayurvedic Institute in Albuquerque to have room left over for other nuggets; maybe I was unable to recognize those nuggets for gold; or maybe I forgot to remove the stopper from the vessel of myself. In any case, I left Nepal knowing that I wanted to be a carrier of this living tradition but feeling that all the work was still ahead of me.

On this trip, a pilgrimage in its way, I’m focusing less on the contents and more on the forging of the vessel. The molding, smoothing, refining. It’s a big job--endless, I suppose--but a satisfying one, as I find that my cup now overfloweth with a heady mixture of aquae vitae. Not the liquors I’d expected, necessarily, but almost everywhere I turn there seems to be a spring worth drinking from. As I’m peripatetic up to now, there can be no serious thought of a singular guru, a lone fountain. But as I trace out my path in time and space, teachers keep turning up. And naturally, they often turn up where least expected.

* * *

I’ve been travelling in Sikkim on a welcome detour from the itinerary T and I sketched out a couple of months ago. After the long bus ride from Kathmandu to the Indian border we craved some relief from the heat and density of the plains before turning South toward even hotter, denser places, so we made a spur-of-the-moment decision to head up to Darjeeling for a couple days of cool air, Tibetan street food, tea tasting, and other unabashedly touristic pleasures. While there, on a whim I obtained a free 15 day Sikkim permit in case we wanted to visit the tiny Himalayan state, and, one thing leading to the next, it was a no-brainer to take a jeep across the Teesta and explore some of the natural and cultural sites for which this place is justly famous. Well, famous amongst Bengali vacationers, orchid enthusiasts, tantric Buddhists, and mountaineers, at least. (What was the latest state motto according to a road sign we saw? “Sikkim: nature, adventure, agriculture?”) We threw together a week-long itinerary to take in some of the Tibetan Buddhist hot spots, including Pemayangtse monastery, seat of the Nyingma order in Sikkim. T and I have both visited our share of gompas, but neither of us was particularly interested in Buddhism at the time. Nor did our study abroad program, Pitzer in Darjeeling, (for all its strengths!) include anything likely to change that. The monasteries we visited were at the time merely a succession of unintelligible murals, noisy and hypnotic chanting, and general dissonance that, however, managed occasionally to achieve a sublime effect. I thought this time we’d be ready to absorb something substantive, actual teachings. In the event, Pemayangtse was spectacular, managing to feel both ancient and vibrant; besides the layers of Thangka paintings and daily rituals, it houses a one-of-a-kind sculpture a former abbot made over the course of five years of painstaking labor. (The effect is of the world’s largest, craziest doll house.) The gumba was everything we were hoping for, except that we left feeling no deeper connection to Tibetan Buddhism than we’d felt before. The door remained firmly closed--all the more frustrating, given its smoky glass window onto dancing lights and screwing deities beyond.

 The next day, less hopeful for a transcendent experience but still up for a walk, we hiked up to the other really old Nyingma gumba in the neighborhood, Sanga Choeling. Most of the monks in evidence were under 7 years old--these monasteries also serve as schools. We noticed a group of local people sitting outside and struck up a conversation with one of the men, a Gurung from a nearby town, to discover that today was the 49th day after the suicide of his wife. Relatives had gathered for the puja marking the occasion and we were invited in. We sat along one wall with the extended family (seemingly including only relatives
from the bereaved husband's side?) with our hands together in the posture of prayer, listening to the cacophony of young and old voices chanting Tibetan texts at different speeds, in different registers, to
the punctuation of the big drums beating now in 4, now 6, now 10.  The bereaved's head dipped in reverence, then lolled in sleep.  I felt myself drifting off to the glorious clamour, when the chanting came to a close.  We were invited to eat with the family outside the gumba: a full spread of Sikkim-style daal-bhaat, complete with a vat of golden melted butter.  We cleaned our plates and listened to the husband's response to this turn of fortune: he was under fifty and alone, now; ke garnu? what to do? We said our goodbyes, promising to stop and see the man if we were ever in Dentam, and walked back down the hill. We hadn't felt closed off from the life of the monastery this time--on the contrary--but neither did we feel any closer to the kernel, to what it was all about.

***

Buddhism took root in Tibet over a millennium ago when, as legends have it, Padma Sambhava a.k.a. Guru Rimpoche travelled across the Himalaya and subdued the resident demons. The forms that the dharma takes in Tibet even today have texts, imagery, theory, and techniques in common with the Indian Buddhism of the late first millennium A.D. This was a time when a body of mystical, esoteric practices called Tantra came to interpenetrate Buddhism, giving rise to a new path toward Enlightenment. Supposedly these techniques, involving yogic austerities and sexual imagery, were taught secretly by the Buddha to those devotees he felt were ready to hear them, and passed along in a lineage down to the present. More likely, it seems, they are a much later graft onto the original Buddhist stock. Whatever its origins, this approach, which came to be known as Vajrayana (the Diamond vehicle), is radically different from the dry, narrow path of the archetypal Theravada Buddhism. Its greatest novelty lay in the outlook it took towards human desire: instead of working to eradicate mental defilements, such as lust, through meditative practice, why not harness these strong emotions? Tantric practices, which span certain schools of Hinduism as well as Vajrayana Buddhism, have in common this radical turn towards the worldly, the bodily. Necessarily this is a risky path, as it is easy to get side tracked and seek sensory pleasures for their own sake rather than for the spiritual progress they can afford the seeker. It is also considered a remarkably rapid path through which one may attain the goal in as
little as a single lifetime.

In Tibet, Tantric forms and practices mingled further with the native shamanic/animistic beliefs called Bon,and the number of deities multiplied to include fierce “dharma protectors” and other subdued demons alongside
the various Bodhisattvas and Buddhas of past, present and future. Over the centuries, Tibetan Buddhism split into the four major schools that continue into the present (Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, and Geluk,
often distinguished by the color of their respective Rimpoches' hats), and each evolved elaborate bodies of ritual.  Into the twentieth century, European scholars dismissed the clamor and kaleidoscopic imagery of Tibetan Buddhism as a bastardization of the Buddha’s teaching. Where, in all the noisy, colorful ritual, was there any attempt to follow the path outlined by the Tathagata? What happened to the foundation of sila--morality--that was supposed to lie at the very foundation of Buddhism and was being trounced at every
turn by these meat eating, chang drinking, copulating lamas? In fact the core teachings have never been lost, though they may have been disguised under layer upon layer of ornate drapery. As Buddhism became the primary religion of the Tibetan people, it needed to take on more roles than simply being a method of purifying the mind if it was to cater to the needs of the masses. This is exactly what goes on at most gumbas (Tibetan monasteries) most of the time: religious ritual geared towards quotidian concerns, such as death rites. Of course the religious merit gained by such acts is intended to help the recipient as well as the monks inch closer to liberation, but this is not the mystical core of Tantric Buddhism. That goes on outside the institutional walls of the gumba, in caves and graveyards and other
liminal, inacessible places.

***

After visiting the Nyingma gumbas around Pelling, I was ready to give it a rest. The living tantric traditions I had been so excited about were receding to the level of otherness: another culture’s practices, exotic and opaque. It had been foolish to go grasping at this lead; such things as teachers and signposts on the path come to one by grace, can’t simply be willed or intellectualized into existence. And much as I might prefer a sexier, less ascetic path, I knew that the Theravada practice of Vipassana is a good practice for me, that I should be satisfied with it and leave these lamas alone.

As it happened, our next stop in Sikkim was to be Khecheperi Lake. The footprint-shaped lake itself is believed to have been created by theleft foot of the goddess Tara, while her body and head are constituted by the forested hills above and the cave at the top.  Sacred geography, indeed.  If nothing else, it should be a pretty place to explore for a couple of days, we figured, having more or less given up on gleaning much from the Nyingma (ancient school) Tibetan Buddhism so prevalent in West Sikkim. We followed a little hand painted sign to a plain looking guesthouse by the lake, plunked down our packs and looked around. My heart fell a little at first to see that the proprietor was a smooth-faced, longhaired kid of twenty or
so. Damn upstart, I guess I thought! Practically his first vocal act was to laugh long and hard when we spoke to him in Nepali. It wasn’t a malicious or rude sound, I realized, but a delighted one. A young woman who looked East Asian appeared and joined him in the laughter, like water tumbling down rocks. It was contagious; even we couldn’t help but smile a bit. He was simply surprised and delighted that we spoke as we did, and he was uninhibited in this expression of those sudden emotions.  The peals passed along with the couple’s astonishment and we fell into comfortable chatter: the simple rooms were 150 rupees a night, he was indeed the caretaker and she his Japanese wife, and would we like sweet or salty tea? After settling
in and looking around a bit, we talked more with the young couple. It turned out that he was a sort of plainclothes Lama called a Ngakpa Lama, one who had undergone lengthy and rigorous training but who was now leading a householder’s life. Conversation turned towards meditative techniques, and Sonam was happy to tell us about his experience with different stages of Tantric initiation and about his 3 year, 3 month, 3 week, 3 day, 3 hour, 3 minute, 3 second long retreat. He was a gushing tap of information, and later in our room T and I struggled to recall all that he had told us about his tradition.

The next day saw us heading up the hill and along the densely-forested ridge overlooking the little lake to the Tara Devi meditation cave. Sonam had sent us out with directions and a hand-drawn map, a little bag of leech-repellent medicine made from salt and wild Szechuan pepper, and instructions on how to respond if we saw a bear: if it was a little one, dog-sized, we should drop to the ground face-down and play dead. The bear would paw and nuzzle at us but we shouldn’t move, especially shouldn’t show our eyes, or he’d attack. If it was a big one, we should run like hell downhill or climb a tree. Truthfully, I was more worried about leeches. I’d encountered the little crawling blood-suckers in this region before, and the thought of bushwhacking through dense jungle teeming with them gave me the heebie-jeebies. In meditation the night before, my mind had kept wandering to images of the big green cattle-leeches I’d heard about dropping down on my head from the wet foliage above, swelling up with my blood. I tried to uproot my aversion; wouldn’t it be better to look at it as a little blood donation? What’s a few leeches? It’s not like they hurt, even, and there’s enough blood to go around! Wasn't this like the practice of Chod, in which one envisions methodically tearing oneself apart?  Didn't the Buddha feed himself to a hungry tigress in a former life?  And so on.

Equanimity is easier imagined than achieved, as the next day’s hike proved. From the start I kept looking down at my sneakers to check for the first signs of dark little inch-worm-like squigglers climbing up towards my ankles. Soon enough I started spotting them and bending down to flick them off. My pace quickened up the hill in the dense, grey morning. After a stop for tea in a village house, our halfway point, our path narrowed and the foliage closed in. The leeches were denser here and bigger, and we started finding crawling above our knees and even on our upper bodies. Panic began playing at the edges of my mind, and a surge of adrenaline sent me shooting up the slope. I wanted to clear this sinister tunnel of foliage as soon as I could and reach a point where I might safely stop and pick off the buggers. But stopping meant giving ground-crawlers equal opportunity. I half wanted to turn back, to plunge back down the slope and not stop until
we were back in the village house and out of leech territory. But we were close now, presumably, and thankfully the leeches started to thin out. We saw strings of prayer flags and a few evergreens and soon came to the old wooden house that had served as a solitary retreat for a lama. It was empty but showed signs of recent visitation. The shrine room was still set up for worship but was also occupied by a
swarm of bees. Neraby, the cave itself was outfitted with a simple shrine with a carved black stone image of Tara and a few brass butter lamps and stupa offerings that had been knocked over by an impious
bear, perhaps. Here, finally, was an area devoted to spiritual exploration, as opposed to institutional religious practice. We marveled for a while at the way the root tendrils penetrated the cave walls and fanned out along the floor. in the damp, cool air, a fine white mold grew on them. We sat for a while to meditate on a rock
bench before turning back down the hill to face the leeches again.

We met Sonam on the way down. He had been out foraging wild forest vegetables for the communal evening meal: 3 kinds of fiddlehead ferns, nettles, and watercress. His ankles were bleeding from a few telltale
spots, and he was radiating good cheer to the four directions. We talked long into the evening, the young lama doing his best to answer our many questions about his life and practice, speaking with authority, humility, good will and humor. I wish I could remember half of that conversation, but what shines through is Sonam's powerful presence. Talking later in our room, T and I decided we couldn't remember the last time we had met a 23-year old with such a sense of directedness. His charisma was grounded in wisdom and compassion, the two qualities esteemed above all in tantric Buddhism as the precursor of bodhicitta, the mind of enlightenment.

The next morning we payed the unbelievably modest rates for the room and food and walked us down to the jeep that was waiting. We pointed our noses towards Tashiding, site of another gumba, knowing that we had already found what we'd come to Sikkim for. 

As I prepare to post this ramble from steamy Orissa, hundreds of miles South along India's East coast, I think back on cool, quiet, Sikkim, its ancient gumbas, mad lamas and manifest deities.  It's nice to know that the door is unlocked.

Gorkhaland Revisited

Crumbling house in Darjeeling town, "Gorkhaland"

Down the bumpy road from Kalimpong bazar we trundle, out of the stink and relative bustle of the town.  Kalimpong: a former "spies' nest" of a hill station still bustling along modestly with its skein of streets crammed with tiny momo restaurants.  Kalimpong.  This is where my engagement with the Nepali-speaking world began 5 1/2 years ago, though it is an Indian town in most of its particulars.  Kalimpong and the rest of Darjeeling District, despite sharing the state designation of West Bengal with Kolkata and Siliguri and all the vast Bengali-speaking plains in between, is populated in the vast majority by Nepali speakers who have been settled in the region for generations.  This is India, though, as anyone here will be quick to tell you if you make the mistake of referring to him or her as a Nepali.  Nepal, from this vantage point, is a curious and rather backward place, and many Kalimpong residents have never crossed the nearby border.  This is India: in their morning assemblies the school children belt our the Indian national anthem and Indian rupees change hands in the bazars, where the shops are run mostly by Marwaris and Biharis. That much identity is clear.  Moving down to the state level, however, the issue is more complicated.  Technically and administratively this is West Bengal, yes, but since 2008 none of the shopfronts display this fact openly.  Where "West Bengal" was once written, hastily-printed letters now declare this "Gorkhaland."  Gorkha is the name not just for the famed Nepali soldiers who fought so fiercely, khukuris in hand, for the British, but for the Nepali-speakers of Darjeeling District (or what is also, confusingly, called North Bengal) who have also adopted the title to distinguish themselves both from the Bengalis to the South and the Nepalis to the West. 

In practice, daily life outside the bazars is much like that in Eastern Nepal.  The striking difference is one of identity politics: whereas in Nepal a shared Nepali identity is so much a given that the differences between caste, tribal, and ethnic groups stand out starkly as markers of community, here the common plight of being under-recognized works to draw the Gorkhas together as a more-or-less cohesive group while blurring the differences between Rai (all 40-plus subgroups), Limbu, Newar (not to mention the dozens of Newar castes), Chhetri, etc.  Of course it's no Shangri-La: Bahuns (Nepali for Brahmins) are still sometimes resented as the most dominant, powerful group, "small castes" and "untouchables" are still tangibly low on the social ladder despite legislation to the contrary, and the pre-Gorkha inhabitants of the region, Tibet and Bhutan-derived Bhotias and indigenous Lepchas, have become minorities struggling to maintain their own distinct identities, languages, and traditions.  In fact the melting pot effect of Gorkhaland tends to discourage other caste or tribe-related languages as well: it's fairly rare to hear any of the Rai or Limbu languages here, for instance, despite the large numbers of those groups in Kalimpong. 

We were bumping along the road from the bazar.  Bumping along towards Bung Busty, one of several villages within an hour's walk from the Bazar.  From here, where the paved road peters out, I look back to see the town crowded along the ridge between two hills, the gleaming roof of the big Hindu temple, the flattened quadrilateral of the fair ground.  The town's momo stalls and weekly market are a world away here, I think, as I catch a whiff of cow manure and wood smoke and watch the dogs tussling in the dust.  It's quiet and sunny, and all around me are newly-flooded rice paddies and the enormous, lazy leaves of banana trees.  I'm back, and I'm not sure how to feel.  5 years ago, on the Pitzer in Darjeeling program, I was plonked down with a host family in this village after a 2 week crash course in Nepali.  My now-partner and traveling companion, Thandiwe, lived with another family a short walk away, and though we were friendly at the time we didn't see much of each other outside of school hours.  I found my host family nice enough but never really clicked with them in the way I later found was possible.  There was old Aapa, the patriach, an old Lepcha man and a joker who never took me too seriously.  He found my initial stumblings in Nepali hilarious.  (What's that you say?  bhudi dukhyo ki budhi dukhyo? Your stomach hurts or your old lady hurts?  Ha ha ha).  His wife, my first Nepali Aama, was a proud Chhetri (or Ksatriya, a high Hindu caste) woman who had married Aapa in what must have been a passionate and scandalous move in its day.  I found her intimidating, as I could understand hardly one word in ten that she uttered, and many of her utterances sounded like commands.  Their youngest son, Lha Daju, and his wife, my Bhauju (sister-in-law), were closest to me in age, but with a seven-year old daughter they were hardly peers.  As much as with anyone, I connected with the 12-year old Ruben, a madhesi (i.e. someone from the Bengali plains) who stayed with the family and went to school in Kalimpong in exchange for doing odd jobs around the house.  We'd sometimes walk together after dinner with flashlight over the terraced fields to find and fix a blockage in the water pipe, or sit by the fire and do our best to communicate.  It was a memorable time of expanding my horizons and generally everything that a good immersive study abroad experience ought to be, but it was also often a trying one.  I remember waking up in the middle of my first night with my host family, in my too-short bed in my too-short room, opening the window, and puking into the potted plants lined up outside.  There was a lot of puking that semester, and a lot of stumbling communication.
Five years later, I haven't called, my one letter probably didn't even arrive, and here I am showing up at the house again.  I've heard through the Pitzer program staff that Aapa and Bhaauju have both died in the meantime, and have no idea what to expect.  From the outside, though, the place looks much the same as ever: the old building (now the kitchen and dining room) and the newer concrete house with their tidy dirt yard in between; the mango tree and potted plants, the home-made beehive and the kitchen garden below.  With a deep breath and a nervous smile I step into the yard.  Not exactly the bustle of activity I remember; the place is deathly quiet.  I call out a namaste and there emerges from the house a young woman I don't recognize with a baby in her arms.  She greets me with a friendly but slightly quizzical look.

Soon she, Thandiwe, and I are sitting in the little-used formal living room (in my nearly 4 months here I remember sitting here twice) and chatting.  She is Lha Daju's second wife, a Limbu; his second daughter is thus a Limbu-Lepcha-Chhetri mix and almost 7 months old.  The three of them are alone in the house these days, Aama having moved closer to the Bazar to live with a daughter after her husband died almost 2 years ago.  Ruben has grown up and lives in the plains with his family.  The two dogs I remember have died and are replaced by two more, and instead of the broiler chickens I remember, there's a small fish pond.  Life goes on, evidently.  And the timing of my visit is good: Ama, Lha's first daughter, and some other relatives and friends are all due to arrive this evening for the weekend.  I am invited back the next day to meet them all.  The next morning, we arrive to find the place full, with the various generations present forming a pyramid: a solid base of 6 or 7 kids, 3 young-to-middle-aged adults in the middle, and Aama by herself at top.  Upon catching sight of me she takes of her glasses and wipes a tear from her face in one motion.  Seated next to her, we hear in excruciating detail, through Aama's intermittent tears, the story of Aapa's last day.  Of what everyone was watching on TV when he fell down complaining of chest pain, of how the doctors in the Bazar were unavailable and how he was taken in a hurry down to Siliguri in the plains, not to return.  Aama was left behind at the house, waiting to hear the worst.  Here one day, gone the next, and Aama left alone after their decades together no longer wants to live in the house.  It is unclear how interested she is in living at all, although later at dinner she is all coos and smiles playing with her newest granddaughter.

Lha is much the same as I remember, still working on odd construction and other local projects in the neighborhood, though more and more of his peers are shipping out to Qatar or Malaysia to find work.  He is as cheerful and energetic as ever; we don't ask about his first wife's death after long illness from kidney failure, and he doesn't bring it up.  Little Anushka, his older daughter, now twelve, is bigger and no less bold, and seems to enjoy her baby half-sister.  One of Lha's own sisters feeds us lavishly (with us ignoring grumbles that we aren't eating enough) and we are enjoying playing with the happy, bouncy baby ourselves when the back-up power cuts out.  It's getting late, time to go.  We say our goodbyes, making no promises to return again but glad to have visited now.  Aama, proud and beautiful to the last, says she'll meet us in her dreams, in heaven. 

R.I.P.  Nima Tshering Lepcha
           Namkomit Lepcha

Nepal panorama

<< Leaf plate vendor in Asan, Kathmandu

Continuing with the attempt to cram weeks of helter skelter into a few hundred words...I have some more coherent, thoughtful posts on the docket, but for now, an attempt at a panoramic shot of the last few weeks, in which I've closed a loop that began 5 1/2 years ago, when I first visited Darjeeling on my initial foray to India and Nepal.  We're always closing loops in space through time: every time you return to the same room in your house you close a loop on the four-dimensional map of your life.  Those places we live become a tangle of small, overlapping, intersecting loops, and then the occasional lone line shoots out to a far place, across an ocean perhaps, to where another tangle begins.  My tangle in Nepal of the last couple years is now part of a finished loop that begins and ends in Darjeeling; soon the thread will head back into uncharted territories to the South.  Puri, Varanasi, Rajasthan, who knows?  
               I left off aboard a sleeper class train to Gorakhpur, near the Nepal border.  We stayed there for the afternoon, Thandiwe and I, to check out the Gorakhnath temple, which commemorates the founder tantric Siddhi who founded Hatha yoga.  But this proved to be something of a dead-end.  Nothing very interesting happening spiritually that we could unearth, and when a Brahmin priest beckoned me over it was only to try and coax large bills out of us for a tiny puja.  Ah, India, the land of extremes, love-child of spirituality and materialism.  The highlight of that day at the temple complex wasn't the life-size likenesses of Gorakhnath's lineage holders or trying futilely to round up some information, anything, on the significance of the place and the teachings, but rather going for turn on a peddle-boat in the square pool with a local school boy excited to practice his English.  A few hours after arriving at this place, one I had been quite excited about, we were ready to leave.  This, of course, is the other side of spontaneity in traveling.  Onward, onward.  The next stop on our sometimes-pilgrimage is Kushinagar, where the Buddha reached Mahaparinirvana.  i.e. died, at the age of eighty, having turned countless of his countrymen and women onto the road to liberation that he uncovered.  The site was long forgotten and has still not reached the popularity of the other major Buddhist pilgrimages, and we are there at the height of summer, when the place is half-abandoned.  Lucky us, actually.  We are able to visit the 25-century-old Buddha statue in peace, and meditate a while under a Pipal tree a stone's throw from the stupa that marks the spot of his death.  A powerful place, resounding in its tranquility.  The only activity around us the slow, steady labor of the man cutting the grass with a machete.  We tour the various temples, Japanese, Burmese, Chinese, spend a sticky night in an otherwise empty guesthouse, and pose for a photo op at the request of a troup of visiting monks from Burma.  The next day, we cross into Nepal, and with the transition comes a  palpable sense of homecoming as I shift from halting, limited Hindi to fluent, comfortable Nepali. From Kushinagar it's ahead 80 years to the place of Buddha's birth in Lumbini.  A stark contrast to the emptiness of Kushinagar, but not in an unpleasant way.  The expected temples from every Buddhist country--each claiming a share in this particular meritorious pie--were present, and rather oddly thrown together in the Japanese-designed park grounds, but the open layout and abundant green space keep the place from feeling too Disneyland.  We pedal around the grounds on creaky Indian cycles rented from our funky guesthouse, and make our first stop near a little straw hut whence an old man has emerged and is beckoning to us.  Definitely not disneyland.  We squat on the earth floor of his shelter or sit on straw mats, and listen to the man speak Hindi as he explains his existence, unquestioned, to us.  His life consists of worship, sadhana, little else, it seems.  He rises early and visits the site of Buddha's birth a short walk away, prays, perhaps meditates, cooks for himself, prays more, sleeps.  He indicates a few fried flatbreads from his breakfast, hour before, and indicates that we eat.  I'm hungry and do so gratefully, savoring the simple food and open-hearted generosity of the man, and hoping my stomach is ready for this kind of generosity.  Leaving the man with a few rupees for supplies--oil, flour, rice, dal, and salt his only necessities--we stow our cycles for a time and enter the main part of the complex.  At the heart of it all is the ancient complex of Stupa ruins that marks the place where the queen of Kapilvastu gave birth to Gautama by a pool, in the heart of her prosperous kingdom.  Again, the time of year and time of day (early) allow us a few moments of relative solitude at this normally crowded site, and we are able to sit and calm our minds in Samatha meditation under a huge Pipal tree that housed the shrine where visitors pay respect.
Meditation has been the constant thread through this trip, the stabilizing force, the quiet at the heart of the madness.  Today, weeks after Lumbini and Kushinagar, while meditating in my gust house room in Darjeeling, a fitting image appeared and succeeded in distracting me: our mind as a disk spinning with great momentum.  In the kind of calming meditation called Anapana, the simple act of focusing the mind on the natural breath, we reach out and try to stop the wheel's habitual, seemingly inevitable motion.  It's moving too fast, and we succeed only in generating heat and friction in the few seconds we can manage to grasp at it.  But, with discipline, we reach out again and again.  As our fingers callous and strengthen we grasp harder and for longer, and the wheel slows.  And once the spinning is under control, the next stage of the work can begin.  Having achieved a degree of Samadhi, contol over the mind, one can work to develop Panna or Prajna, wisdom, through the technique of insight meditation (vipasyana).  One can start to examine the nature of the wheel, the patterns that once appeared as a blur.  And one can start to try and change some of those patterns, generating a great deal more heat and friction (physical and mental discomfort) along the way...Yes, I am back in the thrall of Vipassana, as taught in various international centers by S.N. Goenke of India.  His a pure form of Burmese Theravada Buddhism, which means it's a philosophy combined with a method, without the superstructure of ritual to complicate it.  As Goenka-ji presents the Dhamma, or teachings, or path, it is entirely non-sectarian, merely a remedy for universal sufferings that therefore must itself be universal..  The ten-day courses are designed so that anyone, from any background, can come, and, if she is prepared to set aside every aspect of her normal life, all habits and creature comforts from sufficient sleep and food to reading and writing and communicating with other humans.  As I described after my 10-day sit at Dharmapakasa in Illinois back in March, it's an incredibly hard, cold, dry, and lonely undertaking, but one that effects remarkable transformation.  Like life in the chrysalis, I suppose.  On the tenth day, when the vow of silence is broken and Noble Silence is replaced by Noble Chattering, in Goenka's words, the sense of not just relief but love, gratitude, and good will is palpable.  Well.  Four months on from my own experience with all this, I wasn't quite ready to sign on again, but I was eager for Thandiwe to experience what I had (which makes me sound like a sadist, but I know she's stronger than me in some crucial ways, and that it would as worthwhile for her as it was for me).  While she was sitting her 10 days at the center on the edge of the Kathmandu Valley, therefore, I decided to volunteer as a dhamma worker.  Even the requisite three daily hour-long sits was plenty for me, I discovered, and the schedule had its own demands.  I re-discovered that I'm a lousy disciplinarian (the Nepali guys under 30 took almost every opportunity to start chattering!), but felt the rewards of service when I got to reach out to struggling meditators the way a volunteer reached out to me, in loving kindness, and gave me the courage to stick it out on Day 4 when I was ready to quit.  And what could have been a lonely time is redeemed many times over by the kindness and compassion of the other volunteers, all Nepali, from 16 to 67 years old.  The course remains slow, but leavened with a pen and notebook, a couple novels, and work to do, the 18 hour days fairly flew in comparison to my previous Vipassana stay.  And at the end, sweet reunion, sweet communion, sweet exodus.  And Epic theological, geological, and erotological conversations with a rejuvenated Thandiwe, who had the expected Hard Time but also felt cleansed and clarified.
One upshot of this purification: the sudden return to our haunt on the outskirts of the tourist district, Thamel, came as a slap in the face. After one night we flee south, to Patan, and spend our last five days in Nepal based out of a sleepy little guesthouse over the event horizon of that particular black hole.  Still, we decide not to renew our Nepal visas and buy bus tickets to take us to the Eastern border.  After a social last few days, we find ourselves aboard the night bus to Karakbhitta, on the boarder with Siliguri and the gateway to the Darjeeling Hills of "Gorkhaland," Nepali-speaking India.  We've come almost 100 km west from the Valley after a late start due to a Kathmandu jam and have almost reached the turn-off that will take us down out of the hills and to the east-bound, straight road across the Terai.  We've got adjacent seats near the front (leg room!  A small miracle) and are settled in.  The sun is sinking behind the hills on a surprisingly clear evening, and the moving-vehicle trance is enhanced by the beat of the folk music blasting from the stereo.  Soon it is dark, and I doze, waking to a feeling of peace and security in the face of the almost complete unknown.  I feel coddled, soothed by the warm night air, the music, the banana trees flying by, the jarring turns in the road.  I am able to relax completely, to cherish the moment, knowing that it is fleeting.  Anitya, anitya, anitya, intones the voice of Goenke in my head as on the Vipassana course recordings: impermanence, impermanence, impermanence.  Sure enough, the bliss is not to last long.  Before dawn my reverie is cut short by the all-too-familiar sulphurous belches that precede most of my explosive gastrointestinal episodes in India and Nepal.  This time I reach for a Cipro tablet, knowing the time for holistic, preventative management and time for the big guns.  This is a bus ride, hours left to go, and the closest thing to a bathroom on board is the sliding glass windowpane next to me.  Thankfully the rumblings subside into a minor, vague unease, and Thandiwe sleeps on unaware of my brush with hilarity--which is what would have ensued elsewhere on the bus, I can only imagine, when the passengers caught sight of my skinny ass hanging out the window.  Doubly lucky I am, for within hours the bus is stopped at a banda.  Apparently along this stretch of road in Jhapa a few months ago, a man was killed in a road accident, and his family has still not been compensated.  The strategy, as usual, is to shut down all traffic until a satisfactory outcome is achieved.  Glad not be on a schedule, I ready myself for a long stopped in single-file traffic on an unglamorous strip.  But today the appropriate wheels are greased, and we're on our way and rolling within a few hours.  By mid-day we cross the border into India, suspected visa problems amounting to nothing, and catch a jeep for the hills.  The ride is stunningly beautiful as we are whisked up and out of the heat and bustle of the lowlands into the terraces and tea gardens of the hills.  Behind us stretches the gangetic plain, off into the haze.  Ahead lie fog-enveloped ridges, hill stations like Kurseong and Kalimpong draped over them.  The toy train to Darjeeling criss-crosses the motorable road, the air quickly cools, we are in another world.                     

A couple of loose fragments:
Getting intentionally lost in the labyrinthine streets of Patan with a new friend from Vipassana.  Stopping to eat a big clay dish of the famous, rich Bhaktapur yogurt called Jujudhau (imported from the other end of the Kathmandu Valley), and stopping again when we see a jumbled assortment of musical instruments in a shop window.  We bang on drums, pluck at guitars and what looks like a fretless six-string banjo, until the owner distracts us with something even better: an instrument he's made, like a one-headed drum with a long spring attached.  Shaken, the spring vibrates and reverberates against the drumhead, sounding like storm winds.  Another, smaller one imitates a cricket.  Soon we are all jamming, improvising against a typical Newari street-procession beat...............and at the Vipassana center, craving fellowship, I head up to the course office with a bag of good ground coffee I've brought from the states.  Unsure what the other volunteers will make of this (what, you've been keeping foodstuffs in your room?) I'd considered just making myself a cup to get me through the slow day, but decide to chance it.  Everyone turns out to be as eager as I, and I make a strong, black, sweet cup for everyone in the office.  The next day the ritual is repeated, though I wonder if we're not breaking Vipassana law by craving pleasant sensations, and the next evening, when I must decline, until the coffee's gone.  Small pleasures.

Snapshots

Above: Paan-spit-stained airshaft of a cheap hotel room, Delhi

The churn of experience has been churning away, and (besides the eventual, hoped for gobs of butter), bubbles of reflection have been percolating upwards towards the surface.  By some conspiracy of influences, I'm in the midst of what seems a paradigm-shifting metamorphosis, time plays funny, and everyday events spin themselves into Significant Happenings.  I've been drawn into a nexus, which is all very exciting, but it makes coherent interpretation difficult.  Until I pull some sort of perspective together, I'll satisfy the writing itch (and 'to write' in Hindi/Nepali is derived from an Arabic root meaning "to scratch") with a series of snapshots.

So, the last 10 days, in fragments:

After a frantically social last few days in New York, I wake at first light with a wisp of a memory of turning off an alarm two hours earlier, sit bolt upright, and five minutes later am out the door with partner and luggage, unshowered and greasy, and hop in a yellow cab for Newark airport.  My panic subsides as the driver sagely selects a route and we leave Manhattan behind.  Half to calm my nerves and half to solicit his obstacle-removing shakti, I repeat Ganesh's mantra under my breath.  An hour later we are through on board a Virgin flight for Delhi.......................Our first night in Delhi, in a cheap but clean hotel room armed with a big ceiling fan and a window into a paan-spit stained airshaft.  It's hot but bearable out but like a convection oven inside, the cement walls and hard mattress radiating the day's heat.  The jetlag trance state proceeds through successive rounds of a cooling ritual: rinse off with warm water from the cold tap, dampen topsheet, lie under it until its life-preserving power is exhausted.........................................Wandering the narrow gallis of Old Delhi our first evening, I ask a shopkeeper in my stumbling Hindi where good local eats can be found. His directions are, essentially, "go left, then right, then left again, and you're practically there."  At a bit more prodding, a map is produced.  The first left is to be taken at a Hanuman temple, and the shopkeeper will take us that far.  He wants to share some of his culture and his city, and we wash our hands in a tiny basin, leave our rubber sandals without, and tour the neighborhood shrine.  Soon we have caught the resident priest's attention and been walked through a puja.  Having completed our darshan (viewing of the divine image) we leave with smiles, marigold garlands, tika'ed foreheads......................................In the day's rising heat we charter a tuk-tuk to the Baha'i lotus temple, that faith's only outpost in Asia.  As we wait for the gates to open, I feel myself flushing with a heat greater than that outside, as if I'm the source of the high ambient temperature. Inside the vast, open space within the lotus, silence reigns.  I long to slip into the clear blue pools around the temple.  Mind occupied with the Baha'i creed that all faiths are essentially one..................................Getting the runaround at the New Delhi railway station as we try and purchase tickets for the next day's departure for Gorakhpur, 15 hours to the East.  It is not possible, no, not for four days...until we find the right office, the official one, and buy our tickets for less than half then price we'd been quoted.  Despite this, we have found Delhi much less tout- and scam-infested than we had been led to believe.  It is less concentrated than Kolkata, and without that city's sense of decaying grandeur disappearing under tropical growth.  Instead sprawling, drier (though this is due as much to the season, the last days before the rains begin).  Delhi Chicago to Kolkata's New York? Which would make Mumbai L.A....and Chennai?.................................On the platform awaiting the 8:25 Gorakhdam Express, along with what must be half the population of certain small city states.  We claim some space, people-watch, sweat, and are oggled in turn.  We remark to each other on people's willingness to stare.  Buy a 10 rupee folding fan: "folding fan!  folding fan!," a chant we decipher only after 10 or so repetitions................................aboard the train, sleeper-class.  I awake before 2 AM somehow convinced it is almost dawn, and sit in the open doorway of the car, watching the dark shapes of bushes and the occasional house go by in the Uttar Pradesh countryside.  It's not unbearably hot for a change, in fact almost cool in the heavy, grey pre-monsoon skies.  Move my bowels at the squat toilet, quite clean and perfectly odor free, since the hole opens directly down onto the tracks.  Marvel not for the first time that I'm in India. At 4 A.M. I buy a paper cup of chai (chaay, actually) from the tea-wallas who patrol up and down the aisles, and later some breakfast: aloo chop and white bread with a ketchup packet.  India's British heritage reveals itself, like divine will, in unexpected ways........................Divine will.  I wouldn't have caught myself using that term a year or even a month ago, but I'm becoming less shy about such things.  Do I believe in God?  Not the god I forswore as a small child lit up by thoughts of black holes and, later, the prospect of laying bare the workings of reality through string theory and the like.  I'm still not crazy about the term, and the capitalization, and most of the connotations.  Theology strikes me as futile.  The less said the better about the object of faith--but I've discovered faith, and understand, as Michael Gruber writes in the guise of one of his characters, that it's a gift.................I guess we're out of snapshot mode now, and I haven't even gotten to Nepal yet, even to Kushinagar and the first purposeful stop on what is to some extent a pilgrimage...but Michael Gruber.  The man has penned three novels that have provided an extremely timely source of spiritual nourishment in, of course, an unexpected form.  The books detail the life and most interesting cases of a Miami detective who finds himself embroiled repeatedly in what he comes to dread (and eventually embrace) as Weird Shit: African sorcery and its descendant Santeria, South American shamanistic practice, and less exotic but no less forceful cracker Protestant faith, amongst others.  They're a ripping, gripping read, but under the cover of the thriller, part of the books' real work is to challenge the world's current materialist worldview in ways that are hard to ignore.  Indeed, one comes to realize (if one hasn't already) that our society is as religious as any other, but with rather perverted idols: money, sex, speed, forward motion, shiny things.  Science itself, what should be a method and not a belief system, has taken on cult status.  In this light, alternative views become attractive and in fact essential, and Gruber presents a host of related spiritual systems that fill the void.  The overall arc of the trilogy is also concerned with the spiritual maturation of the star detective, Jmmy Paz, Gruber being a wise as well as an intelligent writer.  There's plenty of other juicy stuff, lots of sex, and also a recurring, hard-hitting racial theme.  Better than any white author I've read, Gruber understands the varieties of racism and the ways in which it is instutionalized and sanctioned.  They're challening books all around, but the medicine just tastes so good you can't put the bottle down.

In the interest of timely posting, I'll leave whatever typos in and save the Nepal stuff for next time.  How time flows, then oozes, sticks, recoils... 
Love to all my readers, with apologies if I've gone too far off the deep end this time.
Jonathan

Investing in Ourselves

It appears that the Escher-eque architecture of the political economy (or is that the economic politic?) is finally betraying itself for what it is: a mesmerizing but trumped-up house of cards.  And while most houses of cards are at least built upon foundations as solid as, say, a coffee table, ours is held aloft by increasingly sporadic gusts of hot air from the maw of a bloated, sickly, senile carnivore.

I'll let those images float around free of further interpretation.  I don't claim any real talent for political/economic analysis.  For that, I'd like to recommend Very Knowledge and Club Orlov.  The authors of both are highly skilled at summing up just why, exactly, we're in so much trouble.  Trouble?  It depends on how you look at it.  But most people would call this Trouble with a capital T: the Western, consumption-oriented way of life is on its last legs, at least in the West (China may just be getting started).  The writing is on the wall.  The eagle has crashed into the ocean.  Yes, change is afoot, Mr. Obama.  Great upheaval is on the horizon, as the re-orientation of something as massive as the global economy won't happen without making a few, uh, waves.  As in tidal waves.  Things in the U.S. are poised to get radically ugly.  This is a good reason not to gloat, even over the downfall of as brutal, myopic a tyrant as the U.S. has become.  But it is exciting.

Amidst such a backdrop of gushing oil and economic failure, it's a good time to think about very basic things, including such impolite questions as "where does your food come from (and where will it come from)?"  And "what is your plan for when oil costs $10 a gallon?"  Many highly intelligent authors have argued that the necessary questions are going to be good deal harsher than this second one, since I have assumed that oil will still be available, and, implicitly, that things like highways will still be in good repair and safe to venture out on in a private vehicle.  Check out James Howard Kunstler for some juicy speculations on that score.  There are limitless possible scenarios, but I don't fancy stockpiling guns and canned food or even for that matter moving up to a remote hilltop in Vermont year round and tending a big garden and a flock of sheep.  Much as I like the sound of the latter, it just ain't me.  For these purposes, the details of just how a post peak-oil America will look are not really the point.  Instead, I prefer to focus on the basics.  When pondering how to spend time, money, physical and mental energy in a time of intense uncertainty, I find myself asking "what can I invest in that I won't end up regretting no matter what happens in the world?"

The short answer is "myself."  Lest that sound irretrievably egocentric, let me backtrack a bit.  

I've figured out that the intersection of my talents and passions and the needs of the world--which is how someone famous or other once defined "calling"--lies in the realm of nourishing, in making myself a vessel for traditions that nourish and tend toward wholeness.  If this I were in The Giver, I'd have been named Nourisher on my thirteenth birthday (and been awfully confused at the time, except that even then I loved to cook).  So I've decided to invest in the pursuit of that general goal.  Health being at something of a premium these days, there will be no shortage of work to be done.  All the more so if we define health broadly, to mean not just lack of detectable disease, but also a positive state of balance and contentment.  Ayurveda provides a set of powerful conceptual tools for achieving balance in body and even in mind.  The contentment part, though, is more elusive.  This is the realm of what we might call spiritual health.

Wait, hold it.  This is getting suspect already.  What does "spirituality" even mean?  Luckily it doesn't fall into the category of asking "what is jazz?," to which Louis Armstrong famously responded "man, if you've got to ask, you'll never know."  Really good jazz has a certain ineffability that defies definition, and if you can't feel it, there's no use trying to pin it down with words.  Ultimate reality may share some of that elusive quality--ask Mahayana Buddhists, who have developed complex ways of talking about that very elusiveness without reifying the concept of elusiveness itself, or physicists, who delve ever deeper into the structure of time and space, uncovering marvels within marvels.  Even the innermost marvels, if there are any that are ultimately innermost, defy all comprehensibility, with features like wave-particle duality.  The most promising theory, String Theory, requires that there be something like 11 extra imperceptible dimensions curled up into vanishingly small knots at every point in space-time--and this is in the name of simplifying.  Ultimate reality may well be beyond our capacity to understand it (wouldn't it be weird if it weren't?), but spirituality is not.  Leaving aside the term's mixed connotations, let us think of spirituality as a sense of purpose in our lives.  This doesn't mean we have to "know the meaning of life," just that we have an operational, pragmatic idea of how to create our own meaning.  Once we have meaning, we have direction, and we have something larger than our own egos and desires to base our lives upon.  Direction gives perspectives and resilience, a certain stabilization that, tended to, will tend us in return and keep us on the path.  

If this spirituality--meaningfulness--is the goal, what is the means to it?  A good place to begin the search is with the Sanskrit term for health itself.  The word is swasthya.  It means self-situatedness.  It conveys a sense that the place to start is with ourselves.  Each of us.  Working on her/himself.  This sounds simple, but in the context of Western society it is in fact radical, for we are accustomed to looking everywhere but within for fulfillment.  But it would seem that some sort of self-work is in order.  This is not egocentrism, for the goal of the process (or one of its side effects) is to eliminate the pernicious and false construct of the ego.  Rather, one's self is the only place one can start.  Later on ripples will spread outward, but those ripples come from the center.  We have to be self-centered; the challenge is (to paraphrase Einstein again) to widen our circles of compassion enough to embrace every being.

It's worth emphasizing that this kind of spiritual work is precisely that: work.  It is work in much the same way farming is work, and involves many of the same processes: preparing the ground, planting the right seeds, weeding out what is undesirable.  It requires the same sorts of attributes that help make any long-term endeavor successful: attentiveness.  The will to succeed.  Effort.  A sense of timing.  Immense patience.  Faith.  All these are necessary qualities, and yet they are also the fruit of the labor.  Thus the process is cyclical, and as different stages are reached, the seeker gains the strength and skill to proceed further.

So far I've avoided talk of religion per se.  Spirituality in the sense of finding and refining one's purpose through "self-cultivation," may or may not come associated with a particular religious tradition.  Many find that having a well-trodden path to follow is helpful--even if (in the world of so many Southasians I've spoken to), "all roads lead to the mountain"/"all rivers lead to the sea"--while others develop practices independently.  For most, some level of guidance is helpful.  What kind of path to follow does, of course, depend on one's aims, level of motivation, and many other factors.  And not all spiritual techniques accomplish the same thing.  The term "spiritual work" is still a useful one, however, if understood as that which contributes to an increase in positive attributes in the practitioner such as contentment, selflessness, and equanimity, while weakening negative thoughts and tendencies.  Buddhism and Christianity, for example, have some serious metaphysical differences, but they both aim to cultivate ethical living through kindness and compassion.

In the Southasian context, spiritual paths take many forms.  Even within Hindu traditions in which the overall goal is union with the divine, there are a number of different paths that are recognized.  Since yoga means union, these have names like karma yoga (the yoga of action), bhakti yoga (devotion), and jnana yoga (higher insight), as well as the more familiar hatha yoga.  Speak with Bharat Natyam dancers or Tabla players, and you will hear of their own practices as paths to the divine.  It doesn't so much matter what as it does as how: Zen Archery could equally well be Zen Underwater Basket Weaving, as long as it performed with mindfulness and devotion.  Many profoundly spiritual people don't associate themselves with any particular tradition, but simply follow the quiet voice of their own way.  I'd love to hear people's stories of others they've known that fit this description, because I think we all have met people who inspire us with their inner quiet, quiet courage, courageous eccentricity.

As I find (to my own continuing surprise) my own spirituality unfolding along a Buddhist path, I have more to say from that perspective than I do in terms of general remarks.  At the heart of Buddhist practice lies meditation, a direct and unmediated act of self-cultivation (bhaavana).  As practices go, meditation is relatively subtle: no signs of visible activity or direct impact on the world.  There is a tendency in our culture to discount the subtle in favor of the obvious, the tangible.  This may partly explain the difficulty so many have in conceiving of something like meditation as having any real value.  Why do Tai Chi when you could really burn some calories by lifting weights?  In reality, subtle forces are the most influential, as gentle, unassuming water carves a gorge out of solid rock.  Emotions may be insubstantial, but murder would never happen if not for rage, hatred, fear, and jealousy.  This principle--that the subtle governs the concrete--is what makes meditation so powerful.  Along with plants and animals, who so far have not been the cause of much Trouble, the world is composed of vast human societies, each of which is composed of discrete cities and towns plus rural areas, composed in turn of families, and finally, of course, composed of billions of individual people.  These people's actions, their ways of being in the world, depend on their internal states.  Without peace and harmony in the inner world, we can't expect it on the outside, either.  Start at the center and ripple out.  And--neat trick--eventually (they say) the center disappears.

                                                                      *         *         *

  For someone interested in pursuing self-cultivation of the sort I've been describing, but who is not sure where to start, there is nothing to be lost and much to be gained by developing mindfulness.   A calm, steady mind is a necessary stage on a number of paths, and it's a beneficial practice in its own right.  Calming the mind through this kind of meditation is akin to simply stopping the motion that we're always making.  If the mind is a car, then it's always running, and of course we need to stop it before we can open it up, see what's wrong, and fix the durn thing.  I like the analogy of muddy water.  Since the mind is always moving, the mud never has a chance to settle out, and the water never clears.  But with enough calming meditation, the motion slows to a stop, and the particulate matter settles to the bottom.  The water becomes clear, full of light.

The simplest form of samatha or calming meditation uses the breath to still the mind and make it one-pointed, absorbed in its object of concentration.  Here are some simple instructions aimed at a novice meditator, enough to get you started with a simple daily practice.  Sit in a comfortable position on the floor or in a chair.  Establish a firm, comfortable foundation.  Straighten your back, but not so much that you make yourself uncomfortable.  Loosen any tight belt or pants so that you can breathe freely, down into your belly.  Set a timer for 5 or 10 minutes.  Close your eyes gently, and turn your attention to your breath, just the way you breath naturally, in and out.  Try not to control your breath, just watch it as it passes in and out through your nostrils.  Sounds simple, but it's not.  The mind will wander away again and again.  Each time you catch it wandering, gently but firmly bring it back to the object of concentration, the breath.  This is enough for many sessions, and it will be hard work.  It sounds obvious, but there is no substitute for doing the work.  Merely reading about it is no good.  You have to do it, every day.  "5 minutes a day better than half an hour on the weekend," says one of my teachers.  If you persist, you will find that the ability to concentrate develops, and your mind will wander less far and less frequently.  You will start to notice sensations that you hadn't before.  As this happens, you can zero your attention in very specifically on the place in or around the nostrils that the breath touches as it moves in and out.  You haven't exhausted the usefulness of this technique until you are able to sit completely absorbed in your breathing, without a trace of discursive chatter nor even a feeling of joy at your accomplishment, for extended periods of time.  Until then, there's always room for refinement of awareness, for sharpness of concentration.  

Pathfinding

I'm not always sure whether this blog is more an open journal (as the subheading once proclaimed), a manifesto, a travelogue, a sort of ethnographic cookbook, or a resource for seekers of holistic health.  It's safe to say that, like Daniel Dravit in The Man Who Would Be King, Ill Wind has been "most things in [its] time."  Today I'll venture into the swampy terrain of self-disclosure and make a declaration, a sort of "contrack" between myself and myself, witnessed by you-out-there.  To wit:

I hereby declare to remove myself, after a third and surpassingly glorious and chaotic romp through the subcontinent to be chronicled in due course, to Portland, OR, city of bridges and natural health mavens and Ursula K. LeGuin, to immerse myself mind body and spirit in the philosophy, art, science, creed, and praxis of Classical Chinese Medicine.  That deep-rooted stuff.  That heterogeneous, contested, obscure, decidedly living body of traditions about the body.

It's official--I've sent in my deposit and I'm crazy excited to make a four-year run of it at National College of Natural Medicine.  This both is and is not a change of track for me.  Is, because I've spent so much time and energy on Southasia and its languages (Nepali, Newari, now Hindi) and medical traditions.  Isn't, because, like Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, in its classical, non Mao-censored glory, has the potential to integrate immanent spirituality and transcendent health.  And unlike for Ayurveda, there is both solid legal basis for practicing Chinese medicine in the States and a deep bank of resources (other practitioners and teachers) to tap into.  So as of January '11, I'm going to shift gears and dive into East Asia.  I'll be starting from scratch in some ways, and what I do already know may get in the way at times, but I have faith that I will not only become adept as an acupuncturist and herbalist in the Chinese tradition but also be able to integrate my Ayurvedic understandings and eventually become a stronger practitioner because of my eclectic background.

Not that it's all so cut and dry as this last statement may make it sound.  In fact, I suspect that this departure will end up being not so much a destination in itself but a substantial length of road to wherever it is I'm going.  Odd as it may sound heading into an intensive four-year program,  I see an intimacy with the Chinese traditional arts as a pre-requisite to something else--even if I don't know what that something is yet.  For I can't help but entertain notions of integration, in the most ambitious and inclusive sense, extending in this case to integration medico-spiritual understanding and techniques from different traditions into one eventual Path.  I'm highly aware of my tendency to think too much (why else would I do so much rambling?), but I think a lot these days about what that ultimate Path will be.  What vehicle I will wind up in for the better part of my journey in this life.  And I have inklings.  Unwise to articulate them too soon, perhaps, but I have inklings that this yog, this union, will occur in the historical meeting ground between India and China, in Tibetan soil.  I'm not sure about this, and even if I were, I don't think there's any shortcut there.  If I'm headed to the mythical Mt. Kailash, abode of Shiva, I must approach it as the pilgrims do, by making a kora.  Perumbulating.  Completing my part of the mandala, so that when I reach the destination I am prepared, i.e. equipped with the appropriate knowledge and experience.  For now, my path leads through China, if not actual China (and I am bone-scared of modern China), then a representative cultural distillation thereof.  Wish this foolish pilgrim luck.

Even as I write this, I'm conscious that it may be the most presumptive and pretentious thing I've spouted in quite some time.  In these few paragraphs are embedded some of deepest visions, faith, and (surely) pride.  But today I feel like letting all that hang out there flapping in the ether, if for no other reason that I'll have something to look back at in, say, ten years time, and be able to judge whether I was more full of pretension or prescience.

The Age-Old Quest for Nourishment

Today on the bus I saw a woman with a stroller get on and take a seat near the front.  She took out a bag of jelly worms and ate one, then fed another of the chewy red and yellow tubes to her infant.  I couldn’t see his or her little face, but I could picture the baby sucking the candy right down like a fat strand of spaghetti.  Ah, I thought--sweetness.  It’s the primordial taste, a direct link to our animal brains, the message that says “nourishment.”  But before someone gets on my case for advocating a diet of Haribo gummy candies for newborns, there’s a distinction that ought to be made.  There’s sweet, and then there’s sweet.  

As hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists--in other words, people who got along somehow without food-processing technology much more sophisticated than the blade, the mortar and pestle, and the clay cooking/fermenting vessel, humans evolved to recognize viable sources of nourishment by taste.  Basically, the things that tasted good to us were the things that would keep us going, providing strength and nourishment to keep us not just alive but thriving.  Things like animal parts (especially internal organs like liver and heart, which are typically prized by traditional cultures and are eaten first by wild animals), seeds and grains, starchy roots and tubers, fruit and nuts.  Most of these foods taste sweet, in subtle or not-so-subtle ways.  Take bread, for instance: chewed for more than a few seconds, the starches in any loaf break down into shorter-chain carbohydrates, i.e. sugars.   So, in the mythical golden age of human nutrition, when the only problem with most people’s diets was that they might not be getting enough to keep body and soul together, sweetness was a pretty good indicator of nutritional value.  Enter the industrial revolution, slave labor, factory farming, and the McDonald’s-ization of global food trends, and the picture gets pretty distorted.  Now sweetness can be extracted from its nutrient matrix and concentrated, packaged and sold.  And by golly the stuff is a hit.  Rather like crack is a hit.  The same can be done with fattiness and saltiness, two other once-reliable indicators of nutrient-density.  The result?  The ketchup-dipped french fry, which to our taste buds is the perfect combination of fat, salt, and sugar.   Unfortunately, 99.999% of the fries out there are made with bad fat (chemical gobbledygook with names like ‘partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil’) bad salt (refined NaCl, possibly iodized but stripped of all other trace minerals), and even bad sugar (high-fructose corn syrup, which manages to be even sweeter and more problematic than the old devil, regular old white sucrose).  The potatoes are from a sterile, mineral-depleted lunar wasteland fumigated by spacesuit-wearing farmers, and the tomatoes, well, aw hell, they can count as a vegetable!  

I tend to get a little carried away when I think about what our society eats.  But it’s not my fault--things really are that unbalanced.  I’m not really one for statistics, but I’d be willing to bet that the average American is at least five times more likely to know how to drive a car and upload a digital photo than how to cook a simple meal of beans, greens, and grains from scratch.  And once quotidian food preparation techniques like making sourdough bread or fermenting a crock of kraut are practically obsolete in mainstream  America.  There’s a lot more that can be said on the subject of our “national eating disorder,” as Michael Pollan puts it, but as that wasn’t really meant to be my focus in this post I’ll refer interested readers to his by-now seminal The Omnivore’s Dilemma instead.  My contribution here is this: people should eat real (ideally, local, seasonal) food in appropriate quantities, yes.  But what if that’s not enough?

Most of the people I see in my capacity as an Ayurvedic/herbal health consultant have something in common.  They are craving nourishment.  I don’t mean that they are wasting away, suffering from calorie-deficiency, but they find that they’re not as satisfied by their food as they would like, or they feel a nameless hunger for something beyond what they’re getting.  This hunger has spiritual dimensions as well, of course--the hunger for meaning that typifies the postmodern era--but I’m talking about the physical plane.  Perhaps its simply the people I attract--I, as someone who has struggled with issues of nourishment and who envision my work in this world as an act of nourishing, broadly-defined; maybe it’s the spectacles I wear that see everything in a nutrition-tinted hue--but I don’t think that’s all of it.  Across the nation and the world, people are hungry.

As I learned to see from Ayurvedic teacher Claudia Welch, how many Americans are weighed down with weight that doesn’t really belong to them, sheer ballast that’s standing in for true nourishment?  Eating nutritionally empty foods can lead easily to a vicious cycle of hunger for nutrients, a hunger which is then fed with more junk, which creates weight but leads to ever more ravenous hunger...even for those who eat a reasonably balanced, mostly whole-foods diet, there is the same craving for grounding.  

Grounding: this mysterious-sounding idea bridges the gap between physical and non, and ties in another symptom of post-modernity: we live too much in our heads.  Our lack of nourishment is inseparable from our lack of sensitivity to our bodies, and to the earth.  It might be said--I’ll say it--that we hunger, at root, for connection, for the umbilical cord linking us to the great mama underfoot.  “Alternative medicine” abounds in ways to talk about this: the root chakra, the earth element, sacral vibrations...these ways of conceptualizing all share an association with the lower parts of the body.  Maybe what we lack, on some collective level, is the ability to shake our metaphysical booty.  (This isn’t so far-fetched: health would be a lot more marketable if people realized the connection between it and their libido.) 

So what to do about it?  I haven’t even mentioned the myriad stresses we’re subject to, from traffic jams to conference calls and jet lag, environmental toxins, you name it.  From an herbalist’s point of view, luckily, these issues and those of grounding and nourishment all point to a common set of remedies.  For nourishing, for grounding, for cooling our feverish appetites, for building our reserves and stabilizing our frayed nerves, sweet roots are what the order of the day.  My staunchest allies, the herbs I find myself reaching for more than any other for myself and other people, belong to this class of nourishing, adaptogenic roots:  Ashwagandha.  Shatavari/Asian asparagus species.  American Ginseng.  Licorice.  These can be taken as powder or tea or even tincture, but my favorite way is simply to eat them, gnawing on the tough Ashwagandha, chewing the sweet Asparagus rhizomes like gummy candy, sucking and chewing up a slice of licorice root until the sweetness is gone.  All extremely safe herbs (the only contraindication for any of these is with licorice, which due to its watery nature shouldn’t be used in cases of water retention or hypertension), they can be chewed freely.  I’ve even been known to give a Christmas present of a jar of “nourishing roots to gnaw” to a certain family member who, I was reminded, loves to do just that.  

To these grounding, building, soothing roots, I like to add some more specifically nervine herbs, especially in cases of heavier stress or where there is more heat and irritation (Pitta involvement).  With my Ayurvedic background, Gotu Kola (Centella asiatica) and Shankhapushpi (Convolvulus alsinoides) are my go-tos, but more recently I’ve been discovering the deeply cooling, calming, tension-relaxing nature of Motherwort and the nerve-feeding capacity of Oatstraw and seed.  A nice Ayurvedic trick is to add some calcium-rich bhasma (calcined mineral) preparation such as prawal or muktasukti bhasma, coral or oyster shell ash.  Given conservation issues, I go with oyster shell.  It lends a grounding weight to a formula and is especially nice for the Vata/Pitta conditions that so many people seem to be struggling with, and it isn’t expensive.  Finally, in cases where some extra grounding (bordering on mild sedation, such as in anxiety with insomnia) is in order, I will use something along the lines of Valerian root.  I prefer not to give heavy, dulling herbs for long periods, but they can be indispensably useful in the short-term.  

     Nourishing roots: Dong Quai (Chinese Angelica), Asian licorice, Ashwagandha, Tien Moon Dong (Asian Asparagus rhizome), American Ginseng

While herbs can nourish us and supplement the problematic food sources that are unavoidable, they are no substitute for deeper grounding work.  Depending on who, what, when and where you are, this might mean digging in a garden bed, sitting quietly and doing nothing for ten minutes, going for a walk in the woods, or playing soccer.  It almost certainly means unplugging yourself from the cyberworld for a spell.  In the spirit of practicing what I preach, I’m off to cook some dinner.