I know that for a lot of people, Bodhgaya is a moving spiritual centre and it is peaceful, but if you’re not Buddhist, my impression is that you can’t appreciate it fully. Varanasi, on the other hand, is a place that touches you whether you are Hindu or not. The fact that, ultimately, amongst all of the other rites and rituals happening here, this is the place where life and material existence ends and one is cast back into nature (the Ganges) makes it a universal gateway.
The main burning ghat is about 250 metres from I am sitting right now. There, wood is carefully weighed (apparently it is quite an art to be able to judge the perfect amount needed to incinerate a corpse) and then built into pyres upon which the silk-clad bodies are placed to be rendered into ash and bone. Many bodies are burning at any one time and you can see the process at different stages as you move around the ghat. Skulls burned clean, leg bones sticking up blackened and everywhere the deep smell of woodsmoke mixed with burning flesh. It is an incredibly powerful experience to see this. A great South African couple that I met in Calcutta told me that Varanasi is a place that every human being should visit and I agree. It’s not everyday that Westerners get to see—in the same day—both poles of existence: daily subsistence struggle and then the very public end of one’s physicality. This is certainly “bare life.”
A few people have written me and, while not wanting to sound trite, have asked if India has “changed me.” I think that anyone with critical faculties cannot help but be affected by what you see and feel here. One thing that I didn’t expect, though, is to feel even more alienated from organized religion than I was before. Seeing, for example, the Catholicism of the Sisters of Charity who teach acceptance of one’s suffering--which they do seek to mitigate, of course--but certainly not by addressing the root causes of that suffering through any sort of social justice-centred inquiry. Or the caste system inherent to Hinduism here. Life is certainly a struggle for millions and millions in India but the alleviation of the exertions and pain can again, only come in the afterlife and its eventual negation… what about now?
5 comments:
"One thing that I didn’t expect, though, is to feel even more alienated from organized religion than I was before."
amen, amen, amen. i absolutely know what you mean. while i have not witnessed such extremes myself, in my own social experiment which i call "9-5 work", i am definately echoing those sentiments. you know to what i refer to...
i view myself as an outsider to the madness, as if everyone else was a character in some grand play.
also, not to sound like a complete bitch but i'm sorry. go anywhere remotely outside your comfort zone and it will "change" you. it's not like india has some sort of special monopoly over "change". what is it? obama?
In point of fact Bob's comfort zone is quite expansive. Recently, in a surprising move, it annexed part of my comfort zone and then declared itself an autonomous territory. Next week it's submitting a petition to the U.N. for official recognition.
But that's my point... people like you who are aware of what's going on and why things happen are going to be changed - and yes, of course, this happens wherever you go that pushes you to think... the others, who stay in the 5 star hotels and "see" places like India or wherever as if through a Disney-like lens will not be.
What's frightening is how powerful the urge to turn off the critical part is when you are being bombarded with things that are so fucking disturbing. Like a man holding a baby's burnt (by acid?) hand up to you in the car and asking for money... what do you do when you know that giving something perpetuates the exploitation of a child's pain? What if the "accident" was inflicted for just such a purpose? How do you live with yourself when you just look away?
i don't know what i'd do in such an instance, i really don't. that is so messed up.
honestly, a scene like that is so shocking that i probably wouldn't do anything. later, i'd think about it and ask myself why this man and his baby found themselves in this situation. what are the exploitative power structures that allow such things to occur?
and then i'd try to think about how to attack power structures.
but then, i'm always thinking about how to best attack power structures. this seems to be my life's work or something. i just wish i'd make some more progress.
reading: "how nonviolence protects the state" indeed! down with nonviolence!
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