year in india, round four

90 seconds in front of the jokhang, lhasa

2010-07-31T16:56:00.000-07:00

note the absence of western tourists and the presence of military goose-steppers,who continually patrol the square before the jokhang.

Lecture Online

2010-07-14T08:24:00.001-07:00

Hamburg University has made the talk I gave on Hierarchy and Gender in Buddhist Monasticism available online. In case your absence last night was not an indication of lack of interest, you can listen to the talk here

or go straight to the mp3 file here.

vegetarians in bhutan

2010-07-08T00:35:00.000-07:00

my friend ariana, with whom i had the joy of sharing a birthday lunch with on my five-hour stopover in kathmandu last tuesday, has posted an interesting reflection on vegetarianism in bhutan.

read it here.

not in india

2010-07-02T08:18:00.000-07:00

nearly every one of my four years in india has included some travel outside the country, and this is no exception. the next stop on a fairly whirlwind tour (five countries four continents, two months) will be germany, where i'll be giving a talk at hamburg university on "hierarchy and gender in buddhist monasticism," and enjoying both the company of my friend Bhikshuni Jampa Tsedroen and an intense few weeks translating the stories about they very first bhikshunis as a visiting scholar at the university's center for buddhist studies.

here's the abstract for the talk:

The nature of Buddhist social organizations has been a topic of great debate and often of grave misunderstanding. Focusing on Buddhist responses to caste, many observers have found cause to celebrate Buddhism as promoting an egalitarian social order. However, even a cursory examination of Buddhist monasticism makes it clear that hierarchy itself is not discarded outright as an ordering principle. This talk draws on narratives from the Mūlasarvāstivādavinaya (MSV) that depict the life of the early Buddhist order, to explore the ways hierarchy is deployed within Buddhist monasticism, as a means of organizing social institutions but also as an integral part of personal training. Since gender is the single most important determinant of location within Buddhist monastic hierarchies—literally dividing Buddhist monastics into two distinct orders—this paper most directly addresses the hierarchical relation between men and women, or monks and nuns.

To that end, this talk will first describe the particular constructions of gender displayed in the MSV’s narratives. What we note is that Buddhist monasticism’s interventions in prevailing constructions of female gender benefited women greatly, yet mainstream constructions repeatedly re-inscribed themselves on Buddhist nuns’ lives and institutions. This talk will then explore moments of parity between the male and female monastic orders, along with the hierarchy that generally prevails between them. Finally, it will argue that the hierarchical relationship between the monks and nuns’ orders is characterized not by unidirectional dominance of one over the other, but by asymmetrical reciprocity, with each encouraged to offer different forms of care to the other. I will conclude with some observations as to the implications of these care-taking responsibilities on the current debate on bhikṣuṇī ordination within the Mūlasarvāstivāda monastic code that is followed by Tibetan Buddhists.

for more details, see this pdf or the department's website.

a string of pearls

2010-03-20T07:56:00.001-07:00

Back in Dharamsala, back to the rhythm of days lived inside texts and out, the two complementing each other better than ever. Among the several texts whose worlds I've had the great fortunate and true joy of spending time in recently is Je Gampopa's Dharma for the Community: A String of Pearls. This text records a series of teachings given by Gampopa in the 12th century in Tibet to a large gathering of disciples of various levels. Because it is not a literary composition but the record of oral discourses, it is a rare opportunity to connect quite directly with the voice and personal teaching style of this great master. The main disciple of Milarepa, Gampopa combined the Kadampa lineage of teachings - characterized by a focus on renunciation and compassion, and a flair for pith communication that cuts straight to the heart like an arrow - and the Mahamudra teachings so rich in meditative techniques and emphasizing a ritual-free spontaneous presence of awareness. A physician who lost his children and wife when all his medical knowledge could not save them from a local epidemic, Gampopa brought his own personal intensity of practice to the integration of these two lines of transmission, and founded the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism.

I share below just one of the many passages from this magnificent text that have stopped me in my tracks as I translate:

To awaken to buddhahood, in the beginning you need a wish to work for the aims of sentient beings. To awaken to buddhahood, in the middle you need to work for the aims of sentient beings. In the end, once you have awakened to buddhahood, there is nothing but working for the aims of sentient beings.

སངས་རྒྱ་བར་བྱེད་པ་ལ་དང་པོ་ཡང་སེམས་ཅན་གྱི་དོན་བྱེད་པར་འདོད་པ་ཅིག་དགོས། བར་དུ་ཡང་སངས་རྒྱ་བ་ལ་སེམས་ཅན་གྱི་དོན་བྱེད་པ་ཅིག་དགོས། ཐ་མ་ཡང་སངས་རྒྱས་ནས་སེམས་ཅན་གྱི་དོན་ལས་བྱར་མེད་པའོ།

Drinking Fully of the Dharma

2009-12-18T16:54:00.000-08:00

Starting tomorrow, and continuing until the 22nd of December, HH Gyalwang Karmapa will be teaching on Nagarjuna's Letter to a Friend. These teachings, aimed especially at His Holiness' Western and students, will be webcast live, and we invite you to take your seats alongside us, virtually, and share with us the experience of receiving the Dharma directly from this exceptional spiritual teacher.

If the time difference allows you to watch during the Indian hours of 9-11 am and 3-5 pm, you will find the webcast at this site: http://www.kagyumonlam.tv/ As a guide to the time differences, these Indian hours coincide with 10:30 pm to 12:30 am and 4:30 am to 6:30 am in New York (and please pardon the east coast bias!)

His Holiness recently commented that he had chosen this text to teach on because :it was the custom in ancient India that, as soon as someone took the five refuge precepts, they would memorize this text. Nagarjuna’s Letter to a Friend was written for a king, with laypeople primarily in mind. Hence, it is very helpful in that it addresses the conduct of laypeople, explaining how they should behave in their day-to-day lives."

Should you decide to join us, we offer this summary of advice on how to listen to Dharma teachings, from the deeply moving talk His Holiness gave last week to a large gathering of monastics attending the winter debate session here in Bodhgaya. It is excerpted from the daily report we are preparing and that you can also find on the Kagyu office and Kagyu monlam websites.

Describing the way to receive Dharma teachings, His Holiness took up the image of a vessel free of the three faults—of having holes in it, being dirty or being placed upside down. He managed to take this analogy, well known to many Dharma practitioners, and make it come suddenly alive and replete with new meaning—another characteristic feature of his teaching style. His Holiness assigned the audience the task of examining for themselves whether their minds were worthy recipients for the pure Dharma. We ourselves must take steps to ensure that our minds are suitable vessels to hold the Dharma, he said. We must actively work to remove any stains in our minds, and see to it that our minds are sound, and held upright to receive and retain the Dharma offered.

Going to attend the teachings of a high lama casually, as if we were going to an ordinary, everyday event, is a sign we are not properly valuing the Dharma. Nor is it adequate to simply sit, nonchalantly extending our plate for whatever might be dished onto it, His Holiness said. Instead, we should go to teachings with a deep hunger, and eagerly hold up the empty bowl of our minds to receive the nectar of the pure Dharma.

october brings change

2009-11-20T08:15:00.001-08:00

The month of October brought many shifts to the quiet routine that had been established in our monastic community. I returned from my long stay in the States, PhD at long last complete and very much ready to move forward to life beside my Dharma sisters in India. The four of us renewed the bonds of affection that connect us, exchanging tales of our time apart and drinking deeply of the joy of the spiritual life that we share as women on this monastic path.

Here are a few snippets from our community blog, which henceforth will be the main site for new updates...

Within days of returning, any hopes of resting after the long and intense period of writing and defending my dissertation were dashed, as a series of translation jobs came tumbling in, one after the other. While I stayed at home working on texts to be used during the upcoming Kagyu Monlam prayer festival in Bodhgaya, the other nuns had the great privilege of attending teaching after teaching by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in his home monastery in Dharamsala...

This month we also had the opportunity to meet privately with the Gyalwang Karmapa, our spiritual guide, reporting to him on our activities over the past months, and seeking his counsel for what lies ahead. In particular, we presented our aspirations for a study program that would meet our needs as Westerners in whom Buddhism needs to be actively inculcated. As we articulated our wish for a program that could combine the best of Western pedagogy and more traditional Tibetan methods of transmitting knowledge. His Holiness responded to our request by expressing his own strong interest in developing such a program, and we now plan to work to have a working curriculum in place for when Dapel, Nangpel and Drolma return from their study program in Nepal.

Later in the month, a solemn ceremony was held down the road from our house to formally release a biography of His Holiness the Dalai Lama that had been long in the making. With HHDL himself in attendance, His Holiness the Gyalwang Karmapa officiated at the proceedings, with a multitude of Tibetans gathering to express their deep appreciation for the Dalai Lama’s extensive activities. The ceremony took place close on the heels of a series of executions of Tibetan protesters by the Chinese government, and at the close of the ceremony, His Holiness the Dalai Lama commented that prayers are stronger when made on the basis of a shared relationship with the one for whom we are praying – such as family relationships, relationships that come from sharing experiences or belongings, or the relationships that link spiritual teachers and disciples. Therefore, His Holiness said, it would be good for us to pray together for those who have been executed, and for happiness and peace throughout the world. Seated before these two exceptional beings, joining them and the rest of the Tibetan community in prayers, it hit home just how exceptional it is to have a culture fundamentally saturated with the wish to ease the suffering of others, and headed by leaders whose own commitment to the well-being of others is unequivocal. Even if those aspirations prove challenging to implement or even sustain, simply setting them at the notional center of a society is already a great deal.

Read more on our activities for this month here.

in 350 words or less

2009-10-18T02:57:00.000-07:00

since i left for india shortly after the phd defense, my friend sangeeta did the honors (and considerably gnarly administrative chore) of taking the final copy for final review and depositing it in the library in madison, thereby officially ending my time as a grad student. my degree was granted on friday, october 16, and a new life has begun.

i know over the years, a few people have asked and if anyone is interested in actually reading it, let me know now and i can send a pdf copy. for those with some interest but no time to wade through 455 pages, here is the 350-words-or-less version i was required to produce as part of the finalizing of the degree:

Abstract

This dissertation explores the ethics that Buddha and his monastic followers practiced, as imagined in the narrative world of the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya (MSV). The MSV is a multi-volume canonical text that has governed various Indian and Tibetan Buddhist monastic communities for nearly two millennia, and it is also hailed as a masterpiece of Sanskrit literature. Through close readings of the MSV’s many narratives, this dissertation is principally concerned to understand in what ways and to what extent its ethics is gendered.

The MSV regulates historical monastic communities, often addressing those communities through narratives. The text thus demands reading practices that reflect its status as both authoritative and multivocal. Deploying such practices, we note that Buddha’s practice of ethics in the MSV is marked by an intense attentiveness to human particularity and difference. In the ethics of the MSV, many features combine to constitute a person: caste, family, gender and other markers of social location, their relationships with particular others, as well as individual disposition and karma. Within Buddhist monasticism, gender emerges as one of the single most important determinants of social location and personal identity, profoundly impacting what is and is not possible for persons at any given moment. Buddhist monasticism’s interventions in prevailing constructions of female gender benefited women greatly, even though those mainstream constructions repeatedly re-inscribed themselves on monastic women’s lives, bodies and institutions.

With its intense focus on the body as a site for ethical cultivation, Buddhist monasticism offers women an alternate model of female embodiment. When gender is institutionalized within monastic communities, we note moments of parity between the male and female monastic orders, along with the hierarchy that generally prevails between them. The hierarchical relationship between the monks and nuns’ orders is characterized by asymmetrical reciprocity, with each encouraged to offer different forms of care to the other.

Throughout, the dissertation assesses the constructions of gender imagined in the MSV’s narratives, asking to what degree and in what ways Buddhist monasticism succeeds or fails to enable women to engage in the work of self-fashioning that is its overall ethical project.

over the edge

2009-09-25T22:32:00.000-07:00

a dissertation entitled:

"For the Sake of Women, Too":
Ethics and Gender in the Narratives of the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya

was successfully defended and signed off on at 3pm today, as you can see.

(please forgive the brevity of this post. i'm fresh out of words at the moment!)

on the brink of dissertation

2009-09-22T21:54:00.000-07:00

friday, september 25.

1pm to 3 pm, madison, wisconsin time, in a room on campus i recall most vividly for its lack of air, i will take a seat before the five professors who make up my doctoral committee.

it will be time to defend my thesis.

first you submit, then you defend.

2009-09-10T00:54:00.000-07:00

i submitted my completed thesis to my doctoral review committee a week ago, and in just over two weeks have my formal defense.

academia really is a pretty curious beast. although we may be familiar enough with them that they seem quite natural, academic practices, rituals and language are easily as odd as the tibetan buddhist rituals that are often branded as bizarre, or more generously perhaps, exotic. one clear example of this is the very process of completing the phd requirements. in the humanities at least, one usually thinks of a phd as consisting of some years of formal study, a year or so spent researching something or other, followed by a final period - a year or two usually - spent writing up the actual dissertation thesis. but this overlooks the very last, and very combative, portion of the process: submission and defense. the odd thing, certainly odd in military terms at least, is that first you submit and then you defend. this is not merely a question of odd use of language. like two animals positioning themselves to determine which will be alpha, there is a carving out of territory, a series of challenges, displays of [here, intellectual] power, and throughout, a process of submitting to a known genre of authority marking and making. in the end, the grad student leaves their dissertation thesis in the ring and withdraws, to allow the committee their time to see what they make of the offering. meanwhile, the process of defending the doctoral theses is the culmination of years of study and research, and, for many graduate students, months or years of nail-biting and teeth-gnashing during the write-up stage. yet given how tightly defined most thesis topics are, and given the strong preference for students to undertake research on topics or questions no one else has explored before, or in the same way, by the time phd candidate have completed the writing of the thesis, in many cases literally no one else in academia knows as much as the phd candidate on their topic.

yet first you submit. and if my doctoral defense is anything like my masters defense, i fully expect that the next entry i post here will be a report of my survival of the encounter, and perhaps even a display of the wounds i sustained in attaining the right to print three tiny letters after my name - a right in all likelihood i will not exercise.

news from the front

2009-08-31T16:18:00.000-07:00

this photo depicts the mountains visible from redlands, the southern californian town i am writing from. over these past two months i have been in semi-retreat writing here, no doubt all sorts of difficult situations and painful experiences have taken place in the world outside this house. but until they penetrate this self-induced bubble, they remain vague 'suffering and causes of suffering.' even now, when serious disaster nears, my head somehow must remain firmly turned to my screen and on that screen Word and not an internet browser must be open.

in the past few months i have written five chapters, and now have the conclusions left. my deadline for handing this to my phd committee is friday, which means thursday afternoon must be spent at kinkos making copies to send them overnight. this is excellent news. except that having offered all the mental and physical energy i had over the past two months, i am running low. and it is 109 degrees, the AC has chosen this summer to become in operative, which has actually been largely manageable because being near the desert, temperatures drop dramatically at night and a well-shaded house like this can be kept fairly cool in the days as long as it gets well cooled at night. but ... at the moment we cannot open the windows at night to let the house cool down because forest fires are devouring the nearby hills. here and in a number of other fires raging across southern california, thousands of home have been evacuated, and already two forest-fighters have given their lives. a crew of prison inmates was enlisted in the struggle to bring this raging force of nature under control, and when the fire began to engulf their campsite, the two firefighters who fell had been trying to find a safe route out for them. one of the two leaves a wife pregnant with their first child, due to be born in the next few weeks. some people refuse to evacuate, thinking they can defend their homes or wait it out, but by the time they are willing to be rescued, the towering flames of fire make it impossible to reach them. men die, children are orphaned, countless animals will be trapped in flames, humans become homeless and fearful for their lives' investments and shelters and dreams. all this only comes to my attention because the air we invisibly share has become dangerous to breathe. so the windows stay shut at night, leaving the house no chance to release its heat out into the night air, and so this house is indirectly warmed by the fire.

today for literally the first time in weeks, i left our yard and looked out and up at the mountains. i last paid them any attention when i was selecting a photo to upload on a past blog entry, in the early phase of this writing. though obviously they have been there this whole time, until they burst into flames their presence appeared utterly irrelevant, one of the million background details our brain processes and doesn't bother us about because it does not matter. we can focus on our little corner of the large world as narrowly as we like, it seems, and even if we can lose sight of it at times, our connectedness to it does not disappear. not even for a moment.

one small bump from china...

2009-08-17T21:29:00.000-07:00

chinese authorities apparently permitted the wide publication of an article advocating taking steps towards the break-up of india. echoing darkly the rhetoric used to justify its invasion and occupation of tibet, the article points to india's tremendous internal diversity as evidence that "the 'so-called' Indian nation cannot be considered as one having existed in history."

a china-centered asia would be so much better for everyone involved, the chinese authors of the article concluded.

from an english summary of that article: Adding that Hinduism is a decadent religion as it allows caste exploitation and is unhelpful to the country's modernisation, it described the Indian government as one in a dilemma with regard to eradication of the caste system as it realises that the process to do away with castes may shake the foundation of the consciousness of the Indian nation.

The writer has argued that in view of the above, China in its own interest and the progress of Asia, should join forces with different nationalities like the Assamese, Tamils, and Kashmiris and support the latter in establishing independent nation-States of their own, out of India. In particular, the ULFA (United Liberation Front of Asom) in Assam, a territory neighboring China, can be helped by China so that Assam realises its national independence.

continue reading the rest of the article.

for those who read chinese,here is the original article. (the connection is sporadic)
h

chapter headings

2009-08-08T22:28:00.000-07:00

as i now near the close of the fifth and final chapter of my dissertation, i thought i'd share some quotes that i am placing at the beginning of each chapter, as an epigraph. each chapter itself in part constitutes a sort of reflection on the epigraph, so i will not try to comment on them here. with the exception of the first - a tibetan proverb - the rest all come from the mulasarvastivada vinaya.

"scriptural texts are like soft clay."

"Venerable Nandaka thought, 'Women have little wisdom,' and thinking that, he taught the Dharma [to a group of bhikṣuṇīs] with meanings, sentences and words that were abridged. Because they were wise, they asked him progressively difficult questions, to which Venerable Nandaka replied."

"In saṃsāra, without needing to direct efforts to it,
A body is extremely easy to attain.
In ten thousand million eons,
A worthy place to offer it is extremely hard to attain."
- Mahāsenā, after she had cut out a piece of her thigh to make a medicinal broth for an ailing bhikṣu. (Buddha compares her act to his own deeds as a bodhisattva, and then immediately thereafter bans monks from accepting human meat!)

"All girls are material to be sold by their parents; if my arm or legs are broken by my jumping up or falling down, who will ask for me? Instead, my whole life I would surely become something my parents had to take care of."
- Viśākhā, a young unmarried girl explains why she does not hop and skip like her friends.

"Dharmadattā said to her retinue, 'Sisters, the fact that the Lord has permitted bhikṣuṇīs to go forth, take full ordination and engage in bhikṣuṇīhood: This is all due to Mahāprajāpatī Gautamī.'"

can i go to india to become a buddha?

2009-07-12T22:30:00.000-07:00

settled well in to dissertation writing here in my hideout in southern california (in the town from which this photo here was taken). my hosts have a four-year-old daughter, for whom my robes, shaved head and life in general are a source of ongoing fascination. my first day here, unsolicited and out of the blue, she looked at me quietly for a moment and said, "i want to go to india to become a buddha. can i go to india and become a buddha?" this, despite the fact that i had told her nothing of life in india, and certainly nothing of buddhist theories of enlightenment.

she later peppered me with other questions - are there little girls like her in india with those kind of clothes, indicating my robes? do they go to school? would she have to cut off her hair?

i told her she could definitely become a buddha if she wanted to, but maybe better to try when she was a little bigger... what i did not say, but might have, was that i too want to go to india to see about becoming a buddha, but first have to finish this dissertation ...

and a little PS for anyone wondering, southern california is indeed rather warm in the summer.

saying my reluctant goodbyes

2009-06-11T22:31:00.001-07:00

it is a bit more than three years since i first came to india for what was to have been a year of dissertation research. this extended period in 'the field' has been fruitful beyond what i could have imagined when it began, and has been fruitful in unanticipated ways.

these fruits grew slowly, in gardens that were initially harsh and sometimes lonely, but always lush in their rewards: reading vinaya narratives in sanskrit five to six hours a day, month after month, in visakhapatnam with the magnificent prabhakara shastri garu whose kindness to me far outweighs his not inconsiderable gruffness. later, reading in tibetan with lobsang norbu shastri, tashi tsering and geshe rinchen ngodrub in dharamsala and in varanasi with shrikant bahulkar-ji; their erudition, humility and gentleness of spirit were a rare and deeply inspiring combination. what i received from them are not small gifts.

i do not think it an exaggeration to say that i really learnt sanskrit and tibetan during this time in india, although on the day i first landed here, i had already completed five years of sanskrit and some eight years of tibetan language study. some years ago i attended a summer seminar in sanskrit regional literatures in jerusalem, led by some of the finest western scholars of sanskrit literature, and at that time i became aware that those scholars whose depth of knowledge of sanskrit culture and language most inspired my respect and admiration had all spent long periods of time reading in india with indian pandits and scholars. most had been years in completing their dissertations. on some partly-conscious level, their example was a partial inspiration for my willingness to open up this large swathe of time to read in india. that example itself was a gift i have savored slowly over these three years.

these years themselves were funded by grants from fulbright, american institute of indian studies and woodrow wilson foundations. truly, their support has been no small gift.

during the past two years, two dear dharma sisters from mexico came at different points to stay with me, and each received her ordination vows during that time. these are great, great gifts.

however, perhaps the greatest gift of all was the bond discovered and deepened during these three years with my lama, his holiness the 17th karmapa. within days of my arrival in sarnath in 2006 for this research period, his holiness happened to turn up in sarnath as well. although i had already met his holiness in 2000, when he first arrived in dharamsala from tibet, this time he gave a short talk for western students that overwhelmingly alerted me to his depth as a teacher. a month later i found myself in a private audience translating his talks into spanish for a group of pilgrims from puerto rico and mexico. in the three years since, those auspicious beginnings have ripened in many ways, too many to even begin to document here.

although my connection to his holiness is without doubt the towering centerpiece of the luxuriant and generous garden that has taken shape through my time in india, alongside that steady and protective presence there now grows the nuns' community i have so long yearned to be part of. my two dear mexican dharma sisters opted to remain in india and a fourth nun has joined us, and somehow together we have found the conditions for a harmonious and joyful monastic life.

i leave india now, to finish the phd requirements that led me here in the first place. but many seeds have been planted, and are being nurtured beautifully by the warm, moist compassion of this lama and of our community's commitment and care for one another. a new research project awaits me here as well - but that is a whole other story, and perhaps an other blog. so just as soon as the dissertation is done and defended, i will be back. i will return to share with my dharma sisters the fruits of life in monastic community, and to explore whatever other opportunities to grow and serve together might happen to crop up.

until that hopeful day of return, i will let our community blog speak for me. what words may find their way onto this site in the future, we shall have to wait and see.

to read more, follow this link.

* first photo in this entry taken in sarnath in 2007, where this dazzling time in india began, second during teachings by hh karmapa at root institute in bodhgaya in 2008, and third at our home in dharamsala in 2009.

bound for sherabling

2009-04-15T08:44:00.000-07:00

my time left in india can be counted now in weeks, but one of those weeks - or eight days, to be precise - will be spent in sherabling monastery, translating teachings on mahamudra from tai situ rinpoche for a group of spanish-speakers from a dharma center in barcelona. i had the great fortune of translating for them last year rather unexpectedly after the translator they had arranged was unable to come, and we made warm and lasting connections with one another. as you read this, i will be reconnecting with my dear catalunyan friends, and offline altogether until at least april 23.

photo above was taken at last year's transmission, and is posted here courtesy of www.palpung.org. i am that fuzzy little figure in the bottom right corner!

provisioning for life in india

2009-04-09T05:02:00.000-07:00

my friend beata just left for london after a week of intense (and joyful) work here on a polish translation of the prayers used in the annual kagyu monlam prayer festival. beata left, but hopefully not for too long, as she hopes to return to complete this rather hefty project before the upcoming monlam. i too will be bringing this 'year' in india to a close soon, for an intensive dissertation-writing period in a semi-retreat in the states. so it seems to be a time for departures and aspirations to return.

in the time we spent together here, somehow she left without going over as we had planned some suggestions for things to bring from europe for life in india. i am sharing here a list i compiled for another friend who came to india for a long term stay my first year here, so it is oriented towards a stay in sarnath where i then lived. it is also much more cautious and thorough than i would be now if provisioning anew, but these are all things i use regularly. i also add some comments here and there to reflect life in dharamsala - better power supply, greater extremes in weather.

i would also like to request those of you who have spent time here in india to add your observations and suggestions, so we can co-create a sort of open resource for those bound for india long term.

Lighting - Bring some flashlights, because of the frequent power outages. I got one called a Petzl headlamp that you put on your head and then wherever you look, it lights there. I can read and study with it. Others bring ones yo ucan stand up that light the whole room. You will also want another small one to hold by hand and take with you when you are out walking. Street lights are a rare commodity here.

Mosquito net. It is hard to even sleep without one in Sarnath at times, and they are sometimes hard to find here and always of lesser quality than is readily found in the States or Europe. Best to get one that only needs to be hung from one string,usually called Spider style I think. I got one for about $10 from ebay. It works fine.

Rope and clothespins - It is helpful to have some nylon cord and a few plastic clothespin so you can hang your clothes to dry inside during the monsoon. You will also need the cord for the mosquito net. You can get both rope and clothespin here, but again it takes some running around, and you may have some already that you can just bring.

Locks. Bring a good padlock to put on your door. Your computer will be pretty much irreplaceable here, even with everything extensively backed up. I have seen people take a crowbar and open the Indian locks when they had lost their key. You can buy locks here but it is hard to find good quality ones with multiple locks (I live now in a community of four, and we had to wait for a trip to Delhi to find a lock that had more than three keys). Good combination locks are helpful too if you share spaces. A lock with a chain is also good for train rides, so you can chain down your bags. Luggage is routinely stolen from train compartments., especially if you travel sleeper class. A friend of mine found a bookbag that can be locked to anything in your room, and cannot be slashed open. Very handy to have, especially for train rides and staying in dodgy hotels! It is called Pacsafe and you can find it online. Just Google 'Pacsafe.' Again kind of expensive and perhaps overkill, but a lot less than replacing your valuables.

Umbrella. A good raincoat or sturdy umbrella is a good idea. Think monsoon. The ones you get here have very short lifespans. One good gust and they can turn inside out on you, and during the monsoon there are many excellent gusts.

Pens - Nice pens make good gifts. Boxed or unboxed.

Battery recharger. If you have time in Delhi, I suggest getting a battery recharger so you can recharge AA batteries. The batteries you buy in India seem to get used up in a few hours, and there is nowhere to deposit your used batteries where they will be recycled responsibly, so bringing many batteries from abroad is not a great solution either!

Vitamins. Staying healthy is a bit of a challenge. Bring vitamins - especially B- complex and other supplements specifically recommended for vegetarians (assuming you are vegetarian). But I particularly urge you to bring one of the acidopholus-type supplements that basically allow your stomach to stay healthy, by replacing the healthy intenstinal flora. I took it regularly my first two years here and had virtually no stomach problems. Here is the one I use, Jarro-Dophilus. If you bring echinacea, you may also have moments of great self-gratitude.

Water purifier. I am using my own water purifier, and think that it has been an important condition for my staying as healthy as I have. MSR or Katadyn are reliable brands. You will also need to buy and bring along replacement cartridges. I only found I needed to replace the cartridge every 9 months or so, but I proba bly do not drink as much water as I should. This might seem expensive, but so is buying water - even at 12 rupees a liter, that is about $15 a month! Apart from the expense, when you note that most plastics are disposed of here by burning or being tossed into landfill, it is a bit horrifying to think what imprint you leave behind in a year of drinking form water bottles. Boiling is not enough to purify the strains of water-borne diseases here. Here is the one I use. Best prices in the US are at www.campmor.com. You can also get flashlights here.

Abode Acrobat or other pdf creator. I had a lot of difficulty printing files in Sarnath. Not all computer places had USB ports, and the one near my room that did not even have Word! Even if you find one with Word etc they are unlikely to have the fonts you use if you work in other languages. They usually do have Abode reader, so the only way I could print was by saving files as pdf files and then printing them like that. So if you don't already, you might want to install a pdf file generator loaded on your computer.

ATM card. If possible, make sure your ATM card does not expire during the time you expect to be in India. You can call and ask them to send one with a longer expiration date if you explain the situation. There is an ATM even in Sarnath these days, and that is by far the easiest way to access your overseas account. and also gives by far the best exchange rate. Some travelers checks and cash are fine to start with, but mainly you can get cash from the ATM every few months as needed.

mp3 recorder. For those coming ot India for research, I highly recommend a small mp3 recorder for when you read with people, especially if you do so in Tibetan or other language of which you are not a native speaker. Also for Dharma practitioners, it is wonderful to be able to record teachings to review later. I got one from iriver (www.iriver.com) with 1GB memory that holds 50 hours and runs on a single AA battery.

Memory sticks (USB sticks). For file transfer and as backup. Get two, the more memory, the better. I had one wiped out when trying to download files another student sent me. (Many computer shops here do not have good virus protection.)

Vegan Sandals. Although you can easily get plastic sandals here too, if you have them, you might want to bring any waterproof sandals (ie not leather), so you can rinse them when they get dirty, which is constantly, and also for all those times when you get caught in the rain. Crocs work will in this climate, and if you have time in Delhi they can be bought there for much less than in the West.

Checkups before you go. If you have insurance, get your teeth checked and ask for a complete checkup soon, so you can take care of anything they might find. Tell them you will be in India for a year, and ask them to do your blood work. It is a very bad idea to arrive here with your health impaired in any way. (That said, now in my third year here I finally found a really solid health clinic and dentist in Delhi that can do excellent overall checkups and medical care. But it will mean a trip (and stay) in Delhi. Here is the number of the dentist 011 26152999 and I will try to dig up contact details for the clinic and add it later to this post:

If you wear glasses, you should bring along a copy of the prescription for your glasses, in case they get lost or if you want to make some new ones quickly here. Glasses are cheap to make here but personally I think you might get a more thorough eye exam in the States. (I think I may have related once the story of my appointment with an ophthalmologist in Visakhapatnam whom I found, when I entered his examining room, reading a large illustrated book entitled 'The Eye'. (I had to travel twice some distance to make and then get the appointment, and it is a sign of the state of indifference that I reached after a year here that I went ahead with the appointment. and even as I type here I am peering at the monitor through the lenses he prescribed for me. I should point out that he was not holding the book upside down; I am sure I would have gone elsewhere if he had been.)

Some basic medicine. When I was staying with my Sanskrit teacher in South India, he and his wife both fell sick from colds, and were really delighted to have some cold medicine. In fact, they used all my supply in the matter of two weeks. So when thinking about what to bring, though you might prefer not to take it, it is good to have even to share with others. If there is anything you use, for colds, or headache or stomach upset or anything, definitely bring it with you. The quality here of medicine can be iffy (and in any case meds are seldom stored in refrigerators and even if they are, the electricity supply will be uneven.) Herbal cough drops are very good to have, as our throats seem to get irritated easily by the dust and pollution. It is good also to just have one hand a basic antiseptic cream for cuts. Infections happen easily in this climate.

My friend tsultrim-la adds these excellent suggestions and her explanations why:

earplugs. countless nights of sleep saved due to them and at times i had to wear them continuously for weeks, depending on where i was staying.

ginger tablets for travel sickness. even if you don't usually get car sick in the west, i found the roads (and driving!) in india are usually another story.

fifty years

2009-03-09T09:09:00.000-07:00

tomorrow is the fiftieth anniversary of the lhasa uprising, a day when tibetans' efforts to protect his holiness the dalai lama from perceived threats to his life by chinese communist army officials rapidly turned to bloodshed. the dalai lama had been summoned invitation to a 'theatrical performance' at the headquarters of the chinese army encamped outside lhasa, a performance to which his bodyguards and other escorts were specifically not invited. perceiving this as a thinly veiled attempt to imprison their beloved spiritual leaders. thousands of tibetans (by some accounts as many as 300,000) began camping around the grounds of his residence, offering their physical presence as a sort of human wall to encircle and protect him. chinese soldiers swiftly moved into position, with artillery placed in range of the dalai lama's residence. the bloodshed began soon thereafter. although he himself had escaped for the long and perilous trek into exile in india at night, 800 shells struck the dalai lama's residence. within a week, some 86,000 tibetans lost their life, and all tibetans had lost their country, their self-determination and their spiritual, moral and political leader.

this is why there was no new year this year. and it is why, after 50 years of occupation, some tibetans have taken drastic steps that move far beyond the main path of non-violent resistance, including an instance of self-immolation that has shocked all the tibetans i have heard speak of it (always in hushed tones). [technically, the attempt at self-immolation failed because chinese soldiers shot and killed him before the flames could end his life.]

it is also why this morning, at the temple of his holiness the dalai lama here in dharamsala, many many people gathered to pray for the long life of his holiness the dalai lama, and it is also why, at the same event, the oracle who is consulted on crucial moments on matters of import to the entire tibetan people was called out and entered trance in public. at a highly charged public event, his holiness the dalai lama held the oracle's medium by one arm while his holiness the karmapa held the other, as the oracle pronounced on the future of tibet at this critical juncture. the prognosis and advice indicated by the oracle were not made public.

but what was very much on public display was the intimate connection between these two leaders of tibetan buddhism, his holiness the dalai lama and his holiness the karmapa. to indicate the extra-ordinary trance state in which the oracle's medium has entered, a massively heavy hat is placed on his head. although while in trance he is able to bear the weight, once the trance ends, his head must be sustained lest his neck break. the sight of the two 'his holinesses' literally sharing the burden of the future of tibet serves as a vivid indication of the role that lies ahead for his holiness the karmapa.

equally clear is this video, in which his holiness the dalai lama tells his holiness the karmapa that he expects him to carry on his responsibilities once he is gone. hh karmapa's response makes it clear he has an idea just what that might mean.

a great deal could be said about the complexities involved in a spiritual leader's accepting a basically political role as leader of a people. but tibetans look to those they consider their moral authorities to set the course for them, and tibetan buddhist leaders consider it their responsibility to offer any guidance and assistance they can to those who ask.

in any case, it seems separation of church and state may be a luxury that those without a state can ill afford.

news flash

2009-03-08T09:55:00.000-07:00

Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times.

that is literally the headline of this ny times article.

oh dear.

raising the world

2009-03-03T02:52:00.000-08:00

listening this morning again to teachings that were given by his holiness the karmapa in bodhgaya... this series of teachings was given specifically for western students this past january while i was in bodhgaya, and i was swept up in a rather strange confluence of conditions - not least of which was the presence of 60 poles hungry for dharma teachings but quite a few lacking enough english language to follow the teachings. anyway somehow i ended up co-translating the teachings into polish with my friend and dharma sister beata stepień. although i had been quite fluent when living in poland in the mid-80s, polish is not exactly a language i use daily. after a year of living with spanish as a daily language, sharing as home as i do with two mexicans, attempting to translate simultaneously from tibetan - a language i am struggling to become fluent in, into a language that was struggling to arise from the murky depths of my linguistic memory made for a very disorienting cognitive experience. as i translated the words seemed to be skipping over the english part of my brain - the part where most actual thought takes place, and much of the meaning also seemed to have leapt over with the words. so there was much new to be heard when listening now a second time.

one bit of advice that his holiness offered for parents with a commitment to a spiritual practice struck me as potentially useful to … well, to people with children. in a style that i am coming to recognizing as vintage hh karmapa, the advice he gave is deeply buddhist in one sense, but potentially relevant to virtually any spiritual practitioner.

in short, his advice is to raise your children in a loving way, with the thought that you are doing so in order that they come to be of benefit to the world.

simple, right? in fact, it may sound so simple that one fails to see how much effort it will take to really live by - or how transformative it might really be if one is able to do so.

actually, his holiness cautioned, to do so as a spiritual practice, one will have to make a deliberate point of bringing this wider purpose to mind, again and again. the objective has to be made clear, as if one were setting a policy for oneself. otherwise one can end up being vague and inconsistent about what exactly one is doing in one's child-rearing. so when parents are engaged in any activity to care for and raise their children, they can intentionally cultivate the thought that they are seeking to give their child a good upbringing with the aim of making a contribution to the well-being of the larger society, and ultimately of all the world.

although he did not say so, it seems to me that this attitude shifts the emphasis from simply one's own offspring (or one's nieces and nephews, in my own experience), whom we can often end up treating as extensions of our own egos, to a vast and inclusive wish to contribute to well-being and goodness in the world at large. for most parents, it may not materially change their external behavior, but internally, it seems to me cultivating this vast intention could shift something subtle but important.

not having children, it is hard to say how this might work, and i would be extremely interested to hear from anyone who experiments with this practice. but i will say, i have found his holiness' advice to be devastatingly powerful, if put into practice.

anyway, for those parents inclined to read advice on child-rearing posted on a nun's blog, there you go!

...photo is taken during those teachings. beata is the one looking happy to my right, i'm the one beside her straining to hold her brain's language centers together.

soe lhatson and bhumo

2009-02-24T08:01:00.000-08:00

the house i share with three other westerners in dharamsala shares a wall with drolmaling nunnery, a tibetan nunnery with 200 nuns in residence and undergoing a 15-year intensive training program in buddhist philosophy and debate. among the nunneries built in exile, drolmaling was designated as one of the nunneries for tibetan nuns who had been imprisoned as political prisoners - nearly all for having taken part in peaceful protests asking for greater religious as well as political freedom for tibet. it was thought best for their healing process that such nuns should make their homes in nunneries with others who shared that particularly traumatic experience.

while sitting across the wall from this community, this morning i read online a short item from the ny times mentioning the sentencing of two tibetan nuns to 9 and 10 years for participating in the protests that were taking place all across tibet last spring.

i quote the item here in full. somehow i found the matter of fact tone of the piece somehow highlights the sinister quality of the devastating facts it reports.

Four Tibetans in Sichuan Province have been sentenced to prison for taking part in protests last spring, according to a Tibetan advocacy group. Two are nuns from the Pangri Na convent in Garze County: Soe Lhatson, 35, sentenced to 10 years in prison, and Bhumo, 36, sentenced to 9 years, said the group, Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy. They were among 55 nuns arrested after a protest on May 14, the group said. Two other people were sentenced to three years each for taking part in a protest on March 18, also in Garze.

it bears mentioning that pangri-na nunnery houses a total of 80 nuns. it is thus clear that the nuns had decided as a community to offer their bodies and voices collectively. only a dozen or so nuns who had been committed to do prayers for families in that area had been absent from the protest. after the arrests, chinese police raided the nunnery and those nuns who had not protested were reportedly "restrained with tied hands and detained for the whole day. Then their hands were untied and they were released after being held for one day, but still they are not allowed to leave the nunnery." they were later subject to 'education' sessions by chinese officials following the arrest of their sister nuns. the 50 - 55 nuns who were involved in the protest last year were reportedly beaten severely at the time. about 40 of them were held for six months and released and another 12 nuns from this monastic community in eastern tibet are still in prison. the 12 still under arrest are said to be leaders of the community.

his holiness the dalai lama mentions sometimes an ordinary tibetan monk he met and whom he asked he had ever been in danger during his years of imprisonment in tibet. this monk replied that indeed he had, and when his holiness asked him what danger, he said he had been at times in real danger of losing his compassion for his chinese jailers. since these two nuns are in their 30s, they may have had the years of buddhist practice needed to authentically adopt such an attitude towards their gaolers. but the total physical control that prison guards have over their wards in the prisons in tibet makes female prisoners - and somehow it seems especially nuns - particularly tempting targets for forms of victimization.

in the very best case, they will emerge in the years 2018 and 2019 with some inner humanity intact. if they still have the courage and resolve to make the long trek over the himalayas to escape to india - a trek that is particularly fraught for ex-political prisoners as if caught they know precisely where they will be sent back to, they might find homes in tibetan nunneries here. but unless they have exceptional resolve, these two, at least, will most likely be too old to begin the long and arduous training program here at drolmaling.

i am posting this message on february 25, the day of the tibetan new year. it may go some way towards explaining tibetans around the world do not find cause for reveling in the dawning of yet another year of this current situation.

soe lhatson and bhumo are just two of many, many other nuns in similar situations. but their names made it on to the public record, and so we have this modest chance to see them as individuals, recollect them, and connect with them in our minds as particular human beings, even once in a while over these long years ahead. their parents names too were published, so can include them too in our thoughts. soe lhatson's parents - no doubt afflicted terribly now by the news of their daughter's sentence - are yeshi gyaltsen (her father) and her mother is named drukdung. tenzin thinley and theymo are the father and mother of bhumo.

in the vast networks of possibility, soe lhatson and bhumo could become our neighbors, in a distant future too rosy for these two even to dare to dream of in their coming days, weeks, months and years of incarceration. whether their future brings them in our geographical direction or not, i want already to acknowledge our connectedness to them in a broader human sense. for our part, we four in this small across the wall from what could be their future home will be repeating their names from today on in our evening prayers, doing our best to accompany them in our own small way.

photo of a nun at drolmaling comes from their website

lhasa, guge, princeton, dharamsala, bodhgaya

2009-02-23T06:19:00.000-08:00

to remember a magical moment in bodhgaya last january with wen-shing - traveling companion from the tibet site seminar trip, neighbor from dharamsala and dear friend.

there will be no new year this year

2009-02-19T04:48:00.000-08:00

normally this time of year my tibetan neighbors here in dharamsala would be joyfully cooking, cleaning and beginning their rounds of friendly visits to share in welcoming the new year, which begins next wednesday according to the tibetan lunar calendar. and i would be preparing for a long hiatus from opportunities to study or read texts with my tibetan teachers. but this year, my teachers have told me it is fine to continue meeting to work together and for class next week. i do notice a good deal of the house-cleaning that accompanies this holiday, but otherwise, tibetans are not celebrating the new year this year. as they explain, it just would not be appropriate to adopt a festive tone when so many tibetans were killed this past year, and so many more are still captive in prison in tibet. from today's ny times article, it seems tibetans within tibet are under pressure from the chinese government authorities to put on their happy faces and go on with business - or holiday - as usual. most are unlikely to do so, by all accounts.

and here, tibetans in exile are free to celebrate or commemorate as they see fit. given the choice, the period is being marked with peace marches, hunger strikes and a general preference to honor the sacrifices made by those within tibet, rather than enjoy the taste of their own freedom in exile.

this upcoming year is particularly poignant for tibetans because it marks 50 years since their country was lost to them, with the invasion of communist forces in 1959. after 50 years of unswerving commitment to non-violence as the path to recovering their country, this path thus far has not yielded a single substantial concession from those who continue to occupy tibet and run it as if it were their own - which indeed it has effectively become. reflecting the lack of success of the earlier policy, his holiness the dalai lama urged tibetans to adopt a so-called 'middle way' path in which they relinquish their demands for independence for tibet and seek instead a more modest state of autonomy in which chinese remains formal dominion over tibet, but tibetans are granted autonomy in practice of religion, and follow their own internal policies - a bit like the relation of the 50 states to the federal government in the us. this too has been rejected wholesale by the chinese officials. in rueful acknowledgment of the lack of progress towards even these more modest goals, earlier this year tibetan refugees from around the world assembled to vote to decide if they would continue to respect the middle way path suggested by his holiness the dalai lama. the result of that vote was to affirm the collective tibetan determination to maintain non-violence as the cornerstone of their response to the chinese oppression within tibet, and to continue to wait for a softening of policies in china.

even the hunger strikes reflect the combined principles of fierce determination and gentle wisdom. those who refuse food and drink to express their solidarity with those in prison and to register their protest of the situation in tibet do not strike to the death. rather, people come and fast together for a few days, and then yield their place to others willing to make this symbolic sacrifice of their temporary well-being, but wise enough to do so without sacrificing their lives.

photo of tibetan nuns on hunger strike by getty images

like we were gods, but also human

2009-02-01T02:50:00.000-08:00

en route from sarnath to dharamsala, i stopped briefly in delhi for a talk about friendship at tushita meditation centre in delhi. while in town, i had lunch with my friend meena, a teacher at the american embassy school and visited her classroom. the embassy school, like the americam embassy across the street from it, is accessed only after the sort of security on might expect at an embassy site in a country plagued by terrorism that can be explicitly targeted at americans, as we saw recently in mumbai. after showing my passport at the guarded entrance, there was a repeated twilight-zone sense of having left india entirely. the entire school could have been lifted up from any american city and dropped piecemeal into the center of delhi, complete with its disaffected teenagers, their hip wardrobes and high-tech accessories. as meena and i - a teacher they knew and a buddhist nun they did not - strolled together across the campus, one thing i encountered that i would not expect in your random american high school were the frank looks - mixing curiosity and a quiet respectfulness - that we received from the students.

the school largely serves embassy offspring and the children of other expats. though it does accept local students, the annual fees of $20,000 - for a day school no less - makes it accessible only to the tiniest slice of local population. as it turns out, meena had taken her ninth graders to tushita some time back, and given them an opportunity to experience buddhist meditation. she mentioned that they had written of their experiences and offered to send me a copy. i found their responses both sociologically interesting and unexpectedly inspiring, in terms of the impact of even the simplest buddhist tools - applied even briefly - for opening the heart. i share here a sample of the students' frank responses in hopes they might also touch yours.

When we all got into the room we all took pillows and sat on it. Ms. S then explained what the whole place was about. After that we closed our eyes and we sent happy thoughts to one person that we thought needed them the most. We did this because Ms. S said that we usually think only about ourselves. Which is true, people are very self-centered. I thought of this little street girl that I see every day at the stop light near my house. I had seen her crying the other day and I just couldn't stop thinking about her. It just made me feel really sad. So I tried to send her all of the happy thoughts I had within me. – Scott

We sat in a circle and practiced meditating and creating these good vibes. In doing so, not only was I relaxed, but I also felt that possibly the person I was sending the vibe to might receive it and be happier. This chance to relax and be positive was both spiritually and physically calming. From our field trip I learned that Buddhism exists in the most random locations of the city and that it's not the location of a religious center but rather what it contains. – Danny

While I was meditating Ms. Srinivasan whispered to us to think about someone who was suffering and to think about them from our side. She then told us to give them a blessing from the bottom of our hearts. At that moment I felt a sense of pride coming over me because I hadn't done such a deed for someone in a long time which proves how selfish we humans can be. Others who live on the streets and live in hardships every day are satisfied and are happy to a certain degree. Those people are heroes and whom I look up to and am inspired by because they hardly complain. After that Ms. Srinivasan told us to remember the last time we ever helped anyone. Honestly for me it had been awhile because I always tried or attempted to but I never ended up helping my friend or family member. As I thought of this I felt dissatisfied. Even though it was only a blessing it came from my heart and I really care for that person but unfortunately they don't know that. I hope someday they will. This experience has made me more mature and to keep a lookout to help those in need. – Kresha

We were told to clear our minds completely and think of any one person that we know or we've seen that is suffering. Then from deep inside our hearts, we were to wish the best for this one person. Then we were to think of all the people in the world and do the same for them. I think this is a really good principle of this religion. When you think like this, you are basically telling yourself that every living person is in a way like you and is basically you. When you show compassion for these people, you are not only helping and caring for them but helping yourself. – Anmol

I think that every religion is the same just looking at different points from different angles and giving more importance to some things. When you start seeing what each one is about you realize all of them are kind of the same. I think Buddhism is a really nice way of seeing life, but at the same time I think it is really difficult because you care a lot more for others than for you and it is really cool but I need to be honest…I mean for me it is really difficult. Anyway, if some day I can really care about others without thinking about myself first, it is going to be a miracle. I would really like to learn more about Buddhism. When we did the meditation I felt so relaxed and I think it is a good and nice way of remembering the people who are going though a hard moment, especially the ones you know but as well as every single person in the world that is suffering. In our daily life we hardly think about all of the people in the world that are suffering and when you think about that you realize how lucky you are and we live in a very nice bubble. I really like my bubble but I really want to try to get out of it especially when I am in India. – Ale

One of the most peaceful ten minutes of my life since I came to India. This field trip that we went on today was a very, very exciting experience for me because I am very fascinated by the Buddha. I have been reading the book "Buddha" by Karen Armstrong recently and find his theories and teachings very interesting and true. So for me to come here to a place where the Buddha is worshipped is something I have wanted to do for some weeks now. It was really interesting because I have never really meditated like that before and I found it rather nice. At first I thought I wouldn't like it and that it was silly but when I got started I felt happy and excited at the same time. The whole concept of meditating and relaxing yourself in this way is something I have only read about in a book. I felt as if I had been lifted up. I felt lighter. – Rasmus

I liked the idea of love and compassion meaning different things. Love meaning you want the best for someone else and compassion meaning you want to end suffering. I think those meanings are much better than the meanings we all, know them for. You told us to think of someone we saw or remember or concentrate on sending them a blessing. This was interesting, in most religions people pray to a god, in this case it was like we were gods, but at the same time people. We were feeling for other people and sending them blessings, as if answering their prayers. – Alex

In this field trip to a Buddhist place, we meditated and thought about the suffering of other people. First we sat in a circle and breathed and then started thinking about someone other than ourselves who was suffering. We then offered them hope from our hearts that their suffering would stop. According to Buddhists life is suffering and when we discover the cause of suffering is desire or an expectation we understand that is we let go of our desires and expectations we wouldn't suffer. However, that wasn't the goal of this field trip. The goal was to move on from focusing on your own suffering and notice how much others around you suffer. The goal was to wish for the well being of someone else for a chance. We were asked when the last time we wishes for the wellbeing of someone from our hearts were, and honestly I had trouble remembering a time I wished well from the heart for someone other than myself, my family and some of my friends. This really showed me that I should be happy for what I have, because there's someone out there who doesn't have anything, and is truly suffering. – Anya

We were told to choose someone who is having a hard time with life at the moment and that we should send our blessings to them. This was very hard as I see so many people that I know having a rough time right now but in the end I chose my grandmother and tried to send out positive thoughts and prayers for her general wellbeing. After our blessings, we focused on Delhi, the whole of India then Asia ands we were asked the last time we really thought about suffering in the world. I couldn't remember and I figured that I should start to do some thinking. Meditation is very calming and I personally have the feeling of sleeping but being awake at the same time. The environment that we were meditating in at the dharma center also contributed to the calming affect it had on me. The lighting was appropriately dim and the fact that we could not hear any of the chaos and noise outside also helped us reach a point of isolation from everyone else in that room. I felt like I was alone and at peace with myself. – Nina

While thinking of people who are less fortunate than me, I pictured the two sisters I pass everyday on the way to school. One of them has something wrong with their foot, the other gets beat regularly. I thought about what it would feel like to live like that, it would probably break me. I realized that they were dealt a bad hand when they were born, but people like my driver, who had befriended them over the years, helped whenever they could. Every time I see them they always smile and wave, I think that it's amazing they can do that when their world is so cruel, for lack of a better word. – Irena

Usually I don't enjoy meditation or yoga, this time I felt that it was really precious time to think about one person who was having a hard time and bless them kindly. Although our class couldn't stay there long enough because of a lack of time to go back to school again, I felt really comfortable and purified after I blessed one kid I met in "Reach Out" one of the service clubs at the American Embassy High School who lived on the streets in front of the school. I couldn't forget his bright eyes and facial expressions though he was very poor. – Jeeyeon

I really liked meditating, that helped me relax and forget the outside world a lot. I believe my spiritual well wishing might have done someone some good. - Kevin

gelongma palmo had two eyes

2009-01-27T06:11:00.000-08:00

back in sarnath for a brief spring visit. reminding me vividly of my stay here before, none of my three teachers really has much time to read, despite the genuinely warm reception they gave me. i leave in two days for dharamsala, where the ever generous geshe rinchen ngodrup la remains eager to work on anything regarding nuns and vinaya!

meanwhile, i met some tibetan and himalayan nuns from Thrangu Tara Abbey in nepal. (photo above comes from their website.) thrangu tara abbey has in excess of 200 nuns and includes a vigorous study program, as well as facilities for nuns to do three-year meditation retreat. nine nuns are currently in solitary retreat there at the moment.

in light of conversations about full ordination for nuns in the tibetan traditions, and especially in terms of their own level of interest, the following conversation i had with one of the thrangu nuns may be worth reporting. she was clearly devoted to his holiness karmapa, and was in sarnath at this monastery to participate in pujas scheduled to coincide with a visit by hh karmapa.

we were seated on the steps to the main assembly hall, in the midst of many of the monastery monks, waiting for the fireworks that a chinese disciple had organized in celebration of chinese new year. i gave this nun a copy of a book that had been produced recording his holiness the dalai lama's address to nuns last year. she asked what it was about and i explained that it had a good deal to say about full ordination for tibetan nuns as bhiksunis. she said at once said, in tibetan, 'yes we need this. we need this book and we need gelongma vows. we are waiting for that, and when it comes we will be first in line.' this was definitely loud enough for the monks around her to hear. and they all became attentive to her comments. one monk was listening while standing in front of us holding some fireworks (not lit), and she said, with obvious humor but also quite firmly, 'please don't point that at me. i need my eyes. i need to have my eyes for when there is gelongma ordination! it could be one of the requirements, to have both eyes! anyway, i need my eyes. did gelongma palmo* have only one eye? did arya tara? no, they did not. so i also need
both my eyes, just like them. so please do not point that at me!'

the monks laughed in good humor and the one holding the fireworks shuffled off chuckling. this outspoken and skillful nun is tibetan, from the border area near nepal, and she was just spectacular.

fortunately for her, she is following a lama who is supportive of her aspirations, and probably that is not a coincidence!

* gelongma palmo is one of the very few fully ordained nuns noted in the transmission lineages of tibetan buddhism, and so serves as a model inspiring female practitioners in particular. her photo appears in the frontispiece to the book in question by HHDL. gelongma is the tibetan term for bhikshuni, or fully ordained nun.

read the speech

2009-01-26T07:23:00.000-08:00

for those who are curious, here is a link that will take you to the text contained in the booklet mentioned in the above blog entry. the pdf begins with the comments made by his holiness the dalai lama in tibetan, followed by a translation into english. the english text begins on page 22 of the pdf file.

read the speech by his holiness the dalai lama, addressed to tibetan nuns in mundgod, south india.

taking the text in hand

2009-01-25T05:40:00.000-08:00

while in sarnath, i attended a private audience with his holiness the karmapa, in the company of my korean friend, chonyi-la, and her mother and sister. when i first entered the room, i took the opportunity to offer 50 copies of the book mentioned in the next blog entry - a speech by his holiness the dalai lama, for and about tibetan nuns - to his holiness the karmapa - as consistent and clear a supporter of nuns as one could hope to find among lamas.

i placed the books on his table when i first entered the room, and even before we were seated, his holiness the karmapa had taken the book in hand and begun reading, nodding in agreement...

cherry blossoms in november

2008-11-16T02:32:00.000-08:00

the house i am occupying in north india, in kangra valley, is now home to three nuns from three different buddhist traditions:

- myong-do sunim, a korean nun now doing a 100-day retreat (and whose haunting chanting of the name of the buddha of compassion now fills the air of this autumn afternoon). it was myong-do sunim who found this house in the first place, a house whose three other vacant rooms nangpel, alicia and i were all too happy to make use of;

- my friend, sister metta, who is ordained in the theravada thai forest tradition, and normally resides in the amaravati monastic community in england. she will be with me for the month of november, and i have been finding it deeply inspiring to share the monastic life with her here even for this short time in our improvised 'nunnery', and to learn of life in her nuns' community; and

me in my tibetan robes.

here are three photos, all taken on our roof, each to various degrees featuring the cherry trees that are now puzzling us by bursting into bloom in november. perhaps this is the time here.

old tibet

2008-11-09T05:50:00.001-08:00

came across some marvelous old documentary footage shot in lhasa in the 40s.

as described by the BFI national film archive, which owns the clips, and posted them on youtube, the first clip shows the parents and siblings of his holiness the dalai lama in its opening scenes, "and a procession of high-ranking men and women. this is followed by a clip of a procession with the dalai lama in a golden palanquin, his presence indicated by the peacock feather umbrella being carried alongside. The final scenes, in contrast, show ordinary children dancing and ice-skating in lhasa." the others do a nice job of capturing some of the texture of lhasa in that truly lost era.

check out the dart scene in this following clip.

conditions gathering

2008-11-06T02:55:00.002-08:00

twice a week, when he is in residence, his holiness the karmapa receives the public and often gives a dharma talk at gyuto monastery here in dharamsala. during the audience held on november 5, when a friend of a friend had her moment to greet his holiness, she held out a barack obama pin. initially his holiness took it to be something he was supposed to bless, until she indicated it was a gift for him. when he looked closer and saw it was an obama pin, his holiness brightened noticeably, and accepted the gift with visible delight!

at that same audience, several european friends congratulated me on what our country has managed to do for itself in this election.

indeed, one feels there is a whole world of goodness waiting to arise from the conditions that are gathering now...

welcoming new life - literally and metaphorically

2008-11-04T05:44:00.000-08:00

as voters on the other side of this planet are lining up, i rest on this side in confident anticipation of positive results. i heard from the kind clerk at the little town hall where i vote in wisconsin that my absentee ballot - sent oct 24 by "two-day express delivery" from india and still not there to be counted as of nov 1 - had managed to land on her desk today, monday. she also mentioned that they had received double the number of absentee ballots that they had last presidential election. and the initial reports suggest that americans are ready to try living up to the vision of themselves that barack obama offered them: as compassionate, tolerant, dignified and responsible members of the world community.

but wonderful new beginnings have already taken place today: it was with great, great joy that i learned that this world community has another member, who i am sure will contribute greatly to its beauty: ayla jade sylvia, the child of my dear friend (and fellow tibet site seminarian) leigh sangster.

i received word that leigh was in labor early this morning, but later in the day somehow found myself suddenly moved to express in words some aspirations for the child. when the message of ayla's safe delivery came through, i learned that this spontaneous aspirational prayer for her was composed just 15 minutes after ayla began her life outside the womb. (makes me wonder just what sort of karma baby ayla and i have together!)

in the hopes that you who read this will add your voice to mine in making this aspiration for ayla, i include it here:

dear baby, even before you develop the words to name this experience, may you always recognize that you are surrounded by love. may you always carry in your heart the knowledge that this precious life you have now is only possible within a matrix of kindness and caring linking many, many others to you.

as you acquire language, may only the words for happiness, delight, love and joy be comprehensible to you, and may the words for suffering and unhappiness make no sense to you at first, because they do not match any of what you have known yourself.

just as you caused joy for many people in many directions today just by entering this world we all share with you, may you continue to be a source of joy and peace to all those around you, awakening love spontaneously in all who see or hear you. may you live always within the embrace of that love.

may your actions always reflect the goodness that is your deepest nature. may your life be long, and full of meaning and wonder. may it inspire others.

may you be happy, dear baby.

if by living this life

2008-10-01T20:31:00.000-07:00

as will be clear from the dates of the last posts, i have not done a very good job of staying connected through the internet. this is rather ironic, as enhancing an awareness of connectedness has been very much on my mind these past months. sometimes, though, that is better done by acknowledging those right in front of one. beyond those in the immediate surroundings, i spend a good deal of my days in the company of nuns and laywomen who were direct disciples of the buddha, through the magnificent lens of the narratives about them in the msv. so, apologies to those whom i have neglected online, but please know we remain very much connected in other important ways.

as a brief update, i offer two small gifts, one visual and the other verbal. first, this photo taken by my dear friend from mexico alicia with my friend and sister in the vows, tenzin nangpel (more recently flora) on the roof of our new home, adjacent to drolmaling nunnery in sidhpur, dharamsala.

the next is a quote from a teaching giveN by his holiness the karmapa last year in bodhgaya. as a model for thinking about our role in one another's lives, i have found it immensely nourishing. i hope it moves you as well.

"Sometimes I think that while I am living on this earth, if by living this life I can bring some actual benefit to the beings of this world and all those who are connected with me, that would be wonderful. That would be best. Even if that does not happen, I will continue to lead this life. I am living for the benefit of the beings in the world, so that there will be one more person in this world with love and concern for them. That is how I think. Sometimes I think I have to do something extremely helpful, and I get attached to that. But I don’t know whether things will turn out exactly as I want. If I can help, that would be best. Perhaps my wish to help you might become one condition, even if only a tiny one, that brings you happiness."

for a full text of this teaching, see this site.

himalayan monsoon

2008-06-24T03:27:00.000-07:00

since my last post so very many months ago, i've relocated to dharamsala - or the kangra valley in the shadow of the mountains just below dharamsala, to be precise. here i've found a home in a small international nuns' community called thosamling. we are nuns from malaysia, venezuela, australia, korea, holland, mexico and elsewhere, and just down the road in one direction is gyuto monastery, where his holiness the karmapa lives, and in the other direction lives the only tibetan geshe i have met who has actually read the entire root vinaya, the text my thesis is on. i am in a very good place right now, in many ways.

thosamling faces the snow-capped peaks in which dharamsala itself is nestled, and on its other sides by terraced fields of grain. both during and after a good rain - which means most days now that the monsoon is nearing - the rice terraces fill to capacity and water cascades from one level to the next as the mountains above shed their abundance on us. it is like living within a huge natural fountain, and the slopes that tower above and fields that spread out below are as voluptuously green as can be. it is truly lovely and for the first time i appreciate classical sanskrit poetry's recurring trope of the monsoon season as a site of beauty, joy and reflection.

a joyful day for la sangha latina

2008-02-26T13:58:00.002-08:00

with great joy i would like to report that my dear friend flora, who came with me to india hoping to bring together the conditions to ordain, last week was able to receive her monastic vows from his holiness the dalai lama. flora now bears the name tenzin nangpal, and is a novice nun (getsulma or sramanerika) in the monastic order founded by buddha 2,500 years ago.

i have watched flora grow from the day she began attending the summer courses in buddhist philosophy in madison, wisconsin, where i was living, and have visited her dharma center in xalapa, mexico several times as well. the step from lay practitioner of buddhism to ordained member of the sangha is a huge one, and flora had been preparing herself internally and externally for several years. for the time being, she will remain in india to begin receiving her foundational training and to commence the work of inner retooling that is involved in this transition and in this way of life. (for an account - in spanish - of her experience as she prepared, read her blog)

in the photo here, flora - that is to say venerable tenzin nangpel - is pictured with the other non-tibetans ordained with her, and sits just at the right hand of his holiness the dalai lama.

flora now joins a tiny number of other latin americans who have taken ordination vows in the tibetan buddhist tradition. a cause for general rejoicing. indeed, it is a joyful day when someone is able to make this commitment - joyful for her, joyful for her community in mexico and joyful for others who might also be inspired to fully dedicate their live to their spiritual development in service to others. it is also extremely joyful to me to be able to welcome flora as a sister in the vows.

welcoming a new year

2008-02-20T05:16:00.000-08:00

hopefully these greetings are better later than never. a few weeks ago we celebrated the tibetan new year here in sarnath. after morning prayers at the tibetan temple, i welcomed the new year in the company of three tibetan nuns from south india and with ven jampa tsedroen. we visited the holy sites that are so close at hand here, connecting through acts of imagination with the buddha who gave his first teachings in this small and still sleepy village and the monastic community that occupied the sprawling structures that lie now in ruins.

quivering at the sound

2008-02-13T05:59:00.000-08:00

haven't found the time to post in a while: apart from the slowness of the internet connection since some transoceanic cables snapped a while back, i have been working hard to complete a paper for an upcoming conference in princeton (yes i fly all the way back just to give a 20-minute paper!) while celebrating the tibetan new year and also trying to take advantage of the time i have left here in sarnath to move through more of the narratives.

the face of the bride

2008-01-28T20:28:00.000-08:00

"at last i have my daughter-in-law," said mrs. agrawal, the mistress of the house where i am renting a room in sarnath. for four years they had been searching for a suitable match for their son and only child. time and again the astrological charts of the son and the prospective brides did not match. time and again they went back to the portfolios that families prepare when putting their daughters on the marriage market, portfolios that feature a sort of CV listing the would-be bride's character traits (open your thesaurus: the more synonyms for docile, gentle, and obedient, the better), a description of her skin-tone (extremely fair, very fair, quite fair, etc.), her educational qualifications (a definitive plus in many circles these days, when two-income families are no longer unthinkable) and detailed accounts of her relatives' names, marriage alliances, professions, and subcaste. oh, and a photo of the bride in a traditional sari.

but finally, a 25-year old local girl turned out to have been born under precisely the right stars for this family's beloved son. the son was educated in india's best private schools and, with the assurance of access and privilege that comes with that, went on to a management position in microfinance or something like that, off in hyderabad. his parents, from whom we rent rooms, have done all they could to assure that he had all the best in life indeed, and he has done very well for himself.

one afternoon, the son had gone to see the prospective bride in person after the charts were found to match, approved the girl and proceeded straight from the meeting to the airport to fly off to his job. he will not come back to varanasi until the wedding itself, planned for april.

meanwhile, for mrs. agrawal, a truly gentle and mild-mannered woman who had no daughters and has spent her years as an adult caring for the two men in her life, husband and son, the joyful anticipation of welcoming a daughter-in-law into her close circle was clearly genuine and deeply felt.

the next major event in the cycle of formalities leading to the actual wedding was the presentation of the bride to the groom's extended family. for with all the curiosity an extended and inwardly focused family can generate, the relatives gathered for 'high tea' on our lawn. after a day of bustle - the casual sort of bustle they do best here - in which a sign-painter was still calmly retouching the sign to their house as guests were pulling up in their cars, mr. and mrs. agrawal seemed stiff and nervous to be hosting this big event. after hearing of the inauspicious astrological charts of all the other prospects, i and the other nun staying here, jampa tsedroen la, were also invited to come see the bride.

her portfolio was quite accurate in many regards: she is very fair, and does indeed work in the operations department of a life insurance company, a fact in which she expressed considerable pride. as for the string of adjectives describing her compliant character, time will tell - a whole lifetime of married life in this new and fine family.

for more on arranged weddings, see this from the first year in india

photos are of mrs. agrawal with jampa tsedroen-la, the bride, an assortment of guests and the buffet table - sumptuous indeed though curiously lacking the 'tea' which i had expected to have for my 'high tea'...

the confidence of 'it is so, it is so'

2008-01-17T05:21:00.000-08:00

i just noticed that a transcript of the teachings that impacted me so deeply by his holiness the karmapa in bodhgaya has been made available online. you can view it here. the first day's teachings are of general interest. the teachings on days two and three are more for committed buddhist practitioners...

for a little taste, here is a bit of what his holiness said during the first teaching:

"Sometimes when we are meditating on loving-kindness and compassion, if we are thinking about a big group of people without seeing them as individuals, we just say, “May everyone be happy!” That is easy. For example, when we think about a lot of people, such as all the people in this hall, it is easy to think, “May they all be happy.” That’s just thinking in a general way. However, when we pick out one individual and try to meditate on love and compassion for him or her, that is something different.

"You should really think about it beforehand, otherwise when you think you are meditating on love and compassion for everyone and say, “May all be happy,” you don’t really know whether that thought is genuine or not. So beginners should begin by testing themselves with one person and seeing what the extent of their love and compassion is for that one person. If we don’t do that, and instead think from the beginning that we love everyone, that has no substance. Meditating toward everyone is like air, which fills everything but does not have much substance. Then, when you get to meditating on an individual, you’d have second thoughts. There’s the danger this could happen to you.

"I have thought of an analogy. If we bought a huge piece of fabric in Gaya and covered everyone’s heads with it, that would be easy. We’d just put it on top of everyone, and there would be no problem of it fitting. But if we took the fabric, cut it up, and made each and every person a hat, then there would be many different-sized heads to account for. We’d have to make the hats smaller for some and larger for others so they’d fit each person’s head. It would not be nearly as easy as just covering everyone with the huge piece of fabric. Similarly, if we just cover everyone with the huge fabric of love and compassion, that’s easy. There wouldn’t be so many lumps and bumps. But, like making hats, considering each individual person is not all that easy, so that is something we need to think through.

"But if we need to think about each individual person, how many are there? There are probably a thousand or two here in this hall. If we need three or four days, or even a week, to meditate on love and compassion for one person, then meditating for a thousand people would end up taking twenty or thirty years. How long would it take to develop love and compassion for all sentient beings throughout space? We don’t know.

"So what should we do? Fortunately, there’s a way around this. We can look at how people are similar and see what they are like. Of course, there are many different types of people, but we can think about them generally in terms of the reasons we should have love and compassion for them. If we look at one aspect, everyone wants to be happy and free of suffering, so in that regard everyone is the same. Of course everyone has their own character, but when we think about one aspect and then really recognize it in terms of one person, we can feel the same way toward all the similar kinds of people."

photo was taken during these very teachings, courtesy of www.kagyumomlam.org.

the cowherd's story

2008-01-11T21:45:00.000-08:00

thanks to mindrol-la for her enthusiastic request for the sequel to the frog's story. in it, we hear what happened to the cowherd after he heard the entire teachings by the buddha. (for frog's story, read here.)

as background, you need to know that that buddha has just given an exquisite teaching that uses the image of a log moving down a river as a metaphor for the course we take through life after life, often getting stuck along the way, but sometimes flowing strongly towards the ocean of liberation. here is the text that follows that teaching in the vinayavastu; translated from the sanskrit:

At that very time, Nanda the Cowherd was standing near the Lord. Leaning on his cane, he was grazing his cows. A frog was pinned by the cane, his skin pierced, his joints dislocated. He generated the thought, ‘If I should move my body or emit a sound, this would be the cause for Nanda the Cowherd to be distracted from the story.’ Having decided that, he made his mind inspired with faith in the presence of the Lord and died. He was reborn among the devas of the Four World Guardian Kings.

Then Nanda the Cowherd set his cane down to one side and went towards the Lord. Having approached, he prostrated with his head at the feet of the Lord, and stood off to one side. Standing off to the side, Nanda the Cowherd said this to the Lord, "Sir, I will not get caught on this bank, I will not get caught on the far bank, I will not get caught in the middle, I will not come out onto dry land, I will not be grabbed by humans, I will not be grabbed by non-humans, I will not be grabbed by a whirlpool. I will not become putrid inside. Sir, may I attain renunciation, full ordination and monkhood in the well-spoken Dharmavinaya. May I practice celibate discipleship in the presence of the Lord.”

“If so, Nanda, you have given the cows to their owners?”

“No, Sir.”

“Why not?”

“Sir, since they are cows who have young calves, they know their dwelling places. They will each return to their respective homes. Sir, may I attain renunciation, full ordination and monkhood in the well-spoken Dharmavinaya. May I practice celibate discipleship in the presence of the Lord.”

“Nanda, although they are cows who have young calves at a tender age, know their dwelling places and will each return to their respective homes, nevertheless this is the duty of a cowherd, who has accepted the owner’s food and clothing.”

At that, Nanda the Cowherd prostrated with his head at the feet of the Lord, and left the presence of the Blessed One. Then he began to run, crying loudly, ‘Danger! Danger!’ Along the path, 500 cowherds related to him saw him. They said, “What danger is to be feared?”

“The danger of birth. The danger of aging. The danger of sickness. The danger of death.”

They too began to run behind him. When they were seen by other cowherds, horse drivers, porters carrying grass, porters carrying kindling, people living from the street and people gone astray living from the street, these too began to run. Servants saw them shouting in this way and questioned them, “What is this, Sirs?”

They said, “There is danger!”

“Danger of what?”

“Danger of birth. Danger of aging. Danger of sickness. Danger of death!”

After hearing this, they too turned back. At a certain point, they reached the vicinity of a district capital. Then the group of people living around the district capital saw the huge group of people and became alarmed, [and ran about] this way and that. Some fled. Some hid their goods. Some armed themselves and stood their ground. Others, the courageous people, advanced and questioned them.

“What is this, Sirs?”

They said, “There is danger!”

“Danger of what?”

“Danger of birth. Danger of aging. Danger of sickness. Danger of death.”

At that, the group of people living around the district capital were relieved.

At that time, on that occasion, Venerable Śāriputra had joined and was seated in that very assembly. Venerable Śāriputra noticed that Nanda the Cowherd had been gone for a long time, and said this to the Lord, “Sir, why did the Lord encourage Nanda to Cowherd, who was desirous of renouncing in the well-spoken Dharmavinaya, to go home?”

“Śāriputra, there is no chance that Nanda the Cowherd will remain within his home as a householder again. Having experienced deposited treasure, will he enjoy the objects of desire? There is no possibility of that. Nanda the Cowherd will now surrender the cows to their owners and come back. After seeing that for the sake of which children of good families shave their hair and beard, put on saffron clothes and go forth with only the correct devotion from their homes into a homeless state - the supreme culmination of celibate discipleship - and having realized for himself the Dharma, actualized it and attained it, he will proclaim, ‘For me, birth has ended. My celibate discipleship is completed. My duty is done. After this existence I will know no other.’”

Meanwhile, after surrendering the cows to their owners, Nanda the Cowherd came to where the Lord with a retinue of 500. Having approached he said this to the Lord, “Sir, may I attain renunciation, full ordination and monkhood in the well-spoken Dharmavinaya. May I practice celibate discipleship in the presence of the Lord.”

And Nanda the Cowherd attained renunciation, full ordination and monkhood in the well-spoken Dharmavinaya, together with the retinue of 500. Having thus renounced, he became venerable... "

and thus ends the story of Nanda the Cowherd, a disciple of the Buddha whose renunciation the frog helped make possible...

hh karmapa in sarnath

2008-01-08T23:48:00.000-08:00

soon after the prayer festival in bodhgaya that was the topic of a recent post, his holiness the karmapa traveled to sarnath and is here still.

this past weekend he led an animal liberation and offered a chenrezig empowerment, accompanied by a dharma talk. i will not attempt here to describe how moving both these events were for me. the photos will have to do instead.

both these images come from the website of HH karmapa's north american seat in woodstock, new york

the frog who showers flowers on lord buddha

2007-12-27T18:39:00.001-08:00

one feature of the text i am reading here - and of much of sanskrit literature in general - is a delight in embedding stories within stories, such that finally stories are set within multiple frames. i share one example that caught my imagination, evoking as it does an image one still sees, and that after reading this story has lost much of its ordinariness for me: a cowherd leaning on his long stick contemplatively as his charges graze nearby. (sadly i have no photo of any as yet, so offer instead an image of some fields, to evoke the pastoral/agrarian setting this story assumes.)

in this tale, while buddha is telling a story to a gathering of monks, a humble cowherd brings his animals to a grazing spot within earshot and stands listening to the story. the narrator of the vinaya later tells us not only the story of the cowherd but that of a frog who was pinned under the stick that the cowherd was leaning on.

along with transforming how i look at cowherds with sticks, it has the effect of evoking the many series of ripples sent out into the world by the teaching of the buddha. translated from sanskrit, the story goes something like this:

At that very time, Nanda the cowherd was standing near the Lord [Buddha]. Leaning on his cane, he was grazing his cows. A frog was pinned by the cane, his skin pierced, his joints dislocated. He generated the thought, ‘If I should move my body or emit a sound, this would be the cause for Nanda the Cowherd to be distracted from the story.’ Having decided that, he made his mind inspired with faith in the presence of the Lord and died. He was reborn among the devas of the Four World Guardian Kings.

[We then hear the story of nanda the cowherd's reaction to the buddha's story: he asks to join the sangha, but buddha does not permit to ordain immediately, for some clever reasons. then we come back to the frog and his trajectory after death.]

It is in the nature of deva sons or deva daughters that when they are newly born they think about three things: from where they have passed on, where have they been born and due to what action. The deva son whose previous existence was as a frog saw that he had passed on from among the animals and been born among the devas of the Four World Guardian Kings, after making his mind inspired with faith in the presence of the Lord. It occurred to him, “It would not be proper for me to let a day pass without going to see the Lord. Therefore I should go to see the Lord without even letting one day pass.”

Then the deva son whose previous existence was as a frog approached the Lord. Wearing impeccable earrings that glittered as he moved, his body was adorned with necklace of 64 strands of pearls, the folds of his lower garment filled with celestial utpalas, kumudas, white lotuses and mandarava flowers, with intense colors. He reached the Lord in the dark of night, and illuminating the bank of the Ganges with a vast light, he showered the Lord with flowers and sat down before the Blessed One in order to listen to the Dharma.

Then, understanding the mental disposition and propensity, character and nature of the deva son whose previous existence was as a frog, the Lord gave that sort of Dharma teaching that penetrates the four nobles’ truths such that after hearing it, the deva son shattered the twenty-peaked mountain of belief in a personal self with the thunderbolt of wisdom, right as he was seated there, and actualized the fruit of stream-entry.

He said, “I have progressed, Lord, I have progressed. This one who is I go for refuge to the Lord, to the Dharma and to the Sangha. Accept me as a lay disciple from today forward for my whole life, as long as I live, as one who has gone for refuge and been inspired with faith.”

thus ends the story of the frog who was reborn as a deva.

now does anyone want to hear what happened to the cowherd?

that type of dream is monlam

2007-12-22T05:23:00.000-08:00

two of the people i am reading my text with here in sarnath left peremptorily on personal matters this week. but the unforeseen interruption to my studies coincided perfectly with three days of teachings by his holiness the karmapa especially for his foreign students in nearby bodhgaya. so off i went.

the teachings were on mahamudra, and they were concise and fully charged with the fresh spontaneity and intense presence that seem to be distinguishing marks of his holiness the karmapa's teaching style. his holiness the karmapa taught in a clear tibetan (happily for me!), and gave refuge and bodhicitta vows, as well as oral transmissions in tibetan, english, chinese and korean. these teachings took place during the annual kagyu monlam, a two-week long extravaganza of prayers by a gathering of the kagyu tradition of tibetan buddhism.

for those who do not know who the karmapa is, he is a young but already highly influential spiritual leader who escaped from tibet in 2000.

as his holiness the karmapa explained, "the purpose and fundamental root of the Kagyu Monlam is to remember the kindness of our Teacher, Buddha Shakyamuni, and to pray for the peace and happiness of all beings with whom we share this world." for more on this event, read below) this year's prayer festival displays the karmapa's spirit of inspired reworking of tradition, as his holiness has been redesigning the book of prayers used during this group's annual prayer festival, and this year includes prayers from all the major schools of tibetan buddhism - prayers by lama tsongkhapa, by sakya, nyingma and even jonang lamas. it would take a bit of explaining to show just how remarkable that is given the usual sectarian divisions within tibetan buddhism...so i'll just say: this is major.

and if i may add, this year's prayer celebration includes prayers in sanskrit and also added emphasis on vinaya... (and as you know, i am working on the vinaya in sanskrit, so you can imagine my delight.)

these photos do not begin to capture the beauty or the energy of the event. i include a brief video from a previous monlam that does a far better job of evoking some of the feel of the event .

the following is excerpted from an interview his holiness gave several days before the start of the prayer festival. many, many thanks to namdrol's mom louise for sending it to me!

Interviewer: Your Holiness, please could you explain the meaning of the word monlam?

His Holiness the Karmapa: From the perspective of mind, the meaning of monlam can be explained in several ways. From the perspective of the individual it means having the profound wish to bring happiness and well-being to others and simultaneously enhance our own root of virtue, dedicating that merit for the benefit of all sentient beings. That type of dream is monlam.

Interviewer: What is its importance?

His Holiness the Karmapa : Generally speaking, all major developments in human culture have come about as the result of hope and a clear vision. From the Buddhist point of view, our ultimate goal is to attain parinirvana; in this process, the role of aspiration is fundamental and threefold. At the beginning it is like the seed, in the middle it is like water and manure, and at the end it is the fruit. Without an aspiration the seed of Buddhahood will not germinate.

Interviewer: Are there any special features of this year’s Monlam?

His Holiness the Karmapa: Because we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of Kagyu Monlam this year, we are offering free medical treatment to help local people. In addition, because the Kagyu Monlam has become an international event, which aims to bring the peoples of the world together, this year the Monlam, recitation texts are available in five languages: Tibetan, Hindi, English, Chinese and Korean. I consider these two the most important special features.

Interviewer: Sanskrit prayers are being used for the first time this Monlam. Please could you expand on this?

His Holiness the Karmapa: Our Tibetan dharma is based on the Sanskrit canon. So, in times past, Tibetan Buddhist scholars considered Sanskrit to be very important; they studied the language and also studied Buddhist scriptures in the original Sanskrit. But, from the time of the Fifth Dalai Lama, about three hundred and fifty years ago, the ties between India and Tibet were broken. Afterwards, it became difficult to maintain the standard of our knowledge of Sanskrit and so things such as pure pronunciation were lost. However, now that we are in India, Tibetans have begun to study and research texts in Sanskrit once more, and are involved in discussion with Indian Sanskrit scholars too. This development is very important for the Indo-Tibetan relationship and, I feel, it is essential that it be maintained. Thus, we are reciting prayers in Sanskrit so that the relationship may continue forever. Furthermore, by reciting in Sanskrit, we can transcend time, generating a feeling of closeness with the Buddhism of the time of Lord Buddha. It is my aspiration that we can achieve this.

Interviewer: This year monks and nuns have received special training in codes of conduct. What was the purpose?

His Holiness the Karmapa: In the twenty-first century there are many external distractions, so we need a way to remain stable. If we are carried away by these distractions we will lose our self-restraint. In order to instill proper conduct and to bring well-being and peace of mind, we have this Monlam. Using ancient methods from the Vinaya, we are training the sangha members because they are the principal participants in the Monlam.

This code of conduct, based on ancient Buddhist traditions, is not intended to serve the interests of one religious tradition alone, but to bring stability and happiness to society at large. Recently, the misconduct of some members of the sangha, both inside and outside Tibet, has become a threat to the security and well-being of society. Thus, we have done this as a service to humanity.

Interviewer: How does the Kagyu Monlam help the well-being of sentient beings and world peace?

His Holiness the Karmapa: Over the years, Kagyu Monlam has become a great assembly of people, and as such, it is very powerful. If we can win people over by our example, then, gradually, through this assembly, we will benefit the whole of human society. For example, if we can change one bad person into a good person, we will have been successful in reducing the number of bad people in the world by one, and thus will have helped world peace.

There is no way that Kagyu Monlam on its own has the power to bring peace to all sentient beings, but we can use the Monlam as a way of broadcasting the message that the world is something that all sentient beings have the right to enjoy, a message of loving kindness, compassion and peace to the whole world." [end interview]

for more on monlam, read here.

i return to sarnath today deeply, deeply renewed by the days i spent near the tree where buddha was enlightened, witnessing the massive gathering of thousands of monks and nuns coming together in its shade to join their voices and hearts again and again in prayers for the happiness of others.

this 68-second video is from the 2005 monlam

satellite image of the temple complex in bodhgaya that marks the spor where buddha sat under the bodhi tree and attained his final insights... and where the fesitval takes place.

tagzaniapaste
Mahabodhi Stupa map - Tagzania

one part brick

2007-12-17T07:45:00.000-08:00

my friend and neighbor here in sarnath, bhikshuni jampa tsedroen, is also working on her dissertation. unlike me, she has just passed a major milestone in completing her draft. she celebrated with a quick trip to a nearby stupa.

local tradition has it that this stupa marks the spot where the buddha actually give the first discourse on the 'four noble truths' and where his first disciples became monks. it thus is revered as the place where the monastic order first took shape. (a similar honor is accorded a spot near the sri lankan mulagandhakuti temple here.) but this spot boasts a stupa that even in ruins towers high above the surrounding countryside; the photo above was taken only halfway up its side. a mughal king later had a pavilion erected on the top of the buddhist structure to commemorate a visit - in the sort of move to assert dominance over a place while drawing on its established sacrality that has been practiced by imperializing cultures everywhere.

the links connecting place and event in the life of the buddha are often tenuous. like many other such spots, it exists as one part brick, two parts imagination. happily, this spot is particularly rich in bricks.

a ride from the clinic

2007-12-14T03:24:00.001-08:00

last week i managed to pour boiling water all over my hand. after googling 'burn boiling water first aid' and finding that anything as large as the area i had covered required 'immediate medical attention,' i was forced to overcome my instinctive resistance to visits to doctors. but a late evening trip to a local clinic just four minutes up the road proved extremely successful - it turned out to be run by a small community of indian women who are also catholic nuns, one a doctor trained in austria and three nurses. they all live onsite, and when we arrived, well after the clinic's closing hours, found them praying together in a simple chapel in back. a sister interrupted her devotions to come out and immediately said of course we will treat you. they did, and refused to accept payment for the service or medication. i came away with a very wholesome looking gunk to plaster over my burn, an admiration for the lives these women are leading and a renewed respect for the service work that christians can be found doing.

unfortunately, my visits to the clinic did not end there. though my hand is healing very nicely, a fairly debilitating stomach bug decided its turns was next. so after spending most of the week in bed i returned today. they put me on cipro, offered me a cup of tea, and sent me back home. i had taken my camera with me hoping to take a photo of their image of christ seated cross-legged with one hand in meditation posture, the other on classic buddhist gesture offering fearlessness or security. remembering on the rickshaw i failed to do so, i took random photos of the series of images that i see regularly during my daily five-minute ride to the tibetan institute. none are remarkable photos, nor were they taken with much care. in fact, they are so ordinary i look forward to viewing them later just for the nostalgia that is best fed by what is ordinary, but only in a given context.

what you see is in the order i passed it during the brief ride, all extraordinarily unworthy of notice here. sit on the edge of your seat, spine straight, and scroll lazily through these images if you want a sense of my ride home: - young girl playing outside gate (above)

- an outdoor barber shop; note brick floor

- a woman walking barefoot down the street (rickshaw driver's back in the extreme foreground)

- a roadside sweet shop cum pan shop cum chai shop with patient client in seating area,

- a cyclist picking his way between cow and her calf,

- a home shuttered up and in disuse,

- a man transporting the gas tanks used in any home that can afford to upgrade from cow dung or coal fires for cooking,

- a roadside furniture shop (manufacturing and sales outlet),

- vegetable stand next to barber shop (sarnath has what seems to me more than its fair share of barber shops for some reason - this is one of at least seven i pass daily),

- an elderly woman pictured near her home making patties out of cow dung to use for fuel, surrounded by goats on excruciatingly short tethers and paan shop,

- motorcycle repair shop (hero honda being the country's most popular model)

- cow hobbled by rope linking neck and leg so it cannot stray far, driver wiping down car while waiting for owner and ad for a local private school

- field of gracious trees crisscrossed by paths villagers take to reach the road - also doubles as cricket ground and garbage dump

- front yard mill - also doubles as laundry drying rack and little boy's plaything

- unmarried girls chatting on strong cot, family buffalo looking longingly at fodder bin

- dharmachakra gate to private home

- roadside grocer

- cow plays her part in the village's ad hoc recycling process

- our neighbor's servant giving directions to a motorist

so: do those of you who have been to india feel nostalgic or what? please leave a comment: they are most welcome and all-too-few on this blog!

pretty great resolution

2007-12-09T09:07:00.000-08:00

yes, this satellite image of sarnath has pretty great resolution. that is the stupa casting its shadow in the morning sun. these days, those who like my mexican friend flora who spend their days here meditating or doing other spritual practices at the stupa no longer chase the shade around the stupa throughout the day, as they did in october when i first arrived here. now it is the sun's thin warmth they seek.

tagzaniapaste
Sarnath, India map - Tagzania

a chill in uttar pradesh

2007-12-01T20:41:00.001-08:00

this week in the north indian state of utter pradesh, temperatures have begun their slide to winter lows. as are the indian monks in this photo, with their shawls and wool hats, i am feeling the chill as daytime temperatures now hover around 70 degrees and can dip into the mid 60s at night.

far greater causes for chill, though, are the bombs set off last friday across the state. it seems earlier in the year, defense lawyers across this state had decided as a group that they would not defend people accused of terrorism-related crimes. now, some terrorist group or other planted bombs that exploded almost simultaneously at courthouses across the state, including that of nearby varanasi. the junior home minister (the ministry in charge of internal security, police etc) told the new york times, in discussing the attacks:

“Uttar Pradesh is so large, lapses can happen,” Sriprakash Jaiswal said.

at least 15 people died in varanasi alone, with many more injured. the following day the right-wing hindu political groups took vigorous advantage of the opportunity to stage a protest, calling for the resignation of the current government of india, and shutting down sections of varanasi. too bad, as the strikes prevented some from attending a dazzlingly beautiful hindu festival in which thousands of candles are set afloat on leaves on the ganges river.

so you have caught lawyers making a statement against terrorists, then right-wing and highly political hindu fundamentalist groups calling strikes against the terrorists and the government that it says is too soft on them, preventing hindu devotees from honoring their goddess ganga. and the government itself effectively calling its own territory unpoliceable - too large to prevent 'lapses.'

in the same complex that binds religious fundamentalism and politics rather tightly here in india of late, a muslim female writer has met with a decidedly mixed reception. this exceptionally outspoken woman, taslima nasreen was threatened with death by muslim clerics in her native bangladesh, after writing novels questioning women's status in her muslim culture. she had a valid indian visa, so came here to stay in the state of bengal that is adjacent to bangladesh and shares much of its culture and langauge, though the state of bengal is predominantly hindu while bangladesh is muslim. but upon arriving, she found that the communist party that runs the state was none too happy to have a prominent target of muslim ire around. (the communist party draws heavy support from the muslim population of the state, it seems.) after they succeeded in forcing taslima out of the state, the other states have been falling over themselves trying to pass her off to another state... except gujarat - a state whose government is most vocally pro-hindu fundamentalism. it seems in the delicate balancing act between the potentially volatile 'communal groups,' this courageous woman has fallen deep into the gap. some of her books, meanwhile, are banned in india.

for those who missed the ny times articles, they are still available online at this link and this one.

just to make clear, it is not all fun and games - or all elephants and relics - here.

elephants make a parade

2007-11-24T01:30:00.000-08:00

once a year, the mula-gandha kuti temple in sarnath that houses relics of the buddha allows those relics to leave the security of its inner sanctum and circle the village. as is apparently most befitting to the physical traces of an enlightened being, the relics go forth on the back of an elephant, escorted by other elephants, marching bands, pilgrims from all corners of asia, nuns and monks with horns, with cameras, with incense and with palms together, along with the occasional government official. this year for the first time ever, they were also escorted by a much delighted mexican pilgrim named flora!

the relics kept here are said to have been unearthed at ruins in andhra pradesh at nagarjuna konda and at taxila in what is now pakistan, during the time of the british colonial government. the mahabodhi society administers the mulagandhi kuti temple, and both were foundered by the famous sri lankan anagarika dharmapala who did so much for the reservation of buddhist sites in india. the mahabodhi society somehow managed to secure for itself the great privilege of providing them with a more suitable home, and has shared that privilege with the entire village regularly since then.

in what is easily the most impressive event of the year for this dusty – if sacred – little town in northern india, the relic parade took place today. locals here kept saying that it was buddha purnima, or the buddha's birthday, a day that is otherwise reckoned to take place in april, may or june based on the lunar calendar. but in fact the relic procession is regularly scheduled for karthika purnima, the full moon day in this eleventh month of the year, when the weather in november is much more manageable - it was 75 degrees today, for example.

the largest elephant has the honor of carrying both the relics and the two VIPs who escort them, and is followed by several of its smaller brethren. the relics themselves are of course tiny and remain throughout the event in a gold container shaped like a stupa. (note if you can as well the symbol of a stupa emblazoned on the shimmery cloth draped around the lead elephant.)

no doubt about, buddha's relics and elephants together really make a parade!

no more a place

2007-11-19T08:21:00.001-08:00

poetry remains the genre of the hour for me here. less wide-ranging but just as bound to place and to translocal moment, these lines are from arun kolatkar's poem on jejuri, a pilgrimage place i never visited when i was nearby in pune last year.

among the successes of his work is the strange wonder he can create by allowing an intimate description of the place to unfold inseparably from his distanced view of it.

he writes:

that's no doorstep.
it's a pillar on its side.
yes.
that's what it is.

and elsewhere, describing a shrine to the god maruti within the jejuri temple complex:

the roof comes down on Maruti's head.
nobody seems to mind.
... least of all Maruti himself
may be he likes a temple better this way.

a mongrel bitch has found a place
for herself and her puppies
in the heart of the ruin.
may be she likes a temple better this way.
the bitch looks at you guardedly
past a doorway cluttered with broken tiles.
the pariah puppies tumble over her.
may be they like a temple better this way.
the black eared puppy has gone a little too far.
a tile clicks under its foot.
it's enough to strike terror in the heart
of a dung beetle
and send him running for cover
to the safety of the broken collection box
that never did get a chance to get out
from under the crushing weight of the roof beam.

no more a place of worship this place
is nothing less than the house of god.

photo is not jejuri, but rather of a shrine i visited in andhra pradesh with my sanskrit teacher last year.

the ram's ultimate prayer to the tether

2007-11-18T23:10:00.000-08:00

along paths both swift and haphazard, a few lines of christopher okigbo's verse find their way, on a smoky sunday afternoon, to the room wedged between field and household compound, in northern india, where i stay:

for we are listening in cornfields
among the windplayers,
listening to the wind leaning over
its loveliest fragment…..

and from elsewhere within the painfully slim volume of poetry he left behind:

for beyond the blare of sirened afternoons,
beyond the motorcades;
the voices and days, the echoing highways; beyond the latescence
of our dissonant airs; through our curtained eyeballs, through our shuttered sleep,
onto our forgotten selves, onto our broken images; beyond the barricades
commandments and edicts, beyond the iron tables beyond the elephant's
legendary patience, beyond the inviolable bronze bust; beyond crumbling towers...
beyond the iron path careering along the same beaten track…
the Glimpse of a dream lies smouldering in a cave, together with the mortally wounded birds.
Earth, unbind me; let me be the prodigal; let this be the ram's ultimate prayer to the tether . .

okigbo's poetry can be read online, and should be.
photo from shiftingpixel.com

locating sarnath

2007-11-18T08:54:00.000-08:00

tagzaniapaste
Sarnath, India map - Tagzania

yes that is sarnath. click on hybrid, and you get a good sense of the lay of the land here. dasashwamedh is a famous area right in the center of nearby varanasi. zoom out and you will see that we are basically right smack in the middle of the gangetic plains. yes, the river you see there is the holy Ganges.

and for anyone who has spoken with me on the phone in the month since i arrived here, you can click on where it says 'map' to see just why the train is so very audible in the background.

taking is bondage; discarding is freedom

2007-11-14T08:04:00.002-08:00

four pratyekabuddhas were staying together in the house of a potter. thus begins not a bad buddhist joke, but a tight little narrative i have just come across in a collection of stories about nuns. it is drawn from the vinaya and retold by the great tibetan polymath buston. the potter sees the four pratyekabuddhas meditating at night, and is inspired to ask them how they came to ordain. here is their exchange:

"where and why did you ordain?"

“have you heard of king rna lag can of the kalinga country?”

“yes, i have heard of him.”

“that was me. after seeing the shortcomings of kingship, i ordained.”

"what did you see?”

“a bird was carrying meat. as it was flying in the sky, many other birds attacked it. it flung the meat away, and another bird took it. then they surrounded the one who had taken it, and stole it from him. seeing that, i had the thought, ‘taking is bondage; discarding is freedom,’ and i ordained.

making buddhas

2007-11-06T21:56:00.000-08:00

the thai temple in sarnath has a major effort underway to build a large –a very large – statue of buddha. the work is now in progress, and indeed has been since i was here last year. across the temple grounds are scattered massive chunks of lovely pink stone, most carved smooth on one or two sides, and some still looking as if they have only just been hacked out of a mountain. only the head and feet have been assembled and lie, appropriately enough, at opposite ends of the stone sprawl. already the faithful have begun offering small squares of gold leaf to the serene face of the buddha, which sits protected by a simple tent canopy. the feet have not received the same attention, but someone perhaps with a sense for symbolism has placed the feet at the base of a shade tree.

each stone that will comprise the body now lies scattered between the head and the feet, and each piece is marked with numbers. looking at these marks, i think of the other large stone images i have seen at various sites around india, and am suddenly transported by a leap of imagination to their process of construction. i see them too, carted in in separate chunks, lain across the earth, marked according to an elaborate master plan, and painstakingly carved under the watchful eye of the master sculptor.

nearby work has begun to erect the central post – what tibetans call the life tree or srog shing – that will serve as the spine of this imposing image (see right side of photo.) this life tree is made of steel beams and poured concrete. it is around this central support that the body of this buddha will at last come together, with the joyful raising up of these now earth-bound bits of stone. from the position of these two feet, planted firmly soles-down on the earth, it looks as if this buddha image will either be a standing figure, which would make it dizzyingly tall, or perhaps another maitreya figure, seated western style. there are no thais around for me to ask about this, just an aged hindi-speaking caretaker and sculptors, so it is again my imagination that must do the construction of the final form. and that form soars up, up high above the village to survey this land where buddha shakyamuni first taught. this towering new image of buddha seems perfectly content. and it is breathtaking.

land of work, noble land

2007-11-03T23:14:00.000-07:00

tibetans are fond of referring to india as the noble land or land of the nobles ('phags pa'i yul or āryabhūmi) whereas indians are most likely to call it the karmabhūmi - land of ritual activity or as i prefer to think of it, land of work. they contrast it with america, which they call bhogabhūmi - land of enjoyments or land of wealth. if the idea is that one puts in one's time working (or performing ritual activities) here in india and then enjoys the fruits in the states, that might seem contrary to the usual immigrant experience leaving india and going to the states. but it seems right to me as i settle in for another year of solid work on my dissertation.

begin round two

2007-11-03T04:01:00.000-07:00

so round two begins. after a stop in delhi to be oriented by AIIS (american institute for indian studies), the extremely kind organization that is funding this second research year, my feet are firmly on the hallowed ground of sarnath.

photos are of me standing amongst the ruins of the monastic site with my friend flora from xalapa in mexico. the other is of bhikshuni jampa tsedroen, another dear friend; the stupa is behind us.

the three of us are staying together in sarnath for a few months: flora preparing for ordination and spending most of her days doing preliminary practices at the stupa, jampa tsedroen-la (who is a phd candidate at the university of hamburg) and i working on our dissertations.

coming back soon

2007-10-04T09:19:00.000-07:00

the second year in india starts shortly. i fly back to delhi on oct 16 and will be in sarnath again by oct 19.

until the next blog entry, here is a short clip of a lama yeshe, my teacher's teacher, who passed away in the 1980s, sadly. very sadly.

one year becomes two

2007-03-23T10:21:00.000-07:00

although my time in india on the fulbright has come to an end, i will be back next fall (oct 2007) for another year on another grant, this time the aiis. in the meantime, i will be doing a far bit of travel:

after a short trip to portland, oregon to see my teacher and friends at maitripa institute...

i will be in redlands in southern california with my dear friend karen derris,

puerto rico at ganden shedrub ling,

madison for teachings during his holiness the dalai lama's visit to my home temple of deer park

new york with family,

tibet during the month of june on a monthlong site seminar organized by princeton to visit monastic sites from lhasa out past mount kailash to the kingdom of guge... and for more on that trip, you can visit the blog of that trip

germany in july for a conference on buddhist women and a week of teachings by his holiness the dalai lama,

tuscany in august for three weeks of teachings by a tibetan geshe on a commentary on the text i am working on for my dissertation,

mexico in september visiting some old friends at buddhist centers in the yucatan, xalapa and guadalajara

back to california in october to write grant applications and then a quick trip to portland to give a talk and visit friends at maitripa

all this takes place between now and the end of october. after that i will be back with more occasional postings from the year in india that became two...

to sarnath

2007-03-23T10:17:00.000-07:00

towards the end of my time in india, i made my way back up to sarnath. there, i began reading the text in tibetan and continuing to work in the sanskrit with Dr. S. Bahulkar, a deeply respected scholar from pune and wonderful human being, working for the next year or so in the research department at the 'tibetan university' in sarnath. here i am with sonam, a student at the university and a regular conversation partner for me.

street scenes

2006-10-15T08:04:00.000-07:00

My existence here takes place indoors, at my desk, surrounded by texts and Sanskrit and Tibetan dictionaries. But community life... life around me goes on outdoors, definitively and consistently outdoors.

Here are some very short clips to share with you a fuller sense of the sights and especially sounds of life, as it takes place on the street outside my apartment. They were all shot from my front balcony. Nothing dramatic, but very much embedded in the texture of life here.

Make sure you have your volume up for the Rickshaw clip. Its distinctive sound is spot on. The music you hear briefly is the sound that all vehicles play when they are backing up. Not all play that same enchanting tune, but they are equally, umm, catchy. The man is milking the water buffalo to bring to the hostel I used to take my meals from, two doors down from where I now stay. Click here to watch "Rickshaw Passes Below Balcony" This link will take you to youtube.com. Press 'back' on your browser to return to this blog.

Another sound that regularly punctuates my studying is that of street vendors calling out their wares. Here is a vegetable seller out looking for customers, door-to-door. His voice is so forceful, he even gets the buffalos' attention. In about the 8th or 9th second of the clip, he passes one of the fabulous designs that housewives draw in chalk daily in front of their homes. Click here to watch "Vegetable Seller Comes Round"

In Recycling, one of the many people who come by looking for garbage that can be recycled stands below the balcony sorting, as various people stroll by. What he leaves behind will be consumed by the dogs at night. Or left to compost slowly by the side of the road. That odd sound you hear towards the end is indeed the bellow of a water buffalo. Click here to watch "Recycling, the Hard Way"

Finally, here is a very quick glimpse of a wandering ascetic on almsround. Most every city or town of any size in India will have a fair number of people who have opted for a spiritual path that involves begging for alms, as Buddhist monastics here traditionally did. Click here to watch "Holy Man on Almsround" The orange clothes, the begging bowl, the gong to announce his presence, are all hallmarks of the wandering ascetic. That house seems to be particularly generous and/or pious, as all the wandering ascetics and flower sellers stop there and wait plenty of time before they give up, as this man does. People come through the neighborhood regularly hawking fresh flowers, which are offered daily at household shrines in many homes.

monasteries made of stone: the movie

2006-10-14T14:40:00.000-07:00

When visiting the Buddhist caves at Bhaja last June, my friend and fellow Fulbrighter Neil Dalal shot some video footage of the caves.

Have a look at the caves in action, as it were. Not much in the way of audio, sorry to say.

And no, this is not just déjà-vu. You did, indeed, read about this before. It's in the June archive, under the 'monasteries built in stone' entry. But I have only now discovered youtube.com, unbelievable as that may be to some. (Thanks for the schooling, Chris!) So better late than never, I guess. I'll change the date of this blog entry back to June at some point, but for now, it's 'new.'

south indian breakfast: coconut-and-mango-chutney and spicy cream of wheat

2006-10-13T12:57:00.001-07:00

Some time back I promised recipes of some of the dishes my Sanskrit teacher has been showing me how to cook. It is an interesting process of teaching. He is an orthodox brahmin and thus will not touch food cooked by anyone except brahmins. So he tells me what to do, and I follow his instructions. So far, so good. But many of the dishes are things I have never tasted myself, and since he never samples anything to give me feedback, I just make it to my own taste and call it a meal. Of course, you'll be doing the same if you try it.. Anyway, here are recipes for two dishes I think are both 1) fabulous and 2) possible to cook with ingredients found in your local Asian market. And they go together. And, they are things I have actually tasted before, so I know it comes out the way it is supposed to.

Coconut and Mango Chutney

You need: a whole coconut; a green mango - not ripe, green; fenugreek seeds; mustards seeds; green chilies; turmeric poweder and salt. Asafoetida if you have it. Oh, and a food processor.

Heat oil a bit but don’t let it get too hot. Throw in a good teaspooon (my teacher here calls it a 'respectable amount' of) fenugreek and mustard seeds. Fry them and when mustard seeds just start to pop, take it off the heat. Let it cool a bit but not all the way. break up red chilies, add a dash of asafoetida (don't worry if you don;t have this.) Chop up a big peeled green mango into small pieces and chopped up meat of one coconut. add turmeric and salt. Eat with rice, with upama, with whatever you like, but eat it soon, it stays good only a couple of days. This is a kind of condiment.

Upama (A Kind of Spicy Cream of Wheat)

For this you need: cream of wheat; a green chili or two; cumin seeds; mustards seeds, urad dal (Indian shops will have it, don't worry); and salt. Asafoetida but only if you have it. This recipe is for one portion, so multiply as needed.

In a generous amount of oil (maybe four teaspoons), fry equal amounts of mustard seeds, cumin seeds, and urad dal. When it starts to turn brown, add a green chili or two depending on your tolerance for heat, and a dash of asafoetida. As soon as the green chili is in the pot, add about a cup of water, maybe three or four times the amount of cream of wheat you will be using. Bring to a boil and add two good pinches of salt. When it has hit a rolling boil, take about a quarter cup of cream of wheat and slowly add t in a steady stream, mixing continuously to avoid clumping. Reduce the heat, cover and let simmer for a couple of minutes. Not too long. Then mix once just turning it over, so what was on the bottom comes to the top and vice versa. Let it sit again, covered, for another minute or two. Then you are ready to eat. Be sure to eat it while it's piping hot. Much better that way.

You can also make this with cashews. Use only raw, not roasted. You drop them in after the mustard, cumin and urda dal is brown and right before the green chilies. Then just stir once or twice until the color of the cashews begins to change. Then add chilies, water and continue from there.

Eat this with the coconut and mango chutney, and you will be having a typical Andhra breakfast!

chinese soldiers fire, tibetans fall

2006-10-12T22:49:00.000-07:00

Apparently, my karma to learn about youtube.com was due to ripen one way or the other. I still thank my friend Christine for first directing me to it, but a few hours after being introduced to this video service, I received an email with a link to this disturbing, though not surprising video footage of Chinese soldiers picking off Tibetan refugees in the Himalayas.

Without warning, and from a safe distance on a nearby ridge, Chinese soldiers take pot shots at Tibetans filing across an exposed stretch of snow. They hit two, the refugees continue trudging forward looking to pass the summit and find cover, perhaps too stunned and exhausted from the altitude and the physical exertion of crossing the Himalayas on foot to even break into a full run. As one utterly terrified Tibetan hides in the toilet of the Western climbers who shot the footage, the Chinese soldiers relax in the camp, smoking cigarettes, as if they have simply completed a little target practice.

In the ongoing disregard for life and truth that is a hallmark of totalitarian regimes everywhere, the Chinese government-controlled news agency later says the soliders had been 'forced to defend themselves' when they were attacked by refugees. Had this footage not emerged, it is highly unlikely the Chinese authorities would have bothered to make public mention of the incident at all. As long as the Chinese marketplace continues to beckon Western corporations, it is unlikely any other authorities will say much of anything at all.

In a clear sign of the desperation of the situation in Tibet, among the 20 prisoners the soldiers captured after killing two were seven children. No one fleeing for reasons of economic opportunity or political conscience exposes their children in this way to the elements - and to Chinese brutality, unless things are even worse at home.

wedding, part one: going to kashi

2006-10-12T14:27:00.000-07:00

At both of the south Indian weddings I attended this past summer, the groom symbolically passed through the major stages of life before arriving at the householder stage, when the actual wedding takes place. Both weddings were brahmin families, and among the ideal life stages for brahmin males is the scholar phase, when students graduate their basic Vedic studies and go to Varanasi (known by its ancient name of Kashi) for advanced studies. First the groom ritually concludes his student stage (brahmacarin) during the wedding rituals, even if he never actually upheld any of the practices of that stage. The groom is welcomed 'home' from his studies, and then, symbolically outfitted for the journey to Varanasi, where advanced scholarly studies is best pursued. The groom and his party exit the wedding hall, and are then stopped by the bride's brother, who stops him and convinces him to stay and get married instead.

This ritual was particularly poignant in the case of this groom, because he did in fact wish to pursue advanced Vedic studies, but had to abandon them after a family financial crisis put pressure on him to study engineering instead. In this video, the groom's relatives are escorting him out of the wedding hall. He wears traditional wooden sandals, carries an umbrella, a water pot, a bundle of food and ritual implements. The man in white in front is the priest (purohita) and the one following is the groom's father. Watch the groom "Leave for Kashi."

Once outside, several members of the bride's party accost the groom and beseech him to abandon his plans to travel to Kashi. My friend Neil Dalal tells me he was in a wedding once as a friend of the groom and his job was to 'try to convince' the groom to turn down the invitation to stay and marry. Here, after repairing the sandal that fell apart and came off the groom's foot (view this clip), the bride's family addresses him with great respect, worship him with lights, incense and flowers as if he were a god, and offer him gifts of food and clothing, carried on silver platters by women you can see behind and beside the groom. In this clip, the bride's brother honors him with a great mark of respectful hospitality, by washing his feet. View this clip. You'll note see that many of those involved are laughing, perhaps at their own role-playing, for these are enactments of roles that almost no one manages to actually live anymore.

More coming in this wedding series...

where is visakhapatnam, anyway?

2006-10-03T00:11:00.001-07:00

First, a warm thanks to those of you who even attempt to pronounce the name of the place I'm staying: Visakhapatnam. Especially my mom. She always pauses for a moment before she says it, and then really nails the pronunciation. It's as if she has written it down and is reading it from a paper she keeps nearby when she calls. Actually, as I think about it, I'm sure that's exactly what she's doing. She's very careful about that sort of thing. (If you care to try yourself, it is, more or less: Vi - SHOCK - uh - putt - numb).

But even those who can pronounce it well cannot usually locate it. Visakhapatnam is very much south India culturally (language is Dravidian, etc.) but geographically on the northern end of what qualifies as 'south India.' I usually explain that I am on the east coast, right on the coast, and about halfway down the subcontinent. And then I explain it again a few weeks later. So here is a satellite image marking the spot.

tagzaniapaste
Visakhapatnam, India - private house map - Tagzania

If the map above does not load properly, try going to this link:
Click here to view Vi - SHOCK - uh - putt - numb.

You can zoom in and out with the arrows on the side of the map. You can also drag the map around to see what else is nearby. (The minorly famous 'Kailasagiri' or 'Mount Kailash' of the south is a short mile to the north, more mountains inland Mount Kailash, the beach you see off to the right is about a quarter mile, or a five minute walk, from here.)

coffee down south, not chai

2006-09-30T01:14:00.000-07:00

There are many serious cultural differences between south and north India. To my mind, the most profound is: coffee. In the north, it's chai. Here, it's coffee. Happily.

I can date with some precision the beginning of my interest in the issue of coffee drinking in India. Before coming to India, I spent several months with my dear friends Karen Derris and Ed Murphy, as I waited for the Fulbright to secure Indian research visas for its scholars. To call Ed a coffee drinker would be woefully inadequate. In fact, Ed has his coffee beans flown in from his favored plantations in Nicaragua and other such places and grinds the beans seconds before brewing his coffee. Coffee in their home was readily available, and Ed was very concerned as to how I would have continued access to coffee once in India. I planned to be in the north where tea (or ‘chai’) is everywhere and coffee nowhere. At one point, Ed was advocating that I learn how to roast my own beans, as unroasted beans keep longer and could be shipped to me green from time to time. I dragged my feet a bit there, and explained that anyway, I take milk in my coffee. Milk means refrigeration, but in Sarnath where I then expected to spend most of my time, there are scheduled power outages from 9 am to 5 pm daily. This led Ed to propose other solutions for me. The suggestions he pitched ranged from carrying a generator with me to India (um, that might be a bit heavy, no?) to procuring a Lister Engine (a what?). In the end, he sent me off to India with a handy one-cup gold filter.

When I first arrived here, I was traveling with my good friend Chela, who is Cuban, as long as we are speaking of avid coffee drinkers…. Chela bought five kilos of excellent coffee at a little shop we found in Delhi. We begged hot water here and there, and used my handy filter to brew ourselves some fine cups of coffee during the month we were together. Some fine cups, yes, but certainly not five kilos’ worth. She carried those bags of coffee with her around the country until she left, and then willed it to me.

But all this was before I knew I’d be in south India, where coffee is very much the caffeinated beverage of choice, taken with warmed milk and, usually, sugar. Which brings me to the supposed point of this blog entry: The material culture of coffee-making in the south.

What you see pictured here is a ‘coffee filter’ a $2 kitchen appliance in the stainless steel that is a staple of Indian kitchen (see the coffee cups as well.) This beautifully simple technology is all you need to make a fine cup of strong coffee. The coffee beans are ground to a fine powder, finer than we might grind for espresso makers, and this powder is then placed in the top half of the coffee maker.

As you see, the holes are tiny, and to compound matters, the other device you see is placed on top of the coffee powder in the filter to tamp it down. On top of that goes boiling water, and then it is covered to allow it to drip down. The first time I tried it, I thought I was doing something wrong, as it took so long to drip down that the coffee had begin to cool off. No, I was told, that is why the milk needs to be very, very hot.

Have you begun yet to wonder why a Buddhist nun is devoting an entire blog entry to coffee? After I first ordained, my youngest brother Dan said, “So now you’ll have to give up coffee, right?” Dan was much more health-conscious than I, never drank coffee or caffeinated tea himself and was clearly pleased at the prospect of my giving up coffee. I was equally pleased to tell him that in fact, Buddhist monks in Japan are sometimes credited with discovering green tea, which they valued greatly for its benefits in supporting alertness during long meditation sessions. Whether or not this is so, the fact remains that Buddhist monastics take no vow against consuming caffeine. Alcohol? Definitely off-limits. Coffee? Coming right up…how do you take it?

Vow or not, coffee is not among the objects we are expected to renounce. Of course, as with anything else, we must take great care not to allow ourselves to become dependent or emotionally attached to the objects we like, eagerly seeking them out and mourning their absence. … The point is not to deprive ourselves of all enjoyment, but to learn to enjoy without becoming attached to the object, or to the experience of it.

As committed Buddhist practitioners, what we strive to renounce is our attachment, not necessarily the objects of pleasure. The difference, you see, is in the mind.

welcoming a new baby: a naming ceremony

2006-09-08T05:53:00.000-07:00

When it comes to life-cycle rituals, Hindu culture beats Buddhist culture (or at least Tibetan Buddhist culture), hands down. I attended my third one in two weeks, this time a ceremony to give a newborn child its name, called nāmakarma. Much more than announcing the name, this ritual is a sort of formal introduction of the child to his community, the extended family. Two quite beautiful practices put all the relatives in the role of caregiver to the child – first, men and women alike will have a chance to give the child milk and later rock the child to sleep, allowing all to share in these two central acts of motherly love.

The overall ceremony begins with the offerings of flowers, rice and other substances to the gods and Vedic chanting that form a backbone a staple of these life-cycle rituals (see photo).

After this ritual is completed, each person scoops up a tiny bit of milk with one of the parents’ gold rings and gives a drop or two to the child (see photo). Later, the infant is placed in a cradle and everyone is invited to take a turn rocking the baby to sleep. As the child is being rocked, the women of the family gather to sing a lullaby (see photo, women singing in background.) Unlike the English lullaby in which the cradle is made to fall from a tree, this one tells the infant he or she is lying on the bedrock of the world, held up by the four Vedas and escorted by divine protectors.

After the child has been rocked by the adults in the tradition cradle made of a cloth tied to the ceiling, it is placed in a cradle on the floor and children are invited to join in and help put the child to sleep. The infant’s older sibling has been very much included in each phase of the ritual, sitting on her parents’ laps even during the most complex stages of the ritual, feeding milk to her brother and now rocking him to sleep.

Based on the astrological chart of the infant, this ceremony might also mark the first time that certain male relatives are permitted to see the child’s face, including even the father if the stars suggest he should not. In the case of the baby boy whose naming ritual I attended today, there had been no prohibitions against seeing his face earlier.

Meanwhile, it is at this ceremony that the child’s name is first made public. At this ritual, the child was already three weeks old, but nearly everyone was hearing the child’s name for the first time, including grandparents and his older sister. Here it is the child’s father who decides the name, perhaps in consultation with relatives. In this case, the father had still been weighing options up to the last minute. The name is announced – Madhav Simha and much discussion breaks out as relatives state the name to one another and comment on the choice. The strongest comments come from the infant’s four-year old sister, who greets this proposal a scowl and a vigorous shake of the head. No, she insists, to much laughter, his name is ‘Tamuru’ - the local term for ‘Brother.’

moving into a big pink building

2006-09-06T05:58:00.000-07:00

Living in a ladies hostel is great, if you are a college freshman, or have very recently been one. Eating the hostel food is not great, no matter how dim one’s memories of home-cooked meals.

That said, I am grateful for the opportunity to learn about the lives of the first generation of young Indian women for whom a college education in engineering or computer science is the obvious choice, virtually regardless of their caste. But now that it is clear I will be here for a while more, the idea of having my own place began to make sense. Very good sense.

Last week, a ‘to let’ sign went up on a big pink building that has been under construction these past months, and within a few days, I had moved in. My new home is a brand new apartment with three bedrooms, three bathrooms, two balconies and excellent cross-breezes. I can see the sea from the rooftop. This is all serious overkill, definitely, but in fact it was the first apartment to come free within walking distance of my Sanskrit teacher’s home. And not only is it within walking distance, but literally across the street. From my front balcony I can look into my teacher’s front yard and see whether he is in or not. We signed a flexible short-term lease, and I will share this vast space with Sangeeta, who will be in and out of town as her research permits.

Did I mention the kitchen? Now to my Sanskrit classes I am adding lessons in cooking south Indian food, the one topic besides Sanskrit culture that I have seen my Sanskrit teacher generate real enthusiasm for. Recipes to follow…

Photos are of my workspace, of the view from my workspace out the door onto the front balcony and of the big pink building itself (our apartment is second floor in front).

“let us read” - on translating

2006-09-05T06:08:00.000-07:00

My Sanskrit teacher Shastry Garu comments that when he was a boy in high school and eager to learn English, he used to go sometimes to hear Christian missionaries preach, since they were the only native English speakers in the area of Andhra Pradesh, in south India, where he lived. One very charismatic American preacher used to dance, weep and fall to the ground as he preached in English. Now, the missionaries always had a Telugu translator alongside them, and Shastry Garu notes that although he himself could not understand much of what the preacher said, he knew enough to tell that the translator understood even less. But when the American danced and threw his arms in the air as he preached in English, the translator too danced ecstatically as he spoke in Telugu. And when the preacher cried out and fell to the ground, so did the translator. This, Shastry Garu felt, was a valid translation, a translation of emotion. “The translator was not communicating the verbal argument. But the whole content of the speech was conveyed. It was a cogent display of inspiration and emotion,” Shastry Garu noted. “And it worked. It was a working translation.

“Translating each word into another language is not a valid translation. The meaning resides in the whole sentence, whole paragraph, sometimes in the book whole. “So when translating, Shastry Garu said, one should render entire sentences, not words. Translation should go from sentence to sentence. Even then, sometimes going from sentence to sentence is not enough. Sometimes you have to translate paragraph by paragraph to get the meaning into another language properly. Then too sometimes you have to concentrate on translating the emotion of a story. Sometimes that is the content. Changes will be necessitated by that. Then you are translating literature.

“You cannot go from word to word when you are translating. How does a language work? Each one has its own idiom. Idiomatic utterances are what convey meaning. A word alone does not. A word alone is not a valid unit of meaning…Let us read.”

The theory of translation that Shastry Garu is urging is deeply embedded in Sanskritic theories of language and of how meaning is generated. It is also very much at odds with the principles followed by many of the great scholars who translated Sanskrit texts into Tibetan, and of much translation by lesser beings of Tibetan into English. Including, to a far larger degree than Shastry Garu would accept, my own translation of the Sanghatasutra… I have some reflection to do.

answering the call: cell phone use during rituals

2006-09-02T05:53:00.000-07:00

Social life just will not be put on hold, it seems, even during major rituals here. Over the last couple of weeks, I have attended three important rituals, marking the naming of a child and marriages. The families involved were fairly orthodox brahmins, and had chosen their ritual officiants (or purohita) with care, to ensure that all stages of the ritual were performed thoroughly and correctly. Nevertheless, when the ritual officiants’ cell phone rang during the ceremony, they did not hesitate to answer the call. At both weddings I attended, the grooms also took calls on their cell phones as the wedding ceremony went on, but sadly not while my camera was at hand.

If the use of cell phones is any indication, these life-cycle rituals do not interrupt ordinary life, but absorb it, even as they punctuate and transform it. At no time did those talking on their phones while they participated in the ritual appear embarrassed or offer an apology. Nor did I see anyone exchange disapproving glances. Indeed, the only people who seemed to find this noteworthy were my friends Sangeeta, Ma’ayan and I, all three of us students of Indian religions, with all the apparently false assumptions about solemnity of rituals that entails.

The accompanying photos are taken at a wedding and at a naming ceremony, hosted by two different families in two different cities. In each case, the person on the phone is a central participant in the ritual.

hitting the road

2006-08-08T03:10:00.000-07:00

So August is a big time for weddings here (yes, those would be ‘monsoon weddings’) and my teacher has invited Sangeeta and me to attend one near his native village, about half a day’s journey from here. The village is in the general area of Amaravati, one of the earliest remaining Buddhist stupas, and the site of a Kalachakra initiation for world peace by His Holiness the Dalai Lama earlier this year. After the weddings, we will visit Amaravati, and another monastery carved into a mountain, in which the great Buddhist logician Dignāga lived.

Expect to be back in Visakhapatnam, and back online, on the 14th or 15th.

monsoon or cyclone?

2006-08-04T01:57:00.000-07:00

The weather here defies my clumsy attempts to understand my environment. Until two days ago, rain has been light, infrequent. Laundry dries within hours. My umbrella spends most of its time in my bag. But this is August already, and we should be halfway into the monsoon season. I ask my teacher, ‘Is this actually the monsoon? Has it come yet or not?’ ‘What do you understand by monsoon?’ he asks. ‘It is raining.’ I decide to be satisfied with that, and to stop grasping about for some ‘actual monsoon,’ as if such a thing truly existed. And when we finally get rains that do finally satisfy my pre-conceived notion of ‘monsoon,’ it turns out to have been a cyclone.

What I happily labeled ‘real monsoon weather’ kicked in about two days ago. It poured all day yesterday. And most of the day before these were heavy rains that did not seem sustainable for very long, and yet that lasted hour after hour after hour. The kind of rain that would have set Noah a-thinking. Then the winds picked up in the evening. We slept to the sound of doors banging and woke up to realize that the worst of it had passed through overnight. Massive healthy branches now littered the roads.

The power is out across the city, no doubt with many power lines cut. But no road crews need to be sent out to clear the fallen trees. Instead, already within an hour of sunrise, the city’s poor are out scouring the streets for firewood. The park across the street from our house yielded an ample supply of fallen branches, and very quickly small groups of people are at work with scythes and an axe, breaking the fallen trees into manageable parts. Twigs and logs are sorted into piles, as men and woman both work with good cheer. By lunch-time, women are on their way home with large bundles of free firewood on their heads. The cyclone has yielded them, quite literally, a windfall.

To me, this downpour that is not ‘the monsoon’ but ‘a cyclone’ has yielded only a small reminder of how arbitrary the act of labeling can be, especially when it comes to weather. Still, I catch myself wondering what category this cyclone would have been considered back home…

anniversary of my ordination

2006-08-01T21:05:00.000-07:00

Today is the seventh anniversary of my ordination. Although it seems safe to say I am the only Buddhist monastic for many miles around, I managed to spend the day in what was clearly a thriving monastery - many centuries ago. As you can see, it is the rainy season here. Here are some photos from that visit, with more text to come...

“let us read” - on commentary

2006-07-31T04:00:00.000-07:00

Very often as we read, my teacher, Prabhakara Shastry (aka Shastry Garu) will take the opportunity to expand on a point he considers important. This discussion may take just a moment, or may equally well take up much of our reading session. But once Shastry Garu has said what he wants to say, he usually pauses for a moment thinking, and then says, “Let us read.” Then we resume our reading of the text. For this reason, from time to time I will be posting bits of those comments under the heading, “let us read.”

We are each reading a different edition of the same text (the Sanskrit Vinayavastu), and today we come across a passage where the editor of one edition has placed a dan.d.a (a kind of period used to punctuate Sanskrit texts) in a certain spot, while the other has not. Shastry Garu observes, “This dan.d.a is a commentary. Putting a dan.d.a is making a commentary. Whoever has edited the book has commented on it. If you copy all the words of a book by hand, thinking you have not changed a thing, that is also a commentary. Any book that comes to you in any way, you are commenting on. Even just carrying a book from place to place is a commentary. Some books you may wrap carefully in cloth and carry like that. Others you just grab and go. When you carry it carefully, you are commenting that this is a very important text, the other is not. You cannot touch a book without commenting on it… Let us read.”

life in a ‘ladies hostel’ - hazing, indian style

2006-07-31T03:45:00.000-07:00

In India nowadays, a form of hazing called ‘ragging’ is an integral part of college life for all incoming students, not just those seeking to join a fraternity or sorority. All upperclassman have the right to rag on all freshmen in their schools. Some of the senior girls in the hostel I stay in have decided to ‘rag’ some of the incoming freshmen, and for days I am privy to all their planning and plotting. One night, as I walk past the dining area, I see that the ragging is in session.

Ragging, as it turns out, is not merely a way to wield one’s power over those socially weaker (though of course it may be that too), but in fact involves both ragger and ragged in a set of social commitments that will last throughout their college careers. Once the junior has successively passed through the ragging, the senior will tell them that they can come to them with questions or problems while they are at college, and if any other senior students attempt to rag the junior, the seniors have an obligation to head them off. In essence, the younger must demonstrate their willingness to show respect and humility towards their elders, and the elders must protect and take care of them as they are able. Ragging continues until both sides accept these roles in relation to each other.

Seniority is based here not on social, economic or caste position, but simply on one’s year in college. At least in theory. Once a senior is satisfied that the junior has accepted the terms of the relationship as they see fit, a kind of friendship may begin to take shape.

In the hostel I am living in, the upperclassmen have chosen to rag the freshmen in the hostel because one of them have behaved in a way that seemed arrogant towards the seniors. How did this arrogance manifest? Mainly in giving flip answers to polite questions, as far as I could tell.

This ragging continues from the first day of classes until a ceremony called ‘Freshers,’ in which the upperclassmen stage a night of entertainment for the freshman, usually a few months into the first year. After ‘Freshers,’ all ragging stops. It may stop earlier, if the seniors are satisfied that the junior students are appropriately respectful towards their elders. My friend Sharada explains to me that once the freshman have satisfied them with their handling of the ragging, if any other girls want to rag them, they will say, “No, please don’t. We have ragged them and they answered properly.”’ If the upperclassman are still not satisfied by the time ‘freshers’ is held, what happens, I ask? Are there any repercussions after the day of Freshers? ‘We are their seniors,’ Sharada explains. ‘So there will definitely come a time when they need our assistance or guidance, and we will not give it to them.’ Effectively, if the junior students do not agree to their side of the relationships by showing respect to their elders, the elders will not take them under their wings.

At least this is how it is meant to work in the college that my friend in the hostel attends. Engineering colleges are notoriously bad for ragging, and there it has gone as far as some of the worst fraternity hazing incidents. A couple of years ago, a boy died jumping off a roof when given the choice between jumping and walking barefoot over glass. Since then, ragging is banned and police will come to campus during the first months of the year in an effort to prevent it. It continues of course, though perhaps with a bit less venom. My friend Sharada at once laments the harshness of ragging at engineering schools and justifies its use in her own, albeit in a milder form.

The night of ragging at our hostel consisted in making freshman talk about themselves and their hobbies and then meet challenges. One freshman cites singing as her hobby, and is asked to song for the group. One who names watching football as her hobby is asked to name all the members of India’s national team. She is unable to do so, and is told to have the list memorized for the following day. Those who seem submissive are let off lightly. The arrogant girl leaves with a list of eight tasks.

The ragging would have continued the following day, but the arrogant girl calls her parents and have them call and complain to the manager of the hostel, who is also effectively its RA. She puts a firm stop to the ragging. The upperclassman have been outmaneuvered.

I return from Hyderabad a few weeks after this took place, and in that short time, I can see that the freshman who handled themselves satisfactorily that first night have formed bonds with some of the upperclassman. Friendships are in the offing.

The arrogant girl whose parents called to stop the ragging eats alone with a couple of other freshmen who had taken her side. They make little eye contact with their housemates.

two discoveries in hyderabad: lost and finds

2006-07-29T03:51:00.000-07:00

In the city of Hyderabad – or Hydro as Sangeeta calls it – I make two discoveries of note. It is in this state of Andhra Pradesh that His Holiness the Dalai Lama recently conferred the Kalachakra initiation at Amaravati, a major Buddhist site whose importance seems to have peaked some 2,000 years ago. In my attempts to learn more about the history of Buddhism in Andhra, I learn that the state is full of old monasteries, cave complexes and stupa sites, in various stages of archaeological excavation. Several such sites are in the vicinity of Visakhapatnam, and I plan to visit them soon.

The other major discovery I make in Hyderabad is pretty far from this first. In many ways. Though I went to Hyderabad full of plans to use the time to deepen my study of Sanskrit grammar, when I actually arrived I rapidly discovered that I urgently needed some rest. I did do some Sanskrit, mainly to keep Sangeeta company while she did hers, but mostly …how to put it? I rested. On Sangeeta’s couch. In front of Sangeeta’s TV. It turns out that Sangeeta had the entire first season of Lost, a show I had never seen. Within the eight days I was in Hyderabad, Sangeeta and I watched the entire first season together. It never occurred to me that I missed American television. In fact, I had lived in a house without television for most of the last seven eight years or so. Yet the show’s basic premise struck me as eerily familiar – that one is dropped into society with people one does not know, in an environment operating on principles that continually challenge one’s assumptions and which one must continually re-assess … well, that is not too bad a model of the experience of trying to figure out how to manage life and get research done here. But watching Lost, someone actually gives you the back-story. And somehow, there is great comfort in the hope that we viewers actually will come to understand the principles of the reality operating on the island --a hope I cannot always afford to indulge in my own life. In the meantime, from the scene where they first realize Sun speaks English, Hurley has given me new language for responding appreciatively and with poise to the surprises life here can throw: “Didn’t see that coming.”

So maybe it was not just about getting some needed downtime, or pining for American culture. But in any case, we are already plotting ways to get a copy of the second season… and friends, I know you are all a full season ahead, but please do not spoil any of the surprises to come. Especially if things do not become more clear!

‘tribals’ take a train

2006-07-29T03:48:00.000-07:00

My Sanskrit teacher has to go to Hyderabad for a week to attend to some family business. With class, there is no reason to stay in Vizag, and I seize the chance to spend some time with Sangeeta in the much bigger and more cosmopolitan town of Hyderabad. I take the overnight train there with my teacher, who will not hear of taking an upper class berth. We travel ‘sleeper class’ and have for traveling companions four women who have never been on a train before, or on a bus, or in a town. They are from a ‘tribal area’ and have been selected to travel to Hyderabad for six months of training to allow enable them maintain a solar electrical facility that is being donated to their village.

Their village is in an isolated patch of the mountains in Orissa, a neighboring state and has no electricity or phone services. They share no language with anyone but their translator, and I seem to be no stranger to them than everything and everyone else in their new environment. I find this quite a relief. They were selected because the four of them had banded together and started a ‘self-help society’ and received funding to help them make and market local crafts. They were enterprising, alert and obviously bright women, ranging in age from about late 20s on up. Apparently it took a month of convincing to get them to leave their village, their families, their terra cognita, their everything. But here they were, about to start what clearly would be the experience of a lifetime. They were a bit startled when the train first pulled out of the station, but on the whole struck me as remarkably self-possessed and frankly less awed by their new surroundings than most foreign tourist might be.

I have no doubts that the village’s solar electricity will be running well for many years to come.

five blocks from a beach i do not visit

2006-07-26T22:47:00.000-07:00

For the first solid month of my time in Visakhapatnam, I have done virtually nothing but Sanskrit. Once I have had breakfast at the hostel, I go straight to my teacher’s house and begin the day of studying. He has given me the use of one room in his house that has a separate entrance. I arrive and begin translating what we have read the previous day until he arrives and we begin to read more. Lunch is served at noon, and we usually wrap up the morning reading at about 1 pm. I cross the street to the hostel where meals are served, and hope there are still vegetables left. Lunch is unvaryingly rice, dal, rasam, some vegetable dish and yogurt. If I arrive too late, I may miss the vegetable dish. After lunch there is a break which I use to write up the morning translation, and to rest.

By late afternoon, we are back at it. Before we move on to a new section of the text, I am required to read aloud the Sanskrit that we have just read together, indicating with my inflection that I have understood the meaning, and being prepared to identify any forms and vocabulary as Shastry Garu chooses to grill me on. There are breaks for coffee and for Shastry Garu to collect the fresh drinking water that is pumped by the municipality only for an hour in the evenings. At about 10:30 in the evening, we wind down. When we read much later than that, as we often do, my teacher will walk me back the two blocks to where I am staying, for safety. Shastry Garu is 70 years old, and I can only hope to have that sort of stamina when I reach his age. And the extraordinary generosity with my time.

Days pass like this, then a week, then a month. We have not taken a single day off. The house I am staying in is five blocks from the beach, a long sandy stretch on the Bay of Bengal. Though this is just an easy five minutes’ walk away, and I know a little physical walking exercise would do me good, I have not seen the sea even once during this month. After the two months of enforced leisure time in Pune, the time Shastry Garu offers is far too precious for me to even think of a stroll on the beach.

blogging after 7/11

2006-07-21T01:32:00.000-07:00

I write this blog entry knowing I may be unable to post it. The Indian government has blocked access to blogspot.com, which hosts this little blog, as well as quite a few other sites. It did so – ostensibly – in the belief that blogs may have been used blogs by the terrorists in orchestrating the devastating attack on Mumbai (Bombay) two weeks ago. Hundreds of people died in the blasts that targeted commuter trains during evening rush hour. One by one, a series of bombs planted in seven different trains, taking the lives of hundreds of workers packed into the cars that were bringing them home after a long day’s work in the center of the city.

That horrific attack took place on July 11, earning it the name 7/11. Like 9/11, the attack is thought to have been engineered by extremist Muslim groups. Like New York, Mumbai is the financial capital of this country. But the issues at stake in responding to a terrorist attack are far more volatile here in India than they had been in the States, the major issue being the possibility of ‘communal violence.’ Communal violence is used here as a catch-all phrase referring to inter-caste fighting, fighting between ethnic or racial groups and, as most relevant in this instance, violence perpetrated by followers of one religious group against another. For days after the 7/11 attack, while newspapers were quoting unnamed government sources pointing to a Muslim group called Lashkar as the authors of the ruthless attack, the government itself officially declined to point fingers, saying not all evidence was in as yet. The reason? Fear that violent reprisals would be taken against Muslims across India. As the nation’s largest ‘minority,’ Muslims form a substantial portion of the Indian population, living and working right alongside non-Muslim Indians in all spheres of public life.

Concern that anti-Muslim rioting could break out has tempered reactions since 7/11, and such concerns are eminently well-founded. Just days before the 7/11 attack, supporters of a right-wing Hindu group Shiv Sena had gone on a rampage in Mumbai after the desecration of a statue of the wife of one of its heroes, overturning cars and ransacking businesses. It is worth noting that blogs are not the only websites that Internet users within India have been unable to access since 7/11. A long list of pro-Hindu sites, including some extremist and rather incendiary, were likewise banned, as the Indian government has struggled to avert the feared ‘communal violence.’

Unlike the flag-waving., ‘these-colors-don’t-run’ sentiments aired on American networks after 9/11, Indian TV stations are broadcasting appeals for tolerance, with personal statements from a long series of Bollywood film stars, cricket players and other popular figures.

So far, people seem to be listening.

sangeeta comes to vizag

2006-07-16T03:17:00.000-07:00

My room in the ‘ladies hostel’ in Vizag is small, but has space enough for two narrow twin beds. Every other room of this size has two, or even three girls living in it. I have warded off the attempts by the landlady of this off-campus dorm housing to install a roommate in my room with the promise that my friend Sangeeta would be coming to Vizag and would stay there with me. I finally make good on that promise. We travel back from Hyderabad together, after my restful week there, and the very morning we arrive, begin working with the professor on Sanskrit.

She will be here for six weeks. This is very good news for me. The work I’ve done on my own here has been enough to sustain me, but Sangeeta’s company makes all aspects of life here that much richer. We each sit in the room while the other reads with our teacher, working on our own translation of following the other’s reading as time allows. We grapple together with the challenges of life here – getting our laundry dry in this monsoon weather, keeping the mosquitoes away and managing to stay healthy on hostel food. At the end of each day, days that are long and full of our Sanskrit texts, we hold ‘story hour,’ trading tales from our respective texts.

from the text - a taste of heaven

2006-07-12T06:58:00.000-07:00

This story is just one of the three to five stories a week I am reading and translating from Sanskrit since I arrived here in Visakhapatnam. The Buddha has just told a much longer story about a nāga (a snake-like being that lives in the sea) who becomes convinced of the truth of Buddha’s teachings and strives to support the Dharma in some unlikely ways. When the tale of his doings is complete, some monks ask the Buddha how that nāga had come to have such convictions. That leads to yet another of the literally hundreds of stories in this text:

‘Some monks had doubts arise, and put their question to the Buddha, the Blessed One, who cuts through all doubts. “In what did the nāga youth find faith for the first time?” they asked.

The Blessed One said, “Long ago, Monks, within this fortunate eon, among a populace whose lifespan was 20,000 years, a teacher arose in the world by the name of Kāśyapa, a tathāgata, an arhat, a perfectly enlightened buddha, endowed with knowledge and conduct, a sugata, an unsurpassed knower of the world, a charioteer who tames beings, a teacher of gods and humans, a buddha, a blessed one. He himself was teaching the Dharma to the śrāvakas: ‘Monks, with forests as your bed and as your seat, with vacant buildings, with mountains, ravines, hills and caves, with bunches of straw, cemeteries, meadows, woods and plains, and with wide open spaces as your bed and seat, meditate. Do not be neglectful. Do not later become remorseful. This is my instruction.’

“Then, Monks, some went to the terraced slopes of Mount Sumeru and meditated. Some went to the banks of the Ganges river, some to the great lake of Anavatapta, some to the seven golden mountains, some went among the villages, hamlets, provinces and royal palaces, and they meditated.

Meanwhile, overhead, above the terraced slopes of Mount Sumeru, a little nāga boy, just newly born, was being carried off by a garuda, king of the birds. He saw them dwelling, engaged in meditation, study, yoga and contemplation, and when he saw them, his mind became clear and full of an intense faith. With this intense faith, the nāga boy reflected, “These noble ones indeed have been released.” Moving on from this form of suffering, he died and was reborn in Varanasi, in a brahmin family immersed in the six brahminical activities. He was raised, brought up and became big. Later, he renounced under the teachings of the perfectly enlightened buddha, Kāśyapa. Making effort, applying himself diligently, greatly striving, through the removal of all delusions, he realized arhatship. He became an arhat, and became worthy of honor, worthy of worship, worthy of reverential salutation.
He reflected, “From where have I moved on? From the animals. Where was I born? Among humans. Where are my parents?”

Then he saw his parents in a nāga dwelling, crying. He went there. Having gone there, he began questioning them, “Mother, Father, why are you crying?”

They said, “Noble One, our newborn little nāga boy was carried away by a garuda, king of birds.”

He said, “I myself am he.”

“Noble, he was in such a wretched nāga form that we cannot imagine him even in a higher rebirth, much less attaining such qualities.”

He made them remember things, and the two of them fell at his feet, saying “Noble One, you have acquired such collections of good qualities! Noble One, you are a seeker of alms. We are seekers of merit. Every day, come only here for your meals, and then go back.”

Every day, after enjoying heavenly nectar in the nāga residence, he came back. He had a novice monk as a resident disciple. The monks asked him, “Where does this teacher of yours go to do all this eating?”

He said, “I don’t know.”

They said, “He goes to a nāga dwelling and feasts on heavenly nectar. Why don’t you go too?”

He replied, “He is highly advanced, with great powers. How could I go where he goes?”

They said, “When he is leaving through his extraordinary power, you grab on to the edge of his robe.”

He said, “Mightn’t I fall?”

They said, “Dear fellow, if it holds hangs on to the edge of the robe, even Mount Sumeru, the king of mountains, would not fall, much less you.”

In the place where he disappears, he made a mark there. Having gone to that spot ahead of time, he waited there. And when he thought that he was about to disappear, he grabbed the edge of his robe. The two of them traveled through the sky, and at a certain point, the nāgas saw them. They set up two seats and cleaned two sitting spaces.
He wondered, “Why are they arranging another seat?”

He turned around, and at once saw the novice monk. He said, “Dear fellow, have you also come?”

“Teacher, I have come.”

“Fine.”

The nāgas reflected, “This noble one is highly advanced, with great powers. He is capable of digesting the heavenly nectar. The other one is not capable.”

To the one, they gave heavenly nectar, but to the student they gave ordinary food. He carried the teacher’s begging bowl. As he took the begging bowl, there was one grain of rice left sticking to it. He tossed it into his mouth, and the flavor was heavenly.

He reflected, “This is how stingy these nāgas are! We are both seated together, yet they give him heavenly nectar, but to me, ordinary food.”

He began making a resolute prayer. “Since I have engaged in a life of celibacy under the Blessed One Kāśyapa, the perfectly enlightened buddha, unsurpassed, a great object of offerings, therefore by this root of goodness, after removing this nāga from this house, may I be born right here.”

In that very life of his, water began to drop from his hands, and the nāga also developed a headache.

He said, “Noble One, the novice monk has had an ignoble thought. Please make him avert it.”

He said, “Dear fellow, these indeed are calamities. Avert your mind.”

The student spoke the verse:

The thought is thoroughly engrossing. I am not able to avert it.Right as I stand here, Good Sir, the water flows from my two hands.

After removing that nāga from the house, he was born right here. Monks, it was there that the nāga youth first gained faith.’

- From the Vinayavastu, the very first text appearing in the Tibetan Buddhist canon. (Translated from Sanskrit.)

leaving pune

2006-06-17T06:56:00.000-07:00

I say a sad goodbye to Anna, her son Christopher and Sonali, our neighbor from the village, and travel by rickshaw to the appointed place on the side of the road where I will board an overnight bus. Here I part with Neil, who has helped me with my luggage, barely manageable with the impressive weight of my books. The first hour of the bus trip is taken up by negotiations over seats. In acknowledgment in part of the male groping of unescorted females that is pervasive here, buses have ‘ladies seating.’ On this better class of bus, if one has been assigned a seat to a man, as I was, one can ask for ‘ladies seating’ and the driver or his assistant will generally shuffle people around until you are either alone or next to another woman. Since I have been ordained, I appear to be exempt from Another woman is also insisting on ladies seating, and at last we end up seated together. We arrive a few hours after dawn in Hyderabad, where Sangeeta awaits me with another rickshaw. I spend two extremely relaxing days in this very cosmopolitan city and then there’s another overnight ride, this time by train, to reach Visakhapatnam.

Here I am now, in a parallel scholarly universe to Pune. Here there are no trappings of scholarly achievement, no ivy-covered institutes, no titles on the door: just Shastry Garu, my Sanskrit teacher from Madison, now returned back at his home in Visakhapatnam. He resumes his role as a teacher fiercely committed to his vision of Sanskrit study, and we read from 9 in the morning until 10 or 11 at night, with intermittent breaks through the day. Already in the first five days we have read more than the scholar in Pune and I managed to go through together in two months. This is very good. When not reading Sanskrit, memorizing verses form the text or preparing a draft translation of what we have read, I eat and sleep in a ‘ladies hostel,’ which is basically off-campus dormitory housing, very basic housing that I share with young Indian ‘ladies,’ mostly undergraduates away from home for the first time. On all this, more later.

time to go

2006-06-12T23:54:00.000-07:00

After two months in Pune, it is time to go. I was planning on passing the monsoon here, working on the Sanskrit edition of my text, but will leave three months ahead of plan, not because I have completed my work, but because I have not, or at least not much of it.

After agreeing to read with me, the Indian scholar I had come to work with was offered the highly visible and highly prestigious position of executive director of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute -- a position that has left him little time for me and my little project. Though he seems interested in the text, he regularly has to cancel our meetings, and our progress has often ground to a halt as he deals with his administrative duties.

In this way, two months pass, and I now find myself leaving Pune having covered only 11 pages with the scholar-turned-administrator. 11 pages. Of a 400-page Sanskrit text. this is very bad.

I call my dissertation adviser, Charles Hallisey, to see about applying for a grant for a second year of research, since obviously at this rate, one would not be enough. (Actually at the rate we have maintained here, 30 years would not be enough!) My adviser’s response: ‘You are telling me you are not making progress there and so you want to spend more time there? Move on. See if Shastri in Visakhapatnam will read with you.’ I call my Sanskrit teacher Shastri Garu and he says, come. Come soon. He is planning to travel to the States and may leave in a few weeks or months.

As I hope this blog shows, Pune is a fascinating and highly livable town. It just has not been an enormously productive one for me. I book my tickets and prepare to leave Pune.

monasteries built in stone

2006-06-12T06:32:00.000-07:00

An easy day-trip from the city of Pune are two sets of Buddhist cave complexes, at Bhājā and Karlī (now known as Karla). I could flat-footedly describe them as monasteries carved out of the mountains, but what was important about visiting here will be harder to convey. I will try, but first, some basic facts: These elaborate structures were built by removing rock from the mountain, leaving in place large open spaces, some with high arched ceilings, dramatic colonnades and some lovely wall-carvings.

At both complexes, the long vaults of teak wood that decorate the ceiling of the central hall are said to be original. But especially what the artisans made of these mountains were monastic living quarters. About half the caves were monastic residences.

Buddhist monks first moved in to them some 2,100 years ago, according to archeologists who date the sites to the two centuries before the common era (160 BCE and 80 BCE are dates commonly given). In some cases, living quarters are carved out of the walls of a large gathering space; in some cases there are multiple stories of quarters, usually quite tiny, connected by winding stairways of stone.

It is hard to fathom the effort it must have taken to wrest these elaborate spaces from the rock, but the strategic placement of these complexes is confirmed by the sight of two long stone forts built at the peaks of two surrounding passes. I made the trip to visit these caves recently with Neil Dalal, another Fulbrighter here in Pune. Neil is a deeply thoughtful student of Vedanta, and made a wonderful traveling companion for this excursion.

There is something extraordinary that can happen simply being by physical present at places that were important to the people who occupied them. Not always, but sometimes, and sometimes this ‘something’ defies our ordinary understanding of the shape of time, and this is especially so if one knows that one is in a place lived in for long periods of time in the past by humans for whom they were deeply meaningful. At least that was the case for me here.

There have been times in Pune - not a city in which Buddhist monks are likely to be seen wandering - when my own monastic robes and vows have seemed out of context. Without a context - a context that most often is provided simply by being in a Buddhist community - the purpose and meaning of those vows can easily lose its clarity. Sitting here, even without any other actual members of the monastic community, that context was fully present for me.

These Buddhist sites caves apparently do not see many visitors most days, though those who do come seem unusually interested in shouting into the caves for the acoustic effect. A temple to the goddess Ekvira, built literally at the doorstep of the main Buddhist cave, draws Hindu pilgrims, but these seldom seem to visit any but the largest Buddhist cave. Across the valley, Bhājā was nearly deserted when we arrived, save for two elderly attendants. Here, Neil and I were each able to take a good stretch of time to just sit silently, each in our own monastic cell.

In one of the photos that I will be posting towards the bottom of this blog entry, you can see the bed (or so I understand it) of rock left in the cell when the rest was carved out. Removing my shoes and entering, I sat down where some other monk must surely have sat in a past I can only reach in my imagination. Actually, since the caves were in use for many centuries, dozens of generations of monks certainly must have sat there. In my robes, holding vows that may have passed received through their lineage, I sat and tried to connect with the other monks who sat there, perhaps arguing with their friends, meditating, reading, sleeping, or like me resting my eyes on the long and lush green view out the door to the cell, wondering about others who had been there before. Or perhaps they wondered about those who would come in the future, in their future that was now my present. Nurturing, protecting and transmitting the teaching of the Buddha as a way of caring for future generations is a prominent part of some Buddhist practices, as is cultivating gratitude for those who have done so for you in the past. And so the monks and I sat in those small quarters, wondering about each other, caring for each other and feeling thankful for the care received.

the bus that means death

2006-06-11T02:35:00.000-07:00

One day after a heavy rain, there is a death in the family whose wedding puja I had just attended. Shortly after the wedding, they awake to find that their grandather’s sister had passed away in the night. She has been living in the household for years, but the night before she said she felt unwell, and asked that her older brother be called. He was on the other side of the city visiting a clinic with his wife, who has also been ill. He is located and comes at once to see his younger sister. They spend a short time together, and then she rests. By morning her long life has ended.

She was frail and old, and always smiling, my neighbor Anna tells me. When news of her death comes early in the morning, Anna dresses at once and goes ‘to say goodbye.’ The grandfather’s sister is laid out for viewing in the house, her nostrils and mouth plugged with some bit of cloth. Bodies here are cremated as soon as possible, generally the same day, and we are told she will be taken from the house for cremation in a couple of hours. Word spreads quickly, and the neighbors and family in the area come immediately to bid her farewell.

Later, as I am leaving my room, I see a white bus marked with a large red cross on its way out of the institute. Her body has been placed inside. The bus has no glass windows, just grills, and is filled with relatives of the deceased, accompanying her body. Others who will not go the cremation ground walk along behind the bus, seeing it off to the main road. I join them. Only one face is trailed with tears, a young woman. The rest are subdued but calm. We soon reach the gate, where the relatives remaining behind will part company with the deceased.

Everyone knows what this bus means. “Who has died?” the staff who are just now arriving at the institute ask us. We tell them. They nod, and stand beside us in silence as we all watch the bus pass on to the next leg of its journey.

a walk amongst pune’s ‘outsiders’

2006-06-08T02:41:00.000-07:00

One evening while riding in a rickshaw with my friend Kranti, I spotted first what looked to me like a Hindu shrine temple with Muslims entering it, and then a large structure that looked like a Catholic church but which she told me was a synagogue. I was intrigued, and she promised to take me to see them both one day. When that day comes, along the way within minutes, we pass a magnificent Jain temple, several Buddhist ‘vihāras’ or tiny temples that also look on the outside very much like the Hindu temples that dot the urban landscape here, a massive church of Saint Francis, a Parsi place of worship closed off to view from the street, as well as a Moslem shrine to a female saint, before reaching finally the city’s oldest Jewish house of worship (see separate blog entry on this). This extravaganza of religious pluralism, ironically enough, turns out to be a by-product of the exclusivist impulses of Pune’s brahmin community.

I chose to come to Pune in part because it is a major center of Sanskrit learning. I am told that many generations back, a king eager to attract brahmins to his kingdom offered land grants to any who would come and settle in ‘the village of Pune,’ as those with long memories still call this now bustling city of Pune. Many took up the offer, made their homes alongside the purifying waters of the town’s broad rivers, and established Pune as a stronghold of brahminical culture and learning. It is still today a great place to come to study that culture’s lifeblood, the Sanskrit language. Brahmins’ status as brahmins depended on maintaining ritual purity. The necessary distance from potentially polluting factors was upheld physically as well as socially. As such, those who are not members of one of the upper castes were discouraged from making their homes within the boundaries of the heavily brahmin Pune village. Even today, it is within the ‘village’ of Pune that brahmins and members of the upper three Hindu castes tend to make their homes. And for generations now, everyone else - Jews, Jains, Christians, Muslims, Parsis, as well as members of those Hindu groups once called ‘outcaste’ or ‘untouchable’ - has made their homes outside that central area of Pune, and away from the pure waters of the city’s two rivers.

It in this outsider’s zone that all the diverse places of worship are clustered, and where those whom they serve live shoulder-to-shoulder. Indeed, it was in this outsider’s area that the British encamped, earning it the name of ‘Camp,’ or, more formally, Pune Cantonment. These boundaries are important, and even today, there are signs in English and Marathi announcing when one is entering or exiting ‘Pune Cantonment.’

My walk among Pune’s outsiders begins with a meal at my friend Kranti’s home. Kranti calls her neighborhood a ghetto, and as in many ghettos, much of life takes place on the street. People are washing dishes at open taps, scolding children, chatting with neighbors. For the first time in Pune, I pass elderly women, children, and young men, who brighten at the sight and place their palms together in respect for a passing Buddhist monk. Kranti’s parents followed the great Dalit leader Dr. Ambedkar in converting to Buddhism and the neighborhood is full of people who recognize my robes. The neighborhood is full of Muslims, recognizable from their manner of dressing, and Buddhists, not visibly marked as such. Kranti’s father tells me there several ‘viharas.’ Vihara is a term meaning Buddhist monastery, and I am somewhat crestfallen to see that here, a vihara is a neighborhood shrine, neatly kept swept but otherwise empty except for a simple image of Buddha and a few plastic flowers. Monasticism, as I will soon learn, has not found much favor among Ambedkari Buddhists.

We continue on. Squeezed between two storefronts is a gleaming white tower of marble, a Jain temple covered in statues and decorative ornamentation from the ground straight up to the top of its three or four stories. It is as narrow as the surrounding buildings, but magnificent, and the opus is apparently not yet complete. A group of men cluster on scaffolding, painting on one of the few unsculpted patches of wall. I wonder why I thought a camera would not be necessary to me this year in India, Kranti comments that they have a lot of money, and we move on.

Next we arrive at the Muslim shrine I mistook for a Hindu temple. The loud music and crowds outside announce to us that we have turned up on a festival day. No one seems to mind our entering, though my robes and shaven head and Kranti’s short hair and jeans might seem to mark us as well outside the fold. We remove our shoes and follow a group of women inside.

The centerpiece of the shrine is a grave, draped in gold silky fabric, covered with flowers and enclosed by a marble railing. Large photos on the wall identify the deceased as a saint named Babajan, a woman with matted hair seated at the base of a tree. Apparently she came from Afghansitan, where she was born, and spent the later years of her life at the base of that tree. Behind the grave is that very tree, also draped in gold fabric, covered with flowers and enclosed. The tree lies on the more spacious men’s side of this shrine, so we cannot pay our respects to it.

Greatly revered for her sanctity (and honored today with her own entry in Wikipedia), Babajan passed away earlier this century, and today is her birthday. Devotees buy flowers and packets of puffed rice at the entrance, hand it to a temple official standing inside the railing enclosing the tomb, who places the flowers on the grave, touches the rice to the grave and hands it back. One woman in her forties takes her rice packet and hands bits of the blessed rice to each of the other women in our part of the temple, including Kranti and me. Women lift their children over the railing so they can place their heads against the grave, sharing in its sanctity, demonstrating their reverence and receiving blessings. After one boy’s feet touch the grave, the temple official begins to do the lifting, holding them horizontally in the air, feet far from the grave. A young Muslim girl is visibly distraught to be swung into the air in this way by an unknown man, and casts her gaze about wildly, seeking her mother. A middle-aged man is praying fervently at the tomb. Tears stream down his face. His prayers complete, he wipes the tears away, glances about and departs. I whisper a question to Kranti, and we begin to attract some attention. She tells me the women are saying we should not be there. We leave.

Next we pass a massive church of Saint Francis. It is a cathedral, really, with row after row of pews spreading in three directions from the central altar. People trickle in, pray for a few minutes, and leave. Saint Francis himself is said to have died in India, and the coastal area once controlled by the Portuguese on the east coast of India, called Goa, is still both heavily Catholic in faith and Portuguese in flavor. Sheets pinned to a column outside the church itself announce classes for children in Goan handicrafts. Signs in English on the church’s wall identify the images of the stations of the cross.

As we move on in the direction of the synagogue, we pass a closed compound that Kranti tells me is a Parsi place of worship. In the street Kranti points out an older woman dressed in Western style skirts, mid-calf and respectable for even the most conservative Sicilian town, yet glaringly out of place here. In these (and most) parts of India women beyond a certain age wear saris, which are always floor-length or, if they wish to signal their modernity, a salwar kameez (or Punjabi) with pants that fall to the ankle.

Soon we are at the syunagogue, about which more in another blog entry, and with this my afternoon in Camp is concluded. As I leave by rickshaw, I note that Camp also has its swank side. The close and vibrant streets in the part of Camp where Muslims, Jains, Catholics, Parsees and Buddhists make their home in Pune gives way to broader streets where high stone walls offer only occasional glimpses at the vast and landscaped colonial ‘bungalows’ where the more affluent outsiders of Pune village make their homes. Huge billboards advertise housing complexes complete with swimming pools, fitness centers and around-the-clock security. This world seems as foreign to the heart of Camp Kranti showed me as is the Deccan Gymkhana area where I am living. The streets again become densely packed as the rickshaw crosses out of Camp and into the heart of the old city.

Soon I will be ‘home’ at Bhandarkar Institute, one of Pune’s most venerated symbols of high brahmin culture in its fullness.

synagogue in pune

2006-06-07T03:05:00.000-07:00

Last week I caught a glimpse from a rickshaw of a massive structure that my friend Kranti told me was a Jewish syngagogue. Today on our walk through her quarter, we stop by. The synagogue is surrounded by a high fence, and the watchman is firm and unsmiling as he tells us that we cannot enter. Unless we are Jewish, he will not allow us inside. We begin asking questions about the Jewish community in Pune and the synagogue’s activities, which he answers readily but still without smiling.

The synagogue was built 157 years ago and features a towering clock spire. The watchman tells us David Sassoon, who financed its construction, wanted the synagogue to be visible all across Pune, as indeed it was in its day.

The watchman himself is not Jewish, but has inherited the job of watchman from his father, and is clearly quite proud of the place. A Jew from Baghdad, David Sassoon was a major philanthropist, and built a hospital that stands to this day in Pune and bears his name. The mayor of Pune recently submitted a motion to remove the Sassoon name from the hospital and call it instead Dr. Ambedkar Hospital. The watchman tells us he had signed a petition protesting that initiative. My friend Kranti, though her family are followers of Dr. Ambedkar, tells him she too had written to protest that change. (The move was not particularly anti-Semitic, but rather part of a widespread move to rid Maharashtra of British names, and The mayor, when told of David Sassoon’s history, commented that she just thought he was British, and announced she was withdrawing her motion.)

Although Kranti has explained that I am a Buddhist nun from America, the watchman again whether I am Jewish, and it becomes clear that he would actually like to let us in. At last, he does, with a wave of his hand. We can walk around the grounds - but cannot enter the synagogue, he adds sternly.

We circle the synagogue. But for the stars of David, to my eye it looks an awful lot like a Gothic cathedral, right down to umatching ornamentation on the columns and long narrow stained glass windows.

As we come round the corner to return to the gate, we see a man and his wife enter on a scooter, and fear we may have gotten the watchman in trouble with our insistence. As we make for the gate, instead he calls us. The caretaker would like to meet us.

He opens the doorway, dons his yarmulke and invites us into the synagogue itself. We are inside an exquisitely detailed, almost understated synagogue in white marble with delicate, hand-painted trim, and all sense of Gothic cathedral disappears completely. The caretaker and his wife turn out to be long-standing members of the community and are most gracious in entertaining our questions. When I tell them I am from New York, his wife is full of questions about synagogues there. Are there really as many as she has heard? Do they offer Hebrew instruction? They are happy to answer our questions as well. The Jewish community in Pune now numbers 250 people, they tell us. Most are ‘Bagdadi’ Jews who migrated to India under British rule in the 18th century, but ten or so are Bene-Israel Jews, or Jews whose ancestors are said to have arrived in India before the destruction of the Second Temple in the first century of the common era. There had been several Jewish communities in Pune, but entire communities emigrated to Israel and now all the city’s Jews fit easily into this one space. They no longer use the separate section upstairs for women, but sit on opposite sides of the main floor during worship. All the high holidays are observed, as are services on the Sabbath, and weddings are still held in the synagogue itself. Rabbis visit, but none is resident, and there is no Hebrew instruction. Still, the foundation started by the Sassoon family continues with its charitable work, and now even has its own website - www.jacobsassoon.org - they tell us with some pride.

When it is time to leave, mindful of the watchman’s position, we make sure they know that he was very careful about letting us in, and did so only after long conversation. The caretaker tells us he used to open the synagogue for visitors for several hours one morning a week, but now will not even talk to journalists inquiring into the program. In 1990, in the opening days of the Gulf War, protestors broke into the synagogue and set fire to it. The Torah was burned, he tells us, with obvious distress. After that, they built the wall, and began to turn visitors away at the gate. Our visit ended, we return to that gate, and are treated to a broad grin from the watchman as we thank him and bid him goodbye.

from the text: there are other beings here too!

2006-06-06T06:45:00.000-07:00

Despite what is reported in this blog, most of my time here is spent reading - reading a text that can be so dazzling in its narrative details that one easily overlooks any metaphorical readings. Here is my translation of a description of the moment that Buddha (then still just a bodhisattva) was conceived.

At that time, the earth trembled greatly, and the entire world was filled by a vast light, exceeding in its intensity the hues of the 33 gods. As a sun and moon in the darkest hells of the world: so great was this extraordinary appearance; so great was its power. This vast light filled even those places that were black with a blackening darkness that has not known the light of a sun or moon. The sentient beings born there had not seen even their own outstretched arms, but by this light they now saw one another. They said to one another, “Sirs, there are other beings here, too!” And so they came to know that there were other beings there too.

- Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinayavastu (Pravrajyāvastu)

This image itself is startling in its beauty, even without contemplating the implication that the experience of suddenly discovering that one is surrounded by others is being understood as one of the effects of the Buddha’s presence in the world.

on the road

2006-06-03T23:43:00.000-07:00

a friend took these photo during a long wait at a train crossing.

arranged marriages

2006-06-03T06:51:00.000-07:00

A German friend here of mine who is also studying in Pune recently returned from a wedding of an Indian friend she had met in Europe, while he was there on an assignment.

The wedding was large. Very large. Some 2,500 guests were invited to the main event. A more intimate gathering of 500 people attending the remainder of the activities surrounding the wedding. There was also a special event for their Hindu guests, an affair attended by 500 of their Hindu friends who were feasted at a banquet hall featuring vegetarian food. Only the very closest 100 or so relatives and family friends would have the privilege of being hosted in and around the house itself, and would take their breakfast, lunch and dinner together at the house. During the five days of the wedding festivities, meals would be cooked, gifts would be given to guests and received in carefully prescribed patterns of exchange.

In short, there was much to be done. My German friend spent most of her time joining in the work with her host’s female relatives, as men and women live largely separate existences. One evening, she had some time to chat with her host, the groom. In Germany, when she had casually asked whether he had a girlfriend, he said yes, a girl in Mumbai, She now asked him whether the bride was that same girl. No, he said. It was the custom of his people to marry cross-cousin. He and his bride-to-be had known each other as children, but lived in villages some four hour’s bus ride apart. In any case, since girls and boys are segregated from the age of 15, they had not had any interaction in years. She had not seen him since then, though unbeknownst to her, he had paid a visit to her village to get a glimpse of her as the marriage negotiations advanced. The girl in Mumbai had not even been considered as a prospective bride. My German friend struggled with her reaction to that. She told me she recognized that her impulse to condemn what she saw as the lack of personal choice and human feeling in this arranging of marriages did not fit well with her observation that the women in the extended family seemed remarkably contented with their lives.

Attempting to help her understand the choices involved, her host said:

“You see how little time I have to spend with you here. Just a bit at the end of the day. It will be basically like that with my wife. The rest of the time, she is with the women of my family. She isn’t marrying me, actually. She is marrying my family. If my mother doesn’t like her, her life will be awful. And if she is not one of my cross-cousins, the rest of the village won’t accept here either, and her life here will be a hell. It wasn’t for myself that I didn’t marry my friend in Mumbai. It was for her. For her happiness.”

Later, when it was time for the bride to leave her childhood home and family to depart for the wedding and the home she would now share with her husband, the entire family wept bitterly. The family had actively arranged for this marriage, and yet they wept when their plan was at last executed. I imagine that at such moment, what my friend witnessed was a rare glimpse at the high value placed on this invisible web that held together that single household, and how highly valued was the sharing of all the small and quiet moments of that household’s life. When the moment came for the bride to leave home, even the men of her household were openly shedding tears, and visibly pained at her departure. My German friend asked them later why they wept so, since as the wife of a cross-cousin they would still see her and she would still be part of the extended family. “Yes,” they said, “We will see her. She will still be part of our family. But she is leaving our house.” She is leaving our house.

the rains come

2006-06-01T05:58:00.000-07:00

Summer in my corner of India has been severe but swift, and ended overnight with the coming of the monsoon. The first drop of rain I had seen in the two months since I arrived in Pune came last Friday, the afternoon of the Khandoba puja (see May 27 blog entry). Pune had been remarkably green, given the utter absence of rainfall, but still it is dry. So much so, in fact, that clothes can be hung two or three shirts on top of another, and still be bone-dry in a few hours, if there is not enough space to hang them one by one, as can happen when Anna and I both have our laundry hanging on our veranda at the same time.

When this first bout of rain fell, it was not a major downpour, but it was certainly wet, and the temperature plummeted instantly. I was inside working at my desk, from time to time glancing out the window that lies directly before my desk, when I heard a rustling behind me. One of the young boys from the village behind the institute was huddled just inside my doorway. The roof of the veranda provides shelter from the rain, so there seemed no practical need for him to enter my room. As I turned to look at him, he smiled and gestured that he was there hiding from his playmates. He respectfully took off his sandals, set them down inside the door and returned to the urgent business of waiting for his friends to find him. He could barely suppress his giggling. I have two doors to my room, one letting into the main stairwell and the other letting out onto the veranda, and when the shout of his friends revealed that they had located him, he took off with a dash through the other door, leaving his sandals behind and saying, “Sorry, madam, ok?” as he crossed my room. Two of his friends tore through my room in mad and noisy pursuit, nearly knocking over my fan as they went. “Sorry, madam!” they shouted, leaving a thick trail of mud across my floor.

When the monsoon does not come, or comes in small measure, there are drought, famine... and desparate suffering. When the monsoon comes in its fulness, the fields are long with grain, the trees heavy with fruit. Even shorter term, the coming of the monsoon brings relief from the dry and dusty heat, and signals the season of growth, and green, and vibrant life. In fact, the exuberance of the young boys playing hide-and-seek in my room seems the most suitable response. But still this was not the monsoon, just a little pre-monsoon shower. The real rains came three days later, and when they did they snuck up on us in the dark of night.

I was awakened at about 1:30 am by bursts of lightning, puncturing the darkness with longer repetitions than I recall seeing anywhere else. The repeated lightning bolts were followed by long and continual rumblings of thunder, as if a plane were right just overhead, but hovering and not passing. The winds slammed my windows shut. They rattled and opened again from time to time, and I did not until then realize that they could not be latched properly. After a while I went back to sleep, until one particularly energetic burst of thunder roused me again. I counted the seconds from flash to thunder, and determined it was some 30 miles away. Still, the electrical outlets were clustered just above my head, so I got up and unplugged everything. I disconnected even my fan, which had been rendered unnecessary by the drop in temperature to a downright chilly 79 degrees. Again to sleep, and so it went until somehow my sleep was reluctantly penetrated by the recognition that the sound of rain falling was coming from inside my room. As I got up to investigate, my feet brushed a large wet spot at the end of the mattress. Apparently I was sleeping under one of several major leaks in the ceiling. By now, it was 4 am and quite tired. I simply shifted my bed out of harm’s way, took everything up off the floor, put a bucket under where I thought the main drip was, and went back to sleep, careful to rest my feet to the side of the wet spot.

The next morning, I awake, survey the damage and note that there are large watermarks fanning across my ceiling. With the monsoon’s persistent dampness, a generous spread of mold cannot be long away. I leave this room next week, but it is jarring nonetheless to recognize that my cozy little home has become virtually uninhabitable overnight.

Once I have fulfilled my duty to describe my disaster in detail and show the damage to all my neighbors and passersby, I take myself out for a walk. Dodging puddles and breathing in deep the cool morning air, I suddenly realize that the world now smells different. Fresh and full of earthy aromas, unidentifiable yet oddly familiar to me. The air is filled with hundreds of winged creatures I had never seen before, their four wings pale and lacy and yellow. Birds in clusters seem to have decided to all pay our garden a visit at the same time. The sky hangs low now with moody but delicate clouds, casting an oddly gentle light on this world of fresh new life. The monsoon has arrived in Pune.

sneak preview of sarnath

2006-05-29T07:10:00.000-07:00

some photos of the central institute for higher tibetan studies in sarnath, where i will be from september or so...

daily rhythms

2006-05-29T00:16:00.000-07:00

My life in Pune has taken on a rhythm of its own, dictated by weather as much as by my study demands. April and May are summer here, and we are just coming to the peak of the hot season. I am out of bed by 6:30, and immiedately open all my doors so the room can cool down before the sun heats things back up. It has been about 90 degrees at night in my room, though I sleep with the window open. It cools down to 85 or 86 in the morning - and even less these days as we moved into the pre-monsoon period. Once the sun starts to flood my room, I shut everything - windows and doors - and close the curtains, which I bought especially for this purpose. By 7:30 I have had breakfast, and then I plunge into my text. I have been translating from 7:30 or 8 until 1 am daily, then lunch, or tiffin, which is delivered to my room. At 1am on the dot the electricity goes out - we have scheduled daily outages to allow for load sharing across the power grid. This means no fan and a full stomach, so often I just rest for a bit. Then, sometimes (when he has time for me) I read with MG Dhadphale, professor emeritus of Pali and Sanskrit at Fergusson College here in Pune, and currently head of the very venerable old Pune Sanskrit research institute, Bhandarkatr Institute.

After that, I turn to Sanskrit study in general - memorizing more vocabulary and working through the Paninian grammar that my Sanskrit professor in Visakhapatnam, Prabhakara Shastri, is composing. In the evenings, I open the doors once it is cool again to help bring down the temperature, and at 10 i call Professor Shastri and he quizzes me and gives me more assignments to work on for the next day.

I have a neighbor named Anna who is an anthropologist from Vienna studying female priests (purohitas) and she very wisely feels I should explore the city more (see below for one successful effort on her part to get me to go out more!)

On Sundays I try to take the morning off, and we go to visit a local temple or market. Anna is here with her four-year-old son Christopher and ten-month-old daughter, and Christopher likes to visit when my doors are open. He speaks to me in German which i only sometimes can understand and I answer in English. We get along exceedingly well. He brings bits of his snacks and fruit to me, and I share with him my peanuts. Last week he put his hands around my arm and said, 'wir sind freunde' - we are friends.

more images of home in pune

2006-05-28T23:39:00.000-07:00

my home in pune - bhandarkar institute

2006-05-28T23:35:00.000-07:00

night out in pune - possession and puja

2006-05-28T22:46:00.000-07:00

(May 27, 2006) - Last night my neighbor Anna, the Austrian anthropologist came knocking urgently on my door. "Come," she said, "there is a puja just starting out back." I had just sat down to do some writing on the 'What Am I, a Demon"?" story cycle in the Vinayavastu. When she saw that I was not jumping up at once, she spoke again, more firmly this time: "Just come, now." So I did.

Earlier in the week, there had been a marriage in the tiny village behind our building. The village is comprised of housing for the staff - watchmen, clerks and lower-level employees of Bhandarkar Institute - and thus I know several of its residents by face, if not by name.

It is now four days later, still the wedding rituals linger on, and each day there is some fresh activity that both extended families gather and attend. Tonight was planned a puja to Khandoba, a deity who appears to take the form of a heavy metal chain. This particular puja is an a regular part of the cycle of wedding rituals for this group, and would be followed by a meal and then a nightlong program involving song and dance to the deity. Those attending were planning on staying up all night to participate. The puja began at about 9pm, ordinarily enough, with red kumkum and yellow turmeric powder, lights, and other offerings for the deity. The altar was on the bare ground, a cloth placed under the chain, and the offering substances arranged on plates. A torch that looked like a ritual implement was blazing, and waved at various junctures in the ritual. Two pujarins (ritual officiants) were there, dressed in white with a white cap. The groom was dressed similarly, with his wife at his side in a splendid silk sari with elaborate jewelry and makeup. They and the married couple crouched by the altar, while everyone else stood around watching as the pujarins directed the series of ritual actions that had to be performed. A small band of musicians, heavy on the percussion, were on hand, offering music. With the musicians was a young woman dressed in a fairly ordinary sari, with only the usual jewelry and make-up. We were told she would dance for us later in the evening. She stuck close to the musicians and made no contact with anyone else.

As I joined her in the circle of onlookers, Anna whispered to me that this was a puja brahmins would not hold nor most likely attend. As she did I noticed that one of the middle-aged ladies - a relative of the groom - had begun dancing, her body jerking somewhat violently as she did. Two women approached her from behind, quickly untied her hair and adjusted her sari, with the end being tucked firmly into her beltline. At this point, we may have been 15 or 20 minutes into the puja. Then another woman began to dance, this one quite frail and elderly: the bride's grandmother. Her movements were vigorous and rhythmic as she danced. Her bun too was let down and, with a minimum of fuss, her sari adjusted and secured around her waist. I guessed this was to protect the women from immodesty as they move about. Then a third woman began to dance: the groom's grandmother. At least initially she appeared to retain some measure of control, for when they came to undo her hair, she waved them off firmly. She had her hair coiffed a bit elaborately, and they left it untouched at her request, but they did readjust her sari for her. She danced with rather more decorum than the other two.

During this puja, no other women danced, and people gave the three of them plenty of space. About 20 to 30 people had gathered around, and they now stood in the dim light of the torch, watching the dancers rather causally, without particular awe or concern. Some people talked quietly as the music continued.

All three women danced facing the altar, though as was clarified later by the bride's sister, the women were not dancing. Certainly her grandmother would never dance in public. Rather, the goddess was dancing.

Later the bride's grandfather told us that when they had held the Khandoba puja after the wedding of the bride's father, similarly a grandmother of the bride and a grandmother of the groom had also become possessed by the goddess and danced. The family had a special connection to the goddess in a number of forms, and one of these would likely have been present. It was very possible that when the next generation marries the goddess might choose their grandmothers to dance as well.

From time to time, some women went to the altar, took some of the red kumkum powder that is offered in worship to deities, and anointed the women's foreheads with it. I understood them to be doing so as an offering to the goddess as she danced.

Very shortly after the dancing began the music stopped and did not resume until they had returned to themselves. The musicians had allowed the three to dance for no more than 10 minutes, and clearly meant the possession to end, waiting until the women emerged form that state. Each did so in a bit of a daze, as if awakening form a deep sleep. Their eyes were glassy. Two of them took the ends of their saris and wiped the kumkum powder from their foreheads. They remained standing where they had been. The drumming and ritual continued for another 15 or 20 minutes. The bride and groom stood always side by side, woman on the left. They were made at times to offer some substances to the altar, at others to carry them off in a particular direction indicated by the pujarin. At one point, the chain was lifted with great care, a cloth draped around the groom's neck and the chain placed on top of it. In this way, he circled the altar holding a leaf pouring water as they went, and followed by five of the young girls from the village who did likewise. They made a ring of water around the altar had been, and continued in a small procession up to the groom's home. The puja continued inside the house at the family altar but at this point most everyone seated themselves to chat on mats outside the house, where a large and elaborate altar had been constructed of tripods of five sugar canes and many other objects I was less able to identify. After some time, food began being carried out on leaf plates and all had to stand so that all could be re-seated in proper seating order for eating. Very unusually, women were served food first, an inversion of the normal order that happens only at this puja.

I left at this time, partly to avoid the social discomfort of not partaking of the food, and also because at this time, I was to call my Sanskrit professor in Vishakhapatnam, Prabhakara Shastry. When I did, he strongly encouraged me to attend every single function I was invited to, as well as those to which I had not been invited, but where my presence would not be offensive. He said he had done the same in the States, entering churches where weddings were in progress if it seemed he was not prohibited from attending.

Anna had come home to put her children to sleep and rest for bit herself, as the program of song and dance was to begin at 11:30, we had been told, and would last all night. At about midnight I began to hear drumming and roused Anna from her sleep. Anna's four-year-old son Christopher had very much wanted to see it, and had asked her to wake him up and take him there. I pushed Christopher in his stroller, Anna carried her sleeping 10-month old daughter in her arms, well and thus the four of us thus went out together to the groom's house, where the night's events would take place.

When we arrived, everyone was already seated, the female relatives of the groom all together in the spot directly facing the musicians, but on the other side of the altar. In my estimation, this women's mat was by far the best spot to watch the evening's events. The female relatives of the bride also sat together on a map, off to one side. The men were divided into groups, and sat farther from the altar. One group seemed loosely, but only loosely, comprised of the groom's relative, the other the bride's. We were all accommodated under the cover of a decorative canopy that had been erected for the event. Another set of men, mostly older, sat on beds that had been placed outdoors, outside the canopy and at a remove from the center of the activities. The wedding was a bit unusual perhaps in that both groom and bride hail from this same small cluster of houses, so most everyone seemed to know each other well.

When we arrived the band was playing, and just as we were arriving, one of the three women who had earlier been possessed again stood to dance. Again she faced the altar, again she alone danced, and again her hair was let loose and her sari made tighter. She was dancing near one of the poles that held up the tent we were under, and two women hovered near her to intercede should her movements bring her too near it. Again women came to anoint her forehead as she danced, but this time the dancing was permitted to continue for a bit longer than previously, but finally, the band stopped playing, evidently sparking an end to the state she was in. One of the women who had been hovering nearby stepped closer, just at the moment when the woman possessed fell to the ground. The second woman was brought down with her, occasioning a great deal of laughter on the part of this second woman as well as those surrounding her. Those sitting around the two fallen women exchanged smiles or laughed at this bit of slapstick, most of all the woman who had been sent tumbling when the possessed woman fell who seemed to seek out eye contact with other women to grin at what had transpired. The woman who had danced possessed did not initially join in the laughter, but rather sat a bit dazed. After a couple of minutes, though, after wiping some of the kumkum and sweat from her face, as she returned to herself, she too exchanged smiles with one or two other women who caught her eye. I was struck by the comfort in shifting from the serious work of dancing for the goddess and caring for the woman who did so with the playful laughter at the slapstick fall.

Meanwhile, the drumming resumed. The musical accompaniment featured mainly drumming with cymbals though one string instrument and a sort of accordion were also at hand. All the musicians were male, and all provided vocal support, in songs that seemed to draw heavily on call-and-response. To my utterly untrained ear, it did sound rather African.

Another woman, one of the grandmothers again, became possessed but did not stand to dance. Instead she threw the upper half of her body forward and back, and side to side, rhythmically in powerful jerks. Someone unloosed her hair, and she was allowed to continue thus for some time. People watched from where they sat, but she was not made particularly the center of any attention. No particular fuss was made, and it all seemed fairly matter-of-fact. Again the goddess seemed to leave her when the music stopped, and she sat for some time, disconnected from those around her and seeming somewhat disoriented.

This was the last of the five instances of possession I saw that night, all happening in the first quarter of the evening's activities.

From time to time, people randomly came forward, men as well as women, and picked their way between the musicians to make a cash offering or offering of kumkum and turmeric at the altar. A couple of older women carried around the tray of powders and anointed the foreheads of the women seated. Throughout, people came and went, younger people continually shifting from group to group, some going off to sleep, while others simply stretched out on the mats and dozed off for a bit. For a while, young girls brought around trays with small cups of strong chai, for those who were choosing not to sleep.

After some time, the format shifted, and two of the musicians began what sounded to me like a ritualized form of banter, half sung and occasioning much laughter. The language was too hard for Anna to follow, and one of the girls seated near us was only able to indicate that it was about different gods. I imagined it to be some form of ritualized rivalry. This went on for quite a while, with the older man dancing in what seemed to me a female style of dance. One of the young girls, Diksha, eleven years old and by far the best dancer in the crowd, stood and joined him. They stood dancing about five feet apart. The man, about sixty years old, kept shifting dance styles and she watched each shift, smiling, and copied his moves. She clearly enjoyed herself but was called back to sit down after a couple of songs. The song, dance and banter continued and later when the performers were calling her to dance, her mother said no. The girl with some English explained that it was not proper for her to dance with him - and in fact had not been proper earlier either, as she was female and already too old for that.

Next to come forward to dance was the single female in the group of entertainers. Until now this young woman had been milling around near the musicians, not interacting with anyone in the audience. At this point, though, she began to dance with the older man, again at a respectable distance from him, facing him, in a style different from any I had seen before. Her hands were continually moving in patterns reminiscent of classical Indian dance, but much more erratic and rapid. Her hips and shoulders moved in small jerks, and she never varied her movements. She did not strike me as a particularly skilled dancer. Men would come forward to dance with her - mostly unmarried men in their early twenties, and many danced in a wild style with big Bollywood movements that only men get away with off-camera here. On one occasion, one such young man came in closer to the woman and the lead musician intervened, calling out loudly in his singsong bantering style that that was her side, and the man must stay over there, on his side. This occasioned much laughter.

It was noted that the groom had gone off - it was 2 am or so at this point, and he had slipped off to sleep a bit - and he was called back. His bride too, who had already been called back from sleep once earlier, was also made to return, and watched as her husband was made to dance with the female performer.

Again the format shifted, with people offering money to the performers - usually about ten rupees - and telling them a name, with the understanding that the performers would then poke fun at them. those in the audience who offered cash for this service were mainly men, and it went back and forth it went, with men from either side of the altar . One of the younger musicians would collect the cash, bring it to the performer who had the main role in the banter, and half-whisper the name of the next victim. The senior performer immediately called out that name, weaving it into his singing. With one exception, those singled out for such ribbing were all men. At times, the person called was not present, and someone went off to rouse them from their sleep in one of the houses nearby. Their obvious grogginess as they were brought forward invariably occasioned much amusement.

For those singled out, the ribbing consisted in part in having to come forward to dance with the woman. Many of the men, especially those a bit older, were clearly embarrassed at having to perform publicly and some did their best to refuse, though in the end, all those singled out were made to take a turn, however short. Before they approached her to dance, though, their faces were anointed, often very thoroughly, with turmeric powder, red kumkum powder and a black powder. Often they ended up painted garishly in these three colors, their face and, inevitably, clothes, stained yellow by the turmeric.

Next to the altar, a fire had been built, and someone sat tending to it, feeding it ladlefuls of oil regularly. As part of the ribbing, the man called forward first had his face painted, usually while seated here. On occasion, one of the young men in the audience would come and restrain their hands, the better to paint them fully. Turmeric might be dusted into the hair, and in one instance, even put under the man's shirt. Sometimes they stood up immediately and danced with the woman, before rushing back to their seat, but others, especially younger boys and brothers of the bride or groom, might sit and tend this fire for some time as well. They may have done more while seated here, but I could not see clearly from where I sat with the groom's female relatives.

This was all done with much joy, and amidst great laughter, and though I could not follow the banter that sparked outbursts of laughter, I found myself grinning often. At one point, someone gave Anna's name to the musicians and they seemed intent on getting her to come up to dance - something no female except Diksha had done. They told her no problem for women to dance, and she joked with them a bit. The women were laughing too, but a few of this sitting near us said, "No Anna, you must not dance." Anna joked that she would certainly dance, but as the last women to do so, after all the other women had had their turn, and when they saw that indeed she would not dance, they turned their attention elsewhere, smiling as they did.

The dancing continued, and at one point many of the younger children still awake joined in the fun, forming a crowd near the altar. The female performer quietly stepped aside and stood watching.

At a certain point, the musicians took a break, and one of the younger ones carried the tray of powders around and anointed the audience members' foreheads. When they came to me and Anna, they quite respectfully determined whether we were each willing before placing the red powder on her forehead.

After this, the musicians who had been standing this entire time, seated themselves and played on from the ground. The dancing and bantering stopped at this point, and the energy level dropped as well.

During the evening, various children (girls and boys) and women came wanting a turn to hold Anna's small daughter Ria, and one such woman, whom Anna did not know, succeeded in putting her back to sleep. Once asleep, Ria was carried into the house and placed on a mat to sleep, next to some other small children. Anna's son Christopher initially could barely stay awake, but later became quite engaged in the activities. He stood up to dance at one point - his dancing consisting in standing motionless with one arm in the air in the pose that dancers often adopt as they move about. He was given a turn to have his face painted, which was done fairly sparingly. We had made small moves to leave earlier, but one elder relative had motioned to us to stay a bit longer. But now Christopher was becoming cranky and her daughter had awakened again, and we left shortly before 4 am, less than an hour before the activities ended.

As Anna and I filed out, each of us with one of her two children, the lead musicians were calling out something that included the word 'deva' (god) and each folded their palms towards me in prostration as I left.