Yoga and Thoreau...

…yes, they’re linked.

The firm control of the senses, is what is called yoga.

Katha Upanishad, II.iii 11

I end up in a few yoga classes a year and, about halfway through, I always feel like throwing up. “I want you to think of a string going right up your spine and out through the top of your head throughout the class today,” the blond woman said. “Sit up nice and straight, don’t strain, put your hands together over your heart space and we’re going to start with three “oms” to get centered and our breath working with us.”

Maybe it’s because I’m never sure exactly why I’m there – and I don’t mean just which way to bend. Am I there for exercise? For a stretch class? Is it supposed to be a physical spiritual practice? Is breathing the point? Meditation? In the past, I’d mostly gone hoping to find exercise that could counteract the effects of running so I found myself sprinting out of any shiny wood studio that spent too long on any kind of prayer. I wanted my spiritual lessons straight up, not slipped in when I was just trying to keep my legs from snapping.

But, that morning, while my head hung down just inches from the rubber mat, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to figure out how this kind of yoga fit in with all the other “yogas” I’d been hearing about in Hinduism.

In this softly-lit studio, the only reference to anything Hindu is a poster which looked like the symbol for “om” from far away but, up close, the gray “om” was actually made up of the smallest of human figures in yoga positions, a pretty accurate metaphor for what’s happened to the practice. I doubt anyone in the studio except some of the instructors think much about where yoga came from and why or that they’re actually engaging in a Hindu practice, albeit a pretty dilute form. I know I never had. In fact, I’d been confused when Professor Chapple started talking about yoga and “important” yoga studios as part of Hinduism’s journey west in the first abridged overview that he gave me about Hinduism in the United States but I’d simply scribbled down what he said. Somewhere in all those notes was the name of a documentary he called the best history of yoga he knew: Yoga Unveiled: Evolution and Essence of a Spritual Tradition. It was produced by Gita and Mukash Desai. I’d gotten through part of it before heading off to yogao class.

Yoga is an ancient practice. The word came from the Sanskrit word yuj or yoke. According to the film, archaeologists found representations of people in recognizable yoga poses in relics that date back to 2500 BCE which makes sense as what we call Hinduism was actually a collection of traditions dating back thousands of years before the birth of Jesus. No one person was responsible for its inception and it wasn’t even recognized as a single religion until centuries after it began. Its name came from outsiders who were describing the people living along the Indus river as “Hindus.” Originally an oral tradition, its earliest texts, the Vedas, were finally written down about 200 BCE followed by the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. The practice we call “yoga” came from something called the Patanjali Sutras, a collection of 195 lessons or verses that were assembled by Patanjali somewhere between 1700 and 2200 years ago. Their purpose was to describe how the mind works and a set of physical practices to get beyond its false limitations.

Exercise was never the principal goal of yoga. If you wanted to learn yoga back in Patanjali’s time, you’d probably have to walk for miles to find a guru and then convince him to accept you as a student because the knowledge was considered secret. And the postures were actually the third step of eight on a path meant to lead, as Huston Smith put it, “to integration or union…of the human spirit with the God who lies concealed in its deepest recesses.”

For the physical postures to be effective, according to Patanjali, students had a whole lot of work to do. First, they had to abstain from violence in word and deed (yama) and then rigorously clean up the way they conducted themselves even when they thought no one is looking (niyama). Were you clean? Content? Able to handle austerities and rigorous self-study? Were you in complete surrender to the creator? Then, and only then, would a guru begin to teach the physical postures meant to control the breath, body and mind. The purpose of the training was to remove all obstacles, especially physical ones, to meditation. Maybe that’s why I always feel like throwing up. I’m pretty sure there isn’t much of those two preceding steps I’ve accomplished. I’ll bet that, if I’d truly taken those two steps first, my mind chatter would be less, too. Georg Feuerstein, author of The Shambhala Encyclopedia of Yoga, said: “Yoga without these foundations is a moral impossibility. It cannot fulfill itself. It cannot have the effect it was intended to have and it can truly not transform human life.”

“Utthita Trikonasana – triangle pose.” We were standing with our legs were spread wide, leaning forward, with one hand to the ground and the other stretched toward the ceiling. I suddenly remembered that you’re supposed to do yoga on an empty stomach.

The historian said the ultimate purpose of yoga had little to do with becoming fit and limber; it was really meant as preparation for the meditation that might lead one to uniting with the divinity inside each one of us. No wonder it was confusing in those yoga studios when the class ended and everyone leapt to make way for the next group coming in. Those last few minutes of silence and repose are much more important than all that comes before; they are, in fact, the point but that’s gotten lost in the emphasis on physical exercise and appearance.

The teacher walked between the mats, shifting a hip here and the angle of a foot there. I caught a glimpse of the clock. Just ten more minutes and one pose left. Good. The postures were no match for my chattering brain which pounced from commentary on the teacher; to rumination on the use of Sanskrit words when they’ve got perfectly fine English names for all the poses; to my assessment of my performance in comparison with those around me – better than the the guy in a baggy shirt but not even close to the pony-tailed woman in front of me; to a fixation on what the statue up front was (a skinny buddha – what did that have to do with yoga?); and then off again to the smell of the incense - was it bothering anybody? I could never use incense in my office without someone wheezing or gagging. And that summed up a scant thirty seconds of thought in a ninety-minute class.

But my hamstrings were better. I could feel that.

The instructor finally said, “Okay, lie down on your mats in Savasana, corpse pose.”

I dropped to the mat like a wet bath towel, making more noise than felt proper.

“Legs slightly apart, “ the instructor purred. “Then let them fall gently out to the sides. Let your arms fall alongside your body, facing upwards.”

I was whipped and warm, grateful for the stillness.

Within minutes, the teacher had us sitting up, legs crossed, palms together in front of our “heart space.”

“Namaste”

“Namaste,” we repeated in unison. And then all around me, just as my mind chatter finally stilled, people began rolling up their mats and heading for their cellphones as the next class started to come in. I decided to go home to finish watching the documentary and what I heard next shocked me.

I’d gotten most of what I needed from the documentary – or so I thought – but I came home and, still in my sweats, sat there on the living room rug to finish watching the rest of the four-hour film on the history of yoga. And there, in the section on yoga’s journey west, was that yoga historian saying that the main people responsible for first bringing Hindu thought into this country were Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Thoreau and Emerson?

I’d read Walden Pond in both high school and college. I’d read Emerson in high school, college and many times since. I’d been assigned essays on both more than once. Yet I’d never noticed any of this.

Georg Feuerstein said that, while there was some evidence that Hindu thought was at least known by the ancient Greeks, it really wasn’t until the first English translations of the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas and the Upanishads found their way into the hands of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the mid-1800s that these traditions had any significant impact in the United States. He said the Transcendentalists “were deeply affected by Indian thought. Thoreau openly uses words such as Brahman and words such as that.”

Of course Emerson’s “Over-Soul” was the Bhagavad Gita’s imperishable, unchanging “presence that pervades the universe.”

Within man is the soul of the whole; the universal beauty to which every part
and particle is equally related, the eternal One.

Of course, both Emerson and Thoreau stressed a direct, unmediated relationship with the Divine as Hinduism did in stark contrast to the religious practices of their day. Of course, Walden Pond was Thoreau’s Ganges, his time there his yogic retreat. In Walden, Thoreau had been explicit but, still, I hadn’t seen it, hadn’t taken it in.

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well or water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma, and ishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or wells at the root of a tree with his crust and water---jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.

How could thought I’d considered so fundamentally a part of my heritage, so fundamentally American, have come, in part, from Hinduism? How could I have started this thing I’m doing with the most obscure, the most ancient, the most remote, the most exotic, the most unknown to me of the traditions and end up here? Inside the pages of some of my most treasured, well-thumbed books? And they were largely responsible for bringing Hindu thought to this country?

Emerson and Thoreau often get slammed for being so “self”-absorbed. This puts it in a different light, doesn’t it, if the “self” they were talking about was actually The Self? In other words, it's not them, in particular, they were trying to fully realize, but the Divine Self.

A few days later, I sat at the long wooden dinner table in the Vedanta Society's dining room after one of Swami Sarvadevananda’s evening classes when the subject came up of how Hinduism first came to the United States. Leslie, an American woman who was raised a Catholic but now wore saris from time to time, said, “It was Swami Vivekananda, wasn’t it? At the Parliament of Religions in Chicago the late 1800s?”

Swamiji’s Bengali-accented English is quite understandable but it’s easy to get tripped up, sometimes, by slight differences in syllabic emphasis. I’m really not sure if it was that or my assumption that the documentary had over-stated the case, or that I thought Hinduism had to have first come to the United States through the aegis of an Indian but I was thought I hadn’t quite heard him right when he answered, “No, it was Thoreau, Thoreau and Emerson who first introduced it here.”

“Thoreau? You mean Walden Pond Thoreau?”

“Yes.”

So here’s what I’ve learned about Hinduism so far: If you’ve ever participated in a Lamaze class or seen one on TV, if you think the state of your mind has some impact on your health, if you’ve been to a twelve-step program, if you are interested in astrology or meditation, if you think good or bad deeds might affect your future fortunes, if you can’t understand why such different ideas often seem to come from the crazy people in California, if you’ve read Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau, and, most of all, if you’ve ever gone to a yoga class, Hindu belief, thought or practice has had some impact on your life.


(19 October 2006)

First teacher...

He who teaches this primal
secret to those who love me
has acted with the greatest love
and will come to me, beyond doubt.

No one can do me a service
that is more devoted than
this, and no one on earth is more
precious to me than he is.

Bhagavad Gita 18.68-18.69

Swami Sarvadevananda told me to ask for him at the bookstore. I was nervous opening the glass-paned wooden door and stepping up into the small store. The raw wood shelves were jammed with books on Hinduism as well as on every faith imaginable. There was other stuff, too: incense, incense burners, some photos, and small figures for sale. I looked around for someone to talk to and then realized that, down behind the boxy checkout counter, a gray-haired woman was bent over, peering at an old computer.

“I’m here to see Swami--,” I realized I’d only seen his name on the website and had no idea how to pronounce it. I stumbled through some approximation of it.

The woman looked confused so I did my best with all those syllables a second time and then said, “I have an appointment.”

She dialed the phone. The voice on the other end did not belong to the swami I’d met. When she hung up she said, “Oh! You don’t mean Swami Swahananda! You mean Swami Sarvadevananda!” but she pronounced his name “SHARva-day-veh-nan-duh” The other swami was Swami Sarvadevanada’s boss, the head of the Hollywood Vedanta Society temple. I confess I was still completely confused, their names still indistinguishable to me.

A few minutes later Swami Sarvadevananda came walking down the brick path. He pulled his keys out from somewhere inside his orange robes and opened the door to his tiny office. In his hand was my proposal. He’d read it overnight.

The swami began as if we were in the middle of a conversation, not the beginning. “I think this should be the question: Why religion? What’s the need of religion? Religion must help one to rise from animalistic instincts to human, and human to divine, and from divine to godly, from godly to an infinitely compassionate personality like Christ and Buddha’s. So, this is a great question and many people don’t understand: what is religion? Thousands and thousands of fanatics and followers and they don’t know what is religion!” Swami Sarvadevanada’s hands were flying. His lilting, accented voice made the already new words and thoughts even harder to follow sometimes. “They don’t know that the transformation of life is religion. Transformation means fighting with my evil tendencies inside, which is meanness, ugliness, which creates pain and suffering for others. That which brings even a little pain for others is not religion, it cannot be religion! ‘Blessed are the peace-makers.’ So, who remembers that word in the scripture? Eh? You should be peaceful, you should radiate peace!”

It was hot in that room even though the windows were open but the swami was untouched by it, his hands kept dancing farther and farther away from him as he talked. It was exciting to see him grab on to this crazy idea of mine instead of what I’d feared would happen. I’d come up with all sorts of ways imaginary spiritual teachers might reject me and my crazy project but I don’t think I had even one scenario that came close to this – complete acceptance.

He was really on a roll. “The transformation of life is religion and anything that causes even a little bit of pain for others isn’t. Sri Ramakrishna, who was born 1836, did not know the complexity of life and other religions. He was a seeker and lover of God.That is called religion. ‘I am religious’ does not mean that I go to any temple and bow down my head twenty times and come to my room and beat my wife, eh? Or I’m a religious person so I can go and straighten you by telling you are on the wrong path, and I can go to heaven, by killing you, if need be, forcing you to believe in my way. That’s a nasty concept of spirituality that has nothing to do with spiritual life. Have you read The Life of Sri Ramakrishna?”

Ramakrishna was the guy on the top shelf of the altar, the main guru of the Vedanta branch of Hinduism. I’d picked up a few books that morning. “I just bought The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.”

“Christopher Isherwood also wrote a book about his life. What Ramakrishna did was simple, he didn’t go for any philosophy. From the early days he wanted to know the secret of the universe. From the early days he felt the pull for seeing God and, after going through rigorous spiritual practice, he declared, ‘As many faiths, so many paths.’ He was born into a very spiritual family. His father (was apart from his wife when) he had a dream in which a deity said, ‘I shall be born in your home.’ About the same time, his wife also had a vision of a beam of light from Lord Shiva entering her womb and felt she had conceived a child!” And Ramakrishna was born, his given name was Gadahar.”

Okay, it must be said: I get nervous around immaculate conception stories. I always wonder if they were trying to compete or maybe the devout think us regular folk won’t pay attention, might not value the message, unless they hype their leader’s story. This was one thing the former biology major in me might never ever get over. I can accept the notion of divinity in people, of certain people, perhaps, being more in tune with that Something More than the rest of us. But beams of light causing a pregnancy in a person? A metaphor, a “true” story I can handle, but insist that it is True, that actually happened and that my faith depends on acceptance of that “actual” fact, well, I don’t know what to do with the big “no way” in my head.

Swami Saradevanada decided to give me the highlights of Ramakrishna’s life, a kind of book-flap synopsis. He said Ramakrishna began his spiritual journey by worshiping God, the Mother, in the form of Kali, a black female Hindu goddess. He went to the Kali temple in Dakshineswar on Ganges River near Bengal every day, demanding that she appear before him. “He’s like a mad guy, daytime and nighttime he is meditating on Mother. When the excruciating pains set in he used to cry, ‘Oh, Mother, another day is gone in my life and you have not come. What is the meaning of this life?’ And he’d cry and weep and rubbing his face on the sandy bed of the Ganges, so much is his urge to see the face of the Divine Mother who is the cause of this universe – that is called religion.” He cocked his head to one side and smiled. Swami Sarvadevananda really liked that story.

I sat politely on the other side of the desk. All I could think was: now why did he have to go and tell me a story like that? If that is religion, I haven’t got a prayer.

Of course the story ended with him seeing the Divine as a beam of light coming from the image of Kali. But – and this was what got my attention – it was through that vision that Ramakrishna came to realize that God had no form. “He reconciled all religions as true: ‘he’ and ‘she’ – gone. Now, you can understand what Hindu philosophy is. It is like a gateway. And after that what happened? Mother is gone, the form is gone. He’s lost into infinite waves of light, an ocean of light and joy.” Swami Sarvadevananda’s “joy” is so much more than a bland single syllable. It’s an explosive word that starts out like the word “jaw” and ends with a curlicue of sound as his mouth wraps around the sound of the “o” and “y.” Jahw-oy! …and he was remained in that ocean of jahw-oy for twenty-four hours!” The swami said Ramakrishna soon came to realize that there was nothing but God.

“He was going to Calcutta afterward. He was so humble that he will run, run towards anyone calling God. So one day a public (carriage) took him by mistake through a red letter – what you call it?” he asked, “A red zone? What is the word? You know, with prostitutes?”

“A red-light district?”

Swami Sarvadenanda nodded, “Yes, a red-light district. And the car he was in was moving and the ladies were looking and Ramakrishna was looking at them and saluting them, ‘Oh, Mother! You are here in this form?’ So if you see the end result is, what? The end result is you see the one Mother - call it whatever name you wish – the oneness in every being. That’s spirituality.”
He sat back, waiting for me to speak. I guess everything my written manuscript provoked in him had been said. I started to ask him about 9/11 but he didn’t want to talk about events like that, at least not right away. “We are trying to understand what is religion first.”

“Right.”

“We must understand our weak point. We must diagnose the disease and then put the medicine there. So if any religion does not allow anyone to think freely, if any religion contradicts normal rational and reason-based thinking, even like this Vedanta, this philosophy, we should discard it as poison! Say ‘I have no need of that religion.’”

Did he really say that? Throw away even his religion if anything he said sounded false or contradicted my own sense of truth? He was saying I had a choice to reject some or all of what he believed. I was surprised, surprised and relieved. That meant he was giving me permission to have my doubts about Ramakrishna’s immaculate conception, for example, which, therefore, gave me room to consider what of his wisdom, his practice, his ideas might have meaning for me. It wasn’t all or nothing.

Okay, so I didn’t have to run out of the room. At least not right away.

The swami continued, “And nowhere is that so strongly said except in this Hindu religion. (Other religions) say my book is the only book, you cannot deviate one letter from there, no? But Hinduism says you need not believe a single word we say, you (can) discard the whole Vedas, the foundation on which the whole spiritual tradition of India is based, unless you find it verifiable. Verified and verifiable. If you can’t, forget it.”

In the briefest of pauses, I tried another question. “Were you born into this part of Hinduism? Was your family also of your same tradition?”

“What if one is born or not, what does it matter?” With that one statement, the swami tossed away my personal question, returning to what he considered the more pressing topic at hand: the necessity of different paths for different seekers. “It’s like you want to eat fish? Fried fish? You want to eat McDonalds? Go. You want curry? Someone makes curry. But the question is: are you eating fish or not?” He laughed. ”Why fight? That my fish is better than your fish?”
The swami lifted a fold of his orange clothing with two fingers and said, “I wish to dress this way, you that; you should have your freedom, I should have my freedom. So, in our dress we don’t fight with each other. In our food, we go to restaurant and we choose one out of so many types food. So, why in the world would we have to have only one religion that survives and others will have to go?” He seemed very pleased with his analogy.

But I was trying to get to specifics. “So, if I came to you and said this is the path I want to follow, what would happen next?”

“Spirituality would unfold in your heart. What we’d do is give you some guidance.”

“Like, things to do and read?”

“Suppose I will put to you the very first question. You are asking me: what is religion? I would put that question to you back. I would say: who are you talking?”

Silence. I had no idea what he was asking me.

He tried again. “Are you a man, are you a woman?”

“Uhm, I’m a, ah, woman?”

“Yes. Are you the woman talking?” Meaning was the person sitting across from him. Is this everything that I am, the sum total of my existence?

“No.”

“Who’s talking?”

“I, well, there is a drive to know this that (comes) before the issue of ‘woman’ or ‘man’.”

My answer wasn’t good enough for him. “My question is a specific, intellectual question: who is that “I”? You say, ‘I drove here.’ Who is that ‘I?’ Is it the physical flesh and bone only? Is it the eyeballs?”

“No. That, I’m clear about. It is not just what I can touch, taste, hear, see. I know that.”

“That is what the rational mind wants to explore. In Vedanta, we say explore more. Go in.” He began to demonstrate what beginners like me should do, the questions we should ask ourselves. “Who sees? I see. What is the ‘I’ that sees? First comes: The eyes are seeing? No. No, eyes cannot see. My mind is seeing? Go one step more. Mind cannot see. Mind is also matter. Because when you sit for meditation, what do you see? Your mind is rambling here and there and there. So, your mind can be seen by somebody. You say: ‘My mind is not very happy today, I’m not happy, my mind is upset today.’ You say:‘My shirt.’ ‘My spectacles.’ And ‘my mind.’ So you are using the word ‘My mind.’ So the question really is: who or what is beyond the mind, the thing that claims possession of it?”

So, I am not my body. That makes sense to me, it makes sense that there’s more to life than this specific collection of skin and bones, dark hair and hazel eyes. But, until Swami Sarvadevananda pointed it out, I’d never really thought about the phrase “my mind” that we all use with its implication that there was something to which my mind “belonged”, something that can observe my thought process.

But rolling ideas around like this is comfortable. I think I’m looking for what might make me uncomfortable, what might challenge my assumptions, what I think I ”know.” I said, “I would like you to tell me things I can do or read. I want to take direction.”

“You have this wonderful basic understanding of spiritual life, about life, about who we are.”

I wasn’t at all sure what he meant but I said, “That’s good to hear.”

“We say, in Indian psychology, that we are the product of all our past thoughts and deeds. And Hindus believe and Buddhists believe that we are not in one life. Eh? One life theory is Christianity, a Judeo-Christian idea: one-life theory. There comes more responsibility, you know? If you have the one chance only, you have to do the best you can do and, if you don’t, then you are going to hell, they say. But Indian hell, Hindu hell is a little less disruptive,” he chuckled, “because you do some bad karma, you go to hell, and then come out and, then again, start your journey. You are not forever lost. Also, to go to heaven is not our goal because that is also temporary, the result of good actions. The goal is to realize God. So this is the many life times theory has a little hope and a little relaxation, also. ‘I could not do this much?’” he continued with a happy shrug of his shoulders underneath his orange robes, “‘Okay, I’ll do it the next time.’”

The swami’s smile was so broad it jostled his eyeglasses. I told him how much I appreciated all the time he was spending with me.

“This talk,” meaning the talk we were having right then, “is not talk, merely. For me, for my spiritual journey, I am worshipping God through serving you. I am talking to you, actually I’m serving God in you. We serve God through all of our actions.”

“And following what I’m driven to do is--"

“Exactly. All our duties are nothing but a chance to serve God. God has given you the life. God has given you the strength – it is to be utilized with proper understanding. God has given you the quest to know the truth and the skills to do it. It is like the waves – God is the infinite ocean and I am only one ripple and you are another ripple and we are dancing in God, we are crying in God, we are serving in God, there is nothing but God. So, to bring this awareness, read the Upanishads. It is the ancient wisdom of our spiritual practice.”

I felt like I’d gotten a seal of approval. “I’m almost through the Bhagavad Gita.” The central text of Hinduism, it seemed like the right place to start.

“When you have a question, make a point, and when you come we can discuss one of these points. How long it takes you to come here?”

“You won’t believe this but I have been all over, temples all over. My office? I can almost walk here.”

“Is it?”

“I couldn’t be closer. It takes five minutes, unless there is a Hollywood Bowl event. Then it can take half an hour.”

The swami told me the times of the classes he taught and then said, “Above all, if you have any questions you can come talk.”

I gave the personal questions another shot. “Now, did you always know you wanted to be---what do you call yourself? Are you a sadhu?”

“We are sadhus. ‘Sadhus’ means we are celibates from our childhood and they call me assistant head, so-called assistant minister.’

“You always knew that you wanted this life?”

“Because I was born in that culture, as you asked me. When I was a very young boy, the sadhus, the monks, the renounced people used to come and their life is so attracting, so much alluring, their faces beaming with joy (jahw-oy!) as it were. That attacted me very much. As I grew, fifth grade, sixth grade boy, the sadhus were very kind. They said: ‘What you are doing? Come here.’ So our home was not that far from the headquarters of the Ramakrishna organization which is near Calcutta. So on vacation I used to go and stay there on the banks of the Ganges. The sadhus meditative life and unselfish love filled with purity, peace, and no outward pretense attracted me most.”

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

He looked pained at the question, like I’d gone one step too far. “I have brothers and sisters but that has nothing to do with what actually God calls you.”

I was nothing if not nosy and persistent. “Have your other brothers and sisters—"

He interrupted, “They are also very spiritual. Nowadays western materialistic ideals are creeping in through the television and other media otherwise in each Hindu Indian family but every morning and every evening, they start with God, they end with God, they pray in between, and before food they pray because the culture is there. All that intense practice goes only for a few very sincere people but, even our father, grandma, mom, our aunti, won’t eat before they take a bath, repeat the holy name, pray and meditate some time. Before that they will not eat at all. So, that is the tradition there. But these sadhus are more profound in their practices. From the early days I never thought of becoming anything but a monk. Seeing them, their joy, their freeness, their openness, their relentless service to others and how they are so princely even though they have no possessions!”

The swami said the Ramakrishna Mission was a huge organization in India. “We have 150 or 160 (temples) in India and activities are multifarious for the poor, for the downtrodden, for flood relief, for tsunami relief. For anything, these monks just jump and go to be the first to help with whatever they can: with material help, with medicinal help, with building up their homes and houses, and with establishing schools and community halls and everything. So that dedication also inspired me.” He tried to explain his thinking at the time. “What is this life, you think for yourself? Only eating, sleeping and dying? Do something for others. At least if you don’t see God, at least you don’t hurt anyone, don’t harm anyone and be a better person, be a loving, caring person.The world is full of misery. You can give a little peace to others.”

“And how did you end up in the United States?”

Swami Sarvadevananda smiled and raised his eyebrows. I’d hit a sore point. “Thaaaat is not my choice. Our organization has a central control in Calcutta and we have all over the world centers. We are not big like the Catholic church - about fourteen hundred, fifteen hundred monks, nuns and novitiates. According to the need of the work, the senior sadhus think who will be fit for what work and send us. I was in one village center, I was the head of a center actively working with the poor people, the needy people, building their homes, giving them education and self-employment skills to the women. Education gives them the strength to become self-reliant.”

“What village was it?”

“Sikra, a village near the border of Bangladesh. So, this was the way I was working very happily in the center and suddenly I was called here!”

“And you weren’t happy about it.”

“In the beginning, I was not at all! Because I had no idea to come and I never imagined in my life to come over here. It is not my choice. I was saying: ‘Please don’t send me, don’t send me. Send some other person.’ I was quite happy with the poor people, being with them, building up their hearts, giving them some shelter, giving them some education and the center was not very affluent but there was a great joy to serve these people. But, anyhow this is also a service to God, what I’m doing.” He laughed. “I didn’t plan. God plans! If you accept, it’s joy. If you resist, suffering.”

“I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you were open to this and how much I’m looking forward to working with you.”

“Please come to the class and give me a call, ask me any questions. It is a lifelong journey. Many people in this country, they want instant effect. Ah, so many impressions, good, bad, have accumulated in our mind and now our mind has to be cleansed. Cleansed how? By loving others, caring for others without keeping any selfish motive.”

“I know this project will be, at best, only a beginning. What happens after—”

“--will be your own journey. In your writing, you referred to Huston Smith. Huston Smith was closely connected with our Vedanta ideas.”

“He was?”

“There was a senior swami who passed away in St Louis, Swami Satprakashananda. And Huston Smith used to go there and he learned Vedanta and this universal idea of oneness. He’s very close to us. Our nuns know him. I also met him. A very humble and spiritual person!”

“See, there’s no accident that I’m here.”

“I tell you one thing: we do not publicize this Vedanta in the newspaper. We are a very silent group but at one time Vedanta created a great impact in this country. Alcoholics Anonymous which is so popular everywhere? Who is the founder? A Vedanta student.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“He employed all the Vedanta principles. Read their books, ideals, goals – all Vedanta. Vedanta has had an impact in subtle ways but it’s not that popular a religion.”

The swami told me Ramakrishna himself had actually spent time practicing other religions. “He one day prayed to Mother: ‘Mother, you are also worshiped by people in the churches. How do they worship? Why not make me like that?’ He had one Christian devotee and he used to go and ask him what is in the Bible. And one day he saw the image of the Christ, the baby, with the Madonna and that vision became tangible and that ray of light came.” Ramakrishna then spent “day and night, not a second thinking of any aspect of god or goddesses; only Christ and Christ and Christ. Then he practiced Islam. No one in the world ever appeared before who in one lifetime has ever practiced all those disciplines that you find in Huston Smith’s book. That’s why Ramakrishna finds truth in every religion. There is truth in every religion.” But, the swami said, there is only one important question. “Are you sincere? Are you following that? Are you living that life? Or are you only fighting for the purpose of fighting in the name of religion. So this is to be understood and this message should go to everyone. Swami Vivekananda (the first Hindu representative to come to the United States) said, ‘I did not come here to convert Christian into Hindu or a Hindu into Muslim or Muslim into Buddhist. We want to make a Hindu a better Hindu, a Christian a better Christian, a Muslim a better Muslim.’ So, we are not to convert. If you are following a path called Christianity, why not love God and see God? ‘Knock and it shall be opened unto you. Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God.’ Where have these principles gone? You’re are talking about other things, abortion, gay marriage, this, that --- these are social issues. Why are you bringing them into religion? Why not make your life spiritual? God sees gay? No, God sees the heart of your love. Eh?”

I felt heavy when I stood up, a thanksgiving meal’s worth of new ideas in my head, but then I remembered a question I’d wanted to ask Hemu but hadn’t gotten the chance. “Now, I watched them last night, the other students. They touched your feet.”

“In the Indian tradition, they do.”

“Is that what the greeting is?”

Swami Sarvadevananda stood up, too. “Anyone senior to us, we touch our head to their feet – it’s our deepest respect. It means I am bowing down my head to you - not you, the person - but the God in you, manifested better, because you’re senior. Our mom, our dad, our elder brother, our elder sister, anyone in the society that is a teacher, a school teacher, because their wisdom is higher. So, we go and touch their feet, but in this country we follow our own way. Okay?”

He was letting me off the hook, giving me an alternative I might be able to handle. He put the palms of his hands together in front of his chest and said, “Namaste. This means: ‘Salutation to you, the Lord in you.’ So, when you do, you remember the God in me is bowing to the God in you. This is the Indian custom.”

I tried it out. “Namaste.” Not too weird.

He said it back., “Namaste.”

And, with that, I dropped my notebook and pen on the floor.


(27 September 2006)

Finding people...

However men try to reach me,
I return their love with my love;
whatever path they may travel,
it leads to me in the end.

Bhagavad Gita 4.11


I stood in my closet, looking at my clothes. All of my life I’ve tried to blend in, to belong. Respectful, I was being respectful, I told myself – but I was just plain tired of it. On the left, there were the black and blue suits for the formerly “in-charge” me; next to those were a bunch of fiercely colorful silk tops and skirts I thought I needed to buy in order to live and to work in Los Angeles; beyond them, were a handful of flirty short dresses I used to wear when I thought I didn’t want to be in charge of anything except maybe date night with my husband; on the other side, were the baseball caps, men’s t-shirts and even an Eisenhower jacket for the I’m-so-afraid-I’d-better-look-tough me; and finally, in drawers, on the shelves, even on some of the hangars were the worn, torn jeans, cotton sweaters and loose tops for the at-home me, the no-make-up me. Ever since I’ve given up the running of things, I’ve given up the costuming, too, reverting to what I’ve always worn since college: long cotton and sometimes silk shirts I’d recently found out were called khurtas, Indian khurtas. I hate clothing that grabs at me.

Well, religious services called for more than torn jeans. If it were anywhere else but an Indian temple, I would have grabbed the pale pink silk khurta with white pants that were my current favorites but now I kind of had the opposite problem: Would it look like I was trying too hard to blend in and, therefore, would it be inadvertently disrespectful?

Over-thinking.

I just can’t do that, get caught up in meaningless external details, over-think and over-plan, and end up as something I’m not. Not wearing what I’d normally wear was just as bad as wearing something I thought might please. I went to Whittier in the pink and white.

But first I had to find the BAPS Swaminarayan Mandir in the thick Thomas Guide of Los Angeles I kept in my car. Kevin had given me a plastic-coated version for Christmas as a joke because I keep accidentally shredding and then losing the square we live on in the regular spiral-bound guides. But, after years of use and abuse, many of the laminated book’s pages - maps to places I hadn’t been - were stuck together by coffee that had spilled and baked dry long ago. Sounds kind of gross but it makes going someplace new very satisfying: I get to peel two new pages apart with a great crinkly cracking sound like cellophane on Easter morning.(Yes, my atheist mother and father not only stuffed Christmas stockings, they gave us Easter baskets, too.)

When I peeled Map 637 from the other pages, it showed that the temple was just two freeways away, no more than a half-hour drive.

The only thing I’d known about Whittier before was that President Richard Nixon had something to do with it and so did Quakers. Growing up in Pennsylvania, you know about Quakers. My brothers even went to Quaker school. It always seemed incongruous that Nixon, that imperious, formal man was a member of the Society of Friends which rejected ritual, had no one leading their services, and was devoutly against war but he was. Whittier, itself, was founded by a group of Quakers in 1887 and about 90,000 people live there now.

I got off the freeway exit closest to the temple. If Whittier had a downtown, I wasn’t in it. Within a few quick turns, I was in a tiny, packed-in neighborhood of tan and brown houses. It was a strange place: many of those small houses had horses in their backyards and trailers for them in the driveway. The traffic flow was choked by a couple of men on horseback chatting with their neighbors on foot.

I thought I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere so I was looking for a place to pull over to reexamine my map when, right in front of me, I saw it, the words “Hindu Temple” on a light-brown building.

People, dozens of them, were walking through the narrow opening in the wrought iron gate into the full parking lot. The women were all in saris, the men mostly in light, long sleeved shirts and slacks. As I backed into a parking space on the street, I felt my heart start to slam into my chest. All I didn’t know felt like a brick wall I was about to hit. I wanted to stop, back up, go home, drive, drive away fast while the rest of my head committee demanded that I get over myself and just get out of the damn car. “But,” the balkers argued, “what if you’re in the “wrong” place? What if you’re about to walk into some peculiar off-shoot of Hinduism or an extreme cult?” Well, if it was, I consoled myself, I could get out before talking to anyone, there were so many people walking in, no one would notice me.

I was wrong. One foot over the base of the sliding gate and a man in a dark blue shirt, the only person in a dark color, leapt forward to say, “May I help you?”

I stopped dead. If it hadn’t been more awkward to run, I would have. I said, “There’s a service today, isn’t there?”

“Well, yes.”

“May I come?” I asked. “I’m interested in Hinduism.”

There were only Indians in the crowd. Even the one red-head turned out to be an Indian woman with dyed hair.

The man in blue said, “Come on. I’ll take you to someone.”

The chance to check the place out anonymously, to get a feel for it before going further, was gone. The man in blue politely herded me toward the first doorway. On the landing outside the plain door, a number of women were standing and talking. Metal racks up against the stucco wall on either side of the doorway were filled with shoes, and a pile was on the ground beside each. It was clear that the men’s and women’s were on separate sides of the doorway. Once inside, the man placed me in front of a woman in a beautiful gold and ivory sari.


They waited for me to explain myself. It was the first time I had to describe what I was doing to someone other than an academic or a loved one, the first time I had to lay out my whole strange mission to a practicing believer. I wrapped my arms around my notebook and said, “I was raised without any real spiritual tradition. I mean, I was literally raised with nothing.”

We were standing in a brightly carpeted room that could have once been a school auditorium with a raised stage except that, on it, were red and gold devotional figures draped with flower garlands. The man and woman smiled, confused, so I continued, “With all that’s going on in the world right now, I just didn’t think I could remain ignorant any longer. So I want to understand what each religion teaches its converts. I’m starting with Hinduism. That’s why I’ve come here.”

It still didn’t look like they quite knew what to do with me so I added, “I thought I’d start with Hinduism because, from the little I know about it, it says that there are many paths to God and it was up to each of us to find our path, our way to the Divine, so it seemed like a logical place to start.”

The woman smiled big and warm. “I’m Rekha,” she said and put her hand on my arm. “Could you wait here for a moment? I have the perfect person for you but I must go find her.”

Rekha began bouncing from one woman in silk to another, asking each one something in an unrecognizable language, eventually disappearing down a hallway, leaving me in the center of the room with the gatekeeper. I wondered what I’d said that made Rekha know the “perfect person” for me. Was there someone whose job it was to wrangle strays?

There was an odd padded divider, no more than eighteen inches high, mostly down the middle of the room; the men and women were observing it as an official separation between them. Somehow, without making a big deal of it, the man in blue, who finally introduced himself as Upen, had put himself on the men’s side while I found myself standing on the side for women.

After a moment of just standing there, Upen pointed to a model under plexiglass and said, “This is the temple we’re building in Chino Hills. It will be the third temple in the United States, the other two are in Chicago and Houston.”

The model showed an ornate temple of white stone with many other smaller buildings. Two of the buildings were exact replicas of each other. “What are those?” I asked.

“That’s a school for boys and there’s the one for girls,” he said.

So the separation was a big deal, at least for this sect. I assumed I’d find it in Islam but I hadn’t expected the separation in Hinduism. I didn’t know whether to talk to Upen or not but he clearly wasn’t going anywhere until the “perfect person” showed up so I asked, “So, there are only three temples in this country?”

“Oh, no, those are the mandirs, the large temples. There are many more centers than that. And the temple in London was in the Guiness Book of World Records (in 2000) as the largest Hindu temple outside of India."

Upen was running out of things to say and clearly wanted to return to the gate so he was relieved when Rekha returned with a slender woman wearing glasses who somehow managed to make her pink sari seem simple.

“This is Hemantika Patel,” Rekha smiled. “You’ll never hear this from her because she is very modest, very humble, but everyone here at the mandir respects her more than anyone else. She’s very wise.You’ll be in the very best hands with her.”

Demurely deflecting the words, the woman in pink offered her thin hand, “I am very pleased to meet you.”

The din was growing so I just handed her my pen and notebook, “Would you write your name down here? I want to make sure I spell it right.”

“It’s Hemantika,” she said while writing it down. “But you may call me Hemu.”

As I started to explain, again, why I’d appeared on their doorstep again, a man with quiet authority came up to us on “his” side of the divider to check me out. After we introduced ourselves – he said his name was Peter - I asked him for his card so I wouldn’t hold things up trying to get the precise spelling of his last name.

Peter brightened when he heard why I was starting with Hinduism. “You know, I teach in the Sunday school, the children, and I always tell them: ‘What shape are the planets? They aren’t cubes or pyramids or trapezoids; they’re circles. And what is one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind? The wheel. And it’s a circle. But, if you push on one side of the circle, it will collapse unless, of course, there are spokes to make it strong. That’s what all the religions of the world are, spokes of the wheel, and it’s important that all the spokes, all the religions of the world stay strong. If any one of them gets weak or collapses, then we will all be affected. But, what’s the most important part of the wheel? The center. The Divine. That’s where all the spokes are connected.’”

I’d never heard anything like that before, a devotee of one religion saying he thought it was “important” that other religions stayed strong. Even Hemu and Rekha were moved.

In the moment of silence that followed, I glanced down at Peter’s business card. It said he worked for a financial services company.

“May I come to your class?” I asked.

“Well, I only teach boys and all the children’s classes are taught in Gujarati.”

Hemu said, “Perhaps you might come to one of the young adult classes for the women. They’re taught in English.”

Comfortable I was being handled, Peter and Rekha left. Hemu hesitated, unsure where to go for a longer conversation. Then it was clear why: she was looking for a chair, assuming that I would need one, but there were none available on our side of the room. In fact, there were only a handful in the large room and they were taken by the elderly and infirm.

“I can sit on the floor,” I said. Anything to stop sticking out. “I really don’t mind.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m completely fine.”

So Hemu, in her sequined sari, and I, in my white pants, sat down on the carpet near the wall beneath photographs of the BAPS temples around the world. “You’ve come on a good day, she said. “Today is the day we celebrate our main deity, Krishna’s birthday. That’s why everyone is so dressed up.”

There was coming and going, greeting and warm touching going on all around us. The closest I’d even been to something like it was a high school reunion.

“May I stay?”

“Of course. But it isn’t in English, you know.”

Not in English? Everyone I’d met so far spoke elegant English. But I said, “That’s okay, if it’s all right with you.” I mean, what else was there to do? Say: Oh well in that case, I’m outta here? Was I going to let language get in the way of my understanding some of what all these people found meaningful? I figured Hemu spoke English and that, for the moment, was enough. “What language are the services in?” I asked.

“Gujarati.”

I’d never heard the word before but, when I looked it up later, I found out forty-six million people spoke it. It was the first language Mahatma Ghandi spoke because he was born in the Indian state of Gujararat. Each state in India is free to choose its own official language so there are more than twenty of them.

I asked Hemu to explain the kind of Hinduism practiced at the temple.

“This mandir has been at this location just since 1984. The founder of our faith is Lord Swaminarayan who was born in 1781. We believe he is a God-realized saint.”

“And is there a current spiritual leader?”

“Oh yes.” Hemu pointed to one of the many pictures of a balding man in orange robes with a kind face and said, “Param Pujya Pamukh Swami Maharaj is the direct spiritual successor to Lord Swaminarayan.”

“Does he live here?”

Hemu looked surprised. “No, he’s in India, but there are about seven hundred “saints,” forty of which live at various temples across North America. They wear orange robes and are complete celibates. They don’t associate with women at all. They don’t own anything or have any money. We say that they have no taste, food-wise, which means they will never ask for anything or say they want to eat a specific food or even ask for something to eat, even if they’re hungry. They are supposed to be egoless and without desire, eating whatever is put before them, practicing complete detachment even from their own most basic needs.”

All I could think was what a picky an eater I could be: cold soup, blue cheese, lima beans - things I still hated - Hemu’s monks would have to eat all of them if they were served, whether they liked them or not. And the excitement of figuring out just what you want to eat and then getting it? I mean, I drive forty-five minutes to go get the cheesesteaks I grew up eating and I love every minute of having and fulfilling that craving. Not for them. They have to get beyond like and dislike. How is that even possible?

But, wait, they didn’t “associate” with women at all? I asked Hemu, “So, you can’t talk to any of them?”

“No, not directly.”

If Hemu couldn’t talk to the “saints,” then I couldn’t either.

Hemu explained that, while this sect’s faith was fundamentally Hindu and used the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas, the Upanishads and all of the traditional Hindu literature, its Holy Scripture was an “historical collection of 262 spiritual discourses delivered by Lord Swaminarayan in Gujarati” written down by the “saints” at the time. The text, The Vachanamrut, was considered by its followers to be “the essence of all scriptures.”

The room was slowly beginning to thin out.

Hemu said, “It’s about to begin. Would you like to go?”

“Go? Where?” I thought we were already in the main shrine. It certainly looked like one.

“This is a very big day for us, a very big celebration, so we have to go next door.”

Some people were leaving but no one seemed in a particular hurry or even necessarily headed for the same place. After we picked our shoes out from what had become an unruly heap, we walked toward the back of the building, stopping at the bookstore to buy a copy of The Vachanamrut in English and a small travel bag with all the items necessary for morning rituals. We then put our shoes outside another door and walked into an even larger room with hundreds of people sitting mostly cross-legged on the carpet, men and women again on separate sides of the room. Only the very young boys disregarded the separation, taking advantage of a gap between the blue padded dividers to dart back and forth between their mothers and fathers.

A group of men was already performing on the stage, mid-song. Hemu pointed to the back of a gray couch up near the stage on the men’s side and said, “Those are the sadhus, the saints.”

I could just make out a small flash of orange silk draped over the back of the couch and the shaved head of the “sadhu” sitting on the end. From where they were sitting, the only thing the “saints” could see was the stage.

Behind the men singing and playing string instruments on stage was an altar with many large figures and a handful of small ones. In a chair in the center of the stage, I thought I saw the man from all the photographs, sitting in meditation pose with a garland of live flowers around his neck and a lit candle in front of him.

I whispered, “I didn’t know your spiritual leader was here.” Everyone seemed way too calm for that.

Hemu turned and looked at me like I was daft. “No. That’s a picture of him.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Of course.”

Well, you don’t start something like this unless you’re able to spend a heck of a lot of time being stupid. I mean, it sure looked real from way back there. He was very still but I assumed he was just very good at meditation after all those years of doing it.

Soon a group of men began acting out a scene from Krishna’s life, followed by a sermon, all in Gujarati, while Hemu translated as best she could into my notebook.

The first sadhu who spoke was a tall, rugged man whose shaved head couldn’t quite make him blend in with the others. He had great personal dignity and, even though I couldn’t understand a word of what he said, he was a dynamic and moving speaker.

One part of the monk’s sermon got real belly laughs. I couldn’t wait until later, so I whispered, “What did he say?”

Hemu tried to answer and keep writing so I would miss nothing. “He said, ‘People are afraid to put trust in God, yet every day people get into to airplanes, trusting their lives to men, to pilots they don’t even know.’”

Yes but those pilots are real people, people they can see as they walk off the plane.

After some more singing, another sadhu came to the podium, a thin man with large eyes. Hemu said, “That’s the spiritual leader of this mandir.”

The senior sadhu, Priyavrat Swami, leaned on the podium as he spoke, not much more than his head and shoulders were visible above it. It was odd sitting there, understanding nothing but the emotion of the swami’s words and his flock’s reactions while Hemu took notes in my notebook, trying to turn the Gujarati into words I might understand. Without Hemu, I knew it would be hopeless for me here but, with her? Hemu had the conviction and the clarity I longed to know. Maybe it could work.

The rhythms of the unfamiliar syllables, sentences, inflections and pauses floating through the room began to feel like music, its beats became regular and expected, when I finally looked down at my watch. It was two hours past the time the website said the service would end, past the time I’d told my husband I’d be home. I whispered to Hemu, “I’m really sorry. I had no idea how late it’s gotten. I have to go.”

Without a hesitation, in the middle of her spiritual leader’s sermon on this most holy of days, Hemu got up to walk me out. She wouldn’t let me leave without going to get me a full meal which she put inside a styrofoam container so I could eat it when I got home, along with a plastic container filled with pastries in the shapes of various fruit. One small “watermelon slice” even had “seeds.” Loaded down with my books, pamphlets, food, desserts and Hemu-written notes, I headed back out to the street with a promise to return in two weeks to begin my studies in earnest.


(20 August 2006)