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)

Swami Sarvadevenanda

Atman cannot be attained by speech, by the mind,
or the eye. How can It be realized in any other way
than by the affirmation of him who says: “He is”?

Katha Upanishad, II.iii.12

I wanted to get a closer look at Swami Sarvadevananda, to find out if he really was The Guy - but I wanted to be invisible while I did it. I felt like a skittish animal peering out at someone from the edge of forest: Is it safe? Does he have food? Will he hurt me? The website of his temple, The Vedanta Society, said he was scheduled to teach an evening class and that seemed like cover enough. It turned out that, after searching in temples all over southern California, I was headed to a temple I could almost walk to from my office. The Vedanta Temple is right near the 101 freeway but you can’t see it because it’s on a small hill surrounded by trees.

The white temple with leaded glass windows sits next to a dark house that serves as office and bookstore. Inside, the chapel is spare with cream-colored carpets, walls and nave. Oak pews with cushions stop at about the middle, leaving room to sit on the floor in front of the steps up to the altar which is deep in the back. The display is much more subdued than the other temples I’d seen; instead of many large life-sized deities, there’s just a wooden stand with three photos on it – one higher than the rest - and a lot of flowers.

A silent meditation was just ending when I walked in – I really should say burst in. I could only see that the room was dim but nothing more through the rippled glass door. I made more noise than I wanted to finding a seat but, as soon as I settled, a white man of about sixty with a grey beard came in, much more quietly than I had, wearing his office clothes. He must have known the drill. He put down his black briefcase by the back door and walked straight up the aisle until he was standing before the carpeted steps leading up to the altar. Once there, he got on his knees and then bowed down long and deep. Sitting up, he then bowed again. And, with that, he stood up, walked back down the aisle, scooped up something small from the tiny covered brass dish on the table by the back door, picked up his briefcase, and walked out. He seemed like he was stopping by from work on his way home just to say hello, to acknowledge a revered elder as if the photographs were real people. The visit seemed to make him happy, content, a peaceful end to a long day.

The worship of people who lived recently enough to be photographed makes me nervous – not that devotion to mythic deities is much easier. Maybe I’ve just covered too many conmen in my old job as an investigative reporter but I’m always on the look out for someone playing a role to get something from others, to get something from me. Not the best attitude when you’re trying to wrestle with matters of faith, I think…or maybe it is. I dunno. But it is a fact that my first reaction, my first action, my first thought is to try to figure out if someone I’m talking to is a fake and this obsessive focus on the veracity of others often gets in the way of my even getting a clue about what I think and feel. But, sitting in the quiet, the photographs suddenly struck me as no different than the photographs on my mantelpiece of the people in my life whom I loved and revered. From looking at my father-in-law’s broad open Irish face, a face almost precisely mirrored in my son, Matt’s, I get a sense of compassion and service, of humility and deep love. From the photograph of my difficult but vibrant mother-in-law, I feel a sense of fire and perseverance while, from the hurt eyes of my grandmother at five, comes a call for unconditional love.

Okay, so the photographs on the altar in temples are draped with garlands of fresh flowers and candles and people were bowing down before them but it doesn’t seem like they’re being worshipped like deities so much as way-showers, people who, by example, truly lived the spiritual practice in a way that still motivates some. So why should these photographs or icons give me so much trouble? I think it’s much easier to accept a representation of Jesus or Buddha because no one really knows what they actually looked like so they’ve become an idea bigger than a single human being. I mean, I find it much easier to see the divinity in every person (well, most of the time) but I get hinky when one actual person is literally put up on a pedestal.

Moments before the class was to begin, I ran to get something from my car. In the quick dash out and back, Swami Sarvadevananda, draped in light orange fabric, had come in. He was sitting on the floor of the carpeted stage, his legs under a small table that held a book, a lamp, and a microphone. I slipped into the second pew, behind a handful of others, and discovered that I’d run back in with my shoes on. A glaring whoops. I pushed my shoes forward under the pew in front of me, hoping no one noticed.

Swami Sarvadevananda was cheerful. “Well, it’s 7:30. I guess everyone’s late but let’s start, shall we?”

From twenty feet away, Swami Sarvadevanada could be mid-fifties, perhaps early sixties. He's thin, with a dark, somewhat random head of hair and an open, playful face announced by almost absurdly large glasses. He seems perpetually on the verge of smiling.

I hadn’t bothered to look at what tonight’s topic was supposed to be. It was Raja Yoga, one of the four basic paths to enlightenment in Hinduism. For us in the west, although we’re unlikely to have heard the term “raja yoga”, it’s probably the most familiar path as it’s the path that includes what’s known here as yoga, meditation, and the exercises that lead to the ability to control one’s body for the purpose of coming to experience the presence of God – the part of Hinduism I’d been hoping to avoid - not the meditation part but the body-control stuff. I don’t know what religion or the practice of faith has to do with theories of how bodies work.

“When we’re talking about prana, about taking in prana.” The swami inhaled deeply. “Most people think we are talking about the breath, about controlling the breath. No. It’s energy, it’s really energy. By controlling the breath, we are controlling the muscles that contract the lungs and that means you are controlling your energy. If we control our energy, we control our body. If we control our body, we believe, we can control the whole system.”

His hands were the most elegant thing about him: when he spoke, one of them usually traced graceful serpentine figures in the air, his long fingers close together, his palms turned over as if offering something from a pocket – if he had any. “Let me explain. Most people think they can’t move their ears. But we know some people who can. We can’t simply because it’s a skill we haven’t developed because we don’t practice it. But we have the power to do anything inside of us. It’s all potential power, power that we can realize by practicing control.”

The swami pointed out that when we held our breath to move a heavy object that was an example of an unconscious use of raja yoga, of controlling our energy.

As he went on to give examples of healing and healers, I found myself veering off into judgmentland. I mean, what he was talking about, these particular Hindu beliefs, were the root of much of what people consider nutty about California: energy healers and crystals and alternative medicine, etc. My doctor’s-daughter mind balked. I mean, I get why meditation and the practice we know here as yoga could be considered antidotes to the frantic stress of our lives. I meditate but I don’t make a big deal of it. I feel better when I do it; simpler, less jangled. And, like many people, after learning that middle-aged bodies need stretching along with running and lifting weights, I go to an occasional yoga class. Not only do these practices no longer seem strange to me, even western medicine acknowledged their usefulness. But it’s difficult for me to go much further than that.

“Energy can be transferred from one person to another. When we are near a powerful person, we feel the power. Similarly, have you ever been with someone who just took all the energy out of you, dragged you down? When we hear a speaker who touches us, who speaks with enthusiasm, with passion for what they are saying, we are touched. We really learn something. We say: ‘they really talked from the heart.’ It’s just the language that we use but what we’re talking about is pranic energy. All we’re talking about is that they were a conduit for the energy that is all around us all the time to flow through them to us.

“The whole world is nothing but energy. You are energy, I am energy, words are energy… I mean, all I’m saying is energy and nothing else but that. And there is only one energy, one prana and we are but individual expressions of it. It’s like a vast lake; if you throw a stone into it on one side, the ripples will be felt on the other shore so long as you’ve got instruments sensitive enough to measure it. So, if we heal ourselves, we can affect the people around us. The great healers – Jesus, Buddha - all knew this. What did Jesus do? He said, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’ Buddha knew this and he healed people.

“Now it’s not so easy to be such a healer. There are some people who take advantage of the innocence of normal people and pretend that they are healers!”

Now he was talking my language. It wasn’t until Swami Sarvadevananda acknowledged the existence of fakers, of people who misuse others’ faith or desperation, that I began to relax.
“Why is it that Sri Ramakrishna,” the swami said with a gesture towards the top picture on the altar, “that Christ, that Buddha have had so much influence on people all over the world? It’s because they raised their pranic energy to a level that they can awaken the cosmic pranic energy. If you are ready, you can feel this uplifting energy when you come close to this vibration. You have the power, the potential, inside of you but it must be awakened.”

So, that was the name of the man in the photo: Ramakrishna. But there were two others down lower. None were easy to see in detail from where I sat.

Swami Sarvadevananda ended the class with some chanting.

I ducked down behind the first pew to pick up my shoes when it was over and, when I came up, I found the swami standing right in front of me. Me. He began talking as if I’d already asked him a question when I hadn’t said a word. “Yes?” he said. “How can I help you?”

Did I have a sign on my head? On my face?

“I’m a writer working on a project and I’d like to come talk to you.”

“When?”

“As soon as it’s convenient for you.”

“Why don’t you stay for dinner? Follow those people, they’ll show you where to go.”

“Okay.” With that, I dropped the books in my arms and some of the contents of my purse at his feet because I was trying to hide my shoes underneath the books in my arms. He said nothing, nor did he embarrass me by bending down to help me pick any of it up. He turned and walked to the back of the chapel to greet people. One after another, almost all of them bent down to touch his feet, even the American ones. So it wasn’t just Hemu’s temple then. I headed out the back door and into the cold night, following a couple of people around the back of the building.

The sun was gone. I walked down a dimly-lit brick pathway and up a few steps into what looked like another, newer house.

I was beginning to get it: eating was clearly a very big thing in Hinduism. Everything ended with a meal – even the rituals in the temples ended with eating things. By leaving the mandir in Whittier without taking food, I was, in some sense, being quite rude. Well, maybe not rude but I was rejecting part of the practice. I never think about food as ritual, as part of a spiritual practice; for me, it’s an afterthought, something dispensable. I even think I’m being nicer by not staying, not imposing, not requiring work on my behalf. And I’m always in a hurry to get home as any “extra” time spent away from my family feels wrong.

That night, I accepted the invitation but I had my internal meter running.

On the long wooden side board, were bowls filled with rice and various simple dishes – including fish. I got my plate and Swami Sarvadevananda said, “Sit there,” motioning to a seat near his place at the end of the long table, capable of seating perhaps two dozen people, too large for intimacy but too small for anonymity.

It took me a moment to notice I actually knew the woman sitting between the Swami and me, an acquaintance I’d met through a friend years ago. When the Swami came to the table to sit down, ready to hear me out, everyone stopped talking to listen to what I had to say - not exactly the scene I’d imagined or wanted.

Describing this project isn’t easy under the best of circumstances, let alone in front of a table full of strangers. I stumbled through it and heard myself stress that my parents thought religions were “the root of all evil, the cause of strife and dissension.” I know I must have said more but those were the words still clanging in my ears days later. I had no idea how the other people at the table were reacting, I couldn’t look at them.

When I was done, the swami said, “Okay, when do you want to come?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Tomorrow at five?”

“Okay.”

And then the swami turned from me to the thin Indian man with salt-and-pepper hair beside me and said, “Are you staying with us?”

My acquaintance, a pale, freckled woman named Leslie said quietly, looking at her plate. “That sounds like an awesome idea. A really, really great idea.”

With relief, I answered, “Thanks.”

I’d finished eating the small amount of rice and vegetables I’d taken while the table full of people who didn’t know each other managed to patch together a kind but somewhat awkward conversation. It felt a bit pushy to ask any more questions so I’d decided to just sit and listen when the swami, again, turned directly to me without my saying a word and said, “You can leave if you want to go. It’s all right.”

Before I left, I handed him my proposal for this project in which I described my background and what I was planning to do; I wanted to make sure he knew exactly what he was getting himself into with me. The swami said, “Oh! I’m not sure I’ll have time to read this but, if not, you can just tell me tomorrow.” He turned to the people who were just starting to clear their places and said, “Now, if anyone wants to work on their karma, the kitchen could use some help cleaning up!”

And he was gone.

I’d found my teacher.



(26 September 2006)

Tires and karma...

When a man has let go of his attachments,
when his mind is rooted in wisdom,
everything he does is worship
and his actions all melt away.

Bhagavad Gita , 4.23

So, tires and karma…

One of the devotional paths in Hinduism is called the karma path. Essentially it means that, while there are those among us who might worship, say Jesus or the Virgin Mary, and still others who prefer to read, coming to understand their faith through their study of the Torah, for example, there are also those who find it easier to express their faith through their work or their actions. Some examples might be Mother Teresa or, perhaps, my husband Kevin’s dad who became an orthopedist so he could help disabled children as Christ did, something he did all of his life…for free. Another would be Nick at my favorite tire store.

So it was way past time to leave for school and Matt was ready and waiting on the living room couch as usual when Luke came out of his room with his hair still wet from the shower, happily rattling off things he needed to know for a test later that day. “‘Araby’ was written by James Joyce. ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ is Garcia Marquez. ‘Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants’ by Nadine Gordimer. and Chinua Achebe wrote ‘Dead Man’s Path.’”

On my toes to kiss the side of his face, I said, “That sounds good. Now, get into the car, we’re about to be late.”

I shifted my car into gear and started to drive immediately, something my eleven year-old car hates. I thought nothing of the shuddering as I pulled away from the curb but, when it didn’t ease up in four long blocks, it was clear that it was much more than that. Yes, anyone but a mother whose sole focus was on making up for a bit of lost time would have known within a few feet a tire was a flat. A very flat flat.

The good news: Kevin was still home with his car. The bad news: we were already too far to run home to get his car, given the boys’ ridiculously heavy backpacks, and have any chance of making it to school even close to on time. More bad news: Kevin had been up until one o’clock in the morning and wasn’t due to start his twelve-hour day until eleven so my phone call would wake him up. Did I mention he was fighting off a sore throat?

This was not the morning I had planned. To add to the scene, I was dressed in the embarrassing sort of clothes worn by mothers all over the country who plan to go for a run or go to the gym after dropping their kids off at school: flabby thighs on display underneath bright orange shorts leading down to gray socks popping up above brown slip-on Merrills because my running shoes were, of course, in my car trunk. After handing off my children to a grumpy husband, I accepted the fact that my exercise today would be changing my tire.

Excavating the trunk, I dug down beneath the old umbrellas and running shoes, flip flops and crumpled sun screen tubes to find, when I opened the spare tire well, that the spare was flat, too…which made not having a jack in my trunk moot. At least my cell phone worked so, after a call to AAA, I sat down on the curb, on top of my squishy spare tire, to wait with my newspaper and a bottle of water.

While flat tires, in general, aren’t happy occasions, I knew I was going to end up at my favorite tire store - yes, I actually have a favorite tire store. It's a small independent tire shop jammed in between car dealers on Van Nuys Boulevard. Believe it or not, I love that shop with a passion verging on groupiedom. Why? They won’t let me buy tires. Every time I come in with a flat, they tell me not to bother with a new tire, they can fix it.

“That’ll be ten dollars,” the guy behind the counter always says.

Once, when I finally insisted on buying tires after a certain point, they explained why I didn’t need the expensive ones. I love them. I tell them so every time I go.

This morning, the owner, Norm, whom I’d never actually met before, was behind the tall gray counter. I told him how I felt about his business. “You’re unique.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. I think most people do things the way we do. There really are only a few rotten apples in any line of work. At least, that is what I choose to believe.”

When Norm went out back to the work area, the other customer in the waiting room, a thin, gray-haired man who was sipping a cup of machine coffee, said he felt the same way. “This wasn’t what I had in mind for my morning either but I love coming here. And the new coffee machine is great; try it!”

Is this what’s meant by the karma path, the path of work? I mean, is it possible that something as simple as running a business selling – or not selling, in this case – tires can be invested with meaning if attention like this is paid? I doubt Norm thinks about it that way unless seductive girly posters with women of men’s imagination posing on impossibly clean, thrusting cars goes with a form of faith I’ve yet to encounter. But, if the point of religion, of spirituality, is to imbue our lives with a sense of connection, with a sense of the divine, I do know that way Norm chose to live and work gave me that sense of connection this morning and every time I even think about the tires on my car.

And my fellow tire store fan was a lovely man with whom to wait. “I’ve decided to get my wife’s car fixed after I’m done with mine today since this is what my day’s turned into anyway.”
Bob, I soon found out, is a respiratory therapist; his wife was a nurse named Louise. My father is a doctor named Bob and my mother, Louise, was once a nurse. It turned out that his wife worked for a national non-profit that tooks care of the elderly, something my father had done for years back east. Bob said the organization was expanding and might need part-time help from someone like my aging father, who is still a practicing doctor at seventy-eight because a combination of excessive generosity to his children and some bad luck means he and my mother can’t figure out how to afford to retire, can’t afford to figure out how to move closer to us as we had assumed they would.

When the owner, Norm, came back in, he cautiously interrupted my conversation with Bob to give the verdict on my flat. “You had a nail in your tire. I fixed it, fixed the spare and rotated your tires. No charge.”

“How do you stay in business?”

With an almost embarrassed shrug, Norm was out the door and back to the service area.

As I gathered up my things to leave, Bob said, “I’ll have Louise email you a contact for your dad.” And then he added, “It’s karma. We were meant to be here this morning!”

Karma, indeed.

(25 September 2006)

While waiting for the swami....

In the Kumbha Mela program, Swami Sarvadevananda was identified as representing something called the Vedanta Society. Professor Chapple had told me this branch of Hinduism was the first to have real impact in the United States. With a call, I found out that Swami Sarvadevananda was out of town for a couple of weeks. I found my teacher – at least I hope I have – but I'm going to have to wait to actually meet him.

In the years I’d spent stewing about this project, I’d decided I should explore the faiths in related pairs, hoping that I might understand each more deeply by coming to understand both what they shared and how they differed, in theology and in practice. Given that Buddhism developed, essentially, as protestant Hinduism – so much so that academics, in fact, refer to it as non-orthodox Hinduism – I thought I should find out more about it while waiting for Swami Sarvadevananda to return.

Going into this, I had just one book on Buddhism: a bright orange book called The Teaching of the Buddha that my husband, Kevin, had found in a hotel room somewhere.

Are you supposed to take Bibles and other sacred texts left in hotel rooms? I kind of don't think so... I think stealing is another big no-no across all religions, yet another thing to feel bad about.

I figured this stolen property was as good place to begin as any and, on the very first page, I found a symbol of a wheel like the one Peter Patel was talking about when I first walked in to the Hindu mandir in Whittier, a wheel with spokes, but it was the symbol of Buddhism, not Hinduism.

It was no accident. Buddhism started near India in what is now Nepal. The original Buddha, Siddartha Gautama of the Sakyas, (563 B.C.- 483 B.C.) was actually a Hindu who began his spiritual journey by first going deeper into Hinduism just as Christianity wasn’t started by someone who declared himself a creator of a new faith but by someone wanting to deepen his own - Judaism.

I had two weeks to kill so I thought I'd use the time to check out the two Buddhist temples I knew about so that, when it came time to study Buddhism, I’d know where to go: the Wat Thai Buddhist temple in North Hollywood or the Chinese Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights.

I’d been to the Thai temple because they had an open-air food market on Sundays and I’d seen, through the wide-open doors of the tall temple, monks in orange cloth, sitting on bright cushions around the sides of the temple, available to anyone who wanted to chat. However, when I went to its website, there was very little information in English and the only classes offered were Thai language classes.

At the Hsi Lai Temple, on the other hand, where I’d been as a chaperone for one of Matt's school field trips when he was in seventh grade, they offered regular Buddhism classes as well as meditation and chanting in English, making it an easier place to get started. The one substantive difference I got from the temples’ websites, in addition to the languages of the services, was that the Wat Thai Temple practiced Theravada Buddhism, a form which has “changed no teachings laid down by Buddha.” This brand of Buddhism is primarily practiced in Thailand, Cambodia, India, Laos, Burma, Sri Lanka, etc. The Hsi Lai temple website said it followed the Rinzai Ch'an (Zen) school of Buddhism as well as the Pure Land school and its headquarters was in Taiwan. None of it meant a thing to me. But Hsi Lai had classes. On Buddhism and meditation. That Sunday. In English.

It was odd to drive up a dry hill, past houses too new to have developed character, take two quick turns off the road and find an elaborate, full-on Chinese temple and monastery, yellow roof dragons and all. Steep staircases led up to a grand entrance hall and, once I walked through it, around what looked like a devotional wall, I was outside in an upward-sloping, open courtyard. The main shrine was on the far side of the grand sqaure with well-tended gardens and covered walkways. When I got directions to the temple from the website, it said Hsi Lai literally means “Coming West.”



It was kind of great to stand in such an exotic place with little more than a half-hour drive from my house but it was kind of intimidating, too. You have to have a lot of faithful followers to build something like this.

I finally noticed a small sign taped to a wooden stand which pointed the way to another stand and then another which finally led to two classrooms - one for beginners and the other for people who knew something. You know which one I walked into.

Instead of a chalkboard up front, there was a plain altar of blond wood with a small brass Buddha statue. A United Nations of about twenty people took up most of the desks in the room while two interpreters for the deaf sat on the right side translating for a few people who needed their services.

A small, well, nun, I guess she'd be called, came to the front and took the microphone. The schedule said she was the Venerable Jue Qian. I don’t know what surprised me more – the fact that she thought she needed a microphone in a room this size or her appearance. She was young. Very young. She could have been thirty but maybe not. Her head was shaved, her clothing and glasses, basic. And, she was quirky. She began the class in an oddly intimate way. “Good morning. It’s a very nice day today. Still a little bit cold for me. Ever since I moved from Singapore, lips is dry, skin is dry, nose is dry and I realize that my body has not gotten used to being here. Does anybody have any suggestions about this?”

What followed was a sweet interchange of suggestions about how to adjust to the dry desert air and about how much water was, indeed, “enough.”

“Okay, before we start, any questions?”

A square-faced white man raised his hand. “I was with some people who said they were Buddhists who told me of a ceremony where you scrape out the insides of a wooden Buddha, consecrate it with fire, and then fill the insides with gems and money. I’ve never heard about anything like this before. Do you know what they were talking about?”

The nun paused for a moment, then brought the microphone back up to her mouth. “I have heard of some people who say they are followers of certain sects who say that they are the ‘reincarnation of such-and-such- a thing.’ Or, ‘I have a special achievement of such-and-such-a thing and now I have special ritual ceremony’ or ‘I am able to see your past and future’ and a lot of people believe in them. And they ask, ‘In order to have a special Buddha statue to have supernatural power, I need diamond, I need gold in order to make it very grand and, please, give me money, give me diamond.’ You have to decide whether this is okay for you or not. We never ask devotees for money. We never ask for anything. It must come from the heart of the giver. So what I’m trying to say is: in Buddhism we always talk about simplicity, how to make things as simple as possible.”

She continued, “People say you shouldn’t judge your teacher. No. This is wrong. You have to judge your teacher, whether (you think) your teacher is telling you this thing for her, for this teacher’s benefit, or for the benefit of the students. Some teachers just teach for the benefit of themselves or their temple.”

I don’t know why but every time someone in robes says it’s up to me to choose what to think I breathe easier.

The square-faced man had another question. “What’s the difference between a lama and a rinpoche?”

“A lama can’t marry, like the Dalai Lama. But say you want to have relations with another person. Then you are rinpoche, you can marry. However, we follow the practice like in India. In India they have a concept: as a human being there are four stages of life. And the last stage you live apart, apart from the family members to practice as lay people. So this is the practice in India and it is brought into some of the practice of Buddhism. We have Mahayana, we have Theravada, we have Chinese, we have Thailand, Korea, Japan, la-da-da-da. Mahayana, Theravada is the earliest. And the Tibetan Buddhism is the latest and it is a mixture of religions in Tibet. Lots of rituals. Lots of dancing, lots of offerings. When Buddhism go into certain countries it will change. It will change according to the culture, according to the people of that country. I am not surprised that in a hundred years, if I haven’t died yet, I will see that in American there will be a Western Buddhism. Right now, Buddhism in the United States, in Europe, in England, is still not considered western Buddhism. It’s very, very strong influence of Chinese or Tibetan or Thai.”

But the Venerable Jue wanted to be very sure we got the message. “You have to judge. I even tell the devotees here not to do whatever we say. Even they need to judge us. Even monastics, we have our bad habit. We are still human. We still have emotion. We still get sick. I still dislike about the weather. If I’d already achieved, I wouldn’t feel anything about the weather.”

The group laughed and the small nun smiled, pleased. “Only difference, I just have the courage to shave off my hair, to live a simple life.”

No one else has raised their hand so the same man asked yet another question. “When the Dalai Lama says he’s going to reincarnate as the Dalai Lama isn’t that really the ultimate attachment?”

Like Hinduism, Buddhists believe in reincarnation. Attachment to things, to others, to life itself, was considered the main source of suffering and the principal goal of Buddhism was to relieve suffering, your own and others.

The nun scanned the room, looking from face to face. “Anyone have any idea, anything to say to this before I answer?”

One student answered, “The Dalai Lama is coming back to relieve the suffering of all sentient beings.”

The nun’s face didn’t let on what she thought of that answer. She said, “Everybody heard of Bodhisatva before? Bodhisatvas in the Lotus Sutra mention about one thing: the beings refused to achieve Buddhahood. You know why?”

A dark-haired woman in the back volunteered, “They keep coming back until every sentient being is saved.”

“Correct. The Bodhisatva have great compassion because they are doing something that is very difficult to achieve.” Meaning, liberating every last sentient being. And that liberation comes, in part, from getting rid of the attachments that cause suffering. “You can test whether you have achieved the concept of emptiness, of non-attachment. Somebody scolds you. Criticize you. If you have no mind of angry, not even a single thought. Not even ‘I forgive him,’ that sentence never arise. It’s just like words coming in and words coming out. It’s the time that we let go on the spot. We heard it, we feel it, but we let go immediately.”

Okay, so attachment leads to suffering. The goal is to give up all attachments so there will be no more suffering. Does that mean I'm not supposed to feel attachment to Kevin? To my children? You bet my attachment to them causes me to suffer. When Matt or Luke scrape their knees, my knees hurt; my knees actually hurt right now just remembering them scraping their knees. I don't think I want to give up that kind of suffering but I guess there are other kinds I could definitely live without if I could just figure out how, like how attached and worried I am about what other people think of me. That suffering I could do without. I mean, it's the reason it's taken me two years to actually put this stuff up on a blog. Every time I thought about doing it I imagined one person's and then another's reaction - all hideously and personally critical, or course.

And what's this “no mind of angry?” I’ve been married more than two decades. I’ve worked in an office. I have teenage children. Let’s just say: I “suffer” from anger. And, yes, I have to admit: I am attached to my idea of what I want to happen. Well, plans require goals, don't they?

“When even a single thought arises that ‘I forgive him,’ that is still an attachment. This is the most highest stage of practice. Very, very difficult.” You bet. I still consider it a major triumph when I can have that "I forgive him" thought arising.

In the class, people started asking all those questions that, for some reason drive me nuts, questions like where, specifically, souls are when they were between incarnations. How can anyone, even someone wearing robes, talk with great specificity about the unknowable? The specific location or state of souls between lives: there are no end of essays, theories, films, novels and plays that could be spun off those words in the effort to come to grips with that question. And every one of them would be about as real to me as a white bearded guy on a cloud. I imagined standing up, shouting: “Why ask such questions? Why put a monastic into a corner demanding the details, the description of a photograph that doesn’t exist?” How could that question have any meaning anyway, stuck as it is in our limited concept of space and time and concrete, physical reality? Emerging from the struggle to move beyond the senses, I can accept that I don't know everything or even very much so that it's entirely possible that there's more to existence than what I can touch, taste, see, hear and feel. I might even be able to go as far as entertaining the idea that this “something” is, in part or in its entirety, related to each of us in some way. But the idea of asking for a description of where that “it” is when we aren't alive feels like asking if fish could wear plaid pants.

Well, they could, couldn’t they? In theory.

But I suppose I have to accept that my conviction that there might be some underlying unseen force – or Force - could be just as absurd to someone else as questions like these felt to me.
Most Hindus would probably argue that there was no difference between a bearded guy in long white robes and a detailed theory of multiple lives or even Swami Sarvadevananda’s ocean metaphor, so long as it helps you feel connected to the Divine. So, what possible difference should it make to me if it works for someone else?

Aren’t we’re all just slogging around in a black bag, trying to feel around, feel shapes, smell through the fabric to get something our brains, our hearts can hang onto that might give us some faith that there’s a good reason we’re in this bag in the first place? For me, I want to know how to live a happier life in the bag and, perhaps, if there’s something I might be able to do for others nestled around me in the bag that might be of some help. Even more, I want to find out if it’s possible to shred the bag to see what’s out “there.” What I can't get is: why ask for promises and concrete descriptions about what’s outside of the bag from someone else who’s in it, too?
And what on earth do rituals have to do with any of it?

As I type this I hear that Gilda Radner character on Saturday Night Live, Roseanne Rosannadanna saying, “Mrs KD from Fort Lee, New Jersey, you ask alotta stupid questchuns!”
If this is how I feel, then how on earth am I ever going to find any answers, any peace in ritual? How did these things come to be related to the quest for meaning? Until now, I’ve led a pretty ritual-free existence. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Big life events like weddings and funerals.

I guess I actually do have some everyday rituals but they don’t involve bowing down to or before or even near any specific icon. I light a candle in my office when I start work and blow it out when I finish. I don’t know why I do it or how it got started but I do it. I clean my small rented workspace myself, waving off the cleaning crew that was offered when I moved in. I get some peace in supporting my work this way. And I never start to write without reading some of the sacred literature that's flooding into my office. I read until that small inner bell chimes with recognition at some passage and then I sit, as empty as I can, meditating for a while. Those are my rituals. More than that feels false. Will I ever feel differently?

The Venerable Jue was looking through her thick glasses from one side of the room to the other. “Ever think about if the Buddha was so powerful, why couldn’t he make himself live forever? Why couldn’t he stay in this world forever so he could keep on teaching? Any comments on that?” The original Buddha was an actual historical figure who lived in India around the fifth century BCE.

The square-faced man stepped in to the vacuum again. “My understanding is that his Buddhahood goes on but it needs to be directed to another body because bodies wear out.”

The middle-aged woman next to him added, “I agree with what Dave said but is it also that, since he is only here with us for a lifetime, for so many years, people will listen. It’s not going to last forever, so listen up?”

The nun then launched into the story of Buddha’s death. “We have many precepts as monastics. One of them is: anybody offer something to us, we have to take it. That’s why even the monks in Thailand, you offer them meat (even though they’re vegetarian), they will take it. This is the true practice of the Buddhist monk.

“So, someone offered a mushroom to Buddha when he was eighty years old and, because of some poison in the mushroom, he got sick. His body was getting weaker and weaker. He knew it’s time for him to say goodbye. A disciple said to him: ‘Can’t you just live on?’ Buddha said one thing: ‘In my teachings, I teach about suffering and I mention about birth and death, that this is the truth of this universe. Nobody can change it. Nobody can escape it. Not even me.’”

But, Venerable Jue said, the Buddha was never really dead because we all remember him, his words and his spirit. “There is no come and there is no go. We’re all very attached to come and go, that something come here and something go there. But to Buddha, there is no come and no go. There’s no yes and there’s no no.”

There's just nothing for me to do with that statement, at the moment, except to report it. Even just typing it, I feel ahort-circuit coming on.

The Venerable Jue Qian spent a lot of time talking about “cause” and “condition.” She said, “This is very important in Buddhism. Even in a temple, no one will stand up and teach without first being asked a question. In Buddhism we always say: ‘cause and condition’, there must be a cause for this condition to arise. This is very important in Buddhism. Everything leads to another thing. It’s a circle. No action, no being can come from nothing and it takes the right condition for it to happen. This means we are all connected and there is no way we can take an action without affecting others or others affecting us. But there must be cause and condition. If plant seeds when no water, the condition of the soil wasn’t right to grow a plant. If soil fertile and ready to grow a plant but no cause, no seed - no plant. Need both things. Need a willing student before anything can be taught.”

Other than the interpreters for the deaf who took over for each other from time to time, the students were still, listening.

“There are so many temples, so many churches around here. How come you are here today, at this one? Why are you here and yet there are so many people haven’t even thought of coming in here? That’s not my answer. I can’t answer for you. That’s your answer.”

My answer is simple, isn’t it? Mark's class trip came here so it was a place I knew and there were classes in English. Okay, maybe it was a bit more complicated since, without the determination to find out more about faith, about different faiths, it wouldn’t have mattered where Matt’s class trip went or in what language Hsi Lai’s Buddhism classes were taught. I guess my "cause" was my desire to understand Buddhism and the "condition" that allowed it were the classes the Hsi Lai temple offered in English – without either I wouldn’t have been in that classroom.

Wrapping up the class with a few announcements, Venerable Jue held up a few flyers. The first was for a Thanksgiving potluck lunch. Both concepts – what a “potluck” was and Thanksgiving - were new to her. “I don’t know what’s this, this ‘potluck’," she said. “I just know Thanksgiving and I never have a chance to see this Thanksgiving. This will be my first time.”

A woman in the class said, “A pot luck is where people bring food and you eat whatever you bring.”

“So we will share the food together? Oh!”

The woman also tried to explain Thanksgiving. “Do you know what the origination of Thanksgiving is?”

“No. Can I get it on the internet?”

Many people pitched in to explain the history and purpose of Thanksgiving to her, stumbling to the realization that, in a strictly vegetarian temple, there could be no actual turkey.

The Venerable Jue was surprised to hear there could be a substitute. “Tofu turkey? Really? They have that here? I never saw before. I will be very, very interested to see it! I saw a picture on the internet when I was in Taiwan of tofu turkey.”

The next flyer was for a class the temple was just starting and the nun made a strong pitch for it. It seemed the temple administration had noticed that there was considerable confusion on the part of Americans about some of the rituals and the temple decided to try to help. “Why do we have to chant the sutra so many times. The sutra is like the teachings of the Bible. Like in the Bible it says that ‘Jesus say da-da-da-da-da-da.’ The sutra is like that. Chanting is the time when peace really come to our mind and to really have a time when we ourselves touch the Buddha, when we communicate with the Buddha. I encourage all of you to take this class. We never ask the devotees to be very diligent with memorizing the sutra. So that’s the reason why for the dharma function. Reverend will introduce the dharma function and why there are so many dharma function and why do we need to make prostration. I realize something about why people here don’t like making prostration. Indians are very small and tiny. Chinese are also small and tiny. Prostration is more easy for us. I realized that most of our western friends are very huge. So, it’s not because of our practice but because of our mat. Our mat is so small!”

The class couldn’t believe what she was saying. The laughter was nervous. Could we have misunderstood her accented English?

We hadn’t. “So,” Venerable Jue concluded, “that’s the reason if I have chance to become an abbess here I will make a bigger mat. That is my vow!”

A middle-aged woman with dark hair in the back said she did prostration by herself in the temple when people weren’t so close to her but then square-faced Dave-of-a-thousand-questions chimed in again. “I don’t know when to do the prostrations. Everybody’s down and I’m up and I’m down when they’re up.”

What an absurd set of reactions I’d had to poor “Dave,” a man I’d never seen before that class. At first, there was gratitude that at least someone was asking questions when I didn’t know what to ask followed, in a trice, by frustration that he was asking so many questions, so many questions that irritated me and now this: I could kiss him. “Everybody’s down and I’m up and I’m down when they’re up.”

Me, too, Dave. Those of us who didn’t know what to do find it easier just to sit and watch rather than get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time or worry that we might. And it was pretty clear Dave and I weren’t the only ones in the room who felt that way.

With that, the Buddhism class was over, I grabbed one of every flyer at the back of the room – including one about something called an 8 Precept Retreat – and then walked up the hill with most of the others to a building behind the temple for the meditation class.

The meditation room had a gray marble floor and a wide wood bench built-in against all the walls with individual seats marked by wood strips. At each, there was already a stack of two flat cushions, one square, the other a narrow rectangle and, beside the pillows, a tightly rolled towel. A statue of Buddha was in the center of the room, lit only by the shaded light that came in through the wide open doors.

A squat, no nonsense elderly nun herded every new person into a corner to give us a few tips before the meditation began. She told us how to sit: on top of the narrow rectangular pillow with one foot up over the other knee or both, if possible. “Protects the back.” After you sit, “rotate around in both directions” to get the most comfortable place to sit and put a towel over your legs. You “get cold when you meditate.” Let your arms fall into your lap, both palms up, one hand resting in the other palm, thumbs together. Sit. “Concentrate on breath.”

Men were on one side of room, women on other so “nothing interferes with empty mind.” Seems to me if your mind was going to get disturbed by members of the opposite sex, it would be far less disturbing to have them right next to you rather than across the room where you can easily see them. Or in another room. And isn't the point to get to a place where it wouldn’t matter if there were other people around you at all?

We then sat for twenty minutes in complete silence, followed by a short break and then another twenty minutes. It was really hard. I could sit for twenty minutes alone in my room but something about being in a new place or maybe it was I'd just come from a class where my mind was filled with new thoughts and ideas but I couldn't quiet my mind in any way.

When it ended, the elderly nun unfolded herself, rotating her ankles, rubbing the blood back into her legs and then, after asking if we found it hard, she squinched her glasses back up her nose a bit and said, “Man was digging a hole in the road. He said, ‘Life is hard.’ Another man, digging a hole in the road, said, ‘This is hard but I do it for a pay check.’ Another man digging a hole in the road is smiling. ‘I’m thinking about all the people who will arrive safely home because of the work I am doing.’ Meditation is like that. It may hurt. You may be doing it just to get something. Only you truly know what you experience. But you get out what you contribute to meditation. There is no substitute for experiencing it yourself.”

Now, that, I know is true. There is no substitute for experiencing any of this for myself.


(24 September 2006)

Kumbha mela...

Find a wise teacher, honor him,
ask him questions, serve him;
someone who has seen the truth
will guide you on the path to wisdom.

Bhagavad Gita 4.34


One stop guru shopping. Well, Professor Chapple didn’t really say it that way but that’s what he meant.

After I told him about my difficulty with both the language and strict separation of men and women at the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan mandir, he suggested I might want to check out the kumbha mela set to take place at the University of California at Irvine. He thought I might find my guru – I cringe typing that word but that’s what a teacher is called in Hinduism – there. It’s the first one ever held in this country.

Kumbha melas are held every three years in India and millions of Hindus go. The purpose of the kumbha mela is to bring together as many of the disparate sects of Hindus as possible. Historically, it also allowed for some standardization of sacred texts, rituals and beliefs but its primary purpose was to anchor peace among all people. A group of temples had decided, after 9/11, to have one here. I decided to go. (Los Angeles Times article on the event.)

When I got to the campus, it was still flat-out summer so I grabbed a bottle of water out of the backseat and a tattered parasol and fell in with the steady stream of people heading for the open parking lot where the opening procession was to begin.There were knots of people lining up, some in robes of various colors, holding bright banners or photos of spiritual leaders decorated with garlands of flowers, while others prepped elaborate carts holding brass icons. Umbrellas and conch shell horns, saris and drums, ropes of flowers and brass bells – I wasn’t sure how I was going to spot my future teacher in this tumult.

The Hare Krishnas’ gold cart, two-people high, required twenty people pulling two ropes to make it move when the procession began. Those not pulling beat drums or danced between the “V” made by the ropes. The Nithyananda Foundation , the temple whose Swami had instigated the event, had five different carts, each with a different icon, each shaded by round red-fringed parasols. While all the Nithyananda devotees were wearing long white dhotis, they also had cobalt blue t-shirts pulled on over them that said: "Be Blissful" and had the website address on the back. Some groups danced, others marched, still others blew horns or gave out flowers.
One vague white man who looked like he'd just come from a data-entry cubicle somewhere was scooting along side the procession carrying an Arrowhead plastic gallon jug partially filled with a murky yellow liquid. Moss or algae was floating in it. He abruptly stopped right in front of me and thrust a capful of the liquid at me.

When I didn’t really respond because I had no idea what I was supposed to do, he blurted, “Sacred river water.”

I looked at the cap and then back at him and all I thought was, if he expects me to drink this, he's got another think coming.

He finally gave up on my ever coming out of my paralysis. "Pour it over your head.”

Relieved that I wasn't supposed to drink it, I did as I was told…and then spent the rest of the day wondering if I should have. Blessed water or not, my college roommate was an infectious disease specialist so I had plenty of things to imagine and, on top of that, I was a kid who wouldn’t go near a pool with even a few leaves in it or any trace of cloudiness and who tried very hard not to touch the bottom of any river I ever swam in. I walked around the rest of the day occasionally wondering what might come of the dried remains of the yellow swampy water that was now in my hair.

There weren’t many of us watching the procession so people kept bounced out of line to offer me a red flower, to ask if I had any questions, to hand me a pamphlet. One white woman put a smudged dot of orange powder in the center of my forehead. Strangely, the only group I had to chase after to get the literature they were handing out were the Hare Krishnas. Along with small booklets describing the message of their founding spiritual leader, Prabhupada, there was a card inviting anyone interested to come to their free “Love Feast” every Sunday afternoon. On the other side of the card, were directions and a suggestion that “your life will be sublime” if you chant the mantra: “Hare Kishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.” One of the temples sponsoring the event handed out a light purple folded flyer to anyone who would take it: “Enlightening Golf Classic 2006.” On the inside it said “Tee Off For Meditation.”

As I watched the procession go by, I kept a look-out for anyone who looked like a possible teacher. But, what was I looking for? Would I recognize him or her if I saw them? And, how? I didn’t think what I was looking for was something that could be seen but I wasn’t willing to let any chance encounter pass me by.

The parade ended at an above-ground pool that had been set up just outside the basketball stadium. A diverse group of swamis ceremonially poured water from a silver urn, said to be from twenty-one sacred rivers in India into the pool, and then each immersed their temple’s idols in the holy water. Once all the holy saints were symbolically bathed, people could touch the water. All of the idols – and there were at least forty to fifty of them of various sizes – were then brought into the event center and put, side-by-side, across the back of the stage in what became a circus of shapes and colors, flowers and brass idols, photographs and garlands and tall round fringed umbrellas.

After a long series of songs, dances and performances, the mayor of Irvine, a barrel of a woman who spoke in a flat but kind politician voice, welcomed the group by saying her city was blessed to have such a rich spiritual tradition in its midst. Then, one after another, the swamis who came together to make the event happen got up from the long table on the stage to speak, their devotees cheering loudly when they came to the podium.

The first to speak, the swami whose idea the Kumbha Mela was, was also the youngest – a smiling, long-haired guru who, at twenty-seven, looked like a movie idol. His followers were the ones wearing the white dhotis covered by the blue t-shirts and, I don’t know what was wrong with me, but they all looked just too happy, like you couldn’t even talk to them, they were in such a transported, blissful state. That sort of abandon makes me nervous. Next, came a swami who spoke passionately but in his native language. Then, a thin, cerebral, man with thinning black hair and big glasses got up to speak.

Undisturbed by the large, somewhat inattentive audience, the earnest man in orange robes began to speak into the microphone as if he were in a small room of intimates rather than a basketball stadium. “I am glad to be here today, to be with you all to celebrate this wonderful Kumbha Mela which means a congregation of all religious ideals and ideology.”

He then talked about the differences between all of the various Hindu sects at the conference, between the various spiritual leaders sitting up on the stage, saying their differences were only in practice but not in their faith, not in their belief in prayer, not in their resolve for peace. With an elegant sweep of one hand, the swami said, “All these different deities represent different aspects of the same One. And, as different streams have their sources in different places, all mingle their water in the sea, so the different paths men take, through different tendencies, various though they may appear, all lead to the same One, the Infinite Absolute. Hinduism is the mother of all religions. We don’t worship idols, we worship any image we choose that can lead us to the One, to the Absolute, to that which is beyond all description.”

Idols lined the back of the stage but this swami was saying they weren’t worshipped, they were more like tools that helped show the way to a single Infinite Absolute. I’d never heard that before.

"Some say that only their God is real, that ‘my God is higher, more real than yours.’ We Hindus don’t. We are not here to change anyone, to make anyone a Hindu, to make them believe what we believe. We want a Christian to be a better Christian, for a Jew to be a better Jew, for a Muslim to be a better Muslim. This is the need of this age, this harmony is the need of this age. That is the way to world peace. And we should be very proud to be part of this religion that has given the world this openness, this acceptance.”

As I watched this sincere man speak his simple words with such kindness and conviction yet with such seeming detachment from any effort to manipulate the crowd or broadcast his personality, I thought: “That’s him. That’s my teacher.”

I looked in the program. His name was Swami Sarvadevananda.



(10 September 2006)

Hemu's Morning Rituals

I tried to practice a bit of the Hindu ritual I didn’t get very far. Using the small morning “puja” kit Hemu suggested I buy from the bookstore at the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan mandir, I struggled, alone in my room.

Inside the tan zippered pouch was: a square of stiff fabric to sit on; red fabric on which the devotional items should be placed; a string of wooden beads; a red velvet, L-shaped pouch open at only one end; five laminated images of Lord Swaminarayan and the spiritual leaders who came after him; a round mirror; a ceramic mortar; an orange pastel-like stick; a tube with a red chalky substance inside; a dropper bottle for water; a piece of metal bent into a U-shape on one side; and a long, streamer-like folded pamphlet with the words “Daily Puja” in brown ink.

When Hemu first walked me through all the items inside, she explained that the L-shaped pouch was for the rosary beads, which were supposed to remain inside it. The meaning and use of all the rest, she said, I’d find explained in the little manual inside; the directions would show me her entire daily morning ritual. I figured if Hemu could do it when she was busy raising two children not much older than my own and running a business with her husband, I could too.

Hah.

Here’s what it said to do: “Awake before six in the morning every day, brush your teeth and …take a bath.” Then, without eating or drinking anything, “do not put on your normal work clothes…but wear… a newly washed set of clothes.” After laying out the cloth to sit on and the cloth with all the other items on it, a devotee was supposed to sit facing north or east. Next, I was to make an orange paste in the mortar by mixing drops of water with the soft orange stick, which the bent metal wire is dipped into it and then pressed “between the eyebrows” leaving behind a yellow-orange U-shape. In the middle of it, I had to “imprint a red chandlo of kumkum” - the red chalk.

Next, there was a brief period of meditation in which I was supposed to contemplate thoughts like: “I am Atma. (God within me) I am not this body.” Followed by “imagining the Lord (Swaminarayan) and His best Sadhu (monk) to be before you. Gently awake Them. Lead them through the daily morning routine. Offer them clothes, ornaments, garlands, aarti (light or fire), thal (food), etc”

At this point three of eleven steps were complete. The remaining steps were: inviting the Lord and his best sadhu to come into the puja; the chanting of various mantras; “telling the rosary” which involved chanting “Swaminarayan” with each bead; standing on one leg with the other crossed and “resolve to offer devotion to God no matter what the hardship”; walking around the mats - in a clockwise direction - eleven times still telling the rosary; prostrate five times, “fully stretched out on the ground” to “show our total surrender to God” and become humble and then, one more time, to ask forgiveness for any mistakes made; then came a period of prayer followed by thanking “the Lord for being present in your puja” and for forgiving “any mistakes you may have made during your puja.” The final steps were cleaning up the puja things, hanging up the special clothes you wore some place where they wouldn’t get touched, cleaning your home temple and bowing down to your parents and anyone else present saying, “Jai Swaminarayan.”

I made a complete mess. The little pamphlet was streaked with red. I couldn’t get the wire to dip into the yellow chalky stuff enough to be able to leave behind the U on my forehead. Instead, I had a smear of yellow between my eyebrows more like a baby with its first solid food than someone in prayer. And, when I got to the directions where it told me to stand on one leg, well, that seemed just plain silly, especially since I’d have to do this while holding on to the pamphlet so I’d know what to do next. I gave up.

Hemu did this every day?

I felt hopelessly inadequate, yet again, to the task at hand. How many working people with families to care for were able to do this every day, to follow every single step to the degree their devotion called them? Did they end up feeling inadequate, too, as though their faith was simply out of reach? Was my inability to charge headlong into such daily ritual significant? If so, of what?


(8 September 2006)

Back to BAPS

It is better to do your own duty
badly, than to perfectly do
another’s; you are safe from harm
when you do what you should be doing.

Bhagavad Gita, 3.35

When I drove home at the end of the day, there was a red dot on my forehead. Here’s how it got there.

No one stopped me at the front gate of the temple this time. I walked in with too much purpose, past the people greeting each other, to put my sandals in the women’s rack before opening the door. Hemu told me the time to come so I was shocked to see a service already in progress and it looked like it'd been going on for a while. I hate being late - hate it - but I was beginning to get that it might not matter here. There was an informality to the services with people coming and going all the time, saying hello, even chatting for a bit.

A man’s voice was coming over the PA system but it wasn’t clear where the speaker was – no one was facing the crowd. Women were sitting cross-legged with styrofoam trays in front of them on the far side of the room while, on the near side of the knee-high divider, two men sat on a special rug in front of a low table draped with silk. A few elderly men watched from plastic chairs along the wall. I felt lost standing there in the middle of the room, wondering where Hemu was so I gave up trying to figure out who was speaking and headed for a small group of women at the back who were sorting through a pile of pink and white flowers.

I bent down to whisper, “Hi, I’m sorry to bother you but...I’m Marley. Do you know where Hemu is?”

One of the women smiled and pointed to the rows of women sitting on the floor.

Hemu was in a yellow sari up front and deep in the rows of seated women. She waved me over when she saw me. I picked my way over knees and trays to sit in the space created when the entire row of women shifted over to make room for me. I felt like a lummox.

“Sorry, I’m late! I thought I was supposed to come at two,” I said. “What’s going on here?”

Hemu said, "We're doing puja.”

There was no time to ask what a "puja" was. Hemu moved the extra tray she'd made for me over along with a styrofoam bowl of water with a plastic spoon in it. On the divided tray, were two piles of uncooked rice, a round nut, pink rose petals and white jasmine stars, some red-pink powder and some white, and a piece of kitchen string that had been dyed magenta. The tray was beautiful to look at, beautiful to smell.

Embarrassed by the commotion I’d made coming in late, causing women I didn’t know to move, mid-devotion, I decided not to ask anything for the moment and just go with whatever was happening.

Hemu grabbed the string on the tray and tied it around my right wrist, whispering, “It shows your devotion to God.” Then Hemu used the spoon to scoop water from the bowl, first into my right hand, and then into hers. I held the water in my palm like she did while whoever was chanting in Gujarati or Sanskrit continued to chant. I wondered what Hemu was feeling, if a particular feeling was what she was after or if it didn’t matter. I longed to feel something, some thud in my gut that felt true, but I also knew there was little chance of that without a willingness to do things I didn’t understand at least until I understood them. But I did know I was afraid I’d forget some of what Hemu was teaching me so I moved the water from my right palm to my left to open my notebook and uncap my pen.

I could feel Hemu tense beside me. “Right hand only?” I said.

Hemu laughed that I got it, then she said into my ear, “Everything on the right side. Nothing on the left.”

A moment later we poured the water from our palms onto the small pile of rice in the center. Hemu then pointed to the magenta powder and asked, “Do you mind?”

I wasn’t entirely certain what she meant but I said, “No, not at all.”

With that, Hemu dipped one finger in the red powder and touched my forehead.

All those times I’d noticed people on the street or in shops with red dots, I wondered what the dots meant. Now I had one. And I had no idea why.

I wanted a mirror, bad.

I wondered what my mother would say if she saw me.

The thought also occurred: if I had done this to myself, I would have felt like a fraud but, since Hemu had done it to me, I guessed there was nothing wrong with a non-Hindu wearing a ritual string or having a dot on her head. I couldn’t wait for the service to be over so I could ask her what it all meant but Hemu had already moved on, picking up a few rose petals and jasmine blossoms and holding them in her right palm. I did the same. A few chants from the disembodied male voice and we put those petals on top of the small pile of now damp rice.

The chanting was so loud and people were coming and going so frequently, I thought I could ask a few questions. “What are we doing?”

“Well,” she said, “Every eleventh day is a fast. But the eleventh day of this month is a waterless fast and a special festival, very joyful. It’s called Jaljirni (This 11th day falls in September during a monsoon season in India and in way of thanking the God for brimming the rivers and lakes with rain, the small idol of Lord is taken for a boat ride in the ocean, a lake or a river. ) The priest is performing a Maha puja over there and we are following along here.”

The two men sitting on the floor before the low table held the microphone I couldn’t see. They were doing the official puja ritual and the women were doing symbolic ones on these styrofoam trays.

When younger men came in during the ceremony, they prostrated themselves before the statues of the deities on the stage, touching both sides of their heads and then their chins to the floor before standing upright and then doing it all over again. Women only kneeled and touched their heads to the floor. I counted the number of times two different men did it figuring, if it was the same, it must be part of the ritual. It was. The number was five. I started to write a note so I would remember to ask Hemu about this later but I got distracted by what one young man did next. He went down the line of elderly men, greeting each one by touching the bottom of their feet and then putting his hands together and bowing.

The elderly men seemed pleased by the attention and smiled back, reaching out to touch his hand when it was finally offered. While all the younger men that came later also greeted each of the elderly men by making some gesture towards their feet, none went quite as far as the first.
Hemu scooped another spoonful of water into my hand.

“But what, exactly, is “puja?” I asked.

We poured the water from our hands into the pile of wet rice.

“We are gently waking God and our spiritual leaders up and taking them through their morning routine just like we do. We bathe them, offer them clothes, ornaments, food – inviting them into our home. We do a similar puja kind of in our mind at home every morning.”

So that’s what was going on: while doing this ritual with the water and the flowers and the food, they were actually imagining a being they could take care of, a being with whom they could have a direct relationship.

Hemu leaned in to help me follow along. “Take a handful of rice, we’re going to chant the 108 names for God.”

A hundred and eight names for God? I could barely handle one.

The chanting began and, with every name, we took one grain of rice and put it down in the pile of petals, rice and water from before. The dry grains made a surprisingly loud sound when they hit the bottom of our trays. Some of the names of God were long and complicated (although all seemed to begin with the sound “om”) so it took almost four minutes to say them all.

What did the rice mean? Was it fertility? Or simply food? It wasn’t either. Hemu explained that rice was used because of its purity. “It is the only grain that is always whole, never fragmented.”

The entire congregation then started chanting “Swaminarayan,” the name of Lord Swaminarayan, the original spiritual leader of the BAPS branch of Hinduism while clapping out every syllable.

Hemu explained, “If we chant ‘Swaminarayan, Swaminarayan, Swaminarayan’ over and over while thinking of God, our problems will be taken care of.”

Seven breaths and dozens of “Swaminarayans” later, there was singing – it sounded like the fragment of a song – and then a loud bell sounded.

“It’s the lighting of the fire. Aarti,” Hemu said.

Across the room, a brass candleholder on a tray was lit and then ceremonially waved from down low to up high.

I asked, “Fire is called “aarti?”

“Yes. In the olden days, there were no lights, no electricity. It was dark so you took the fire closer to God to see each part of God from His feet up to His head. This is our way of giving Him honor, of respecting Him more.”

“And wanting to see Him more?” The tray of fire was coming closer to us. I could see its blaze reflected in Hemu’s eyeglasses.

“Yes, and to see Him more. But then it became a ritual. It’s also a form of welcoming someone.”

The fire was walked around the room, from person to person. Each, in turn, waved some of its heat over their head and then into their heart and then put a dollar on the tray holding the fire. The money seemed symbolic, not meant to be a contribution, as there was an official window near the bookstore set up to process donations and a locked box in front of the altar.

Taking more flowers in her hand, Hemu said, “Now we ask for forgiveness.”

With the perfume of jasmine and rose petals floating out of my hands, asking for forgiveness was lovely but over too quickly for my list. When we were done, those petals, too, were added to the pile of wet offerings on our styrofoam tray.

When the service ended, the men left the room so the women could walk around the table where the main puja had taken place. At least twenty women were already walking around the table when Hemu and I went over. “We walk six times around,” she said. “It symbolizes that you’ve done the pilgrimage to all the temples, all the pilgrimage places that there are. You get the boon of that, the blessing of that, by doing it symbolically right here.”

Hemu, who appeared to be shy and self-effacing, didn’t even try to insert herself in the slow-moving knot of women. She zipped around the outside of the circle which meant she had to step over or around a chair that was up against the wall without bumping into the circle of devotees. Caught between my desire to be respectful of the people in this unfamiliar environment but also wanting to keep up with Hemu, I tried to stay as close to her as I could without knocking anyone down. I’m on the short side of average but Hemu couldn’t be more than 5’ 2” and her thin frame made her seem even tinier, so I couldn’t quite keep her bright yellow sari in sight. Searching for Hemu while trying not to be rude put any kind of devotional feeling out of my reach. My guess was the slow-movers had a better shot at it.

At the end of the circling, someone handed us a cube of cake – “blessed food” – which we ate as we cleaned up after ourselves, tossing our trays full of rice and flowers and cups of water in the trash. We were already late for the only class taught in English at the mandir so Hemu and I walked out the back door and down a driveway along a number of buildings that might have once been homes.

Suddenly, Hemu stopped short and turned to face the wall of the main hall. “The sadhus!” She edged even closer to the building.

On the other side of the driveway, two men with shaved heads were walking towards us, in flying orange robes, fit and confident.

“Are we not supposed to look at them?”

“No, you can look at them but they won’t look at you. We try to be respectful and make it easy for them.”

It's hard for someone who lives for eye contact to avoid it but, out of respect for Hemu, I tried... though I can, of course, tell you that the sadhus bounded up a few steps to one of the buildings and then disappeared inside.

After they were gone and we continued walking to the building on the end, I asked Hemu, “How does someone convert to this kind of Hinduism?”

“You don’t really become a Hindu," she said. "You just start coming. Well, we do take a vow to follow five niyams and those are: never to drink alcohol; never to eat meat; not to kill; not to steal; and not to commit adultery. These are the five things that apply to humanity as a whole.”

“So I could walk in right now and take those vows and I would be considered a Hindu?”

“Well, yes.”

“Isn’t there more I would have to learn before doing that?”

“No. This is basically it. And you wear sacred beads (around your neck) which means you have surrendered yourself to God. And when you surrender yourself to God, God will protect you. That’s what it means.” Hemu’s hands punctuated her words. “Because you have surrendered yourself to God, it is now his total responsibility to look after you.”

Wouldn’t that be great, to have Someone who was totally responsible to look after me? “And those are the beads that you are wearing,” I asked. “could I wear any beads?”

“Yes, you can but these are made from tulsi. It’s like a basil plant. It’s a sacred plant. When you offer food to God, we put a leaf of tulsi plant on it and offer it to God. Well, when we offer ourselves to God we can’t put a leaf on our heads so we just wear these. Ladies give it to ladies and saints give it to the men. So, what we do is we give you water in the palm of your hand and you say these five vows and you abide by those five vows and then we give you the beads and, basically, you practice Hinduism. That’s the initiation.”

We stepped up on the small landing outside one of the houses on the temple's grounds and started to take off our shoes. Maybe I've fantasized the mystical rigors a convert has to go through to join most any faith. Maybe it's as simple as signing up for a club and then just showing, just waiting for the feeling of belonging, the feeling of belief kicks in.

In my very first job in television news, I met Father Miles Riley who was, at the time, the press handler for the Archbisop of San Francisco. Aside from referring to me as a "heathen" - with great warmth - Father Miles Riley told me the story of Father Bob Duryea, a priest who fathered a son, secretly married, but continued ministering to his blue-collar parish which knew and kept his secret. Father Duryea and his brother, also a Roman Catholic priest and Stanford’s chaplain in the late sixties and early seventies, were raised to be priests by a mother who had converted to Catholicism. She'd made it clear to her sons from an early age that no other life choice was possible for them.

Father Miles tried to explain a woman like Dorothy Duryea to me when we really had no shared language. He tried to explain that those who are raised in a religion could, in some sense, take what they like and leave the rest, unlike a convert; converts feel they must accept it all, believe it all, hew to it all, or they shouldn’t make the leap. Conversion is hard. Converts think it must be all or nothing. Father Miles found this absolute thinking amusing, even quaint. All I saw was how destructive it was to the Duryea boys.

Now, I finally understand why Dorothy Duryea felt she had to be absolute once she’d made the choice to become a Catholic. Standing on this side of the chasm, it does seem all or nothing. Accept all the tenets of a particular faith, or what's the point of converting, no matter how simple the ritual? But how can you do that when you don't know anything about anything?

I took off my shoes for the second time that day. What am I was getting at with this idea of mine, am I looking to convert? I know I'm trying to figure out what I believe. I know I want to get at the mystery of why believers go to war with other believers. Academic study just can't get at what I want to understand; it's too clinical, too cerebral, too far removed...I think. Even if I can't figure out what I believe, I'm desperate to understand the connection people feel with their god and with their community of believers, something I’ve never had. Doing seems like the only option, doing what a convert might be told to do in preparation, doing until I can feel, well, something. Some Thing.

Hemu and I walked inside the tan building, inside the hot, dingy room where a small group of truly beautiful young women sat gracefully on the floor - their saris, hair, and skin flawless, even though the floorstand fan was doing nothing to disturb the incredible heat. That Hemu showed up with me elicited no apparent curiosity. Had she warned them?

It seemed like more of a study group than a class; there was no teacher. Sima Patel, a dark-skinned, almond-eyed beauty wearing a luscious green and rust-colored sari, was trying to get the computer she brought to work with the projector and screen in the room.

While waiting for the class to begin, Hemu said she liked the idea of what I was trying to do. She thought it was like Hinduism’s notion of many paths all leading to the same goal, God. “It’s like if you want to get to the Los Angeles airport, there are many, many ways to get there. From anywhere in the world, you can get there, and by many different means. It all depends on where you start and what transportation method you use but you can always get there.” This sweet embrace of difference felt gentle, kind, warm, like someone offering to share their blanket at an outdoor concert.

Sima was finally ready. “Can someone read this section from Gadhada III, 28 out loud?” Sima wanted someone to read from The Vachanamrut, a book containing the spiritual discourses of the founding leader, Lord Swaminarayan.

When I took out the English copy I’d bought at the bookstore to find my place in it, the tallest, most self-assured of the women leaned across a few people to hand me a ring binder to place under it so the Swaminarayan text wouldn’t touch the floor.

Hemu leaned over to whisper with pride. “That’s my daughter.”

One of the young women started to read, “If one has realized God with the knowledge of His greatness…then how can one feel egotism, jealousy, or anger towards a sadhu of such a God? If one still does, then there is a flaw in one’s understanding. …If one understands God’s greatness in such a manner, then egotism is eradicated.”

In the role of teacher, Sima asked, “What does this mean?”

One of the young women answered, “There is no greater glory than to understand the glory of God.”

“How can we attain this higher devotion to God?

“Follow the rules….The easiest way we can show that we are completely devoted is by following the spiritual vows in our every day life.”

“Will someone read the last one?”

The most perfect beauty in the group, Meera, whose elegant whisper of a body was draped in shell pink, complied. “If I would shake the earth with the toe of my foot, the world with its countless (cosmoses) would begin to shake. If one develops the conviction of my form in this manner, one’s mind would become fixed on me, God, and one would never stray anywhere else.”
The women seemed intent on their studies while I was just intent on their intentions, their feelings, their beliefs. Maybe it was all too much to process, the rituals, the languages, the beliefs, the dozens of new people. And it was confusing to know who I was in that room. I'm used to meeting new people and then reporting what they said and did. But, if I am a reporter, who's the subject? Them? Hinduism? Or me? I mean, all my outward actions are the same: I have a pen and notepad; I'm asking questions and writing down answers; I'm observing and trying to see connections between things. But one of those "things" now includes me and none of my training or job experience has taught me how to do that; I'm used to being as invisible as possible. Going ahead without my invisibility cloak is as big a stretch as practicing a faith.

Suddenly a newspaper was put in my hands. I was expected to read the next question and Pramukh Swami Maharaj’s answer. Hemu nodded for me to do it. So I read out loud, “My mind is like Saddam; it is stubborn, it doesn’t obey me.” My eye was desperate to look at the date of the newspaper – could they really mean Saddam, THE Saddam, Saddam Hussein? – but all eyes were on me and I was too afraid I’d stumble over the words I was supposed to read. It was already hard enough, what with all the anglicized Sanskrit or Gujarati words that weren’t written the way they’re pronounced. (Siva, for instance, is pronounced She-va.) So I just mumbled my way unintelligibly through any words I didn’t understand. “Swamiji: That’s why we have to fight with our mind. We should bombard it. What will be our bombs? Constant discourses. Seva and devotion?”

I looked to Hemu for the okay on how I pronounced the words. She gave me an insanely generous nod so I continued on with the swami’s answer to the devotee. “The mind will never be free to retaliate. Then, will it not be destroyed? Aspirant: But my mind is hiding in a bunker. Swamiji: Then we have to use our laser weapons, follow agna.” Relieved that my question was over, I had no idea what I’d said or even really what it meant except that was important to keep reading sacred texts and discussing them with other believers as a way of fending off the mind’s doubts.

During a small break in the class, Hemu introduced me to some of the women. Pointing to the fragile beauty, Meera, she said, “Her sister is serving in Iraq right now.” Meera was so ethereal it was hard to think of her as related to anyone in the real world, let alone to someone fighting in Iraq.

“How long has she been there?” I asked Meera.

Meera said, “About seven months, now.”

Then Hemu added, “And she’s also a marine.”

Much as I tried to imagine Meera in combat fatigues, going through basic training, I couldn’t even imagine her driving a car, lifting anything heavy or, indeed, even walking around. She looked like someone who should float.

I asked her, “Will you have to go?”

“I’m not sure.” But her gaze said, ‘I’m not afraid to go if those are my orders.’

It turned out that the rest of this room was filled with future pharmacists, engineers, medical technicians and doctors.

Near the end of the class came a question – and an answer – that seemed louder to me than all the rest: “Is a guru really necessary?”

The answer: “Swamiji: Absolutely.”

“Are you saying that without a guru one cannot attain God?”

“Swamiji: That’s right. Just like when we go to school, we only acquire knowledge by learning from teachers.”

Teachers. I still need a teacher.

Hemu’s translation of the sadhu’s sermon in my notebook said, “Right, positive understanding is the key to our spiritual progress” and that understanding could only come from “a God-realized guru.” Hemu wasn't that, so it couldn’t be her. And I couldn’t talk to the mandir’s sadhus: they were men who couldn’t talk directly to women and, when they gave public sermons, they only spoke in Gujarati. I was going to have to find someone I could talk to, in a language I could understand. Warmth and acceptance were not enough.

I knew, with clarity and sadness, my teacher was not there.

Driving home, I caught sight of my forehead in the rearview mirror in the late afternoon sun. I was shocked by what I saw. The red dot. It had been there all afternoon long and I had forgotten all about it. I pulled off to the side of the highway to study my face with such a mark in the center. Although I hadn’t put it there, I also knew that it didn’t belong, yet anyway, to me. I felt disrespectful wearing it. How could I when I didn’t know enough yet, understand enough, to let it remain? As I took a napkin from the small pile I kept in the pocket on my car door and wiped it off, I noticed the magenta string still on my wrist.

That, I left on.

Where was my teacher?



(3 September 2006)