on manners and banishing fear

The intelligent who do not lead others falsely
but lawfully and impartially
and are guarded by the law
are called dhammattha–
“Those who abide by the law.”

They are not learned merely because they speak much;
Those who are secure, without hate, and fearless are called learned.
Dhammapada, 19:257-258


I read an article some months ago in the New Yorker about a man who suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a milder form of autism that resolves itself in all kinds of anti-social or asocial behavior. He had obviously made a lot of progress in dealing with the syndrome since he was able to write about it. He said that oddly, the book that helped pull him into the human race was Emily Post’s “Etiquette” because, he said, that book not only “offered clear reasons for courtesy and gentility,” but most of all it convinced him “that manners, properly understood, existed to make other people feel comfortable, rather than… to demonstrate the practitioner’s social superiority.” (Tim Page, “Parallel Play,” New Yorker, August 20, 2007)

I was thinking of some of the really noble people I have met in my life, that were so intelligent, perhaps wealthy, successful in business, erudite, sophisticated, and I must say the best of them have always been people like that, who made me feel comfortable rather than try to show off their superiority, never made me feel stupid for my lack of education, who seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say, who eased me through an uncomfortable social situation, who had no need to prove their superiority. Instead of talking down to me, I always get the feeling from them that they are pulling me up to their level.

I didn’t even know that William F Buckley had died until I got down here to the hermitage and started rummaging through the periodicals a few days ago. (I missed a bit of American news while I was on the road in Asia.) I was quite fascinated by him in my own what I’ve come to call “neo-con” days of the 80’s, when I was hanging around people who were pretty smart conservatives and pious Catholics (who considered themselves not conservative but “orthodox”). And I used to watch Firing Line pretty regularly in those days, mesmerized by his skill as an interviewer, his erudition and, of course, his vocabulary. My favorite shows, or moments in shows, are two. In 1986 when he was debating and interviewing all the Democratic presidential candidates during the primary season, there was a moment when Buckley found himself standing at a podium next to Jesse Jackson, and he glanced up, everyone could see, rather nervously. Jesse was kind of an imposing presence, and for the first time I thought something like a look of panic crossed Buckley’s face. The audience laughed, and they had a wonderful exchange afterward, certainly the meeting of two very different but equally eloquent speakers. The other was one of the times he interviewed Glenn Gould, which of course featured the latter performing Bach on the piano. They spoke at length about the differences between live performance and recording, and it was a magical almost mystical conversation. You could see how much appreciation Buckley had for the genius of this man, not to mention the glory of the music itself.

As much as I admired Mr Buckley’s intellectual integrity, I was also “confused,” shall we say, by a few of his controversial positions such as on the Jim Crow laws and his backing of Sen. McCarthy, for instance. And I was always amazed how he could consistently be held up as a model of orthodox Catholicism when he himself is oft quoted for his aphorism “Mater Si Magistra No!––Mother, Yes, Teacher, No” when it came to the Catholic social teachings, all the way from John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris through the bishop’s letter on Economic Justice in the 1980s. And of course there was his abhorrence of the Novus Ordo of Vatican II, especially in English. One priest (shame on him) is quoted in print saying, “Bill quite rightly loathed the liturgical changes in the Catholic Church.”

I’ve been happily pouring through the tributes to Mr Buckley recently, especially in the National Review, and the one thing comes up over and over again: though one might have gotten the impression of him as aristocratic or haughty or exclusive due to his ideology, acerbic wit and vocabulary, person after person mentioned about him that as an interviewer he was a self-effacing and almost invisible presence, that one left feeling enhanced, exhilarated, and a better person after being with him; and that in person he was tremendously egalitarian: he treated everyone equally, with equal dignity; he treated people with respect and inquisitiveness, and he loved to celebrate other peoples’ triumphs, from his cronies like Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater to John Kenneth Galbraith and Ira Glasser of the ACLU, who were his ideological opposites, down to the lowliest first year law student who came to interview for a job. Again, in this way instead of talking down to people, he pulled them up to his level.

I heard someone say years ago that if he had been the one who had been raised from the dead instead of Jesus, he would have climbed to the top of the parapet of the temple and shouted, “Oh yeah? Who’s King of the Mountain now?” And yet in the Gospels we see Jesus appearing after his resurrection just as humbly as he walked the roads during his ministry. Some of the Patristic writers noted this especially: Peter Chrysologus, (in Sermon 76) wrote that Jesus, when he meets the women at the tomb and when he greets his friends, does not terrify them by his power but convinces and confirms them “with the ardor of love.” And St Jerome says that we always find this, both in the Old and New Testament, “that when there is an appearance of any majestic person, the first thing done is to banish fear, that the mind being tranquillized may receive the things that are said.” Jesus of course is what God is like, so he has told us, and I like to think of God in Jesus, pulling us up to his level. God in Jesus does not terrify us by his power, but convinces and confirms us by the ardor of love. Jesus, like God, pulls us up to his level.

Right away in the Easter season we need to start focusing on this: that not only in Baptism itself but in the feast of Pentecost toward which we are heading, when we celebrate the outpouring of the Spirit of the Risen Christ into the depths of our being, we are celebrating the fact that Jesus is pulling us up to his level; where the head has gone the Body will follow. If the Spirit of the One who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in us, then that same Spirit will banish our fear and give life to our mortal bodies as well through the ardor of love.

I’d also like to think that I/we could be so majestic, so gracious in our behavior toward one another, if for no other reason than in imitation of Jesus, to never exert any kind of superiority, but to always put others (and service to them) first, to banish fear and assure others of the ardor of our love, to strive to be at the same level of Jesus and invite others there too.

nudus nudum

I ran into the famous aphorism of St Jerome again recently: nudus nudum Jesum sequi––“Naked, we follow the naked Jesus.” He was speaking of evangelical poverty, though sometimes the meaning is extended to include going beyond images in prayer and the purification of our faculties, but it struck me in another way in relation to the Passion of Jesus. As Spidlik explains, in Scripture and the rabbinic tradition being deprived of one’s clothes is a sign of loss of identity, or of freedom being taken away; it is usually applied to captives, slaves, prostitutes, the demented, as well as to the dead who were buried naked.

We often note the parallels between the gardens of Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection and the Garden of Eden, the story of Adam and Eve. Here’s one of them: Adam and Eve were “naked and without shame,” the story tells us, with no reason not to trust the benevolence of God or the Universe that surrounded them; on the other hand here is Jesus, surrounded by malignant forces, with every reason not to trust, and yet totally exposed and vulnerable, somehow trusting that even death could not destroy his real self.

There is a moment in the reading of the Passion, at the mention of Jesus’ death, when we pause and kneel, and it has always seemed to me to be the most profound silence of the year––the whole world is quiet for a moment while we chew on this greatest of all mysteries––death. And in that moment, and throughout this celebration, we are challenged to face it, and to trust that our real selves, hidden with Christ in God, can never be destroyed if nudus nudum Jesum sequi––if “naked, we follow the naked Jesus.”

last thoughts for now, happily home

saturday, 8 march

Seconds, minutes, hours, quarters of the day;
Lunar and solar days make up a month,
Yet there are many times and many seasons;
One single sun runs through them all.
O Nanak, your Lord is likewise One,
However many his aspects are.
from the Sacred Writings of the Sikhs

I had kind of a day off yesterday. As is typical of my hosts here, they told me there was a change in the schedule that left me a day and a half off to myself, and then filled the day with things for me to do. The last concert of this series was here on Thursday, again a very nice and receptive crowd. Because I have stayed on I have actually gotten to know some of the folks here. I’m staying with the Redemptorist community; the house has seemed very homey to me.

Yesterday morning I was asked to do a session with the choir. It wasn’t completely clear what they wanted me to do with the choir, some general spirituality, some things about liturgical music and how to get people to sing better, or, perhaps, just a repeat of the concert for the elderly folks from the choir that hadn’t been able to make it the night before. I was, I’ll admit, groaning under the weight of it, trying to work up some enthusiasm even as the few people were gathering, but as soon as we got going it went well. We were about 30 people in a little auditorium. Even a small group of high school aged kids came who were part of the music ministry here. I did not now what I was going to say, nor did I have any inspiration of what to sing, but somehow it just got rolling. And I found myself talking about the connection between the Word and the voice, and how often I discovered in other traditions two things: 1) an essentially vocal music and 2) that they were singing their Scriptures. I brought in the example of the Brahmin priests at Tiruvanamalai first, and then Hafiz and the Jewish cantors, and then made the tie in with monasticism and liturgy in general. It is odd, not only here, but everywhere throughout the Catholic world that this insight tends to be rather surprising: that liturgical music is all about singing the Word, and that is what we have to learn form studying other traditions. I think I have my talk for NPM in the summer ready now.

I sang a few examples with them and was only sorry I did not have the Psallite stuff with me (what I do have here in Asia is back with my hosts in Kuala Lampur, arriving today). Well, that led to a few very interesting conversations, one in particular with a woman who has been married to a Hindu for years and told me that that was the first time she had ever felt some comfort about being open to his tradition. We talked about the difference between the faith and the cultural expressions of it, and I probably went on at too great a length about it, but it is exactly in a place such as this where that plays such a vital part of their life. Afterwards I went out for tea with four of the young guys, who show some of the mix of races and cultures here––Tamil, Chinese, Portuguese, and especially the mix of the latter two, Eurasian. They all speak Malay (Bahasa) which I compulsory to learn in school, but none of them are fluent in the mother tongue any more. It may be just this generation that is losing it. They were all musicians, and are frustrated with the Catholic Church for having such boring music, but are really attracted to––are you ready for this?––“praise and worship” music, Charismatic music from Don Moore (I don’t know him, an American) and music “like they have in the Methodist church.” They liked what I did but have already been steeped in what sounds to me like the worst of music in English (as in India) that it is very hard to break them out of the mindset of drums, bass, synthesizer, etc. I am not here to do liturgical music workshops, and was resistant to being dragged into one, but somehow this is all not far afield from my other work.

In the afternoon, I was given a tour of the two great caves by a man named Joseph. He himself is a successful Chinese businessman. He owns his own marble factory (though he told me it is actually limestone that they deal in). The first cave was far out of town, a huge cavern with stalactites and stalagmites, and a rive running through it way, way down deep. It was a guided tour as the place has been prepared for tourists and is maintained by the government for tourism, though our guide said that tourism has been low for this spot. Our guide was a Malay, who was most keen on showing us all the natural formations and water painting––owls, and seahorses, Kuan Yin and a woman’s head. The other in the group were four young folks from Indonesia who are here in Malaysia working in a microchip factory, and spoke little or no English, so he kept switching back and forth between English and Bahasa, with Joseph helping out a good deal too. Afterwards we went to another cave, closer to town, that I enjoyed even more. All along the hills near the outskirts of town there are temples built into the caves, and this was the biggest and most famous one. The front side was given to Taoism and Confucianism, and the back side (with its own entrance) to Buddhist. So at the front there was a statue of Confucius holding the I-Ching, and the three great sages of Taoism; at the back there were various statues of bodhisattvas, most prominently Kuan Yin and Maitrya Buddha. Then behind that there was a fabulous garden with a walking-running path and a huge lotus pool. I enjoyed that even more than the stalactites and stalagmites.

In the meantime I got another good lesson in Malaysia culture and politics from Joseph. The most poignant thing that I remember him saying was that even a few years ago he used to be able to socialize with his Muslim neighbors, especially those among them who were the most open. But that is almost a thing of the past for him, not for any loss of love for them but because it is so had on them, as the imams have gotten stronger and more influential, warning against being polluted by mixing with people of other faiths. He says most people have just given up and have learned to live quietly side by side without a lot of mix between the peoples. It is hard to separate the ethnic from the religious issue here, because this is a matter of ethnic Malays who are all Muslim, and who are being favored by the government as bumi putra, sons of the land, in a kind of affirmative action program. The only problem is that the affirmative action program, which has been in place 30 years, has not been helping the poor; it has been helping those in power, who seem to be keeping the little people in control through religion. Yesterday was Friday, and of course everyone was going to the mosque. Joseph said it was not accident that the elections had been scheduled on a Saturday because the ruling party, Barisan Nasional, was counting on the imams to urge their listeners to vote them in again.

* * *

9 march 08, Singapore

Well the big news that trickled into us as we ended our retreat Sunday noon was that the Barisan Nasional lost heavily in the elections, losing at least five of the thirteen states. I knew of the Chinese discontent with them––there has been a long standing rivalry do the Chinese’ great success in business––and I had heard on the BBC that the Indians were finally fed up, having also been on this soil for many generations. What no one was quite ready for is that the ethnic Malays themselves swung. The paper said that 80 per cent of Malays along with Chinese had turned against the BN and as a matter of fact in one state they themselves, who seem to be using Islam for power and control, actually lost to the Islamic party (PAS) in one state. Someone had said to me that there was a chance the “common people” among the Malays themselves were also fed up because the programs set in place that were supposed to be benefiting them seem to have only been benefiting the politicians. I am impressed with the courage of the “common people” among the Muslim Malays, and hopefully this signals a new chance for relations between the various races and some extrication of religion being used as in a divisive way. The excitement was palpable but tinged with anxiety. People were reminding each other to erase all their phone messages and be careful what they texted and said to each other via cell phones, because they are convinced the ruling party (it is still in the majority) will be tapping phones and invading privacy. And police are urging people not to celebrate publicly, because the last time the BN lost the public celebrations among the Chinese especially sparked off race riots and led to many deaths. It felt like an historic day to be there and I tore off the front page of the newspaper to keep as a souvenir.

12 march

My time here in Asia is done for now. The short retreat at St Anne’s in Penang went well enough. It had been cut short specifically because of the elections. Folks there are enthusiastically encouraging me to come back to Malaysia and “stay longer.” I’m of two (or three minds) about it. On the negative side I want more home time, but also I keep remembering a couple of folks in India especially who were very negative about people from the West coming in as teachers in the East. That opinion has a lot of layers of baggage, I think, I understand it but, on the other hand, I also think that the whole invisible wall between east and west should be dismantled at some point anyway. I found when speaking about music though, the same thing is still going on as in spirituality in general: many Christians in Asia are still steeped in Western European forms and concepts (including music), and not the best of Western European (especially in music!). So that inculturation has not happened yet. Nor has the bridge to other traditions been solidly, permanently constructed. There seem to be merely rope bridges thrown across swollen streams from time to time. Meaning, on the positive side, I always learn so much here and find that the “common people” are craving something that they are not getting from the their own, most likely due to a lack of resources and personnel, not a lack of good will, talent or depth surely. It occurs to me that these are still “missionary” times, or that they are missionary time again, but in a very different way then the colonial missionary times, even apologetic times but in a new sense of that word too. I find myself on the non-Christan side often trying to merely justify why Christianity is still vital and why it to is an expression of the perennial philosophy. And music and meditation still seem to me to be the two vehicles most suited to the task at hand for the global church in this globalized world.

May all beings be at peace.

meeting mud

Held by the cords of love,
the swing of the Ocean of Joy sways to and fro;
and a mighty sound breaks forth in song.
See what a lotus blooms there without water!
And Kabir says, ‘My heart’s bee drinks its nectar.’

5 march 08

Three days now into my time in Malaysia. I had a very well attended concert again in Singapore. They amaze me at being able consistently to turn out such crowds there. That was Saturday, which left me Sunday for leisure, which I spent mostly with Joyce and Richard Koh, two of the group of young meditators with whom I had spent such a lively evening on my last time through. This was a little less intense. They took me first for a light lunch and then to the “primary forest,” that is, the original rain forest protected area, where we had a long beautiful walk in what is what Singapore would have looked like to the aboriginal peoples and the first settlers. Then we had a big Japanese meal for supper, which I thought might sit well with my poor innards. I actually have been sick to my stomach again since arriving in Singapore. I don’t know if it is a coincidence or if there is something about coming to Singapore from Delhi that sets off a chemical reaction in me, but for five days I have not been holding food in well.

Monday afternoon my hosts Patricia and Joseph arrived from Kuala Lampur to ferry me off to the Malaysia peninsula. It was quite an experience crossing over the border from Singapore. To everyone’s horror and surprise, a terrorist prisoner escaped from the infamously unbreachable Singaporean prison system last week and there has been a massive tri-country manhunt on. So every car–-this was rush hour––had to be stopped, passengers seen and “boot” (trunk) of the car inspected. It was not a long drive then to our first stop, Johor Bharu. We could still see Singapore from many points in the city across the straits. But I definitely knew I was in another country. Singapore consistently strikes me as odd; it is such a small country-state-city––still less than 5 million people on an island with a land mass 30 by 40 miles––and yet it has developed a very unique, booming, distinctive culture, especially as compared with its closest neighbor and parent land, Malaysia. It is far more sophisticated, richer, cleaner, more organized and powerful than the much larger Malaysia. That partition after the 1957 withdrawal of the British was not without its own controversy and bloodshed, but it seems that mostly ethnic Chinese stayed in Singapore, with some Tamilian Indians and fewer Malays, while in Malaysia the native Malays remain the dominant majority, with ethnic Chinese next and then Tamils, followed by Eurasians and expatriates of various stripes. John, Dominic and Clare had all told me just about the same thing, that I would love Malaysia, that it’s more laid back and friendlier than the high paced success conscious Singapore. And I could see evidence of that right away.

The first night’s event was in Johor Bharu, (Johor also being the name of the state), at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Chinese pastor there who greeted us is pretty young, Fr Peter, and is aided only partially by an elderly semi-retired French missionary priest, Fr Binet, MEP, who had just the day before celebrated one of his unspecified 80th birthdays. (He would only say that he was an octogenarian.) The bishop was also there at the parish, but only for a meeting. He is a Jesuit, a former secretary to the Secretary General of the Jesuits in Rome, a very affable and informal man. The concert was again very well attended, easily 400 people, many of them coming from the choir of the parish as well as from the WCCM, and they were wildly receptive and responsive, and afterward very gregarious in wanting to talk.

After the concert Frs Peter and Binet took me out to eat at a smoke-filled French bistro, and I do not know if I conveyed to them adequately how confused I was to be in that environment. It was not at all what I was expecting in Malaysia, if I expected anything at all. I had a delicious plate of pasta with almonds and goat cheese, and the best crème brulèe I have ever had. Alas, it did not stay in me long but it was fun while it lasted. The net morning Fr Peter took me to a small Indian restaurant run by a Keralese family for breakfast, delicious thick milk tea and a couple of dry chappati. I am telling you this to give you a sense of the mix of cultures I was already getting in my first 24 hours: a Chinese priest, a French bistro, a Keralese family. At this point it seems as if the only ethnic group with whom I will not have much contact is the native Malays. That is a very interesting phenomenon.

The indigenous Malays, the tribal peoples, are sequestered off a bit here on the peninsula, have their own language yet and are in large part Christian. But since the 15th century the Indonesian Muslims came who came up and settled here consider themselves the “people of the land.” Their language is still virtually the same as Indonesian, and they are for all practical purposes all Muslim. Each state is still considered a sultanate with a sultan and his crown prince, and each of these sultans takes a five-year turn at being king of Malaysia. Since independence, only a Malaysian Muslim can be prime minister (one of the reasons Singapore split off), it is illegal to convert one of them or for one of them to convert. They are also subject to the Islamic shariah law as well as civil law. (On our tour of the city of Johor Bharu after dinner, we passed by the well-lighted Islamic Center, mosque and mightily imposing Shariah Court Building.) This has not been imposed on non-Muslims yet. One of the recent edicts is that the Christians have been ordered not to use the word “Allah” in reference to God, even though it is a pre-Islamic word and is the word for God among many Asian Christians, particularly the tribal Malays. So I am told, some official Islamic government officials consider Allah to be “their God.” The Catholic bishops here are ignoring the order: though the Catholic newspaper may not use the word or else it will not be allowed to be printed, the official liturgical books are all replete with “Allah,” and one priest told me that they will not be stripped of this in speaking. There is a lively interfaith dialogue going on here among Buddhists (Chinese and Thai Theravadan), Hindus, Taoists and Christians, but the government will not allow an official representative of Islam because, I was told, they consider it to be beneath the dignity of Islam to dialogue with other faiths (though there are unofficial Muslims who participate in the dialogue anyway).

There is simmering tension underneath all of this and more than a bit of resentment. It is election time here right now and that brings a lot of stuff to the surface. Luckily people still feel as if they can talk semi-openly about it––there doesn’t seem to be any fear of a Taliban-like takeover––but many folks to whom I have spoken do not think that they are living in much of a democracy. For that matter, neither do some people in Singapore where, though not religiously controlled, there is a very tight control of the state and really only one political party has been in power since independence, though Singapore is fiercely a “meritocracy” while Malaysia unabashedly favors ethnic Muslim Malays who feel themselves deserving of a kind of “affirmative action.” Practically speaking that means that all administrative positions in the government, education and the military are Malays. I guess it all depends on how benevolent that ruling party is, and to you.

This is the reality of inter-religious dialogue, and life in a land of mixed cultures, and also the dark side of religion when it gets wedded to political and social power. Like the wake-up call from Pahmo from Burma at Gurukul in Chennai, I am not about to be cavalierly quoting the mystics of Islam, here where Sufism is considered a cult, or the Prophet (Peace be upon him) himself, or sunnily suggesting that co-existence is easily won. This is also where Pope Benedict is quite insightful, suggesting that often the dialogue that goes on is not a theological one at all, but an inter-cultural one. But I have been carefully telling the story of Kabir, re-kindled by this translation of Tagore that I am carrying around, and I must admit I love hearing the muzzein issuing the call to prayer across the city while I am murmuring my own chants and psalms in the morning.

* * *

6 march 08

Thursday now, and I am at my fourth and final concert stop, Ipho. It has been a fascinating week. After Johor Bharu I performed for a smaller crowd in Malaka, a small ancient town on the west coast, known mainly for its preservation of remnants of the Dutch colonial period and the site of the first burial place of St Francis Xavier, which is a big tourist spot. I was hosted there by Fr Deva, a lively Tamilian priest who appreciated my “program” a great deal. I had a wonderful conversation the next morning with him the next morning (at a Chinese kopitiam coffee house) regarding the use of Asian philosophy and universal wisdom in articulating the Gospel. I am still a little diffident about bringing up my Indian references, not to mention singing in Sanskrit and Hindi, in front of ethnic Indians, even if they have never been to India, but I am consistently consoled by their positive reaction and affirmation, and especially glad when and if they tell me that I am pronouncing the Sanskrit well. Then yesterday we––my hosts-drivers-dharma protectors Patricia and Joseph Lip from the WCCM and I––were in their home town of Kuala Lampur, which like Washington DC is the capital of Malaysia and considered a separate district and not in a state.

Kuala Lampur, I found out, in Malay means "meeting mud." It's the place where two rivers meet.

The highlight of the day was a visit to the Shuddha Samajam, the Pure Life Society. Like Sri Ram in Haridwar, it is an ashram that is also an orphanage, started in 1952, after the Second World War, when there was still so much devastation and destitution here in Malaysia (the Japanese occupied the peninsula) and many orphans. It was founded by Swami Satyananda, a Malaysian Hindu monk. He was originally a member of the Ramakrishna Order. but he asked to live out his monastic vocation doing this charitable work instead of the regular life of a sannyasi studying and teaching and meditating. The order said that he could not do that while remaining a member of their order but it was a friendly parting and he stayed true to the ideals of the monastic life throughout his life and on good terms with them. His focus, like the founder of the Ramakrishna Order, Vivekananda, was on the universality of religion and embracing all creeds and paths. The main attraction for the folks who know the tradition of John Main is that it is he who taught Fr John how to meditate, right there at that very same place, and it is that fortuitous meeting that led to Fr John’s ministry later in life, and eventually the founding of the World Community for Christian Meditation.

It’s a wonderful place, housing nearly 100 children with a separate housing site for senior boys (teenagers). It has been steered for years now by Mother Mangalam, who as the closest disciple of Swami Satyananda, helped found the place and carries it on in his same manner. Patricia had told her of my coming and her plan to bring me there to see the place and Mother wanted both a meeting with me and for me to sing for the children, both of which I was more than pleased to do. We met for about 45 minutes in her hut. She is about 84 years old now and has been laid up recovering from a broken shoulder which she sustained while helping one of her own invalid sisters who now lives with her. She had been forewarned of my recent stomach problems––which have been the talk of all of Malaysia––and so had a special concoction of tea made for me that included cardamom, turmeric, jaggery, cumin and Lord-know-what-else, and we talked at hurried pace about our many connections. She had been given and listened to a copy of Echo of Your Peace, and was anxious to tell me to the origins of the yantra-design on the cover which she recognized right away. It is the Sri-Chraka of a text called the Sri Lalita Trisati Stotro, a text in honor of Divine Motherhood, to be chanted on navratri puja, a nine day celebration that usually falls in October. She had also been to Shantivanam and had spent time with Fr Bede there and also in Chennai for a series of meetings, if I recall correctly, and spoke lovingly of him.

We then went up to the Temple of the Universal Spirit where the kids had gathered already twenty minutes before in anticipation, and we had a great time together, me singing for them, singing with them, them singing for me. I did the Jaya Nam bhajan with them and I must tell you, never before has that bhjan slipped so easily into the faster tempo; they just carried my guitar and I along with their enthusiasm and the clapping. After a half an hour or so we stopped and I met each and every one of them, they being pleased as punch to say to me “Nice to meet you!” and some of them also echoing me by saying, “What is your name?” There are two things I have grown to love in my middle years––children and India; and I am absolutely powerless over the combination of the two.

A few of the staff then gave me a tour of the rest of the place, the beautifully enshrined hut of Swami Satyananda, with even his clothes hung neatly in the closet and covered with plastic, and his Samadhi shrine where his ashed are buried. All around are various symbols and reminders of the world’s religions including large posters displaying Hans Kung’s great initiative, the Global Ethic. We reconvened at Mother’s where she had proper tea laid out for us, including homemade lime jellies, biscuits and curry puffs. As I left she presented me with leftovers from that, a stack of books, two loaves of bread, and a little jar of an herbal curry she had prepared just for me and my whacked-out stomach.

Then off to the parish, where I was to stay the night, and the largest attended concert yet, well over 500 people. Amazing, for someone virtually unknown. I was having trouble hearing due to sitting behind the speakers and the roar of the fans circulating the sweltering air, but Patricia and Joe said it was the best sound yet, and again the reception was very enthusiastic.

I got a run in for the first time since the first days of January this morning. Pat and Joe’s son Geoff fetched me and took me to a 6 km hilly trail. It felt awfully good, but it shook up forced out whatever was left in my stomach when I got home. It may just be that whatever it was is actually gone now as a result of that, because it feels better, though I have taken nothing but black tea, toast and bananas all day. They all gave me a tour of KL this morning and then put me on a coach (they thoughtfully bought me two seats so that my poor beat up Taylor could travel first class too), and I am now in Ipho where I will do the last of this series of concerts tonight. The pastor here feels like an old friend. He is an Indian Malaysian himself, an old friend of Leonard and Clare in Singapore (he actually married them), and a Redemptorist who spent time at Shantivanam with Fr Bede also. This is also, though far from luxurious, the most comfortable house I have stayed in in months. I am supposed to give a talk to the choir too in the morning (how they snuck that in I don’t know) and take a tour of the area in the afternoon, but at this point I would be just as happy to sit in this room and read and write and stretch and pray.

dirty ol' delhi

Keep your mouth shut,
guard the senses,
and life is ever full.
Open your mouth,
always be busy,
and life is beyond hope.
Tao te Ching, 52

I said to John (Wong) and Dominic (Ong) in the car yesterday, I was thinking that I should just keep a room in Singapore since I seem to come through here so often. John said to me, “But you do have a room here!”

I’m back with the friars at St Mary of the Angels in Singapore, here for a concert tonight, and then off on Monday for a whirlwind tour up the Malaysian peninsula doing concerts and then a retreat for the WCCM in Penang on the weekend.

So, Delhi. What I liked about Rajpur was that the locals neither seemed to interested nor surprised to see us. They were neither chasing down our business nor jacking up their prices to accommodate for Western money. On the other hand, it seems like everyone in Delhi is on the hustle. I had booked a room through a travel agent in Dehradun––Pinky’s––not really knowing what prices got you, but still had thought on the train that I would try the YWCA again first since I knew it and the area. A driver accosted me at the train station, and I told him I didn’t want a taxi, I wanted a rickshaw and he said, “Come!” I was trying to act like I knew what I was doing and said I just needed to go to the YWCA on Ashok Place, which I thought was just around the corner. He quoted me a price for it and I said it was too much. Well, so much for knowing what I was doing––I was not at the train station that I thought I was at and the YWCA was a clear 12 km across town from where we were. So I agreed to his price and we got to his vehicle, which was not an auto-rickshaw at all but a taxi. I noted that, and he said, “Yes, but it is a small taxi!” By then I was already tired of arguing, so off we went. He tried to tell me that the YWCA was not going to have any rooms, but he knew a hotel and had a pamphlet for it, his friends owned it, AC plus Internet, very clean, very safe. He was asking me lots of questions, did I have a reservation, how much was I paying, what was my budget. I’m just not very good at that and always feel like I have to answer all questions and answer them honestly too, but I finally said, please just take me to the Y and we’ll see from there. I didn’t want to tell him that I had a paid reservation at another place and that I was thinking of forsaking it (about $10). He was right; the Y had no rooms and so we were off to another part of town.

I was a little distressed when I saw the neighborhood and the hotel itself––Hotel Swagat Palace––where I had my reservation, even from the outside. He led me in, and I paid him off and got my room. The word “hellhole” kept coming to mind. It wasn’t the dirtiest place I had ever seen, but it was pretty primitive. There was no hot water; there was no faucet in the sink, no towel, no soap, and only a padlock on the very flimsy door. (That was particularly annoying since I had forsaken my morning hot bath at Sri Ram looking forward to a hot shower here in Delhi. Oh well.)

I hid my computer, locked up, strapped my passport and money around my neck, and headed out. I found the metro easy enough, and took it up to Connaught Place, the area that I did know pretty well. I walked around until I got my bearings, the block where I hung out last year, near the Sikh temple and the restaurant where Pranjal worked that I ate in every day. Again, I shouldn’t be surprised by encounters like this, but just as I came up from the underground tunnel, someone from behind me said, “Excuse me sir, what are you looking for?” I turned around and amazingly it was a young guy named Raj whom I had met last year. He was one of a dozen or so guys that had approached me on the street last year trying to lure me into going to visit the Indian Bazaar, where he would receive R 100 for having brought a customer. I had told him that I would pay him R 100 if he would walk around with me instead, so that I wouldn’t be accosted by other hustlers, which he did for about an hour, talking and still trying to lure me into the bazaar and/or get more money out of me for schoolbooks. He was quite surprised that I remembered him at all, and that he was from Rajasthan, lived with his uncle and was studying English. So he walked with me, I warning him that I was under no circumstances going to go to the Indian Bazaar. We had tea and I mentioned to him an inkling of an idea that I had had about coming to Delhi, that I might perhaps buy something at the famous music store named Rikki Ram, but I needed to go not to the well-known location but to their second store. He proudly said he knew right where it was and after we finished our tea he got on a bus with me and led me right there.

John Pennington had led me to their other store when we were in Delhi together in 2005. That place is like a pilgrimage spot for Western musicians. First of all, it is probably the most famous music store in India, especially for the sitar. There are many pictures of Ravi Shankar and his daughter Anoushka among other sitar greats, not just publicity stills but taken right there in the store with the proprietors. Of course the thing most people really come to see are the pictures of the Beatles, and one extra of George Harrison later in life visiting the store, because this is the store where George bought his sitar in 1966, which he used to record “Norwegian Wood.” John and I (or I should say, John himself) wound up buying the tabletop tambura there that we have used in concerts and on the last recording. I had in mind that I might possibly buy another one of those, perhaps even the improved version of it, though was truly loathe to go through the hassle of lugging it home. MC, knowing how I was hesitant about taking anything big with me on the road, had given me the idea when we were together down at Shantivanam of perhaps instead buying one of the electric tambura boxes that many of the professionals use now, that are also battery operated. That had struck me as a great idea, and it was echoed by Dayanand at Sri Ram, who himself had pulled out a very cool little electric tambura, and had said that he had gotten it a Rikki Ram, not at the main store but at the second store. And so there I was.

The big man working on a sitar behind the counter was friendly enough. It wound up being Sanjay, the owner. I told him I hadn’t known before about this second store, and he told me proudly that this was the store for the professionals, the other one, run by his brother, was just for tourists. I told him what I was looking for and he gladly pulled out the three models he had. The one Dayanand had was the least expensive of the three, and also the lightest in weight, and I might have bought that one, but Sanjay didn’t approve of the sound, which was synthesized and not a direct sample. To make a long story short, I wound up buying a very nice model, and in the course of buying and selling, we had a heck of a conversation. Sanjay proudly told me all about his friendship with Ravi and Anoushka Shankar, for whom he does all the repairs and construction, and who had just been in the day before. As a matter of fact he tours with Sri Ravi playing tambura, and was about to leave the next day for a series of concerts. Not only that, he made the mohan veena for the man with whom Ry Cooder had done the album that I love so much, and knows Ry Cooder himself, along with knowing Sting and Krishna Das and countless other well known Western musicians. Even more interesting, he knows Barry Phillips well and his wife Shelley, both of who played for me on my new album for OCP, and the new pieces for Echo of Your Peace; Barry is also on Compassionate and Wise. So it was pretty amazing to be across the world talking with someone with whom I had friends in common.

Just before I left, Sanjay’s mobile phone rang. “It’s my wife,” he said. The ring tone was “Norwegian Wood.”

I usually don’t buy something like that right away without thinking it over, but I happened to have all my money strapped around my neck and Sanjay was willing to accept American dollars. So I reached under my shirt and deftly extracted four $50 bills, for which he gave me change in rupees. I had mentioned Raj to Sanjay a couple of times, and how he had led me there, hoping that Sanjay might get the idea to give him a little tip as they would at the Bazaar, but no luck. But now Raj had seen me with a wad of cash, so as we left he asked me if I could buy him a school book, since we were right by the book depot, and I said, “Absolutely.” It was a little expensive, a Hindi-Sanskrit-English Dictionary, but at that point it felt like the right thing to do. Then Raj led me to a local restaurant where I bought us each a tali. The young guy who seemed to be the manager of the place was quite taken by having this Westerner there and was eager to engage in conversation, and others of the staff sat at the table across from ours and simply stared at me while we ate, but I guess by this time I am used enough to that to be able to carry on. By this time it was pretty late and dark and I didn’t know where I was, so I asked Raj one more favor––could he lead me back to my hotel, which he did esaily by way of public transportation, a frighteningly crowded city bus, right to the door of my hotel and advised me to not go out any more tonight, “People are drinking here. Just you stay in.” I gave him another little tip, and he said that he didn’t have school the next day and “Do you want me to come tomorrow too?” I said I thought that would be a great idea, so he agreed to come at 10 and show me around Delhi.

The next day was not quite so fun. I was surprised that Raj actually did show up, but he was there waiting at 10. My plan was to go to the Ramakrishna Mission to meditate and buy the second volume of Sancarya Charaya’s Commentary on the Upanishads, then go down to Sri Aurbindo Ashram for lunch and a look around, and perhaps a visit to the Oxford Book Store at Connaught Place before heading to the airport. Raj had a better idea; “How can you come to Delhi and not see all the monuments?” he said, and offered to give me a tour of the major monuments. Well, I thought he was right, that I had for once better do the tourist thing.

Raj led me immediately to a tourist place that he said offered a tour in a mini-van of all the major monuments. Only there was no mini-van so they said that they could get me a taxi for the whole day, wherever I wanted to go, for R 1800. This made me suspicious right away––I suspected that Raj was on the take from them––and I probably should have backed out at that point, but I was trying to be open. We stepped out for a minute while I thought about it, and I asked Raj right away if he worked for them, and he swore he did not, so I reluctantly agreed that if they would also take me back to my hotel to pick up my luggage and then on to the airport I would do it. (A ride to the airport alone might have been R500.) So we set off in our taxi.

All was fine until the third monument, Huymana’s Tomb, considered the Taj Mahal of Delhi. For an Indian it cost R10 to enter; for a foreign tourist it was R250 or $5 American––listed just that way, in American dollars. I hesitated but then again decided to go through with it, so I headed back to the taxi to get a five-dollar bill out of my backpack instead of using up all my rupees. Just as I was about to head back to the tomb, Raj came hurrying back, got into the taxi and said, “Let’s not stay here, let’s go to the next one.” I was a little confused but got back in the car. Suddenly a brown suited official came and knocked on the window on Raj’s side of the car and gestured for him to come out. An angry exchange ensued between the officer, the driver and Raj. No, I take that back. Raj wasn’t saying anything, just standing there looking very guilty and a little scared. I finally got out of the car and asked what was going on. The officer was very polite to me and just let me know that I should go and see the monument but that this was not a nice man––Raj. I thought he was telling me that Raj was actually a tour guide and had a card, and was posing as a friend to get me to go along. In other words, everything that I had suspected. I looked at Raj, who was saying nothing, but looking very guilty. So I grabbed my backpack and headed to the tomb, paid my $5 and went around for a lookabout, feeling as if the whole day had suddenly taken a very bad turn and that I was very naive.

When I got back to the car the driver was there waiting and, I was somewhat relieved to find out, so was Raj. I at least wanted to get an explanation from him, and was hoping he had not gotten arrested or something. We got in the car and he hurriedly explained to me that locals are not allowed to accompany tourists to these monuments unless they are certified tour guides and Raj (just the opposite of what I thought) was not a registered tour guide, and that officer was a tourist police guarding tourists against getting ripped off. Now I was really confused and didn’t know whom to trust or what to believe. I was made to understand that if we visited any more monuments there was a good chance of this happening again, and I would have to explain that Raj was my friend or else he could get arrested. By this time it was as hot as Hades, the traffic was a snarled mess, Raj and the driver seemed to be arguing with each other, and I was sorry that we had done the whole thing and was willing to cut my losses and be done with all of them. We wound up spending another hour or merely slowly driving by another three or four monuments without getting out, and then we stopped for lunch, at which point I left Raj behind and headed back to the hotel and on to the airport a little early with just the driver, though it still took another couple of hours to do all that. We did stop at Ramakrishna Mission on the way to the hotel, but it was closed. Alas, the one thing I really wanted to do…

What was stranger yet was that as soon as we left Raj behind the driver suddenly started speaking to me in pretty good English, asking me all kinds of questions and telling me all about the things we were passing on the way, which was pretty surprising because up to that point he had only been speaking in Hindi, and right to Raj, not to me. He was very nice, but by the time we got to the airport it became clear that he too wanted a little extra money, which led me to believe that perhaps he had been in on the little scam as well. He didn’t get much money from me because by that time I actually had spent all of my Indian rupees.

In other words, a horrible day, and I am now even more convinced to not do the tourist things in India. I was left pretty downhearted about the whole encounter, that that would be my last few hours, but that is exactly the down side of India. I was thinking as we lifted off that I either never want to come back to India again or I want to move here permanently.

why are you working so hard?

So long as one clamors for the I and the Mine,
our works are as naught.
When all the love of the I and Mine is dead,
then the work of the Lord is done.
Kabir I.83

tues, 26 feb 08

There is a little temple that sits on a hill along the path of the shortcut we take to the yoga centre in the morning. I assumed it was abandoned, but a few days ago I started seeing people there again, and one of my mates told me that there was a sadhu who lived there. I saw him a few times, talking with other people there and have wanted to stop and meet him, though I am generally not good at those kinds of getting-out-of-myself encounters. Saturday, at the end of our free day, I was walking the path and noticed that he was sitting out on the low stone wall, and there didn’t seem to be anybody else there, so I decided to go up. There were in fact a few other people, most of them young guys scraping the walls of the temple and preparing it to be repainted. He greeted me gently. I told him I just wanted to look and he gestured to me to do so. When I had walked all around the temple and back to where he was sitting, he started asking me a few questions about where I was from etc., and I sat down on the ground in front of him and we talked for bit. His English was rough; he seemed to speak better than he understood. His story, which I pieced together after an hour-long conversation, is that he is from the state of Karnatica. He is a vairagya monk, like Baba Hari Das, not a sannyasi (he wears white). His name was Swami Saccitananda, very propitious! His father died when he was 7 months in the womb, and then his mother died when he was 9. He lived with his uncle for a year and then somehow moved into an ashram under a guru at 10 years old. He was a mauna, silent, for 12 years, from 12 to 24 years old, and then lived with his guru in Mysore for some years. Eleven years ago he moved here into the house next to this abandoned Shiva temple. He knew of the yoga school, and had himself done a full yoga course only recently, “not to teach, just for self.” I think after a while he finally understood that I was a monk and priest as well as a musician. He had that typically Indian way of holding a conversation in that he was in no hurry to fill the silent gaps between topics, so you never knew if he was done talking or not. I’ve learned to ride those silences out by now, so it was a comfortable time together. The others had all left by the time we really got talking.

Anyway, the Swami said something that made me very happy and that kept echoing over and over again in my dreams and waking all that night. After I told him about the yoga course, he said to me in kind of a funny voice, “Why are you working so hard?” I must have looked a little perplexed because he went on to explain what he meant: “Forty minutes in the morning before meditation is enough. This yoga is good for 20 year old and 30 year old but at our age [he was 46], this is enough.” During the course of the conversation I had asked him if he did puja or chanting the Vedas, and he said, “A little sometimes.” He was telling me that he spoke Karnatic, Maharastra, Hindi and a little English, and I asked him about Sanskrit. His face kind of screwed up, and he shook his head and said, “No, no, no Sanskrit.” I asked him what Scriptures he read, the Gita, the Upanishads? He waved his hand dismissively and said, “No Scriptures, only meditation.” Then he said something like, “I meditate three, four hours a day, I do some sweeping, maybe puja sometimes, but I think about God all the time. I stay here all the time, never go out, no attachments to people. That’s enough.”

The place has little shrines to Kali and Hanuman as well as the main shrine to Shiva, and another separate one dedicated to the nine planets. Fr Bede loved to mention that tendency toward monotheism that underlies Hinduism, the tendency to “see beyond all these gods to the one Reality which lay behind them.” There is a famous verse in the Rig Veda, ekam vipru bahuda vadanti: “the one being that the wise call by many names.” Swami gave living proof of that again. I asked him if he had any devotion–bhakta to any particular deity, and he gently screwed up his face again in that way of his, frowned and said, “No, just Brahman, nirguna, nirmurthi, nirakkar.” No qualities, no images. It is really this one Being that Bede says “haunted” the mind of the Vedic seers who knew that all the “gods” and powers were really nama-rupa, name and form of this same one Reality.

I’ve gone back a few times now, and wish I had discovered the place earlier. The swami had told me the story of how Vivekananda had come there, over a hundred years ago, and met with another famous swami, Turiyananda. What I didn’t realize until my second or third time there was that down below the temple there is something called the “Vivekananda Meditation Cave,” a beautiful spot that reminded me of Virupraksha cave at Tiru. Sunday I stopped by partly to visit with him, but even more just to sit there in front of the inner shrine with its Shiva linga and various icons and I realized what I have been missing these days: that bhakta-devotional element. We chant the text in honor of Patanjali every day, and Rajiv ends every class by guiding us in a meditation, inviting us to bow in supplication and gratitude to the point of refulgence within the vast space in within us, cloaked in an image of the Divine that is dear to us, and he often spices up the class with references to Hindu mythology and bits of philosophy, but I have to admit sometimes it has felt more dry than many of my classes in the gym. I have missed that spiritual context that we have, for example, in the Saturday AM classes at Mount Madonna, and I have missed the ambiance of, say, a place like Sri Ramanashram at Tiruvanamalai or Shantivanam or even Rishikesh. Somehow sitting in that little temple with this solitary swami felt like being home.

I love that: “Why are you working so hard?” My left hip was aching all night one night and I kept tossing and turning trying to find a comfortable place to sleep, and every time I would wake and try to go back to sleep I heard his voice clear as a bell saying, “Why are you working so hard?” and I knew somehow that it was enough to just stay close to God with the mantra, the name, the image in the cave of the heart.

* * *

I had been vacillating about whether to leave on Wednesday (by necessity to get down to Delhi to catch my plane out for Singapore on Thursday) or a day or two early to see the folks in Rishikesh again and/or Haridwar before taking off. I opted out of Rishikesh again, just to get as much class time as possible, but I am going to go to Haridwar today to visit Sri Ram and our friends from Mount Madonna who are there with Baba Hari Das at this time. I must admit, after this much time with folks from the Iyengar tradition, I am looking forward to talk to someone from what feels more like “my” tradition, simply to compare notes and get re-grounded.

Rajiv himself kind of summed up my final thoughts on this experience. He was downplaying yet again the notion of getting teaching training certificates and qualifications of being any kind of yogi, and said something like, “So you will go home and write on your CV: ‘Went to Rajpur, Rajiv yelled at me for three weeks, learned some asanas and left… with mixed feelings.’” There was a pause and then we all laughed quite a lot about the “mixed feelings.” He seemed kind of melancholy and frustrated yesterday, and talked more than usual, a good half of the class time. He was trying to instill in us again the real meaning of yoga––“the art of personal transformation”––and how asana practice can lead you to the foothills of the mountains and from there we can look at where the great yogis are, and it is then that we choose or, better, we are chosen by, one of the great margas—pathways, karma or jnana or bhakti or dhyana yoga. That was the first time I had heard it put that way, that the four yogas are only chosen after we had mastered a certain practice. He also talked about the great saint Mira Bai, who never did asana practice at all, in the context of saying the real conquest is the conquering of self, so obviously he believes that one can become a great yogi without the technology of asana as well.

Rajiv obviously has a real bone to pick with Western yoga in general and even especially Iyengar Yoga as taught in the West. For all his insistence on accuracy in poses he says that Western yoga has an obsession with shapes and they (we) think that all yoga is about is looking beautiful. The others in the class who have been here for these courses before, I found out later, were annoyed to hear this harangue again; apparently it is a constant theme of his. But in between the berating and exhorting, he has moments of real lucidity and genuine humility. I think he recognizes his own shortcomings as a teacher and does not consider himself to be a great yogi or a holy man, but merely a close disciple of Guru-ji BKS Iyengar and an accomplished instructor, both of which are true. He and Swati have certainly put together a stellar center and I am glad for the experience. I would be interested to go back to an Iyengar class at the OM Room in Santa Cruz now for more of the “technology” of this system from another teacher.

* * *

I’d agreed to go up to the Purkal Youth Development Center to sing and talk about the American election process on Monday night. One day when I was visiting the Swami asked me to sing something, and I said I would (and did) but told him that I would be passing by with my guitar on Monday, and could I stop and sing then. He liked that idea, so I stopped by late afternoon on Monday on my way to Yoganga to be picked up and driven to Purkal. As he had warned me, there was a group pandits there, which in this case means young (20-something) brahmacaryas doing a nama-japa at the shrine of the nine planets that had already lasted the better part of the day. Also there was the crew of local guys who had been hired to scrape and re-paint the temple, who I had already met on previous visits. The pandits eyed me a little funnily as I walked up with my guitar on my back, but the Swami ushered me right into the central room of the central shrine next to the Shiva linga surrounded by the hooded cobra and icons of various other deities, gave me a large straw mat to sit on, lit some incense and an oil lamp and left me to it. I hard him outside say something in Hindi to someone else who was there that included the words “music program.” I wasn’t sure; I thought maybe he was going to come back in and sit down. So I played for a while, tuning and warming up, getting used to the space––a beautiful acoustic; the guitar was almost too loud for the voice––but he never came back. I alternated singing and playing for 30 minutes. At one point one of the pandits came in and laid down a mat for himself as well, and I could see various others circulating around outside the low door. I asked to make sure I wasn’t disturbing their ceremonies but he assured me not. I think they were done by then. When I finished the young pandit thanked me and asked, “Coming tomorrow?” But alas, that was my last day. I would have liked to, and again was regretting that I hadn’t discovered the place earlier. Still in all, this is enough. I bade goodbye to Swami and he handed me a little bowl of sweets.

I made it up the hill just in time for a little van to come roaring up to usher me away to the Purkal Youth Development Center. I was accompanied by two young teachers, one of them a gregarious young guy named Vimul who I had met the week before, who engaged me in polite rapid fire conversation. It was a wild very fast ride up the mountain. After a brief visit with Mr Swami who again clarified what he wanted me to do in addition to singing. He did ask a little about my own background then, for which I was oddly relieved. And then we went in to the 50 or so gathered kids from 6th, 7th and 8th Class, so perhaps 10 to 13 year olds. So I launched first into a couple of songs, including of course “My Own Two Hands,” which I used as a seque into talking about democracy and voting and how everything we do can change the whole world, and how important our voice and vote is. Had I ever taken a civics course (I must have somewhere along the line!?) my civics teachers would have been proud of me, but still only probably given me about an 80 for a grade on my oral report. I remembered the best I could and then did a little research online, so the presentation was well laid out and systematic, but I sort of folded when it came to the question and answer part. Of course, it was Mr Swami himself who was asking all the questions, as the kids’ attention drifted off in utter boredom at the tedious, complicated process of number of Senators plus number of Representatives equals the number of electors in the electoral college, etc. etc. They did enjoy the part when I divided them into Republicans and Democrats. The girls were the former and delighted to have the elephant as the symbol of their party. The boys on the other hand were quite dismayed about the donkey, and actually asked it they could have the lotus as their symbol instead, which is the symbol of the BJP party here in India. I said I was sorry but there decisions had already been made. Then I got to sing a few more songs, had another little visit with Mr Swami at his house, which was nearby, and then whisked back down the mountain. I found out from Mr Swami that he was a graduate of the same Loyola College in Chennai that I had just visited and he spoke of his high regard for the Jesuits. Though not a particularly religious man himself, he appreciated my path and work, and asked many questions. He said that he thought we’d all be a lot better off if the religions of the world could stop concentrating on their differences and come together about something.

One last dinner and long conversation with my wonderful housemates, and then in the morning I caught the train to Haridwar. I was vacillating about adding that little side trip but in the end really thought it would be a shame ot be so cose and not stop in. I was greeted very warmly, though there was actually not a bed for me, they were so full. Jaya was most apologetic but I was perfectly happy on an overstuffed mat in the yoga hall where one other intrepid drop-in was also camping. I saw Dayanand and Sadanand, and a few other faces I recognized with from Mount Madonna itself or from my two previous longer visits there. But I must say I was most happy that some of the kids remembered me, especially my young friend Vijay, who I saw just after I arrived as the kids were coming home for lunch. He’s the young guy who was coaching John on the tabla when we were here together in 2005, and with whom I played a bunch of music last year. We had both, apparently unsuccessfully, tried to send each other things this past year, I a CD and he an e-mail. I had heard from Dayanand that just after I left last year his little brother had one day simply shown up at the gate of the orphanage. I still didn’t get the whole story, but apparently neither one of them was able to talk for the first few days that he was there. He’s a strapping ten year old with a huge smile and enough confidence to run for office, and Vijay was very happy to introduce us, and when he did, I realized that that had been the main reason I had come––to see him and meet Krishna––and told him so.

While the kids finished school in the earl afternoon, Dayanand and I sat and played music in their apartment upstairs, he with a full five guitars and/or mohan veenas of various shapes and re-configurations. My favorite was a Taylor twelve-string that he had had modified at Rikki Ram (the famous sitar store in Delhi) with drone strings just above the low E, and another of sympathetic resonating strings set at an angle right above them. I could barely make hide nor hair of it but he made it sing. We played on happily for an hour and a half or so, gathering a small crowd. And then I spent as much time with the kids as possible: tea time with Baba-ji at 3, study hall with Sonja, Savita, Amita and Arun at 3:30. I watched the boys play cricket and then played a long couple of games of 21 (basketball) with Prakash. Either the basket was lowered, I have really improved with age, or I was having a very good day, because I kept swishing it from the free throw line. I think it was the first, but still Prakash was mightily impressed, as was I. Then after our (guests’) dinner I went to their cacophonous arathi in the shrine room. Krishna was quite proud to show me that he was the pandit that evening, which meant that he got to dress all in white, and wave the fire and incense. After that, all the kids go to Baba-ji’s room for candy and games, but Vijay stole me away, found Krishna, and led us to his new room for a private visit. We took a bunch of silly pictures, Vijay showed me his tabla books, I impressed them (or they acted like they were impressed) at being able to read a little bit of Hindi, and we exchanged e-mail IDs again. I had a wonderful time and stopped just short of offering to adopt the two of them as my sons. Suddenly that part of the sannyasa diksha made sense––“I give up the desire for progeny…”––and stung a little.

I take back what I said three weeks ago: last night on that matt on the floor of the yoga room was the best night’s sleep I have had in India, almost nine hours. Again before we slept Jyoti was apologetic about the lack of space, but I was as comfortable as could be on the floor and instead apologized to her for turning their yoga room into a flophouse for wandering sadhus. Early morning calisthenics with the kids (the same warm-up routine I do every single morning now) and then I joined them for their chanting and dhyana. As in time past, as they leave to go up to Baba’s before breakfast, I stayed in the shrine room for my morning prayers and meditation, and felt very much at home. I said goodbye to them all as they left for school, caught a taxi to the train station and am now on the train to Delhi.

We’re ambling into dirty Delhi now.

no yoga for pig eaters

yogena chitasya padena vaccham…

Let us bow before the noblest of sages, Patanjali,
who gave yoga for serenity and sanctity of mind,
grammar for clarity and purity of speech,
and medicine for perfection of health.

Let us prostrate before Patanjali, in incarnation of Adissa,
whose upper body has a human form,
whose arms hold a conch and a dsic,
who is crowned by a thousand headed cobra…
chant to Patanjali

23 feb 08

On our break now after the second week of the yoga course. I have not yet decided exactly when I am leaving, could be as early as Monday, most likely Tuesday, but for sure by Wednesday since I need to get down to Delhi to catch my plane out of India. These weeks have flown past. I can hardly believe my time in India is done but I am well into my sixth week already.

This week went well and fast. I always keep in mind the phrase the Kristi in Santa Cruz used to say, that in yoga we should find the “edge between our minimum and our maximum.” There was one day in the middle of the week when I felt as if I was stretched even beyond my maximum. We were doing back bends for over an hour and then we ended class with a series of long-held chakrasana–the wheel pose, both hands and feet on the ground underneath and bending up from the waist. There were people collapsing all around me, and there were also about six people in the middle of the room slowly folding backward from a full-shoulder stand straight into the pose who seemed as if they were defying gravity. Rajiv was concentrating all his effort on them, trying to fine-tune their hand position and descent. I was relieved to find out afterward that Espen, who is quite experienced in Iyengar, also found it a grueling workout and has been carrying the same pain in his lower back since then as I have all week.

That afternoon was our philosophy class. To give you a taste of Rajiv’s style in teaching us––I wrote this down verbatim so that I could remember it––he started class by saying, “When you Westerners come to India you don’t have the context for this…” And then he told us that it would be a waste of his time to teach us Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras; he needed instead to teach us “pop” philosophy.” Again I was disappointed by that, but he may be right; perhaps the majority of the class does not have much background in philosophy and spirituality, and only know the asanas. In my case it is almost the opposite. I studied the philosophy for years before I ever began hatha yoga. There was never a yoga teacher at New Camaldoli so I had to wait until I got to Santa Cruz. I wrote in my journal that after the years of study “it’s almost as if I had to sneak back outside of my body and come back in, make the journey all over again, trying not to forget what I had already learned as I enter into my own second axial consciousness.” Ignore the thing about “second axial consciousness” if that doesn’t make sense and suffice it to say that I think this is also emblematic of Christian religious life: we do tend to have a lot of book knowledge and theoretical knowledge and rational knowledge, but we have been scant on practical skills and practices.

But––and this is what I did glean out of Rajiv’s talk that day––this is why you teach yoga to children, so that when the time of interiority comes later in life. He was referring to the vanaprastha asrama, the third phase of life when one can retire to the forest, what one of my friends refers to as the “RV stage” in America. During the first years, the brahmacarya phase, young people are being governed by biochemistry, and they got to have to have the fire in the belly. That is the time when they need to be taught virtue and how to act properly int the world, give them some reins to drive the chariot. In that second stage of life, grihasta, as interaction with the world gets more and more dense, as I have heard it described before, so Rajiv also said that the main focus is on the righteous pursuit of material affluence, and a judicious use of pleasure and karma. But then, some time after 50, the density of interaction with the world begins to diminish, and one starts preparing for death. It could be a time then to also actively phase out interactions with the external world and really focus on the inner journey. And if you have studied yoga, you already have some practical skills of focusing within through the body because through yoga one knows how to turn the gaze within, one has a sense of the indwelling divine, one knows one’s own body as the brahma-loka.

I remembered Richard Rohr’s teaching about the male rite of initiation, that the young boy carries with him that memory of the experience of death and what to do with it––“Go down!”––when the time comes, when he reaches the crisis of limitation in his life. Rajiv said something similar: “Yoga prepares you to die,” he said, by teaching you to engage in the core self, in the essential being that does not terminate, the pursuit of knowledge of the Self when the urgency of the immediate fades away. But, he says, it’s too late to start when you are middle aged; you need to start at a young age to know what to do later when the time comes to start detaching from the outer for the sake of the inner. Then age is not seen as a hardship but rather as a time when one can perceive judicious interaction through the knowledge of hindsight.

I was wondering if people in the West or anywhere in “developed nations” really know what to do with themselves when there is nothing left to do, nothing left to entertain and distract us. When there is nothing else on the outside calling for outward attention, work or duty or family responsibilities, that is, according to the Indian mind, the time not to “move on” but to “move in,” all the way in. I don’t know that the Indian mind is that different from the any other mind in this regard, only that it is written out literally. We see this natural movement in some people in all cultures and I certainly see it in America, how many people in their 40s and 50s and 60s are hungry for a “way in,” practical skills for making the inner journey and devoting themselves more to prayer and meditation, the spiritual life in general. While it is vitally important also to give young people practical skills that they can tap into later, I don’t want tot think that older folks are a waste of time either, or even that it’s too late to start at middle age.

I ran into this beautiful mantra from the Isha Upanishad the other day that had given me such consolation some years ago, and it made all new sense to me in the light of this: Krato smara krtam smara––“O mind remember all that has been done. Remember!”

The funniest thing the Rajiv said the other day, though I am not sure he intended it to be funny, was the closing line of his lecture. He had been talking about karma and diet and said simply, “There’s no yoga for pig eaters!”

* * *

A couple of things happened this week that really started building some bonds between is all. Monday afternoon after our philosophy class many of us headed down the hill into Rajpur proper for various reasons and about ten of us wound up at the same at tea stall. It was the first day that I actually felt a connection with people outside of my housemates, and the liveliness of the conversation was amazing. As I noted, the crowd in general is very international anyway, and there we were sipping tea folks from Norway, America, Sweden, Switzerland and Sweden, if I remember correctly. We of course were comparing notes about the class and Rajiv’s fiery style of teaching.

And then Thursday evening we had all been invited to go to a place called the Purval Youth Development Center. This is apparently a favored charity of Yoga-Ganga Centre, who likes to encourage folks to give donations in that way instead of just doling out indiscriminate charity. A small school bus met us and took on a hurtling ride about 10 km up Mussorie Road, first to beautiful home of Mr Swamy and his wife, who run the PYD. He is a retired economist from Bombay. His idea for the PYD was an after school program to help disadvantaged young people in this area, his adopted home since retirement, to give them basic educational skills––English, computer, maths, and, what appears to be his special love, current events in world affairs. He and his wife greeted each one of us as we entered their beautifully manicured garden, asking our name and country of origin. When he found out I was from California, he said, “Oh, I must ask a favor of you.” A little later he approached me again and let me know what it was: could I please explain to him the American election process? What was all this business about primaries and caucuses, and why were there only two parties, and why was there no popular vote? I started in the best I could, and he said, no, not now. Could I come and teach his children at the school about it before I left? I said, we would see what the schedule allowed.

We then went over to the school. He has done a marvelous job, built up a couple of sturdy buildings with five classrooms plus a science lab, computer lab and yoga hall. We were ushered in to the yoga hall where Mr Swamy showed us a Powerpoint presentation, and then the older kids were paraded in and gave us a series of speeches on various topics about the organization. After they were done talking he asked each one of us to get up and point to our country of origin on a world map and tell something for which our country was famous. That was pretty interesting even for each of us to hear a little more from each of our yoga mates. We were three Americans, from far different regions––Chicago, Colorado and California. I always seem to either just say “California” or add it to “USA” since people here seem to know it well as a separate entity. When I finished Mr Swamy said to all the kids, “And Mr Cyprian here is going to come and teach us all about the American election process.” Now, I had been thinking to myself that I didn’t necessarily want to give any cash donation but that I was would enjoy coming to play for the kids, so as we were leaving I said as much to Mr Swamy. He said, “Oh yes, yes, that would be very nice, but for sure tell us about the American election process. I want the kids to know.”

Anyway, it’s a great program, and very heartening to see someone spend their retirement years giving back in such a way, so I’ll do what I can to get up there one afternoon before I go.

* * *

sat, 23 feb 08


Those who check their anger,
like a rolling chariot,
them I call charioteers.
Other folks merely hold the reins.

Conquer anger by love,
evil by good,
stinginess by giving,
falsehood by truth.
Dhammapada 222-223

I had an incredible day yesterday. I had been wanting to go up to Mussorie, which is an old British hill station town about 20 km from Rajpur and a popular tourist destination that others in the class had praised highly. I had run into my young friend Sonu Negi again the other day in town and suggested to him that he accompany me there if he really wanted to spend time with me and practice his English, which seems to be his main interest in me. But he didn’t seem too keen on that. So when two folks mentioned that they were going to be hiking up there, I asked if I could join them and they were quite happy to have me come along. We wound up being four, Jillian, a traditional Chinese Medicine teacher from Newfoundland, Eryk, a seeker from Poland, and Andrea, a yoga teacher from Colorado. Others had told me that it was a beautiful hike, and Florence had said that it was not all that steep, although it is at 6000 feet. We left at 8:30 knowing only that it was about a four-hour hike and having only the vaguest sense of the route. “You can’t get lost!” we were told. Well, we could have gotten lost, but luckily at every crossroads there seemed to be an angel waiting for us, an old man at the first, a couple of women sitting on the ground at the next. At one point it looked like the trail headed right into somebody’s home and there was a flock of goats and an old unhappy dog sitting on the roof, and suddenly a women appeared and we said the same thing to her as we said to everyone: “Mussorie?” And she indicated to us to proceed, right through her yard and between two homes continuing up the path.

We passed through countless new little ecosystems and such beauty. I kept forgetting what country I was in. At one point, surrounded by chaparral like in Big Sur, we were being circled by a large and powerful-looking hawk with a white tail. At another point we were looking down a terraced hills planted with rice patties. Then it was as if we were in a tropical forest near a waterfall and we suddenly realized that there were bright green parrots flying all around us. As we climbed higher and higher the trail became not much bigger than a goat path and we were unsure again so we yelled down at some people in a house across a small valley: “Mussorie?” and they urged us ahead. Then we ran into three young people who were just coming onto the path, all dressed in their school uniforms carrying book bags, and we asked them as well, and one of the boys nodded yes and waved his hand forward, indicating they were going the same way. They stayed ahead of us a long time, and if we slowed down they did too to make sure we were following. I could see that the one boy really wanted to engage us in conversation and finally he turned around and asked us something like if we were from Dehradun, and then we asked him if they were going to school and what class they were in (9th Standard, all of them). Then he slipped ahead with his mates again who teased him about his English. It was something to think of them making this trek every day not for fun but to get to school. As we passed others on the way, men building a home, women carrying jars of water or baskets of mud on their heads, little kid out playing while their young mother hung up the laundry, the kids would yell out “Namaste!” or something more like “’maste!” I was actually quite surprised at how many homes there were out there and how well constructed they seemed to be as well, since there was absolutely no access by vehicle, so everything had to have been made there out of the soil or carried in, bags of cement, bricks, tin roofs, framing wood, satellite dishes! I think my favorite thing was at one point we passed by a little temple, in the absolute middle of nowhere on which was a sign––in Sanskrit, transliteration and English––that read Sarva Dharma Mundir, Temple of All Religions, indeed with symbols of various religions painted on the walls surrounding the entrance.

Mind you, we were climbing to 6000 feet. Florence had at least understated the climb. The kids left us just before the last little climb into what someone would alter tell us was a “suburb” of Mussorie, right near St George’s College, certainly a regal vestige of the old days of the East India Trading Company. By that time all of our legs were feeling the weight of hike. We were walking up just as the angelus bell was ringing and I must say I had a moment of gratitude seeing the church and bell tower in the distance. Thinking that was Mussorie itself, I was dreaming of getting a chance to sit in there for a bit while the others went off to do whatever––what a joy that seemed like it would have been!––but we still had 5 km to go before reaching the town proper.

Anyway, the trek wound up being nearly five hours including a stop for tea in that suburb. We had talked a lot all the way up, and laughed a lot too, comparing notes about the hardships of class these past two weeks. By the time we reached Mussorie we were exhilarated as we were exhausted from the climb, and piled into the highly recommended Pamini Nivas Hotel for a generous at delicious, though mildly costly at R 135, vegetarian tali (meal), complete with potato, cabbage, rice, chappati, raisa, butter milk, sambhar and salad, all we could eat. Then we headed into the market area itself. Mussorie is a destination spot for Indian tourists more than Western ones, it seems. So it was commercialized but in a different sort of way that’s hard to describe, things that would appeal to Indian tourists. Lots of photo studios that featured old style clothing from the days of the Raj, lots of popcorn stands and shooting galleries, in addition to Domino’s Pizza, Baskin Robbins Ice Cream and an Asian version of Starbucks that I had seen also in Singapore, I think, called Café Coffee Day. All these places seemed a little anachronistic but I confess to a delicious cafe Americano and a little bit of chocolate at the latter. We also had a stop at the wonderful overstuffed Cambridge bookstore. Books were piled on top of each other in only the faintest resemblance of order, but the manager seemed to be able to locate anything we asked for. Lastly we also took the cable car up to the top of the mountain, “Gun Point,” it was called (hence the shooting galleries). On a clear day you are supposed to be able to see well into the Himalayan range from there, but it was not a clear day and it was a dreadful sleazy and commercialized spot, which we were not expecting at all.