Varanasi has been on my travel list for a long, long time. It's the holiest city in India. I resonate with the the mystic teachings of Hinduism, particularly the Upanishads. Benares, it's old name, is where Yogananda met his guru.
Plus it's right next to Sarnath, one of the four pilgrimage sites the Buddha suggested. In that region, when Buddha spoke his discourse explaining anata, or (the much misconstrued) no-self, several of his disciples awakened through his living presence of anata.
So I was saddened to read about the violent blast that killed and hurt dozens of devotees in Varanasi temples today.
At a used bookshop in Phuket town in early January, I 
picked up a paperback called: Sacred Spaces: Exploring Traditions of Shared Faith in India, by Yoginder Sikand. The author visited pilgrimage sites of saints revered by both Hindus and Muslims alike. He spoke of the long legacy of Sufism and Islam in India that has been historically buried. The book starts off a bit scholarly and dry, but slowly flowers into a powerful eye-opening book.
The chapter on Kashmir was particularly sublime and heart-rending. I realized reading this book that I was not yet ready to visit the cacophony of India. And simultaneously that I am destined to*.
When I left Sri Lanka, I instinctly knew Indonesia and India were next. Purportedly because they too are 2004 tsunami-countries.
The Economist's "The great Indian hope trick" cover story last week: "India has more Muslims (150m or so) than any other country other than Indonesia, yet, as Mr Bush likes to point out, no known members of al-Queda." (Newsweek's March 6th cover story is - there's several - on India too.)
Even Sri Lankan television pros once they realized I wouldn't be offended bemoaned all the "Hollywood propaganda". (I wouldn't have been offended if he took the opposite tack either.)
Between cricket matches, I watched TV commercials telling a beautiful people that a magical made-in-USA cream promises to make them "Fair and Handsome." (This is the actual trade name of the product.)
One doesn't have to understand a speck of Sinhala. Good ads are visual and visceral. I don't remember this ad specifically, but it was comparison-based. Perhaps? Before: Dark-skinned, frown, alone. After: Light-skinned, beaming, women flock. Thereafter I noticed whitening lotions for men and women everywhere: drugstores, magazines, etc. The subtler message: Be like them. I had to smile thinking of my self-tanning cream tucked away in my cabinet at home. I broke into a bigger smile a week later when the Columbo-bound bus zipped past a billboard with a ripped Sri Lankan pronouncing boldly "Bronze is Beautiful." Touche!
As we sat drinking orange gin mixed with Sprite, and arrack mixed with Coke facing the shrimpers plying the river behind the azure pool, a nightclub manager asks me, "Are you Christian, Buddhist, or a free thinker?" I say neither of those fit but he senses I'm comfortable with the direction of the discussion. If I had to do it all over again I would answer I am a mystic, one who lives (tries anyway): Be still and know.
Any answer is superfluous. He asks me if his practice of revering saints rather than focusing on the Christ alone is wrong-minded which launches us into a very moving conversation about how he is transported to another realm as soon as he crosses the threshold of St. Thomas or St. Anthony for the noon weekday mass.
"Hmmm, I don't know. Sounds like the Holy Spirit. I'd trust that feeling." Later:
His friend,a wealthy hotel owner featured in full color on the backcover of a lodging booklet the nation's tourism authority hands out, shares that his daughter is in Canada studying for a public relations degree.
"First she used to write me letters that started, 'Dear Father, God Bless You.' They were beautiful letters that ended with 'I love you."
He paused. I take another sip of the coconut liquor. Others jump in and out of the pool.
Now she starts the letter off without salutation, he says. "She ends with 'Take care.' "
"Take care," he repeats. A Sri Lankan teledrama (soap opera) is filming here past midnight. Normally it'd be hidden night, but in the glow of the set lights I see his milky eyes match mine.
"She's crossed over to the other side."
I know and he knows that I know he doesn't mean Hell.
The lull of the West to abandon all that sentimental old-fashioned goop. Alluding that's just where it starts. Pulled by peer forces akin to gravity. Who knows where the free fall ends.
When I learnt that Islam means surrender in the Sri Lankan Lonely Planet guide everything dropped into place for me.
Why are so many Islamic fundamentalists willing to fight and die in the name of their religion? How does a life of austerity and faithfulness win out over instant gratification and self-indulgence? This is one of the great mysteries that we in the West just cannot comprehend. After half a century of increasing devotion to secular materialism, many of us have forgotten how powerful a force deep spirituality and faith can be. In the Winter 2005 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly, editor Nathan Gardels shed some light on the question:
After 9/11, the Bush Administration launched an international public relations campaign premised on the notion that "if the Muslim world only understood our good intentions, all would be OK." But the propaganda of postmodern America - our globalized mass cultural presence - had been out there a long time already and was understood by the Muslim world. The problem was not that angry Muslims didn't understand America, but that they did. - "Spiritual Pollution," AdBusters, Mar/April 2006
I went to the Mercy Church in a strip mall lined with NGO offices one Sunday in January. I was aching to go to something akin to a church although rationally I told myself that was a brilliant idea as I ought to investigate these rumors and allegations of aid for conversions among the Christian faith-based aid groups near Khao Lak, Thailand.
What struck a chord was the underlying message the evangelical minister gave which is basic to both Christianity and Islam (and dare I say all faiths): There is only one will.
This is something I grapple with on a moment-to-moment basis. I gave myself over to the romantically terrifying notion of living in perpetual discovery and adventure while in Asia.
Asia seems fitting for that lifestyle though.
Coming back to USA, I feel sillier. Backwards. Out of sync.
The real thing: I shrink from the immensity, beauty and power of this vastness. I think we all do.
We might then look for scapegoats: Yeah, they're the reason we confine ourselves to a scared dot in the infinite canvas. (That's scared not sacred.)
I see myself doing it. Thus I could relate to Akbar Ahmed's statement in Postmodernism and Islam: "The more traditional [or further from the mainstream] a religious culture in our age of media, the greater the pressures upon it to yield."
It doesn't matter so much that the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated is on the shelves this month or I find myself less than electrified by pop-American conversations.
The 'demon' Ahmed writes about isn't out there.
I secretly want to yield to the pressures. Please - please GQ, Versace, Kate Spade, anyone - come rescue me from this enveloping infinity.
When I've been still, I note the struggle is inside. In Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Chogyam Trungpa writes: "We begin to realize that there is a sane, awake quality within us. In fact this quality manifests itself only in the absence of struggle... Struggle is ego. Once you give up the struggle, then there is no one left to conquer struggle; it just disappears." Clean the lint on the projector, and the projected clears.
(How-to on dismantling your projections is outside scope of this blog, but I highly recommend the non-spiritual book: Loving What Is, by Bryon Katie.)
This I realize is culminating in (dare I utter it) a book that's writhing to come out whether or not I cooperate.
If it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
- from So You Want to Be a Writer? by Charles Bukowski
In a nutshell I imagine it's told through my personal lens traipsing through Eastern countries using the micro- in the service of illustrating a macro- story. Story though, not journalism. Juxtapose the inner and outer struggle of globalization - between secular and faith, traditional and new, control and surrender, east and west - in human terms.
(In mid- and long-term tsunami recovery and rehabilitation there's a recurring undercurrent of cultural friction when foreign donors and foundation directors drive what gets priority, what is valued, and what is funded from best practices in 'development' to psychiatry and counseling. But that's another post.)
A Jesuit priest who once taught near Poona, India really hits home:
"What miracles has your Master worked?" he said to a disciple.
"Well, there are miracles and miracles. In your land it is regarded as a miracle if God does someone's will. In our country it is regarded as a miracle if someone does the will of God." - One Minute Wisdom, by Anthony de Mello
*Very long time readers might remember scribbled an outline in the middle of the night on December 24, 2004 into my journal. That was the last entry I wrote. Although my other possessions did not reappear, the journal did weeks later. That sense of destiny first wrote itself in that outline - I knew the book would conclude in India.
tags globalization islam citizen journalism sri lanka india faith tsunami asia
Photos: Each night one could hear Indian chanting carry across the water from the devale right by the giant Buddha (pictured) standing guard by the bridge. One day on the way to my riverside hotel in Moratuwa, I stopped to take a photo of the Buddha and these Sri Lanka women praying outside the Hindu devale. (Yes, Hindu shrines inside Buddhist temples.) On the west coast near Columbo, (this photo is in Karuna, near Negombo) there is a Catholic majority harking from Portugese colonial times. These saints encapsulated in glass boxes greet many neighborhoods.
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