Sacrilege and Sanctity 01-Apr-2006

On the ride from Rishikesh today, I realized somewhere, maybe near the beginning of the Delhi sprawl, that, indeed, India is not any holier than the rest of the world. This is, in some ways, profound, and in a simple way, sacrilege.
I was reading V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now for most of the drive. The Indians that Naipaul interviews relate that India’s history has been one of remembering “which God did what” in a certain place, and he goes on to note that the same people couldn’t tell you (and wouldn’t care) who was ruling the area at any given point in time and who dispossessed them of their power.
Thus, India is a land that is entrenched with a religious history that talks at great length about the religious history of the land itself. The longer I stay in India, the less impressive it becomes to hear that one God or another “stood on this spot” and, say, disemboweled a being from the netherworlds.
One side effect of the religious-geographical history is that Hinduism, taken out of its motherland, is a fish out of water. Hinduism, once disabled of its patron Sacred Rivers, its complex social systems, and its monthly or semiannual pilgrimages, becomes reduced to a philosophical system, a yoga practice, or a set of dogmatic rites. (Rites that might embody more the sentiment of nostalgia or homesickness than the mood of religiosity.)
The second side effect is that anyone alien to this complex, ancient history is kept at a level of a superficial of a permanent tourist, in the trappings of the self-contradictory mythology that is Hinduism. With mouth wide open, the new comer ponders: “So, you say that Shiva, the God that doesn’t take incarnations was right here?”
The masters of India have done well in picking and choosing what of Hinduism they export to the West. Vivekananda brought philosophy. Yogananda brought meditation. Sri Bhaktivedanta Prabhupad (Hare Krishna) brought singing. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi brought meditative mantras. So many others have brought the yogic path Ayurveda, Jyotish or Vaastu Shastra. No one seems to explicitly say they are bringing Hinduism—in my book, the reason is simple: Hinduism is not for export.
I do not think that any non-Indian can fully convert to Hinduism. The nature of the mind of the convert is to be enchanted by some understanding that the new religion provides, yet, with Hinduism, any Indian will be quick to tell you—they don’t understand it themselves! The history of Hinduism is too rich, too complicated, too vague, and too confusing to give a perspective convert a feeling that he or she has been given understanding, or at least the understanding in the form of a great parsimony that erases doubts and confusions at their base.
With just a little insight at how this history has come to be, (through meticulous detailed conservation of events and through amazing amounts of elaboration of the same tales when told person-to-person) one could easily assume the most profound idea for Hinduism and for all the world’s religions—that this kind of elaborate, amazing sanctification has been taking place all over the world, for all time.
Just because we don’t have any scriptures saying that the Mississippi or the Amazon or the Colorado Rivers are forms of God that wash away sins, doesn’t mean that they are not. The Ganges, the Yamuna, the Krishna, or, further west, the Jordan all flow into the same oceans (which are, anyway, all directly connected with each other) and their added waters from their many tributaries don’t seem to dilute the sanctity of the holy rivers as you flow further and further downstream.
It may be a more universal form of Hinduism to accept that there have been thousands more saints than can be imagined. Just as one passes exceptionally holy spots on the quarter-hour while traveling through India, maybe this is also true of Minnesota, Norway, or Columbia. Whatever quality it is that makes the Hindu mind so ready to accept the possibility of such localized sanctity in India (even if it is also responsible for gullibility) could be cultivated around the world for globalized sanctity. We could all be left in wonder about how it might just be true that we all possess an infinite spirit and that this life is simply meant for the cultivation of that spirit. “Imagine there’s no heaven, above us only sky.”
Much of these thoughts came about, coupled with a release at the kind of subtle cultural superiority that many Hindus seem to carry about. Especially living in India, I am often confronted with these sentiments that “India is the Holy Land” and that Indians are somehow more pure or innocent than “foreigners.” Racial superiority or inferiority aside, as I carried this desire to see the many pilgrimage spots of India in the short time I have here, and continued to be only frustrated by having a broken ankle, I realized: It’s simply not true. “The gateway to heaven isn’t Benares.” The gateway to heaven is everywhere—whereas it isn’t true to say that “Benares isn’t the gateway to heaven”, it’s also not true to say that “the gateway to heaven is exclusively Benares.” (This last part is so often the popular Hindu belief.) More important than any sacrilege to Hindus or Hinduism is the acceptance that everywhere is holy.
This all is also not to devalue the contributions of the ancient Indian sciences, which do seem to hold up to an experiential test. Many of the beliefs that are so tied in with Hinduism with their sources from ancient Sages and the Vedas are parts of a meticulously detailed science of raising consciousness and opening the heart.
I feel that one of the most pervasive illusions of Westerners who come to the path of yoga and of Indians when they evaluate the Western world is the belief that India is the holy land and Indians the chosen people (a hand-down from the caste system post-modern-corruption?) and people outside India are somehow tainted and their lands less sanctified. This belief undermines the tenet of yogic philosophy that it is a natural tendency of spirits to move toward raising consciousness. By this, I mean that yogic philosophy professes that there is something eternal and in all places the same—a basic “core spirituality” or universal human values. To say that Hindus are more in touch with this is to take away its very universality.
Hindus (and yogis) are, perhaps, more in touch with the form of those values take inside their culture, but they are also, like all people, attached to the form those values take, and sensitive to when that form is not maintained—i.e. representations of sexuality, respect for specific social roles and relationships, behavior around food or temples. Hindus are sensitive to their own dogma and they label that as “core spirituality.”
Just in my own life, I know that I have a different way of perceiving those values, and the form they take in my life might be watching Six Feet Under or listening to folk songs or bopping my head to Lauryn Hill. My spiritual values have a lot to do with what I try to understand about others and social conditions and what I try to help others see of my own vision. This is a good stepping-stone for understanding how any other Westerner accesses universal values in ways that might not be recognized by the highly orthodox.
No one intentionally, fully knowingly, lives an inauthentic life or chases things that they know not to be conducive to happiness. The search for happiness is synonymous with the conscious search to expand oneself because becoming happy is, in a subtle but sure way, expanding out from that contracted sense of Self. Every “teeny-bopper” listens to their pop music because they feel it conveys something about life, something about joie-de-vivre that was not previously displayed. Every drug addict in the world is looking for deliverance from their mistakes and from the pains of life, and every one will be able to tell you about someone who is less moral than they are, and will be able to draw the distinction that they are “not like that”, and are really more positive. Even when the intellect is wrapped in nihilism and atheism, its basic search is for truth, and the main debate put up by such a person would be to say that it’s pointless to waste precious time in life and it’s not needed to be self-abnegating. These same points, when said by a holy man become deep spiritual truths, but they are so often discarded and labeled as bitterness when they come from a common person. It may be a critical step to recognize that there are no common people; every soul is one that contains truths—wisdom gathered from living life from that perspective.
In giving this a fair analysis, I have also arrived at an important question—What, then, are the dogmas of the Western way of perceiving universal truth? What are the places in our search for truth where we are simply caught up in the form?