Synapse: the point at which a nervous impulse passes from one neuron to another.

(Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 1974)

And I shall find my guru? If you go to Benares, Sahib, you may find your guru. You may. I cannot tell. (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Francis Yeats-Brown, a.k.a. Charles Claypon)

Synapses in Varanasi:
Emptiness, Memory and Architecture.
Matthew Brown

Varanasi within India

Map of the city, tributaries, Ganga and ghats

Contents

Book One: Dogs Among Flowers and the Ashes of Corpses Enjoyment Education

Book Two: Places Within the Body Tirtha & Mandala Ecology Enlightenment

Glossary of Indian Terms Bibliography 92

The road to Vishnu Rest House and Pandey Ghat, 1996

BOOK ONE: Dogs Among Flowers and the Ashes of Corpses

Varanasi, May, 1996

Introduction

Thurs. June 27, 1996

When I was in Varanasi there was a wrestling club beside the Vishnu Rest House. It was here that my Indian Brother Raj went through the various laborious undulations and posings appropriate to an Indian bodybuilder. At any rate, one day a bearded man and a gang of wild loin-clothed urchins were sporting in the dirt pit and I came in with my camera to take some shots.

Wrestling gymkhana by Pandey Ghat, 1996

A diminutive Japanese man was there and eventually I got to talking to him, sitting on the low wall, looking down the slope past the shade of trees and some goats to the glittering Ganges. It turns out that he had been visiting India on and off for the last 20 years, and worked in Japan as a Shiatsu therapist. He preferred West Bengal, for the people and the countryside, and was learning Bengali. His interest lay in healing. With some prompting, he propounded his theory to me that all through the human mind and nervous system are a series of synapses. The nature of synapses is that, for a message to jump across, the space between them must be empty. This theory understands a system of energy pathways in the body, as in Tai Chi and acupuncture. Many illnesses arrive because of blockages in various synapses.

But my associate went further. These synapses continued into the ground. Why else would we get certain feelings in certain places? (An apt question, gesturing to Maa Ganga, which somehow magnetizes and becalms so many travelers.) I tried to pursue this thought and extend it to the receptive power of all environments, but Shivata (that was his name) would go no farther than trees. At any rate, he drew a diagram in the dirt with a stick to illustrate his point about synapses. It looked like this:

A full glass of water had no use, because it was full, Shivata said. No flexibility or potential was there in the full cup. Only in the empty one, just like a synapse. The discussion went from there to Shivatas assertion that gravity moved both ways in a body, and somehow had to do with the flow of energy in the synapses. He did an elaborate and not immediately forgettable demonstration of how a coasting bird made use of gravity in the ripples of motion outwards through its wings and back to its center. Anyhow, although Shivatas ideas were tickling the infernos edge of something exciting, he wasnt particularly into a free exchange of ideas, and was turned off when I suggested he might apply some of his Shiatsu know-how to my aching shoulder.

A thank you card lies on the ghats. Down the steps a dog paws the dirt. The cricket ball goes into the water.

The River Ganges as seen from the Vishnu Rest House balcony, Pandey Ghat,1996

Enjoyment

Eun-byul, Mitsumi, me, Edouard, Swiss woman, ghat kids, Ganges River, 1996

Wed. May 15, 1996

11:03am

Varanasi ghats feeling of peace dead baby in tide of garbage dogs among flowers and ashes of corpses tails wagging Brahmins getting a shave children hopping, bathing in dresses young men with impossibly tight tiger-striped jockey shorts old ladies who have been here how many times? clutching fingers of grandchild the boatsman, copping a Japanese cigarette, us on the Ganges at dawn in a wooden boat the freelance journalist, the electrical engineer, the writer (teacher?) and the humble rower. Two Japanese, a Canadian and a Bengali. On the other side flats of sand, shimmering. Barechested Brahmins, barefoot, striding along bellowing Mahadeo and taking a shit. The boatsman poking a human skull with a stick and explaining how, at night, the holy man comes here with Indian alcohol and flowers and makes the skull speak. The government has constructed an ugly pink blight of a watertank, appended meaninglessly to the ancient ghats, and apparently they dont work. Families splashing, dobhis washing, my Japanese roommate, 32 yrs. old and with so little English, explains via the journalist that his father died suddenly on January 22nd of a brain hemorrhage. The last time hed seen him was celebrating on New Years. A young lad in nicely pressed slacks asks us where were from. On the boat I explain to Mitsumi, the journalist, that 2 days ago I was in a hospital bed in Howrah with an IV in my hand. I swim in the Ganges again. The sun is starting to heat up and well eat breakfast. Ive stepped in shit several times in Varanasi but none of it has been mine. O Mother Ganga, accept this prayer. (Lit flower raft is set afloat, rupees are demanded.)

Fri. May 17, 1996

In Varanasi, the heart is starting to affect me.

In Varanasi, the Heart is Starting to Affect Me, 1996

Tues. May 28, 1996

Had some sweet moments savoured with people who have now moved on the Frenchman with the bent nose, his girlfriend who gazed at me, the woman from Colombia who loved dancing and was studying development she left me her address in Bogota and I accidentally left it in the pages of a book I shipped off to Kagendra in Nepal via the French couple. Edouard, black and from France, has left us. When he felt melancholy I had no sympathy for him, and now that he is gone I feel sad. I have been in Varanasi for so many days now some so minimal consisting of little else but Ganga, shorts, bare feet and the company of a drifting cast of locals, water and tourists. My Indian brother, I saw him lifting weights. We met him drunk one night on the ghats, with no clothes on, apparently fighting another man with a stave. He approached us and tried to be friendly to me and Japani friend.

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Raj lifting weights in wrestling gymkhana by Pandey Ghat, 1996

Im lying on a bed in a custard-yellow coloured room. The custard yellow, however, by no means owes an exclusive allegiance to the walls, and is powdering off onto the floor, out the window in minute particles and clogging my lungs. Bung, the electricity has cut out, killing my fan. The window sucks and blows my stained curtains. Out on the Ganges a boat engine chugs intermittently. The sweet and nave voices of 2 Japanese girls figuring out a song on the mandolin. The smell of a fat yellow mango, wafting in from the windowsill. Mysterious bumps and thumps from the ghats. A vest, purchased in a remote rural market in Nepal, hangs limply from a shutter. Its too hot to consider wearing it. Underneath it is one of those flimsy Indian scarves, golden with red Hindi lettering, which I would never buy, associating such cloths with the heads of fellow tourists, but I have purchased one, meant exclusively to wrap a one hundred year old Swiss pocketwatch with a cracked face I bought in a cramped souvenir shop. My fan, which, judging from its I am a 1940s telephone appearance must also originate from an antique shop, splutters back into churning life, polluting the air with noise and dust particles and doing a fine job of it, too. I am an igloo permeated by heat. As in a tundra situation, I wonder where my ice particles are.

My electric fan, Vishnu Rest House, 1996

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Im recovering, again, from weariness. Oh, Ive known adventure. A swim at evening from wooden boat, the ancient city front now gaily painted with ads for lodges, at one point no doubt these facades were the fronts of exclusive palaces. Today I saw some man chiseling a window out of a stone wall in one of the twisting cow-infested alleys leading to my hotel. How old was the house, I asked the man in Hindi. 300 years old said the rough-handed chiseler. My youthful interlocutor said a window was good for light and air. Also, these houses, 300 years old, were very sturdy. But why, I said, make a window there now, after 300 years? The young man replied that tourists like windows, dont they?, completely skirting my irony. I laughed. The old and the new in India, blah blah blah. We had to make way for a man bearing the contents of a salad in a small blue transparent plastic bag. Down the ghats from the door of our much-dawdled-in Vishnu Rest House is a shack where a boy named Aloo (potato) hails unsuspecting tourists in a more-thanpassable Japanese. He sells cool drinks from an old metal cooler (new ones no good), and cigarettes, chai cooked on clay strut above burning cow pies. Hes a good man. He can speak some English, Japanese and phrases of European languages as well as his native Hindi, but can barely read or write. Now he is fifteen, surrounded by 4 brothers and 5 sisters who look almost exactly like him, what will he be doing when I come back 20, 30 years from now? He pats the worn bench and says same, then laughs and does a double-take and says, My children will be doing this, I wont have to work. Now the Ganges is at lowest ebb, you can swim across to a no-mans land where men go to drink at night or piss and shit by day, and on the horizon an improbable forest sits. The water has even exposed squelchy mud on the ghat side of the Ganges, and Aloos teashop seems deceptively eternal, but when high tide comes, like so many other Indian things, its scant materials will quickly be dismantled and borne away to await the next season. Outside my brothers retreat was a pair of narrow toy train tracks which zigzagged across the road and all the way up into Darjeeling. The locals set up their market stalls right over the tracks, as the train only passes twice a day. Quiet a comfortable blue light can be created by rigging up an awning of plastic canvas between bamboo poles, but its also very easy to take down. Comfort and respite are, by their nature, transient. -Anyhow, here we are under the moon and the stars and the spilling water, you can have sweet milk curd in a clay pot and smash the pot afterwards, in a lane where men have spit betel, dogs have lain, children have played and woman have been led beneath the cover kerchiefs in a small procession.

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Aloos chai shop, Pandey Ghat, 1996

Diminutive dishwashers: Aloos brother and sister, 1996

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Post- morning boat ride, 1996

May 29, 1996

One brown plastic elephant: rs.2. (Response of Indian people to my pulling a plastic elephant on wheels behind me on the Dasaswamedh Road:) -Hatthi mero saatthi. (Elephant my companion.) -Aw, eh-lee-phant. -Fantastic. -Eh-lee-phant. (Incredulous look and smile.) (police man with 15 year old wooden rifle.) -I no like. -----------

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One man volunteers to help me buy a mango, from a wooden roadside cart. For a moment he is fierce, clutching the yellow mango in his hand. I am not illiterate. I nod gravely. I am heavily qualified. He must be taken seriously. He introduces me to his friend, a politician with Youth Congress. ----------A cow standing on a traffic island, facing the traffic light, beyond which 4 roads meet. It chews, occasionally shifting a foot. Rickshaws, beeping scooters, creaking bicycles pass. The cow is immobile. And object lesson in meditative stillness. Should a cows home be a traffic island? The hot sun of late afternoon beats down. The cow is still. My Japanese companion is feeding a monkey which sits above her on a shrine. ----------My teacher hidden from the world by an incredibly thick pair of glasses, hidden from me by an alien language and a lack of teeth. He is humble and immobile but his hands flutter at the dholak like no-ones business.

Dholak lesson with Kali Maharaj-ji, International Music Ashram, 1996

----------God is zero.

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(Brahmin proprietor of rest house, with enigmatic half smile.) If you want power, you must reverse that number. (incomprehensible statement directly following, hinting at vast numerological network.) I dont like the white people in India. (deformed man selling beads on the ghat.) What for India? (same man) Every Indian man fucking the white girl. (same man with wistful, moralistic moan.) I am all traveling India, 24 hours before. -----------

The sailor without a boat is very pleased to be here tonight, at the bottom of the sea.

Thurs. May 30, 1996 Still in Varanasi. (re: electrical power failures:) Try to surf out of the black and into the blue.

Fri. May 31, 1996

6:58am

Marriage party in Cantonment area last night ride in on scooter past prostitute zone Brahmin ceremony extended beyond belief into morning hours, the girl covered up with glittering shawl and man beneath an oversized tinselly hat. Relations friendly dancing in surreal procession of blaring cart, volume heightened to distortion and incomprehensible echo, strangers of all shapes and sizes bearing chandeliers on their heads (some little girls, some middle aged men, some old women) and marching band belting out boozy renditions of popular film songs in the beloved Indian style. Casual

16

conversation during ceremony. My friends Brahmin and contented, the ceremony a financial transaction, some differing levels of English.

My friends son & worker, Mona Lisa restaurant, 1996

The father of the bride was in the Air Force for 35 years. Proceeding wrap-up, at 4am, I sleep on a table as an awning balloons in the wind against my scalp. Woken by flies, arms for a pillow, the day is light and cool and other guests stir amid the ruins of last nights marriage, on bedraggled front lawn of house from which all memories of England have been thoroughly rinsed by a collection of carpets, plastic chairs and Pepsi bottles. And back home, the Ganges is glittering and tossing, the air is refreshingly cool, and the Brahmin proprietor has seen to it that I receive a soft pillow. Dholak lessons later today. The scrawny cat jumped impossibly into the box set into my wall. I think it was trying to eat a lizard. 17

__________ (in disposable time of loud techno in custard yellow room, memories of Mexico taxi cab spinning in a morass of spanning beats and beautifully meaningless words in whose emptiness the world can be found, while Varanasi lies outside in near-full moon light, and an illusion of Etobicoke apartments full of Somalis in winter bobs on the tide of maya:)

Somewhere in the shelf of beat a force of God seems to appear. We can surrender and be effortless in the promise of continuation. Ah yes, there is continuance. Edouard said he disposed of the Buddha, while meditating. But can you?

Nothing sounds more like stuffing than no thing.

Sun. June. 2, 1996

10:31pm

One of those golden Varanasi evenings every shop lit like an Edward Hopper painting, solitary figures buttered with stolen light. The cows horns looking sharp in the street, are they more edgy than usual because of the full moon? Bats sail past the pale beacon and the Ganges, a riddle, undulates in seams moving and unguessable. What was here a thousand years ago? Nobu laughs. Thousands of people were here.

Tues. June 4, 1996 A LETTER FROM THE WILD BEYOND! Dear Mom, Dad and Judy, Hello. I am sitting on a balcony in Varanasi (Benares), one of the oldest cities in the world, overlooking the Ganges, the holiest river in India.

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View from the Vishnu Rest House balcony, 1996

It is rumoured to flow out of Shivas forehead in the Himalayas, a claim which does not seem unreasonable after spending some time here. And I have spent some time here although I didnt originally mean to. After leaving Calcutta, and the friendly attention of my friends parents and sister, I had a long overnight trainride from the fantastically chaotic Howrah station. In the duration of the whole trip, I didnt see or speak to a single foreigner, but I was admired for perusing an English/Hindi language learning paperback Id purchased at the newsstand. Upon arrival in Varanasi I almost immediately fell into step with a gangly and somewhat obnoxious girl from California who had just been volunteering with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, and a silent somewhat confused-looking Japanese man who was following her. At the tourist office we ran into a Japanese woman carrying, of all things, a mandolin case, who had a fair bit of English. After going through the usual absurd song and dance of trying to post a letter between various desks of officials, none of whom had any paste, I marshaled our small party into an auto-rickshaw, myself squeezed next to the driver, in the front of the putt-putting three-wheeler. I was feeling happy, with that unique rush or actually managing to get places in the jumbled, cheerful and bloody hot traffic of India. We had a delay the hotels name was similar to the one we wanted, but not the same. We bade farewell to the rickshaw wallah, who by now was not smiling, of course, because we had come down to the moment of payment. We walked with our packs into the narrow alleys. The American woman had nasally waved off an aggressive hotel manager, telling him the only one of our party could not stay at his hotel, because We all like staying together. Soon, she was zooming off ahead of us on the back of a

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Frenchmans scooter. It later turned out that he was a scientist and part-time clown, and good company for our Californian friend. We found the Vishnu Rest House right on the side of the Ganges, that famous river which wed all heard about, and the ghats, those series of platforms and stone steps which lead down from the jumble of several-centuries-old palaces and rest houses into the river itself. Everything happens next to everything else on the ghats clothes are washed and smacked on stone slabs, pilgrims and locals come to stand in the river and pray to the sun in the mornings and evenings, barbers offer a shave under umbrellas for 3 or 4 rupees, holy men or sadhus, bearded and with wild hair walk with staffs and bare feet looking dazed, tourist families in bright saris and huge groups float in wooden boats, swimmers yell and splash each other, a concert of brown skin and green water, dusty plains and beached boats lie on the other side, the occasional body of a poor man or baby floats by, because these people cannot be burned at one of the 2 24-hour cremation ghats where a specific lower caste goes about its job of stoking the pyres with cords of wood, onto which glittering biers bearing the mute bodies of freshly wrapped relations will be rendered into ash, and the soul, as the Hindus believe, sent straight to Heaven. The river is sacred to Hindus, but a fair number of Muslims also show up strolling around, although as one young man who mysteriously showed up at evening on the plains on the other side said to me, To us the Ganges is just a river. But anyone can feel the power of it relaxing, but also energizing, and yet, ultimately, staying. At any rate, the river perfectly accommodates the Indian habit of everything-at-once, everyone-alltogether, and theres room for freaked out tourists, lungi-wearing and dreadlock-sporting weirdoes from England, France, Israel, Japan, Australia, Holland, Korea, New Zealand, Canada and America as well. So what am I doing here? Well, Ive never spent this much time at one place in India as a tourist. Its very rewarding. One gets to know the neighbourhood, the local children, to become somewhat acquainted with the tangle of cow-infested and peoplechoked medieval-era alleyways which lie behind our hotel. My Hindi is steadily improving I can have brief conversations, surprise people by reading signs and say I dont want anything to the seedy young individuals who offer to sell me silk, change money on the black market or, in a theatrical leer and lowering of tone You want hash? Life in India. Now I am sipping a Pepsi, the official soft drink of Benares, many of which one often consumes in a single day. I have briefly discussed with the Brahmin proprietor his prediction of rain, which came last night in a harrowing torrential blast, preluded by whipping haze of grit and dust. He had seen the ants carrying their eggs and understood that, within 10 days, rain would come. Well its the hour of the chai shop, when a few of us local travelers gather at the ghats below the rest house, at the small tea shop with its bamboo poles and billowing plastic roof. Its run by a cunning and resourceful 15 yr. old boy whose name, he claims, is Aloo, which means potato. At evening and morning the shop is also cluttered by his 4 brothers and 5 sisters, all of them looking tough and sweet and like they just rolled out of the same Xerox machine. Ill go down now and chat a bit with Nobu, the long-haired sitar student from Japan, the skinny Japanese couple, sporting Rastafarian hats and a tattoo of Bob Marley, the long-haired laconic French guy who gave me his book about

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women in China and maybe Ari, the effeminate ex-Future Bakery employee from Toronto. God is love. (very skinny Brahmin man who lives in our hotel and admires Bernard Shaw.) (next day June 5, 1996 9:48am)

Well, Ive had my morning dip in the Ganges, my tea and biscuit and tried to practice new rhythms Ive been learning on the dholak. What is a dholak? Ah, the mystery shall be unfolded. But I have to go to my lesson now. 11:36pm: (The dholak is a 2-ended Indian village drum.) Typically, another day has fled by under the bridge of time in Varanasi. I went to my drum lesson in a bad mood, tired and legs are feeling sore at the knees from so much sitting crosslegged. I arrived a half hour late and my teacher, a lovely balding myopic and nearly toothless master of the dholak was ensconced in a game where you flick wooden discs against one another into holes, playing with one of the resident 10 year old girls. She made fun of my Hindi, which got me irritated.

A daughter and father of the International Music Ashram during afternoon siesta, 1996

But I dragged out the drum and managed to discover what I had done wrong in my practice the day before. After the lesson I had a good solid 1 hr sleep on the floor, beside my relentlessly goodnatured teacher and various yapping family members. After this I managed, with the help of an enormous young Sikh whose sister lives in Taranto, to send a fax to Rhonda, and one to the offices of Gulf Air in Delhi, where I hope to alter my returning home date to Aug. 6 or 7. After that I drank a smooth roadside lassi,

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bought 2 mangoes, and met various friendly foreigners, inviting them to a concert at the school tonight. Swam in Ganges with a guy from Ohio and ate pizza with Lebanese and Palestinian engineering students. Love you all having a good time have prayed for you. Take care. Love, Matthew

Wed. June 5, 1996

11:57pm

India forces one to face oneself stripped of habitual defences, because everything material here is of such a transitory and uncertain nature. E.g., chai shop constructed of bamboo poles, box on stilts and flimsy tarpaulin, or the lungi itself. Even the tablas skin, which is not at all tough but must be tapped lightly and knowingly. And no wonder the Ganges is worshipped, because its really always there, physical and yet wonderful and permanent, and not (yet) corrupted by too much dirt, refuse and lack of consideration for fellow individuals or tomorrow.

June 7, 1996

10:32pm

Finally made it out, by eternally stalling and pausing cramped bus, to Sarnath. Stomach rumbling and sulphurous burps bubbling up you know what that means. Managed on village streets to find medical shop with help of locals. Rode half the way on back of bicycle. Visited Burmese temple. Amazing stupa and ruins of monasteries told off some holidaying students for wanting to take photos of me. Actually refused. Parted on smiling terms anyhow lay down on the grass. Visited Sri Lankan temple with creamy and very fine wall friezes by Japanese artist. Unexpectedly embraced by appreciative priest behind the stupa where relics of Lord Buddha were said to lie. Saw Chinese Temple where 2 old monks were, in fact, Tibetan! And full of warmth. Conversation a broken mix of English and Hindi. Further along the wall, through a magnificently broken down Chinese gate, an old Tibetan woman sits on a string bed with a little Indian girl. Wild tangles of forest lie behind them. The woman has an incredible smile. I converse with a young Jaini shop owner whose brother is in Japan and has married a Japanese woman. I buy nothing from him. We part smiling. I see a small Japanese temple where I share half a lime with the boy who guarded my shoes. On the

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road to eat masala dosa I ask a young pony-tailed Tibetan and his pale companion attired in the apparel of a monk, why there are big rich-looking houses on this street which now seem to be abandoned to poor families and decay. The Tibetan doesnt know. His companion speaks Russian and Tibetan, no English or Hindi. The dosa is good. I get into a bus, after peeing. Ah, peeing in the trees of night.

Dhamekh Stupa, Sarnath

In the bus I am unwillingly drawn into conversation by a young man who gazes at me too much. But my rudeness in grunting to him cursorily while leaning out the window does not dissuade him. His earnestness wins me over. He is 18, in love with a girl from a lower caste back home in Assam, hopes to enter Science at college, his hobby is traveling but he has no money to travel. I tell him that Western women are not all of loose morals, but then go on to confuse him by describing premarital sex as something not uncommon among couples in Canada. We part on good terms. I make it home after ridiculous unfolding of bumpy night time Varanasi streets and people buzzing about their compartments amid the noise pollution of car horns and thumping generators. A paan seller does not rip me off.

Maa Ganga from Vishnu Rest House balcony, 1996

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Sun. June 9, 1996

12:16am

A kid daubed my forehead with sandalwood paste and a young Bengali woman from Assam who is teaching primary school in Rajasthan recited Wordsworth to me on the ghats. Also, I had a drum lesson and bought a Buddha for 7 rupees, and had roadside photo with ancient camera (Kodak, made in Rochester, New York made the journey some time in the last century?) by stonefaced Muslim photographer. Also more discussion with my earnestly searching Israeli friend Nair. A partially dessicated brown plastic elephant on wheels with yellow ribbon tied to its snout and two incredibly abrasive balloon-flutes sit atop a flimsy Sita Ram scarf which is fluttering in the midnight breeze.

Mon. June 10, 1996

Togetherness is at the crux of India people in large groups. Brown skin green water the Ganges on a Sunday evening, early June.

----------Yah, Im secular (with vacant tone, gazing skywards) where is the moon tonight? (guy from Toronto)

-----------

Ye Hindustani hai?

[Is this guy Indian?]

-reference to me by customer at yiddli house, speaking to proprietor

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Self portrait in Bengali Tola, 1996

----------

Sometimes I think of my girlfriend back in Toronto while lying on the cool stone floor of the International Music Ashram house, among a spill of lolling children and dreaming old timers. Here in Asia, among a gaggle of Hindi speaking men with ragged smiles, young women with carefully combed hair and fancy shoes passing from the direction of the ghats, a dog suddenly screaming, the curd-seller leering, onions, pepper and ginger in baskets on the road, a pipe leaking, older fat woman with pendulous breasts covering head with scarf, young man barefoot and lungid and swaggering over to lean on a cart, moustache upon moustache, loose cloth waving, toy watches strapped to a mast and carried aloft by skinny salesman, scrappy young cow roped to an uneven table, clay pots licked clean by dogs and smashed in gutter, clutter of bells, little girls with kohl and flip flops and shopping bags and handbroom, dust swept along the road into dust, a warm wind gently stirring the plastic floral print, potatoes onions mangos noserings and a Sikh, a limp golden flag stirring atop its pole in the remains of sunlight, gunning of motorcycle, young men in tandem, women greedily sipping cream from glasses with crude mouths, large bottomed polyester slacks, eruptions of tinny pop music, banging ringing shopping strolling and biding time I miss her.

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Excerpt from Novel Manuscript, 2005

There were temples and shrines all over the city- and the Ganges river itself emanated a faceless presence that hummed in the same part of you where Hindu temple statues reverberated, their limbs black and gummy from centuries of libations, their atoms saturated with devotion. The river was like a drug... and a small world had been created along its ghats, the stone steps and platforms leading down to the Ganges, populated by foreigners, students, local poor kids, businessmen, priests, ascetics and pilgrims. I savored bathing in the holy river every morning, playing Kubbadi with local urchins, which was kind of like wrestling and tag combined, until my knees got bloody, and trying to fathom Mitsumi, with her deep, compassionate silences and agonizingly drawn-out sentences, interrupted by brow-furrowing over an electronic dictionary. I remember one evening when Edouard and I were sitting together. He was wearing his swim trunks and goggles, I merely a pair of shorts. He mentioned meditation, which he had been practicing at Rishikesh, up in the mountains, at the source of the River. I asked him to show me how, sitting inexpertly cross-legged on the stone floor under a plastic awning, facing the Ganga. I tried to breathe to a spot two fingerwidths below my navel, and observe my thoughts and feelings without attaching to them. It was only years later I read that the Ganges was significant to the early Buddhists as a symbol... this was the river of samsara, or suffering, that one must cross to reach nirvana on the other shore. Even later than that, I found out that the Buddha was rumored to have bathed not far from where I sat, awkwardly trying to meditate. Among the many things foreigners did while in Varanasi was to visit the burning ghats, where the bodies of Hindus were cremated on piles of wood, and their ashes cast into the Ganges. One evening, on an impulse, I decided to go there. It was already dark, and I opted, for some reason, to go by the network of medieval alleys, instead of the river. Labyrinthine by day, the alleys at night were like neural pathways in the subconscious of India... cobblestones slick with cow shit might lead directly into someones living room, a TV set blaring in a concrete cavern, or a low vaulted passageway that opened into breeze and stars. Finally, by keeping the River to my right, I made it to an opening where I could see flames not far off. A man took me by the elbow and led me to a stone balcony, from which I could clearly see the bodies, wrapped in bundles of silk, twined to poles. Somehow it was all real and closer than imagined, with the smell undeniable. The man wanted money. I shelled out a few rupees and turned away, straining to make out the skull of the body, where the hissing flames liberated bone from cloth. Another person tugged at my elbow. Annoyed, I snapped that, whoever it was, I wouldnt give him any money. An angry little face appeared with teeth bared and

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informed me that I was standing in a house for the dying, where sick and elderly pilgrims went to spend their last hours. My presence there was an insult. He wanted money for some association to help these people. The limbs cracked and sizzled, snapped like sticks. I dont know what I thought. I dont know how I got back to the Vishnu Rest House. Mitsumi was in the room. I tried to talk, but I couldnt. I tried to close my eyes, but I couldnt. I cried. She held me. There was a traveler among us who always wore high-topped basketball shoes. I secretly thought it was ridiculous, given the heat and the necessity to constantly be putting on and taking off your shoes in India. But I liked him. He was a genuine eccentric, a Jewish guy from Toronto whose hair stood straight up in a shock, and whose gray eyes offset his steel-rimmed glasses. Ari seemed like the kind of guy I knew very well from home... and, indeed, we had a common acquaintance: a basement-dwelling viola player whom I had once seen scavenge the remains of ten butts from his ashtray to roll one cigarette. Anyway, it was with Ari that Mitsumi, Eun-byul and I decided to rent a boat one fine evening and take it out on the river.

Author, Aloo, Ari

Mitsumi

It was the usual scene. People moved like ants along the ghats, engaged in sacred or profane routines, and boats plied here and there on the rivers broad, brown bend. The opposite side loomed emptily, as it always does, a vast sandy wasteland when the water is low. Mitsumi decided to go for a swim. It was easier than stepping across God knew what closer to shore. I let her slip overboard, and continued to chat. Five minutes turned into ten. The sky began to darken. Our conversation drifted here and there. Now there were waves, a novelty in my two-week experience of Varanasi, and they were starting to roll.

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Crests and furrows formed and pockets divulged and then concealed their contents. Across the choppy darkening waters I saw that a boat of Indian men was making its way toward us, calling out. I expected it was the customary crew of rambunctious, testosterone-addled asses who, deprived of female company made their sport of assailing female foreigners. Mitsumi had been groped all night on her train journey to Varanasi in the lower berth of a second-class sleeper. She had even been fondled while walking behind me in an alleyway in broad daylight. I tried to shoo the men away, but they were drawing closer, and my boat-mates seemed to have no problem with it. I sighed. In India, nothing ever happens the way you want it to. Like a heat-seeking missile, it always finds and destroys its target: your pretension to control. The others on my boat were suddenly excited. Why? Because the Indian men had a bedraggled Mitsumi with them. Back in our boat, she looked frightened. She had lost her strength while swimming, then lost her way. The men in the boat had saved her from drowning. Meanwhile, our boat had drifted considerably downstream, and I remembered something about boats: when you set away from shore, youre certain where your home is, but the further you move away, the harder it is to find it again. Sure, you look for the landmarks, but the Varanasi skyline was a jumble of palaces, concrete boxes and crumbling walls slathered in advertisements in many languages. Not only that, but the wind, which had picked up, was carrying grains of sand. I grabbed the boats mismatched oars and began to row, feeling quite masculine and proud. We had made two meters of headway in two minutes when suddenly, the frayed string holding the left oar snapped. The river was transforming into Hokusais Great Wave, and we had one oar to row with.

Katsushika Hokusai: Great Wave at Kanagawa, 1831

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I would have laughed, but I was too busy realizing that death was possible. And then I did laugh: Ari was pulling at his shoe, his ever-present high-topped basketball shoe, with its long laces. We fumbled the lace from its eyelets as waves and wind tossed us up and down, and I wrapped it around the oar and knotted it as lefthanders do, which is to say, slowly. We managed to carve a diagonal path against the current to a spot just before our rest house. As the prow touched mud all the sand along the ghats was whipped into the air. It stung our skins and temporarily blinded us. We ran with our hands outstretched towards the door as the clouds divested themselves of all the water they had been holding for weeks. Ari and I stopped just short of the rest house as Mitsumi and Eun-byul scurried inside. We were already wet, so why bother? Suddenly we began to jump around and holler. We danced and we capered, and we yelled Wooooo-hooooooooo! We lay on our bellies as the rain drummed around us. The ghats had been storing up heat from the sun all day, and now they warmed us, as the water washed our skin.

Tues. June 11, 1996 9:19am

Mitsumi left this morning, taking elephant with her. Her room, across from mine, stands empty. I face the battlement of the day, having slept on the ghats with 2 left handed Jews and a Japanese, party to the moonrise and the sunrise. Last dholak lesson today. I leave on the the 11:30pm train for Satna. And Im tired. But! Where theres an ear infection, theres a way.

Thurs. Aug. 1, 1996

9:35am

ONE AND A HALF MONTHS LATER

Back in Varanasi. The Finn lies beneath his mosquito net, waking at the slightest noise. Not a single mosquito has bitten me all night. The familiar city of terrace upon terrace and corner upon corner lies sodden, outside my window, beneath a carpet of grey and birdsong. Dogs bark and I can hear the tap, filling my bucket for laundry. 9:45pm: What am I doing here? Biding out my time in what must be one of the strangest cities in the world, definitely one of the oldest, built on the bank of a river which routinely floods the bottom floors of houses and temples every summer and then eventually retreats to reveal a desert and dozens of layers of ghats. Have you ever been in a city in which, after riding a boat across the river, you could pass from extremely

29

cramped and urban hustle and bustle to the pastoral tending of water buffalo with nary a permanent structure to be seen for miles? Never mind the cheek-to-jowl co-existence of Brahmins, tourists and everyday families in my own 3rd home in the world (after Toronto and the Childrens Home in Tamil Nadu), the Bengali Tola. I was in a funny situation today. I was sitting in a wooden boat pulling away from a mouldering Maharajahs palace. It was raining, although blue was visible in patches of the sky. One of the 3 Japanese tourists let me munch on a stick of roasted corn. The 3 rowing boys, one of them Aloo (formerly of the chai shack) bantering in Hindi and straining their muscles, and a hypochondriac Finnish doctor exchanging English with me. We were heading diagonally across the muddy swollen waters of Indias holiest river, a fierce middle current yanking us sideways. I was tired from having rowed earlier, and possibly from having showed off with so much bargaining and Hindi, both with our boyish rowers and the owners of various snack establishments in Ram Nagar, where the Maharajah apparently still lives, off in some corner of the palace, which is now open to any tromping tourist with 4 rupees to spare. No signs explain when the palace was built, by whom, what happened there or why there are photos of visiting Oriental dignitaries on the wall. It is like the entire fort was cut out of context, and sent downstream half-submerged like the trees one sees poking out of the brown and rushing silent Ganga, borne away from their roots by an indifferent flood. Except the river is time. THINGS THAT HAVE CHANGED IN VARANASI SINCE I WAS GONE: - almost all of the ghats are completely covered with water. No evening walk among the crowds is even remotely tenable, and the now-opaque and rubbish-strewn waters do not invite the swimmer. Gone is the chai dhokan, and the mornings and evenings spent hanging around in it, munching a biscuit, nursing a glass of hot tea and conversing with the local children and fellow foreigners alike. -The heads of the music teachers at International Music Ashram are now covered with thick black hair. When I knew them before most of the men had shaven off their hair because of the death of a male family member Now, even my former dholak teacher, Kali Maharaj-ji, sports an unexpectedly black topping of hair. But they all remember me. -The decrepit and suspicious crawl space leading to Vishnu Rest House around the corner from Homy Paying Guest has in fact been partially built into admirably plastered rooms fronted with iron mesh. What their function could possibly be, I cant guess. -The bizarre desert-like wasteland which used to be visible across the waters has now disappeared completely, in favour of a remoter green treeline. Gone is that intermediate zone of bones, piles of shit in different degrees of stratification, bits of garbage and garlands and beached boats at the foot of the dunes. Where I walked around, on either side, is now underwater. When will I come back to Varanasi? I dont know. You can stand on the rooftop of our guest house an see all over the roofs of the otherwise ridiculously cramped neighbourhood, as well as the swollen river.

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Local neighbourhood from the roof top of Homy Paying Guest House, 2007

Today I was tired from so much walking. Several people were crowding the gallery of a small mandir looking onto the mute and swiftly flowing Ganges. It doesnt have time to stop and talk these days. On the same platform behind me, there was a well-to-do family on one half and some shirtless, bearded sadhus on the other half. The sadhus and some extra men were passing around a chillum and sucking hashish smoke from it. The bourgeois family was going through the ceremony of shaving the head of their five year old son, whose hair has not been cut at all for the first 5 years of his life. As the hair disappeared under the careful scraping of the straight razor, the sadhus coughed and gestured to each other. A crazy man got into an argument with the sadhus and one of them made obscene gestures towards him. I laughed and some Indian men next to me insisted I share their masala puffed rice. The boys family laughed, the beautiful pale mother looked almost Jewish. The cut hair seemed to be wrapped up in a ball of dough. Then, as had to happen, a pair of young Indian men on my left, school teachers from Gorakhpur (near the Nepal border,) struck up a conversation. They are 24 and 29. What do I think of marriage? The older one doesnt like it. What good is a wife? He says he will marry his friend. They seem pretty close. I dont doubt it. Earlier that evening something had dropped on my head. Bird dropping, the man next to me eating the puffed rice from a paper cone explained. I brushed it off my head. But it wasnt your typical dropping. It was a bit of something red, with a slender bone sticking out of it. Not a shit, although a dropping, yes. Not bad luck, although something baptismal, unpleasant because of its frankly predatorial nature. Okay, Im being chosen for something. But what?

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Im writing with a flashlight in my mouth, the Finn is snoring, the fan is labouring, the bugs are getting drawn to the light source and landing on me. Now I know how a lamppost feels. Good night.

Boats on Ganga, 2001.

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Wed. Oct. 3, 2001

10:48pm

Finally back in Varanasi ha! I cant believe it! After running the gauntlet of a 40 hour train ride without any other foreigners, and a re-entry to the Holy City led by a dissolute con-man named Baboo, my rickshaw driver, who tried to convince me that a little dead-end no-name alley was Dasaswamedh Ghat, and that the Vishnu Rest House had been destroyed, because its license hadnt been renewed. Ha! Revived by a chat with 3 helpful Spanish lads and a look at their guidebook, and a Nepali guy who worked at that hotel (who was actually nice and had more personality than the job called for) I soon found myself trudging the ghats, with that bloody dissolute guy still following me, the sun having come out from behind the clouds now, chanting the 100-syllable Vajrasattva mantra out loud, and found that Heaven still existed. Home. In Varanasi, in the company of foreigners, Hindi-ized. The Ganges still the Ganges. A nice double-room, like the one I first stayed in that first night I came here, over five years ago, a different man. Something was just crying and screaming outside. The crickets resume. Varanasi, always beautiful and ugly together The beautiful and the ugly.

Thurs. Oct. 4, 2001

5:21pm

Varanasi Varanasi could it really be that Im in Varanasi again? It hurts so much. Like a dinosaur would feel in the modern day, perhaps, sitting on exactly the spot where he spent his youth, a location buried in strata beneath him to a depth of 25 meters. This morning I wept and wept like a baby. And as I was descending to breakfast, finally, I heard the almost-forgotten voices of fellow travelers, said to myself My God, I almost forgot Im a foreigner, and my feet promptly flew out form under me on the rain-slick stone steps and I fell the next four stairs. Indian help staff soon ran to me sitting there, sustaining no injury worse than a scraped-up arm. Its been raining and raining, the sky crying, me packed in like sardines with people from Norway, England, Holland, France, Germany, Poland and so forth. Trying to be one of them, or let go of some of my knee-jerk Im better assumption. Buuuuut heeey. As painful as it is to remember the sunbaked memories of five years ago here in the lowest 2 rooms of this fine establishment, I think its important to come here and make some sort of rapprochement with that experience. 33

In fact, it was rather enjoyable just how surreal the experience was of being told a certain road, which looked nothing like the one you so firmly remembered, was indeed that road. And I walked (finally) out into Bengali Tola after a minimal let-up in the rain, and BY GOD was it pleasant! A tickle to the senses, even though BY GOD I felt weak, sad and tired and needed some food, and walked and walked until there werent any more foreigners or Japanese or Hebrew on the walls, and I had to ask for directions in Hindi, and eventually walked through a Muslim section where no-one bothered me or sneered at me or even paid attention to me, and then finally, FINALLY I REACHED A RECOGNIZABLE DASASWAMEDH ROAD! And it had turned into a river! The rain runoff had brought the brown waters over knee-high and finally I saw the darling handrail that meant the middle of the road that would lead to the alleys leading to the hotel and all the nooks and crannies so well known and fretted over tried to remember. And there I was, walking with a line of bemused or concentrating Indians, an older man with white and orange on his forehead trying to help his wife as she lifted her sari veil above her head with an elbow, trishaw drivers incredulous at my refusal to take a ride, trading a joke with young men smartly turned out riding in the back seats of rickshaws, grim blank-faced smooth young shopowners with the road before their saree emporiums turned into a soup, and me loving it, loving it, grinning like an idiot, MAMA, IM HOME!!! Had lunch at that nice little Nepali restaurant, saw a bearded and be-pierced nice little Spanish sitar playing man with his German girlfriend, also hippied out with plastic sunglasses in her hair with red rims, and wanting to learn Bharathnatiyam. And a longhaired Japanese music student guy, handsome and self-sufficient, an angular Indian traveler. The Nepalis who worked there were nice, and soon I walked back into the river. I walked down to where the steps lead down to the Dasaswamedh Ghat area, and they had become a raging brown torrent, and it was fun to stand in it and feel the plastic bags wedging around my ankles in the current before I twisted my leg to send them tumbling down the stairs. Clenching my chappals with my toes to keep them from slipping away, but they were staying on. Some boys gathered around me, one remembered me from five years ago and had a thin scarf wrapped around his head, told me indifferently, I have no father and no go to school, but- some inconclusive hands-turning gesture, a smile, no offer from me of sentimental gift-giving. You hang out, the current rushing past your ankles, an old lady with baggy tattoos blurry on her dark chest berating a laughing urchin for tossing a half-filled water bottle into the torrent and chasing it. Then an Indian man wanted to take my picture, standing there, with a pint-sized Shiva sadhu right next to me! When I yelled Om nama Shivaya, he got very excited and happily shouted all sorts of Shiva things from his black beard, shaking his trident, it turned out that the Indian man was a news photographer for a Hindi daily, and he was soon berated by another sardonically smiling photographer for having no pen or paper but still claiming to be a photo-journalist. So I finally traced my footsteps back through the alleyways where I am known, leading from the vrai Dasaswamedh Road to the real Vishnu Rest House. Ah, the contortions felt familiar, like a lovers elbow coming where it should in the anatomy of the dark. One boy following me, neatly combed and wearing a Japanese coin around his neck, trying to get me to teach him French for Hindi lessons. And the other, the scarf

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over the head one, saw me to the lodge with my more-or-less acceptance and I gave him the 3 bananas Id bought, aaah why not I was happy and in India no-one does nothing for nothing so why not.

Newspaper clipping, 2001: Har Har Mahadev! (Praise, Praise Great God!)

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Fri. Oct. 5, 2001

10:33pm

Everybody is as happy As a man could be Climb aboard, little wog And sail away with me. -Randy Newman In Varanasi, the heart is starting to affect me. Again. In no other place in the world can I be as much myself. Taku, a Japanese guy I met today and spent a bit of time running around with, asked me to write down something I said to him, so I will. We were sitting at the rooftop restaurant of a hotel which scenically overlooks the twist of the Ganges, moon shining off the water and dimly illuminating the myriad rooftops. The delicate smell of cremated corpses was wafting our way, and foreigners at other tables were doing what foreigners do gathering together and kibitzing. Inside, Indians behind a glass window were cynically watching an important cricket match on TV. Taku looked across the river, which at the moment isnt terrifically wide, at the wasteland on the other side, a band of grey beyond the blue, with a few lights shining in it. He said they reminded him of boats on the ocean.

Ganga from roof top at night, 2007

I said the other side of the river was like death. Dark, mysterious, and we know nothing about it. We sit laughing and joking, absorbed in our lives in whatever way we

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are, and occasionally glance across (and see the lights) and say, Oh, yeah, death is there. A boat ride with 2 Dutch girls (one sick) a lunch visit to Homy Paying Guest with Hamama (the Israeli) and a hyper-literate British guy named George. Dinner with Taku (met by chance in road) at New Star, met Spanish guy and his German girlfriend, they invited us through crazy bazaar alleys to get some eucalyptus oil for me to inhale from hot water for my throat. In their room, crazy jam session with bizarre multistringed instrument from Madagascar with echo effect on amplifier and me on drum, and Taku and the German girl doing hand claps and bird-call clay devices. Oh, yeah. Beautiful. A lot of people remember me in Varanasi. My photo in a nation-wide Hindi newspaper this morning. Hamama is convinced it means something. A cow horned me in the butt. Hung around a lot on the ghats today. Drinking tea, eating biscuit, chatted with Indians and fellow foreigners. Speaking various degrees of Hindi, English, French, Japanese and Spanish. Time not passing. What after this have to heal Want to heal. Im very happy to be back. Its crazy. Everything is chaos. But, this is my city. Not Toronto. Om mani padme hum.

Its like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder How I keep from going under. -Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five

New Star Restaurant, 2001

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Taku, 2001

Oct. 6, 2001

10:35am

The morning lies out before me like a great bruised criminal. A tickle in my throat has developed into a chest cold. I dont think Ill make it out to Sarnath today. (Despite a nice monks invitation.)

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Oct. 9, 2001

12:13am: Its been a slow day, marked in its own way by the accomplishment of a number of tasks eating breakfast, doing laundry, eating lunch, sending email attachment photo of me on Dasaswamedh Ghat in blue sweatshirt with baseball cap on backwards screaming with sadhu in the onrushing roar, taking nap, suddenly on spur of the moment putting little baskets with lights into the Ganga from boat rowed by Aloo with Taku along as night was falling, went to main ghat puja for the first time with Gaelle (cantankerous French girl), Hamama, Taku, Nick (blonde Seattle guy) and French theatre couple (Vincent and Sonia.) Yeah, put those lights in Ganga for Mom and Dad, Judy and Stephen, Mitsumi and Eun-byul and Edouard, and Hana, by the way. Then walked a thousand miles on ghats muddy with the troupe to the Haifa Restaurant, a restaurant unattractive but with some good Middle Eastern cuisine, and on the way Taku and I managed to see the moon rise, a giant orange eye poked by the thumb of the sky over Maa Ganga, busily swirling whirlpools collecting and dispersing in unguessed depths of brown tea, perhaps commiserating for the deaths of so many Afghani soldiers.

Moon on the Ganga, 2001

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Fri. Oct. 12, 2001

9:05pm

MUGHALSARAI TRAIN STATION

Well, here I am (as they say in the literature.) Having roused myself from a general endemic stupor and prolonged unnamed malady in Varanasi, I am finally on the verge of leaving. The car ride here from electrically-blacked out Vishnu Guest House makes Willards trip into Cambodia look like a childrens birthday party. A hoarse-voiced woman calls me Babu Babu and walks away, tapping a wooden cane on the platform I didnt even get a chance to look at her. Now trainmates from Delhi try to decipher what Im writing a flimsy shirt bought at Hamamas behest on the Dasaswamedh Road isnt doing much to protect me from the fan. There were the worn cobblestones, cowshit lodged between them, the same chipped and repainted walls, cows suddenly tossing their heads at me, and scooters like angry bees, trying to carome down a passage cluttered with school-children. An old woman stooped over on shop front stoop, who I never bought anything from or talked to, always said Namaste to me, and so did her daughter, who looked exactly the same. Aloo, slim, a prince, facing an elegantly sad and confusing life as a half-foreigner, and a kite-fighter.

Tourists watching the Ganges, 2001

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Tues. July 25, 2006

10:58pm

TORONTO

By the way, a memory recently came back to me that is just, well, one of those memories. I had been standing by the Ganges, I think it must have been 2001 chatting with a guy from Korea. He seemed intelligent, somewhat sensitive, although perhaps a trifle detached and critical. What do you do back home? I asked. Im study architecture. He squeezed his eyes together and squinted at me. Maybe you should become an architect. Because all the things you like to do, maybe you have good personality for that. I quickly inventoried my internal state to ascertain my reaction to this and, even as my lips moved to declaim as politely as possible my complete lack of interest in architecture, my inner heart conceded that no matter what my lips were saying, if someone was telling me this by the Ganges, it might turn out to be true.

---------

Did I make up this story? Im not sure.

Varanasi Stacked Housing Part II, 2006

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Varanasi Death House I, 2005

Varanasi Death House II, 2005

Varanasi Stacked Housing Part I, 2005

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I learned some things too this time: a) Aloo, of chai dhokan fame, is actually named Pakalu. Now he is a man. And, I realize, my friend. He talked to me a lot during my stay, about his life, his loves, his problems with the Rest House owners above him, who envied the success of his business with visitors to the ghats, and kept trying to shut him down. Pakalu filled me in on many of the intrigues, how most of the ghat rats were goondas, and how he had chased a girl, and then paid her scorn back in kind. I ate dinner in his modest, smokefilled dwelling with his mother, brother and sisters. I saw his photo album, filled with photos of him and other tourists over the years. And photos of his father, who had died several years back, leaving Pakalu as the head of the family, perhaps even more so than his older brother. I carefully tried to divine whether the dinner was a way of getting money out of me. It seemed that it wasnt. I was relieved. I hope I see Pakalu every time I go back there in the future, and that I am able to offer him value through my friendship. b) The little red dots all over my legs which sprouted up as soon as I arrived at the Vishnu Rest House dormitory were an infection of the hair roots. I was led to the doctor by the skinny Brahmin old man, whod told me in 1996 that the wind gave him a caress without touch. The same who admired Bernard Shaw. And intimated to me, as Pakalu hadnt, that maybe I could give him some money. Which I didnt. c) In Benares, healing negative emotional patterns happens much more quickly and magically than in normal locations. I had noticed this because in summer of 2002, Id finally met my guru in Toronto, or, more precisely, in Oakville, and he had taught me a series of visualization and meditation practices to heal negative emotional patterns. In Varanasi I can remember walking along the road, intuiting that a bad feeling that suddenly came up could be healed then and there while walking with a little concentration and prayer to the Ganges, and I do believe this is what happened. No need for the usual 20 minute process, sitting down with closed eyes in a quiet location. Amazing! d) Apparently the Vishnu Rest House had legendary status for Korean travelers. Two travel guide writers from Seoul had stayed there while doing field research, then fallen in love and gotten married. This was all written about in their book, even the number of the room they had stayed in! The Korean backpackers also had a superstition if you ran into anyone twice while traveling around in India, especially while staying at the Vishnu Rest House, you would marry them. e) In between my visits, bombs went off in and around the ghats. Members of Pakalus caste, the Majhi, died. The tea shops along the ghats were all closed. A terrorist group funded by Pakistan was fingered. More bombs went off in 2006 I found out in the architecture studio from a fellow student who had read the news on his

43

computer. This time they bombed the Hanuman Temple, killing more than 40 marriage celebrants. They left a bomb in a bag in the Dasaswamedh Market, but the vendor suspected something and police defused it before it could go off. Other bombs went off around the district I call home, and killed people. Innocent people. So Varanasi wasnt immune to the ills of the world, after all. The same dumb sickness that affected Jerusalem, Belfast, Oklahoma and so on had hit the meta-timespace mandala of Benares. Why? I could say it was karma, or a continuation of the Muslim invasions that leveled the city several times, for example, by Mohammed of Ghazni in the tenth century AD, or when Aurangzeb renamed Varanasi Mohammedabad around 1669. This name did not stick, but it nevertheless highlights a typical human inability to let other people have their party while you have yours. Yet life goes on. My South Indian Hindu friend emailed me, Shiva will protect his city. I hope so. f) I know now from reading that the places I was often walking by were important temples, such as the Hanuman Temple, or wells, such as the Jnana Vapi, where Shivas earring is said to have fallen, or famous tanks, such as Kapalamochan, where a Brahmins skull fell off the hand of one of Shivas incarnations, as entry into Varanasi finally cured him of his sins. There is also a pilgrimage route, called the Panchakroshi Road, which comprises more than 100 shrines, takes six days to traverse, and circumscribes Varanasis sacred zone, or the outward boundary of its mandala.

Bicyclist & Two Bodies, 2001

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Education

Which is not unduly obvious, as I am about to explain, 1996

45

Brief Explanation: Here I will copy down passages which stand out from books written about Varanasi throughout the years. From my journals, its quite clear what the city has meant to me, and the facets through which I discovered and experienced Varanasi. Now we turn to the words of others, and observe what the superimposition of their declared interpretations does to my picture of the City of Light. Note 1: I will respond to each passage I quote. My responses should act as signposts denoting my own shifts in conception regarding Varanasi, as well as being a method for placing myself within the discourse of English literature as regards the city. Note 2: Ive decided to make the quoted passages as long as they need to be. In other words, Im quoting entire paragraphs. This runs the risk of becoming a tiresome exercise, but I think it pays the reward of providing ideas in their context and allowing them time and space to unfold. These authors took time to craft their words. I learn a lot by copying them out. And then, I get to carry them away, long after the books have been returned to their libraries. Note 3: The name by which I came to know the city, Varanasi, is an ancient name which is thought to have been derived from the two rivers (actually, the latter is more like a brook or tributary,) which bracket the current city on its northern and southern borders, and feed into the Ganges to the east of the city: the Varuna and the Asi. Varuna + Asi = Varanasi, the land between the Varuna and the Asi. In the centuries preceding the Buddhas lifetime, the kingdom of the Kashis had Varanasi as its capital, hence another ancient name for the city is Kashi, or The Luminous. During Mogul rule, the name of Varanasi was corrupted from Varanasi to Benares, which the British also took up, hence the books from pre-Independence will call the city by that name. The city is also of prime importance to numerous sects within the enormous umbrella of Hinduism, especially that of Shiva, who apparently swore never to leave Varanasi ever again, and hence called the city Avimukta, or Never Forsaken. Varanasi = Kashi = Benares = Avimukta. Finally, I have found that when Indian place names get transliterated into English, no-one is very fussy about settling on one version, the result being that there are many English spellings for the same place. In that light, we can come to understand Varanasi = Kasi = Kashi = Banaras = Benares = Avimukta. One more caveat: in Hinduism, or at least in books that people write about it, the myriad gods are in fact all expressions of the same divine universal energy. The many = the One.

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1. Linkages, Components & the Unconscious

-Lawrence Cohen -Nita Kumar -Francis Yeats-Brown, a.k.a. Charles Claypon

Ghats and the Alamgir mosque in the background, app. 1850

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For all the international attention and the prodigious literature it has generated, Banaras continues to be framed as a cultural domain unto itself, paradigmatic yet exquisitely local. In part this localism originates in the Orientalist imagination in part in parallel maneuvers to render the city timeless and unique, undertaken by Brahmanical pangyrists, national and international tour operators and increasingly the so-called Hindu right. Bombay film has circulated depictions of Banaras-ness widely through films like Banarsi Thug and Banarsi Babu. Anthropologists like Jonathan Parry, Nita Kumar, and Joseph Alter have produced careful, complexly theorized, and richly textured ethnographies of the city, all of which have chosen to highlight practices understood as unambiguously traditional and particularly local. I began this book trained to do something similar, but confronting the limits of my initial endeavor and in being forced to ask in different ways what was at stake in studying old age in a given place and time, I came to redefine the boundaries of my field in its dual sense: where and who I study, and how and for whom I write. Varanasi has receded from its position at the center of this book, figuratively and literally, and has become a site in a different way, as a set of linkages from the intimate to the global, but particularly in between. -Lawrence Cohen, No Aging in India, p. 43, 1998.

[Is it possible that Varanasi acts as the site of realization for people about themselves? That they arrive be-numbed and awed by outer splendifera, of both a positive (pleasant) and negative (disgusting) order, but arrive finally at a discernment of deep inner issues, and an awakening of sensitivity to what Cohen describes as a set of linkages from the intimate to the global, but particularly in between?]

My defense in the face of this damning evidence of numbers came from the growing confidence that what I was constructing, even from the tales of a few artisans, was a correct picture. There were many other discoveries that lay behind the in-depth conversations: observation and participation in activities as part of a crowd, familiarity with details of the urban landscape, random exchanges with people all the time, and of course my archival work. I felt part of my surroundings; I was like a finely tuned instrument from which a complex sound could emerge and all the resonant strings vibrate in analogy with the sitar when the correct note was plucked. Reports confirmed one another, facts were buttressed by more facts, interpretations rallied to one anothers defense I was interacting with only a few informants on one level but on many

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other levels I was interacting with other components of the city. I felt beyond the shadow of a doubt that I was interacting with the city itself. -Nita Kumar, Friends, Brothers, and Informants: Fieldwork Memoirs of Banaras, p. 230, 1992.

[What are these other components of the city that Kumar is subconsciously interacting with while ostensibly carrying out interviews, taking rickshaws, buying groceries, etc.? And if she is interacting with the city itself, does that mean the city has a personality, an identity, an aura, or a message to communicate, which she, an anthropologist, is straining to hear, and feels privileged to have been allowed to partake in? I think maybe, yes. And its funny that neither she nor Cohen would concede this in writing as a possibility. Would they risk their impartiality as anthropologists or researchers in doing so, or run the risk of professing religiousseeming sentiments in a scholarly forum?]

Very humbly and hopefully I went to Benares for a week at Christmas, in order to discover whether I might find there that bridge that I sought between East and West. I sat at Mrs. Besants feet on various occasion, but on others, I must admit I danced with two American tourists (one fair, one dark) whom I had met at the hotel. Looking back on them, even from this distance of time, I am not surprised that my attention should have been distracted from the holy city of the Hindus. It is true that I searched for Sivanand Joshi, and also attended the lectures at the Central Hindu College, but my pursuit of knowledge was not as diligent it would have been had there not been a curly head, and a pair of bow-shaped lips, and a Virginian burr in my memory. But for this frailty I might have become wiser. Or again, I might not. As to Mrs. Besant, she was all that I had imagined her to be, in elegance, dignity, sincerity; and Krishnamurti, whom the esoteric section of the Theosophists believed was about to become the Saviour of the World, seemed a modest, handsome, straightforward lad. But I was very much disappointed in their friends. Before the meetings, a venerable figure (who was later accused of abducting the Theosophical Messiah, but later acquitted) used to give us lithographed scraps of paper revealed to him by the Masters of the Great White Lodge. On their way from the snows of Tibet these thought-transferences seemed to me to have lost their sting and degenerated into platitudes. Krishnamurti generally sat on the platform with Mrs. Besant. On one occasion he spoke. As bad luck would have it I had made an appointment this evening to dine with my friends, so I missed a scene which may (or may not) be remembered as epochal in future ages. For it was then that the Holy Spirit descended on Krishnamurti. Great vibrations thrilled through the hall, wrote an eye-witness later in The Theosophist, and the slender figure took on a surprising majesty. Indians, Europeans, Americans, bowed their heads at the feet of the sixteen-year-old Brahmin

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boy, whose body was shaken by the Coming Avatar, and asked his blessing. These things we missed for grilled chicken and Pol Roger. I can never forget the debt I owe to Mrs. Besant. But the masters, the Great Ones, the Lords of Karma, and so on, were not for me. The fair and dark tourists taught me more of life. -Francis Yeats-Brown (aka Charles Claypon), Bengal Lancer, pp. 67-69, 1930.

[Yeats-Brown learns something of life. He learns it from eating grilled chicken and dancing with other tourists. He empathizes with the overt signs of religious seeking, pays his respects, and then describes how, in Benares, he still was taught something. As he also writes, and I believe it may form a tie with what Cohen and Kumar have written before,]

It was no good pretending the repulsion did not exist: Benares is an incarnation of the Hindu mind, full of shocks and surprises. You cannot view her through the eyes of the flesh, or if you do you will want to shut them. Her real life burns in the Unconscious. -Ibid., p. 122.

[Yeats-Brown himself, later in the book, does manage to learn Yoga from Sivanand Joshi, but also loves the British military pastime of pig-sticking, or hunting for wild boars. He gets hung up on a sort of racial profiling of world wisdom traditions, ending his deepest thoughts with the assertion that Brahmins and the English are equal races, both being Aryans. Its too bad. This mistake, I think, enabled him to create an elite group of rightwing Englishmen in support of Hitler before World War II. Claypon (his real name), died in 1944. Could he have written the above passages, and yet endorsed the genocide of the Jews, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovahs Witnesses, Down Syndrome sufferers and all the others the Nazis and their collaborators murdered in Europe? If so, what good are the pithy reminiscences quoted above? Still, reading his book the year before I went to Varanasi was the first time I ever heard mention of Benares, or seeking a guru, or learning Yoga.]

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2. Sinking in Mid-Stream

-Reverend M.A. Sherring -E.B. Havell, A.R.C.A. -Nita Kumar -Lawrence Cohen -L.P. Vidyarhti

Bathers in the Ganga, app. 1850

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It is a fact, admitting of no dispute, that Sakyamuni, the last and only really historical Buddha, on attaining the mysterious condition of Buddhahood under the Bodhi tree in the neighbourhood of Gaya, traveled to Benares, and proceeded to the Isipittana Vihara, or monastery, now known as Sarnath. This may have been in the sixth century B.C. Here he announced the change which had come upon him, and the transcendental and superhuman, not to say divine state, in which he imagined he found himself. The five Bhikshus, or religious hermits, men of considerable note in the early history of Buddhism, who had formerly been associated with him, but had subsequently abandoned him, and who happened, at that time, to be at the Isipittana monastery, embraced the new religion, and became disciples of Buddha. At Sarnath, Sakyamuni first began to turn the wheel of the Law, in other words, to preach the famous doctrines of Dharma and Nirvana, which were destined, in later years, to exert such an extraordinary influence over a large portion of the human family. [Dont forget, its a Christian missionary speaking here, back in 1868!] It is plain that Benares must have been, at this time, a city of power and importance, the weight of whose opinions on religious topics was very considerable in the country generally; and therefore, that it was of the utmost consequence to secure its countenance and support on any great subject affecting the religious belief of the entire nation. That this was the real reason why Gautama wished to commence his career from Benares, admits of no controversy. In any case, Benares is a city of no mean antiquity. Twenty-five centuries ago, at least, it was famous. When Babylon was struggling with Nineveh for supremacy, when Tyre was planting her colonies, when Athens was growing in strength, before Rome had become known, or Greece had contended with Persia, or Cyrus had added luster to the Persian monarchy, or Nebuchadnezzar had captured Jerusalem, and the inhabitants of Judaea had been carried into captivity, she had already risen to greatness, if not to glory. Nay, she may have heard of the fame of Solomon, and have sent her ivory, her apes, and her peacocks to adorn his palaces; while partly with her gold he may have overlaid the Temple of the Lord. Not only is Benares remarkable for her venerable age, but also for the vitality and vigour which, so far as we know, she has constantly exhibited. -Rev. M.A. Sherring, Benares: The Sacred City of the Hindus (in Ancient and Modern Times), 1868, pp. 2-8.

[I like the Reverends respect for the Buddha, and the way he castigates Hindu intellectuals for a tendency to meld legend with fact, then concocts a scenario in which Benares endows King Solomons court with ivory, peacocks, apes and even gold for the roof of the Temple of the Lord! Benares has got him, I would say.]

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But it is not in its architectural features that the chief attraction of Benares lies. It is as a microcosm of Indian life, customs and popular beliefs that it furnishes a neverending fascination. Here the student may read a living commentary, more convincing than any record ever written, painted or sculptured, of the life of ancient Egypt, Babylon, Nineveh, and Greece. [Sound artistic? It is now the late principal of the Government School of Art, Calcutta, Ernest Binfield Havell, speaking. Much appreciated, his bringing to the discourse a painterly perspective; and it must be noted that he picks up the harp where the Reverend put it down forty years or so before, namely the romanticization of Benares as a sort of key for Westerners back to their own disappeared sacred roots. This thread is picked up again and again, all the way down to Richard Lannoy, by far the most thorough of modern Varanasi historians I could find, writing in 1998. In modern parlance, Benares is the oldest living traditional sacred city in the world, contemporaneous with Jerusalem, Mecca, Athens and Beijing, but the only one among them to have maintained an unbroken religious practice since that time. Saturating the neurons of every rock and tree in the place, I would say. Likewise, the Benares as Indian microcosm paradigm is picked up by every other writer to come. But lets go on, enjoying the bombastic way people used to write before sound-bites, Concord jets and the Internet.] Here the artist may see before him in the flesh the model of the classic sculptors and painters, which might have served for the Panatheniac frieze, the statuettes of Tanagra, and the frescoes of Pompeii. There is an indescribable charm of colour in the throng of women on the ghats and in the streets the rainbow-tinted cotton saris of the United Provinces, with their varied shades of lemon, rose, and the palest blue, contrasting with the simple white of Bengal and the deeper notes of indigo, crimson, orange, and chestnut from the rich silks of the Deccan and southern India. The painter need not search for subjects; he will rather be bewildered by the kaleidoscope of changing scenes, groups, and incidents, with marvelous backgrounds and surroundings, which pass before him in endless succession. You may spend hours on the ghats and in the streets and temples watching the old-world customs and the simple faith of the common people, who, however misguided, show an earnestness and deep religious feeling which many conventional Christians might study with advantage. [I agree. I mean, not just Christians, but anyone from the developed countries who has allowed compartmentalized thinking to convince them that religion is the sole province of large institutions with dismaying track records.] It must not be supposed that this faith and piety are common to all Hindus in the holy city. Unless report maligns them, there are many Brahmin priests in Benares

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leading immoral lives, and waxing rich and fat on the offerings of the pilgrims. It is certainly evident that many of those in charge of the temples, and more especially the low-class Brahmin Ganga-putras, or sons of the Ganges, who act as guides and instructors to the ignorant pilgrim-folk, are more concerned in extracting money from the worshippers, and in pestering tourists, than in attending to their religious duties. [Sounds like Benares to me!] Shares in temple property, which carry with them the disposal of the pilgrims offerings, are often bought and sold like common merchandise. It is even said that a proprietary right in a Hindu temple has in this way sometimes fallen into Muhammadan hands. -E.B. Havell, A.R.C.A., Benares, The Sacred City: Sketches of Hindu Life and Religion, 1905, pp. 80-82.

[The more divisions you make and rigidly stick to, the more confusing the world gets. Fact vs. fiction, East vs. West, Hindu vs. Muslim, commerce vs. religion why not see them as expressions of the same dynamic process? Take an equation I hope I may be allowed to derive from the findings of successive schools of Buddhism Samsara = the world of grasping and suffering. Nirvana = the condition of release from suffering, found in a realization of nonduality. ---------Samsara = Nirvana. ---------Anyhow I was in Varanasi 90 years after Havell wrote, and how much had changed? In addition, some refinement and sensitivity are apparent in his writing, unlike other Western commentators of his era (e.g. Rev. Phillip Cape, whose xenophobic take on Benares I didnt care to delve into), Havell shows respect for the Hindus, and never advocates converting them to Christianity. He also has some sexual frankness] In the Hindu social and religious system the musicians and dancing-girls are an indispensable institution. They personate the Gandharvas, the mythical musicians of Indras heaven, who attend the feasts of the gods, and Apsarases, the voluptuous charmers With all the gifts of grace, of youth, and beauty.

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. . . . Yet thus fair, Nor god nor demon sought their wedded love. (Ramayana. Wilsons translation.) The dancing girls of Benares are generally the unmarried daughters of the Kathak caste the caste of professional musicians. They live in the quarter known as Dal-kimandi, a long street with houses of several stories, some of them resplendent with silver furniture and crystal chandeliers. Unlike the dancing-girls of southern India, they are not attached to any particular temple, or married to the god, but at special festivals or religious ceremonies they are engaged to chant the praises of Rama, or to sing Sitas love, in the classic songs of Tulsi Das, or the more voluptuous odes which tell of Krishna and his amours. Of secular songs for pleasure-parties they have an extensive repertoire, both old and modern. They are often very generous with the wealth they acquire, and in old age, when virtue has become a necessity, spend it freely in acts of charity and religion. Benares from very ancient times has been famed for these sirens, whose amorous glances, alluring mimic, and pretty shuffling feet have troubled many a Hindu sage. Among the many stories of Buddhas former existences is one which explains why he abandoned his faithful wife, Yasodhara. It was the retribution for a crime she had committed in a former life, when she was a dancing girl at Benares. Long years before, the story goes, (see Nepalese Buddhist Literature, p. 135. By Rajendra Lala Mitra.) there was a young and handsome horse-dealer, called Vajrasena, who lived at Takshasila. As he was going to the fair at Varanasi (Benares), he was attacked by a gang of dacoits, who stole his horses and severely wounded him. He crawled for shelter into a deserted house in the suburbs of the city, where he was found by the watchmen and arrested as a thief. The next day he was brought before the raja, and in spite of his protestations of innocence he was condemned to death. But on his way to prison he was seen by Syama, the first dancing-girl of Benares, who fell madly in love with his manly beauty. She gave orders to her handmaids that he was to be rescued at all hazards. They offered large bribes to the executioners, who agreed to set Vajrasena free if Syama would arrange for a substitute to suffer the death penalty in his place. Now, Syama had an admirer, a rich bankers son. Pretending that Vajrasena was her relative, she persuaded him, out of love of her, to take some refreshment to the condemned man. He went to the execution-ground without the least suspicion of any treachery, and, as he was approaching Vajrasena, the executioners, according to the prearranged plan, suddenly cut him in two. Vajrasena was hurried off to the house of Syama by her handmaids. Syamas passion for Vajrasena grew deeper and deeper, but he could never forget her infamous conduct toward the bankers son, and sought means to escape from her seductive snares. At last the opportunity came when they both went down to the Ganges for a pleasure excursion. Vajrasena plied her with wine, and when she was quite overcome, he smothered her, and held her under the water until he believed her dead. Then he dragged the lifeless body to the ghats, and fled away to his home in Takshasila. Syamas mother, however, happened to be near at hand, and with great exertions restored her daughter to life. The first step Syama took after her recovery was to seek a

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Bhiksuin (a female devotee) of Takshasila, and to send through her a message to Vajrasena assuring him of her undying love and imploring him to return. Buddha was that Vajrasena, and Syama, Yasodhara. -Ibid., pp. 86-89.

[Anyhow, while were on the subject of crossings, lets cross-pollinate with Kumar, Cohen, Vidyarhti and Havell once more.]

There is something very meaningful about crossings for Banarsis, and they keep referring to their main ones. In a book on Banaras, the old-time resident Vishwanath Mukherjee takes his readers on a trip around the city. All his points of reference are crossings, places where one territory ends and another begins and where cross-movement is possible, a partial reflection of the stable and culturally differentiated constitution of neighbourhoods in old cities. Indian crossings are intersections of four roads (chauraha, four paths), an hence the hubs of commerce and communication where life at its most intense can be observed. The busiest teashop or pan shop, for example, will be at the crossing, and, with its crowds, serve in turn to make the crossing more packed, impossible, and wonderful. -Nita Kumar, Friends, Brothers, and Informants: Fieldwork Memoirs of Banaras, 1992, p.44.

The river anchors the pilgrims construction of Kashi as the most famous of tirthas: crossing over places, junctures with the transcendent experiential order of moksha, or release. -Lawrence Cohen, No Aging in India, 1998, p.39.

[Crossing = tirtha. Cross-movement = opportunity for change.]

The major concentration of the population, both Hindus and Muslims, is in the pucca mahal [genuine old-fashioned neighbourhood, made in the traditional clay-

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brick technique]. Even within this area the maximum concentration is in two wards, namely the Dashashwamedh and the Chowk. The pucca mahal, particularly these two wards, is a place for varieties of sacred and secular activities. The famous Vishwanath shrine is located in this area. The narrow gali [alley] which leads to the Vishwanath Temple is the main fancy shopping centre of the city. Visessarganj, which is named after the original shrine of Visheshwara [knocked down by Mughal emperor Aurangzeb and replaced with a mosque, although not completely, as remnants of the old temple wall are still visible], is the main mandi (wholesale grain trade) of Varanasi. Between Vishwanath gali and Visessarganj there is a wholesale market for Banarsi sarees, and there are also several shops of varieties of arts and crafts for which Benaras has been famous through the history. It is also in this area that important Sanskrit pathashalas [academies] and mathas [monasteries], and all the sacred bathing ghats are located. This is also the home of learned pandits, priests, ascetics, men of literature and artists as well as thugs, gundas [no-good criminal or bully-types] and prostitutes. In brief this area represents the core of Kashis sacred and secular life, in other words, the total personality of this great city. -L.P. Vidyarhti, The Sacred Complex Of Kashi (A Microcosm of Indian Civilization), 1979, p. 27.

[Great indeed! And here, finally, we get an Indian writer writing on Varanasi. Note how alleys, shrines, Sanskrit academies, grain markets, fancy goods markets, sarees, sacred bathing ghats, priests, writers, artists, criminals and prostitutes all get added into the mix on equal standing. Fabulous. Now lets go back to Havell, for his even-handed take on the architectural legacy of sacred geography in Varanasi.]

Scattered about Benares in odd corners, and placed under pippal and banian trees for worship, are numbers of miniature temples elaborately carved in single blocks of stone, and all of them with the characteristic sikra or curvilinear spire.

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Riverfront, app. 1870..

Some of them are multiple shrines, that is, carved all over with numerous minute representations of temples, all of the same shape. The popular tradition about these is that Raja Man Singh of Jaipur made a vow to present 100,000 temples to the city, and ordered them to be commenced and finished in one day. In order to accomplish this extraordinary architectural feat they were all cared in miniature. The tale is obviously a Brahminical invention. These stones seem to be votive shrines of a very much earlier time than Man Singh, who lived at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Many of them are of the early Buddhist period, and numbers of them are now being dug up in the neighhourhood of Sarnath. They are not, however, Buddhist, but dedicated to various Hindu deities. The Deer-park at Sarnath was, as we know, a retreat, or kind of sacred grove, where religious devotees of all sects met. The most interesting of the ruined buildings of ancient Benares now existing are those which have been appropriated by the Muhammadans. At the back of the moque of Aurangzib, near the Golden Temple, is a fragment of what must have been a very imposing Brahminical or Jain temple. The south wall of the mosque is built into it. Tradition points to this as being part of the original temple of Vishweshwar destroyed by Aurangzib. From the style it would appear to belong to the reign of Akbar, or about the beginning of the sixteenth century. The raised terrace in front of the mosque is built upon some very much older structure, which Sherring suggests might have been a Buddhist vihara or temple-monastery. This, however, is mere conjecture. On equally substantial grounds it might be supposed to be one of the public halls for the discussion of philosophical and religious subjects which existed in Buddhist and pre-Buddhist times. It is quite possible that the whole quadrangle in which the mosque stands originally contained a number of Brahminical, or perhaps Jain, temples and monasteries of many different periods, such as are often found grouped together in places considered especially sacred by any sect of Hindus. In the northern side of the city there are several Muhammadan mosques which have been built out of the remains of old Jain, Buddhist, or

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Brahminical temples or monasteries. The most interesting and picturesque of these is opposite to Kasi railway station. The Muhammadans, in converting it to their own use about one hundred and twenty years ago, gave it a symmetry suggestive of a Greek or Roman temple. There are several other mosques of the same kind in the same part of the city. The Arhai Kangura mosque is a large one in the quarter bearing that name, constructed in the same way from abandoned or demolished Hindu or Buddhist buildings. In the roof of the second story a slab is inserted, upon which is a long Sanskrit inscription, and the date 1191 A.D., showing that it originally belonged to a Hindu temple or monastery. The Muhammadans, iconoclasts as they were, have been more respectful to ancient art in Benares than British utilitarians like the district officer mentioned by General Cunningham (Archaeological Report, 1861-62, p. 123), who carted away a quantity of statues and carved stones excavated from Sarnath to strengthen the foundations of the bridge over the Barna [Varuna]. -E.B. Havell, 1905, Ibid., pp. 200-203.

[A number of interesting points here: a) The deployment of temple fragments as building blocks of more temples, or even bridge foundations, over time, and in the service of different religions. My hypothesis: if material does have synapses and absorbs the emotions of those who are around it, the focused devotional energies of Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Muslims and the pre-Aryan animists who originally occupied this crag overlooking the Ganges are deployed again and again in the very fabric of Varanasi, and in the currents of the Ganga. They contribute to the intensity of experiencing the city, regardless of your own faith, place of origin or culture. b) E.B. Havell has the gift, unpossessed to such an extent by the other authors quoted here, of a pluralistic vision: for example, for him, its an acceptable and given fact that the Deer Park of Sarnath was a gathering place for religious devotees of many faiths, not just Hindu or Buddhist. Similarly, Havell goes to pains to point out the fluidity and continuity (not to mention the occasional ignorant occlusion) between Jain, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and pre-Aryan religious devotional sites. Finally in this vein, he always has the wit to label the cultural aggressor, whether Aryan, Mughal or British, as such, and as comparable in that role. c) Havell engages, somewhat ironically, in a literary equivalent to the partial incorporation and partial desecration of former edifices by dismissing Sherrings theory as mere conjecture. Here is a portrait of time, and what seems to me the human proclivity for reinforcement of self and other. I mean, why couldnt Havell have seen Sherrings work as valuable, and included himself in the same continuum of scholarship? Obviously, I would argue, the Muslims of Varanasi have benefited, however subconsciously, from the groundwork laid for them by their

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fellow countrymen of different faiths, and so too has Havell benefited from Sherrings attempts to decipher Benares.]

The image of the goddess, a repulsive black figure with natural hair, like a childs doll, and a protruding tongue, representing Kali trampling on the prostrate figure of Maha-Kal (Time), is taken from her shrine in the house and placed in a state palanquin. Then, accompanied by bands of music and a procession of elephants, camels, and carriages, it is conducted with much state to the ghat. The idol is here lifted from the palanquin, the jewels which adorn it are removed, and a few locks of hair reverently cut off. Then about sunset, the worship of the year being over, it is handed over to two swimmers, who take the idol and sink it in mid-stream. -E.B. Havell, Ibid.,1905, pp.111-112.

[Time again. And no time. Just like I found, never having seen the ceremony Havell describes above, and knowing nothing of Kali, the wrathful incarnation of the female archetype, dancing on the prone body of her husband with a ring of mens skulls about her neck, sticking out her tongue. I bought a cracked Victorian pocketwatch in Varanasi in 1996 from an antique shop, wrapped it in a Sita Ram cloth and gave it to Mitsumi, in Japan, in 1999. I wrote a novel around that time, whose climax occurs in Varanasi. As the main characters arrive in the city, nothing mechanical is working. All watches and clocks have stopped, and everybody is taking their electrical appliances in a procession to the river and throwing them in. When the protagonist asks why, a man turns to her and says, Maa Ganga! She eating the electrics!]

Goddess Kali, trampling the prone body of her husband, Shiva

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3. The Possibility of Receiving All and Rejecting None

-R.L. Singh -Baidyanath Saraswati

Nilakantha Avalokitesvara he with the blue-throat. As he is able to swallow the 3 poisons of craving, hatred & ignorance in sentient beings, his throat became blue as a result. Another fierce form, this image looks very much like Shiva, the Hindu God. But there are many references to Avalokitesvara as the blue-throated one in the Dharani of Great Compassion, so there's this relation to Blue Shiva, the Isvaradeva in Buddhism. The image above is a Tibetan depiction. His mantra is: Padma narakindi isvara buru buru hum

-lotustemple.com

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[I still have the same Lonely Planet guidebook to India that I bought for my first trip there, in 1994. Through my four trips, it has served me well, and would no doubt make an interesting soup if you boiled it, yielding some kind of essence of train-voyage grime. Anyhow, this bible offers the following definition of Puranas: -set of 18 encyclopaedic Sanskrit stories, written in verse, relating to the three gods, dating from the period of the Guptas (5th century AD). While, as noted earlier, the Hindus havent seemed to care much for factual history, they certainly have a rich written tradition, as also noted before, and there is plenty of devotional lore dedicated to Varanasi, or Kashi, as it is also called in these accounts. I regret to say that my Sanskrit isnt good, so I will rely on another authors translation for some of these laudatory passages. Another note: the three gods, as referred to in the Lonely Planet definition of the Puranas, are the central triad to what is currently understood as Hinduism. They are Brahma, the creator of the universe; Vishnu, the preserver; and Shiva, the creator and destroyer. These days Brahma isnt much in focus, but the rest of Hinduism is more or less equally divided into Saivite (Shiva) or Vaishnavite (Vishnu) sects.

Shiva.

Vishnu.

Brahma.

In addition, each god has his female consort. Vishnus wife is Laxmi, the goddess of wealth. Shivas wife is Parvati, daughter of the Himalayas. It gets more complicated, though. Shiva and Parvati have a son, Ganesh, a paunchy elephant headed god who apparently is the patron saint of thieves and writers, and he both causes and removes obstacles. Vishnu has nine incarnations, including the epic hero Rama and his lover Sita, subject of the Ramayana, and also Krishna, the lovable blue shepherd who seduces milkmaids in the thousands and plays the flute. Hindus have cleverly incorporated Buddha as one of Vishnus incarnations, thus bringing him within the purview of the Hindu universe, a move typical of Hindu cultures hybridizing genius. The same genius incorporated presiding nature deities the indigenous Dravidians worshipped before the Aryans arrived on the scene and,

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some people believed, created the caste system to keep the Dravidians and tribals segregated. Goddesses are not under-represented there is Saraswathi, riding upon a swan, patron goddess of the arts and learning, and Durga, riding upon a tiger, wrathful warrior goddess, as well as Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and fortune. We cant forget Hanuman, monkey god, faithful assistant to Rama, and I havent even scratched the surface of the Hindu pantheon. But keep in mind, all are One.

Saraswathi.

Durga.

Lakshmi.

Keep in mind, also, that I never heard a single person talk religious philosophy during any of my four visits to India. I was first brought to a Hindu temple by children, who instructed me how many times to circumambulate the central shrine, where to make bows and prostrations, and what to chant. Its a very religious country. Even the atheists are religiously atheist. What Im trying to say is, explanations in books are nice, but they dont do much to communicate the qualities of devotion, supplication and sensory overload which one can find in Indias places of worship, from the smallest roadside shrine to the largest massive temple complex. Interestingly, and apparently exceptionally, Varanasi, although understood as the home of Shiva, is also home to every other Hindu sect. They are all mutually tolerated and worshipped.]

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Ganesh.

Hanuman.

Buddha.

2. Vaman Purana, ch. III; Vishnu says to Maheshwar [Shiva, like Varanasi, has many names] Thus: There is a river named Varna, rising from the south of the city of Prayag [modern-day Allahabad] which is very sacred and relieves of all miseries and sins. There is an other stream known as the Assi. The country lying between the two exalted streams and frequented by the devotees and sages is the most sacred place in the world. No other land stands comparison to it in the whole universe. It is the land where the sacred and famous city of Varanasi exists with its marvelous splendour and grandeur. 3. Padma Purana, Kashi Mahatmya, v. 58: The illustrious city of Varanasi is bounded on the north by the Varna and on the south by the Assi. 4. Skand Purana, Kashi Kanda, XXX, 20, 21: The gods created the rivers Varna (Barna) and Assi on the north and south (of the city) which is a land well defended and removes all miseries. -R.L. Singh, M.A, Ph.D, Banaras: A Study in Urban Geography, 1955, p.2.

[Varanasi has been around and documented in Sanskrit texts back to at least 1400 B.C.]

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To a discerning mind the question would arise as to what gave Banaras the lions share of this antiquated glory although a number of other cities, much bigger and more important in some other respects, grew up along the Ganga. The answer may partly be found in the very site itself the nature of the Ganga bank which is so stable. The main current of the river has always washed this side of the city so that in [the] course of time after the clearing of the forest cover the whole bank of the river was fully built over. Just as the forest cover may have protected the bank from erosion and decay in conjunction with the kankar reef in the remote past, so during recent times the stability of the riverside has been maintained by the construction of pukka ghats and buildings along it. But since the construction of the Ramnagar fort in the 18th century on the opposite side of the river, the main current, dashed against the edge of the fort, strikes near the Assi ghat [the southernmost of Varanasis 2 or 3 kilometers of ghats] and then it is deflected eastwards. It is feared that a shift in the position of the main current might be made away from the Banaras side. Today the tendency of the gradual silting-up of the riverbed near the ghats is being indicated. No doubt, the final shifting of the main current will adversely affect the position of the city.

Present Condition of the Ghats Another important aspect of this side worth mentioning, is in connection with the ghats which have been so responsible in embellishing the riverside and have also played an important role in the life of the city. Unfortunately, a systematic neglect of these ghats as also of river training during recent times has now produced a serious situation. The foundations of a number of these magnificent structures are being gradually undermined. The Kashi Tirth Sudar Trust was established in 1926 with the object of carrying out systematic investigation, repairing, improving and rebuilding that ghats under decay. After a preliminary survey the committee reported the ghats were gradually collapsing into the Ganga and scarcely a single ghat was left in tact [sic]. Today anyone can see that in the case of almost every ghat at least the lower steps have subsided into the water of the Ganga. This subsidence has been taking place for over half a century. The foundations of the ghats are inadequate. In most cases the lower steps have been placed on the clay with kankar without any protection in front and without piles or wells below. The percolating sewage water from the cityside combined with the undercurrent of the river washing against the weak foundations of the ghats have been responsible for this subsidence and breaking-up. -R.L. Singh, Ibid., 1955, pp. 43-45.

[The city has been shifting site throughout history, either south from Sarnath, or at least south from the Rajghat plateau at the confluence of the Varna, one half of Varanasis namesake, with the Ganges. Singh makes reference to

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Sherring and Havell, but also, for the first time in my chronological reading, to the local conception of 3 divisions in Varanasis growth, ranging from north to south, and from oldest to youngest: i. Banaras, ii. Kashi, iii. Kedar. And then, the river itself, although a goddess, is changing course due to human settlement, and the ghats are in the process of collapsing. Not only is everything moving and shifting course, its also corroding and falling apart. And nobody is doing much about the sewage in 1955. Vidyarhti et al. mention the same problem 24 years later, in 1979, but someone must have taken care of underpinning that ghats by then (except for the enormous granite Anandamayi ghat which Lannoy reports fell off entirely during floods in the 1950s.) When I was there in , 1996 the ghats seemed stable, if none too clean. I did get parasites from swimming in the water. Interestingly, earlier photographs of the ghats from these books show spaces of trees and even mud reaching down to the bank. Dasaswamedh Ghat in Sherring, Havell and Greavess shots looks positively bucolic. Certainly there are fewer and fewer green spaces over the years. Cohen focuses on the untouchable castes living south of the Assi, outside the official sacred zone sanctioned by the Brahmins vis-vis their Vedas. (The caste system is roughly broken down into four groups hierarchically, with Brahmins as priests and teachers, Kshatriyas as warriors and administrators, Vaisyas as artisans and retailers, and finally the Shudras as farmers or peasants, engaged in untouchable professions like hide-tanning, streetsweeping and sewage-removal.) Cohen sees the Shudras south of the Asi tributary as deciding their Hinduism is more pure than the adulterated Aryan beliefs of the Brahmins who control Varanasi-proper; they go for their verity to the older Dravidian and tribal roots. So the commonly accepted mythologies of Varanasi as promulgated by Brahmin authorities can be seen to have edges that fray: Singh finds the river itself changing course and the ghats collapsing, Cohen sees the disenfranchised shifting the sacred centre south, and I see the disappearance of green spaces in photographs. Is Varanasi in crisis? Or is everything in the world always involved in a cycle of birth and decay? Which one of us isnt closer to death and re-birth in every moment? And what is the place of architecture in all of this? Is it hubris to presume we can plan?]

In the urban landscape which represents the maximum humanization of the natural landscape some sort of open spaces we need for the recreation of the urban community. It is towards the fulfillment of this need that the provision for national parks in every town has been advocated. Parks can be regarded as the lungs of the town. Unfortunately in the great city of the Aryans, who loved air and space, growth has taken place in such a haphazard manner that in the main built-up zone it is hard to find any open space. -R.L. Singh, Ibid., p. 95.

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[Well, thats certainly true. Maybe thats part of why I loved the riverfront promenade so much theres some open space. As for haphazard well, thats the gamble. Urban evolution along chaotic lines nonetheless has its inherent structures and logics. The question is, can one stand to live there? Lannoy laments the overcrowding of Varanasi since bucolic days in the 1950s, and Kumar is glad to vacation in other cities where there is more space. But, on the other hand]

When transferred to his home city, the Director of the Varanasi station of All India Radio felt extremely unhappy. He told the author that Kashi is such a mysterious place, that whosoever came here was captivated by its charm: the Ganges came and lost her way here, and so instead of flowing from north to south, she changed her natural course and began to flow from south to north (uttaravahini); when mango, the king of fruits, came to Banaras it became lame (langara ama) so that it may not go elsewhere; and when Harischandra, the most illustrious and truthful king whose adherence to his word is proverbial, came to Varanasi he was sold to a Doma an untouchable caste. Even thieves hold Kashi in highest esteem, so says Ballaldeva of Kashi (16th century) in his celebrated work the Bhojaprabandha. (Once when Raja Bhoja [10th century] was roaming on the road at night two thieves were wandering. Of the two, one whose name was Shakunta asked the second thief, Marala, as to what he would do with the heap of gold stolen from the kings treasury. Marala replied that his father who used to commit thefts since his childhood has given up this sinful profession and now becoming indifferent to this worldly pleasure would come to Kashi with his family. The store of wealth is meant for his sake. Sakunta [sic] remarked that Maralas father is extremely fortunate, for Can the wretched Indra stand the match for a dog who is infused with the longing for an abode in the city of Kashi?) Whatever exaggeration, ethnocentrism, and superstition the above responses may carry, they certainly give an idea of the ineffable charm and reverence and affection the Hindus of different classes and from different linguistic regions of India have for this puzzling sacred city. The discomforts of the city are no concern to a devout Hindu pilgrim. He is not frightened by the fighting bulls or the insidious monkeys; the stinking lanes do not suffocate him, and the rapiciousness [sic] of the pandas [low-level pilgrim tour guides] or the booming crowds do not bother him much. While he is aware of all the inconveniences, exploitations, and dirt and filth he continues to hold this city of bliss in highest regard. To a student of civilization this city presents a bewildering arrary of human organization. -Baidyanath Saraswati, Kashi: Myth and Reality of a Classical Cultural Tradition, 1975, pp. 3-4.

[Yes.]

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Kashi with its long and continuous history is on the forefront in the civilizational history of India. Mythology dates this ancient city to the early period of creation. As the legend has it, at the request of seven rishis [holy sages] who wanted to be shown a road to salvation, Vishnu created a sound which shone in glorious effulgence. Originally a span in width, it grew and diffused itself in a radius of five kosas (ten miles.) This was Kashi, the centre of the first created spot on the earth. -Baidyanath Saraswati, Ibid., 1975, p. 5.

[There are a few different origin myths for Kashi. Another one is that the city rests on the tip of Shivas trident, where it will remain intact as the rest of the universe is destroyed at the end of this epoch. Lets talk about the Hindu concept of epochs, and how Kashi, as a very old city, may have been changing form throughout them]

The sacred geography of Kashi has been adequately described in the Puranas. It has been stated that its physical appearance has been changing with successive yugas [epochs]. In the Satya Yuga Kashi was like a trisula (trident); in the Treta Yuga it was like a circle; in the Dwapara Yuga it assumed the form of a chariot; and in the Kali Yuga [our current era, understood to be a dark age of suffering and universal human selfishness] it has the form of a skankha (conch shell.) -Ibid., pp. 10-11.

[So the city form can be understood to change with the nature of its epoch. Im not sure exactly what these city forms mean in relation to their particular yugas in this description, but the notion of continuous change of the citys shape still intrigues. Eternal, yes. Static, no. Furthermore, Saraswatis dovetailing of myth with history is endemic to an attitude lamented by Sherring in 1868. But it does shed light on what the city means to its inhabitants. It also comes closer to what it feels like to be there, whether the city is built on a kankar reef or not. Who knows, maybe kankar is the key. Of further interest and divergence from the path of previous authors so far read, Saraswati maps change and palimpsest throughout Varanasis religious history]

It appears that many bodhisattvas of the Mahayana Buddhism who were once worshipped by the authochotones [sic] of this place assumed the form of birs when

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Brahmanism became the dominant religion of Kashi. [The birs are the male deities of the indigenous people of Kashi: Ahirs, Manjhis, Bharabhujas and Domas.] But this can be substantiated only after a careful study of these shrines and the Buddhist texts. -Ibid., p. 35.

[You mean the indigenous peoples of Kashi are still around and identifiable, after thousands of years of intermixing with their Aryan dominators? And theyre now Buddhists? But werent all the Buddhists converted to Islam by the successive waves of Muslim invaders, and now mostly poor weavers, as Kumar relates? And what about the Shudras on the other side of the Asi, rezoning the sacred geography of Benares, according to Cohen? I thought they were what was left of the indigenes? Thats why I love reading this material. More and more layers, to the point where you wonder if theres any particular identifiable truth about Varanasi which can be related in words. And the open field conjecture becomes a sort of artwork or tapestry woven by the writer. But it is fair to say that each writers angle reveals another valuable facet of the citys matrix, and also to say that some authors seem more able to draw fascinating connections between the citys apparent paradoxes than others]

In Kashi, there is another undercurrent of culture, the self-identifiable culture of Kashi known as the banarsi culture. In it the organization of order and process of live is uniquely different from both Hindu and Moslem classical cultures. One might say that in banarsi culture Hindu elements are quantitatively large, but so far as its cultural focus is concerned it is qualitatively different from both Hindu and Moslem cultural streams. For, banarsi culture is free from the ubiquitous other worldly elements, and it emphasizes on the cultivation of excellence in this worldly life. It is because of its disregard for the diacritical marks of religion that it can accommodate a much wider variety of people who are otherwise separated from each other by religion, caste, language, or region. And, therefore, what the people of Kashi commonly share among themselves, regardless of their being Hindus or Moslems, Brahmins or Jains, Vaishyas or Shudras, Saryuparis or Bengalis, rich or poor is the banarsi culture. This reality culture of Kashi also overlooks many of the traditional social values which are bred in the bones of narrow sectarianism, and it presents a certain style of life which is abhorrent to both orthodox Hindus and Moslems. -Ibid., pp. 52-53.

[Interesting. So, according to Saraswati, the city has bred its own culture; and, as a sort of counterweight to the widely known sacred status of Benares, banarsi-ness emphasizes worldly pleasures. Nirvana = samsara.

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Unlike British writers such as Sherring, Cape and Havell, Saraswati finds no Hindu rituals impenetrable, abominable, or idolatrous, and, unlike Singh, he can cede some respect to the Muslims, despite poor behaviour by some of Muslim emperors in the past. Unlike Kumar, he does find meaning and beauty in the ghat scene, and unlike Cohen, he doesnt seem to feel the need to use jargon terms like the twentieth century touristic, whatever that means. And, finally, he has the werewithal to transcend sectarian divisions in his analysis, thus, I think, contructively building roads instead of walls.]

Kashi holds people by generating a deep sense of attachment. Love for Kashi is supremely idealized by such a sacred myth as Shivas agony in his exile from Kashi and his irresistible desire to throw away Divodas who had usurped Kashi Shivas beloved home. The story of Shivas lamentation on this occasion is widely portrayed by the kathabachaks [religious storytellers who speak to pilgrims by the side of the Ganges], and this helps in intensifying the love and veneration for Kashi in a systematic manner. [Although it does nothing to describe why I feel that way.] This intense attachment is not restricted to Hindus alone. The illustrious Moslem poet Sheikh Ali Hazeen did not like to leave Banaras for any thing, and wanted that even after his death his body should lie in the grave in this holy city where he noted that every scholar is treated like Rama and Lakshmana [two heroes of the Ramayana, an incarnation of Vishnu and his brother]: Az Banaras na ravam, mabadi-am ast een ja; Har Barahman-pisaray Lachhman-o-Ram ast een ja The Sheikh has further noted: The people of Banaras admired and respected me and my talents in the like manner and that is what I longed for during all these roaming from Ispahan, my native place, to Banaras. Hence I feel satisfied to remain in Banaras until death. He died in 1180 A.D. and was buried in the fatman of Banaras, as desired by him. -Baidyanath Saraswati, Ibid., 1975, pp. 60-61.

[Well, in that way I share a common feeling with a poet from Isfahan who died in 1180. Finally, Saraswati ends his slim tome with an analysis of how Varanasi, a timeless city in sacred consideration, accommodates changes over linear time as the mundane world impinges. Valuable musings, as we look back to the impending crises of R.L. Singh, percolating sewage and eroding foundations, the shifting of Mothers Gangas life-giving currents away from the sacred city; and Lannoys

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lament over the loss of Varanasis traditional wisdom and tranquility amid the hubbub of motorscooters, television sets and over-crowding. How does banarsi-ness survive?]

The Nilakantha Syndrome The control mechanisms by which Kashi preserves its essential character have already been indicated. To make these more specific it may be noted that there are four concentric fortresses which protect the essentials of its classical cultural traditions. An element totally acceptable to this system has to pass through the gates provided at these fortresses. 1) At the first gate, the element seeking entry into Kashis cultural system has to show sufficient evidence of adaptability, its capacity to function harmoniously with other elements. Since the system is governed by a flexible interpreting mechanism, it can easily accommodate a wide variety of elements. 2) Once the element proves its worthiness at the first gate, it is required to present its utilitarian character at the second gate. It must have the capacity to provide secular incentives within the framework of a hereditary, non-competitive economic organization. 3) At the third gate, the element has to undergo through the processes of sacerdotalization so that its temporal power is cut to size and it remains perpetually under the spell of supernatural energy. 4) Once treated with the charm of sacerdotalism the element is firmly entrenched into the system with no possibility to go back or to regain its original character. Indeed, it remains no longer a foreign element. But in order to occupy a key position in the functioning of the system it has to concede at the fourth gate the ordered hierarchy of the trigunas [an aggregate of the three principal qualities of human nature sattva, rajas and tamas.] Whereas at the first three gates the interpreting mechanism has shown considerable liberality, it now rigidly abides by the law of the trigunas and no compromise could ever be effected in interpreting this law. This master plan of defence presupposes that different elements will find their place in different enceintes [this word means pregnantin French, Im not quite sure what its doing here, unless its jargon specific to anthropology in India] according to their responses to the challenging forces. It also raises the possibility of receiving all and rejecting none, at least, at the first gate on account of its liberal policy of accommodating anyone who is willing anyone who is willing to coexist without being intolerant to others. Hence, at the interactional level, in Kashis cultural configuration different groups of people are placed on different scales of relationship. On account of this system varieties of cultural traditions coexist in Kashi harmoniously, and the varieties of groups have unequal participation in its total cultural complex. This raises a fundamental question regarding their integration as groups or cultural traditions. A civilization may react to a foreign element in two different ways. It may either reject the element altogether or receive it by the process of gradual incorporation. When a new element is incorporated on par with existing elements, it is called an integration of

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elements. This implies that no sooner the new element is incorporated the new element is incorporated it becomes an indispensable part of the whole and hence it begins to function uniformly with other elements in both time and space. But there can be a third way of receiving an element in which a new comer may or may not be treated on an equal footing and yet it remains a part of the organic whole. In the former method the host cannot afford to keep the new element undigested, but in the case of the latter it is possible to do so. There is a well-known myth in the Hindu Pauranic tradition about the churning of the ocean of milk by the suras and the asuras [gods and demons] who used the serpentking Vasuki as the churning rope and the mount Mandara as the churning stick. Out of this churning came (1) the dreadful poision, Halahala; (2) the upright medicine-man, Dhanvantri; (3) the goddess of fortune and wealth, Lakshmi; (4) the happy Varuni (the grapevine); (5) the finest of horses, Uchaihshrava; (6) the pearl of jewels, Kaustubha; (7) the fabulous cow fulfilling all desires, Kamadhenu; (8) one of the five trees of paradise, Parijata; (9) the moon, Chandrama; (10) the elephant Airavata; (11) the nymph, Rambha; (12) the bow, Dhanush; (13) the conch shell, Shankha; and finally (14) the immortal beverage, Amrita. While everyone was anxious to drink amrita no one was prepared to take the halahala. However, at the request of Brahma, the great god Shiva drank it, but held it at a certain point in his throat or else it would have killed him forthwith. This has turned his neck blue, since then he is called nilakantha, the one with a blue-neck. In the like manner, a civilization may accommodate an element which others are unable to digest. Kashi represents a civilization of this kind. For, it has borne the onslaught of various waves of cultures, one after another, from the beginning of its history, and whenever some agreeable elements came, it duly absorbed them in its system; it ingeniously kept the offensive elements at appropriate places without any constraints, as its nilikantha syndrome began to operate. And hence today, Kashi is a city of contrasts, a city with an infinite capacity to cultivate excellence and bear obnoxious elements, such as the gundas, thugs, prostitutes and murderers. It is also because of this that a banarsi comprehends all these unhealthy elements as the reality of life, the totality of human culture, and with all his oddities he is least worried about the challenge of time and modernization to his traditional values. He reacts to the processes of modernization with supreme confidence that nothing could destroy his masti [ardent passion, wantonness, joi de vivre] and phakkarpana [a Bohemian-type person who is contented with the bare minimum, carefree, and unconventional in many respects] in the city of nilakantha. -Baidyanath Saraswati, Ibid., 1975, pp. 66-68.

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4. The Generous Blue Throat of an Even Larger and More Inclusive Continuum

-Rajendra Pandey -K. Chandramouli -Brajamadhaba Bhattacharya -Richard Lannoy

Bathing at Dasaswamedh ghat, 1924

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The world of religious beliefs and superstitions guiding almost every action of human beings has always baffled the intellectuals. It is difficult, if not impossible, to analyse the true character of the Kasi kingdom which figures prominently round the personality of the Great Buddha in his former existence as the Bodhisattva. Naturally, therefore, Buddhism must have dominated the beliefs and practices of the people of that locality. But there are still traces to show that the popular mind and practices of the time retained at the same time the harmonious connection that existed between the Vedic thought and the Buddhistic philosophy. -Rajendra Pandey, Kasi Through the Ages, 1979, p. 122.

[It is very interesting to read Buddhist accounts of Varanasi. Like the Indian author who suddenly gave credence and reportage to Banarasi Muslims in the preceding account, this author (whose family name is, incidentally, the same as the ghat on which the Vishnu Rest House is situated), painstakingly goes through all the Jain and especially Buddhist jatakas (previous-life tales) to find references to and descriptions of Kashi, both the immediate city and outlying region of the same name. Obviously, whats counted as important or which groups of people are worth representing is relative to the historian. In addition to which I love the part about the baffled intellectuals.]

In the Pauranic texts, Kasi has been represented as the important and famous centre of Saivism [the cult of Shiva.] On the other hand, in Vedic and Buddhist literature, the fame of Kasi as a kingdom (Janapada) and its capital city Varanasi is attributed to its trade and commerce and not to its religion. We, however, note some difference between the Aryan religion of the Kuru-Pancala kingdom and the religious beliefs of the Aryans of Varanasi. The Vedic literature unfortunately gives no elaborate account or information to this effect. But this is certainly the reason why Kasi did not find a prominent place in these early texts. The Puranas and the Buddhist texts undoubtedly make some reference to the ancient religion of Kasi. The Puranas unanimously treat this land as Saivite since the creation of the universe. The most interesting evidence adduced from the Puranas is to be seen in the story of the great sacrifice performed by Daksa in which Lord Siva was not invited for his having no faith in the Vedic religion. His wife Sati or Parvati went to ther fathers home even without any invitation and had to suffer much insult there. Being much shocked she jumped into the sacrificial compound [fireplace?] and gave up her life. Afterwards Virabhadra, with the permission of Siva, destroyed the sacrifice. Dr.

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Altekar infers from this story an attempt to wipe out the differences between Saiva and Vedic religions [perhaps in the same way that Christianity, as it spread to different parts of the world, incorporated pre-existing local religious rites within its own fold; witness Easter, originally a Pagan festival.] The story of Divodasa as depicted in the Kasi-Khanda and many other Puranas indicates that the king and people of the Kasi Janapada [kingdom] checked the growth of the Vedic religion in Kasi. In this story we are told that king Divodasa expelled all the divinities except Siva from the kingdom of Kasi. The Kasi-Khanda even goes to say that after the expulsion of all the gods form Kasi the propagation of truth increased. In order to take revenge the gods stopped giving aids to Kasi, but Divodasa remained firm and unmoved. Ultimately, the gods decided to practice deception and succeeded in leading the other gods into Kasi. The Vayu Purana further tells us that even after Divodasas destruction, Siva did not leave Kasi. In Varanasi he told Gauri [another name for Shivas consort, Parvati] that he could not go anywhere leaving the city. For this very reason the God himself called this land Avimukta [Never-forsaken.] The Agni Purana attests the fact that Kasi came to be known as Avimukta because Siva never left it. -Pandey, Ibid., pp.122-123.

[Interesting passage for a number of reasons. Firstly, although Saivites, or followers of Shiva, typically seem to identify Varanasi with Shiva, planting lingams, (or phallic embodiments of the god) everywhere, older Vedic and Buddhist texts hardly mention Shiva at all. And yet origin myths in later books, such as Diana L. Ecks Banaras: City of Light, recount how Varanasi was created on the tip of Shivas trident before the rest of the world, and will continue to balance there above the raging devastation after the rest of the world is destroyed. Varanasi, in the origin myth Eck recounts, even sprouted from the lingam of light which Shiva produced to dissolve an argument between Brahma and Vishnu. So, I think this reinforces a common lesson Ive already learned several times: one persons given, sanctified truth is anothers myth, while yet another may not even have heard of it; even if all three individuals come from and live in the same place. So where, then, is the truth? Another interesting deviance in this text from the others is the tale of King Divodasa. In every other account Ive read (Sherring, Havell, Greaves, Vidyarhti, Eck, Cohen, Kumar, Saraswati et al.,) king Divodasa is a sort of representative Buddhist who drives Shiva out of Kasi. Shiva then agonizes and obsesses over how to get back into his beloved city, and sends the other Hindu gods in one by on missions to convince Divodasa to let Shiva back in. And, in the story, each god is so beguiled by Varanasi that they just stay there themselves, until Shiva must go there himself in disguise, but thats another story. The point here is, why in this account is Shiva there all along, where it is the other gods who Divodasa sends into exile? Did someone make a mistake, or are both versions of the story told?

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The lesson seems to be that myth is mutable, elastic, and does not owe any allegiance to any one group or person, but rather lives electrically as an impulse with characters and situations in constant archetypal flux. Finally, in addition to the Buddhist jataka angle, Pandey reports on the ancient worship of tree deities in Kashi]

Tree-worship in India is very old and was continued even after the rise of Buddhism. The Jatakas are full of references to tree-worship, with its superstitions and savage customs. [There are still many tree shrines in Benares today!]

Chatting with young cricket players by a tree shrine, 2007 (photo by Luca)

Sometimes human sacrifices were also offered. They were consulted as oracles, and expected to grant children, fame and wealth. They were believed to injure those who injured the trees in which they dwelt, [the Japanese shiatsu therapist Shivata whom I spoke to in the wrestling gymkhana in 1996 would go no further in his theory of synapses transmitting between the human body and its environment than trees, would he?] and they were pleased when garlands were hung upon the branches of the tree, lamps lighted around it, and offerings were made, at the foot of the tree. [As I also

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saw the Buddhist pilgrims reverencing a descendent of the original bodhi tree under which Gautama attained enlightenment in like fashion.] The Dummadha Jataka refers to the practices of the people of Banaras who were offering sacrifices to the banyan-tree in which the entrails, blood and flesh of victims goats, cocks, pigs and the like are the substantial parts of the sacrifice. The crowd, were are told, made prayers to the fairy who had been reborn in that tree, to grant them sons and daughters, honour and wealth, each according to his hearts desire. Similarly, in the Dhanasaka Jataka we meet with a similar dreadful account of the guardian deity of the banyan in which a number of captive kings were reduced to a state of insensibility, their eyes were put out, and after they were dead, their flesh was caused to be carried away by the Ganga. The entrails were hung as garlands on the tree, which was marked with spread hands dipped in the blood of the victims. In most of the Jatakas we come across such superstitious beliefs of the common folk of the village of Kasi. [Human beings! Gotta love us. But] New Awakening The Jataka stories testify to a leap forward in speculative thought, a new birth in ethics, and religion of conscience threatening to take [the] place of the old religion of custom and magic. We can regard this period as that which saw the existence of various orders of teachers representing different groups or schools of thought. -Pandey, Ibid., pp. 127-129.

[of whom the Buddhists were one such group. Note: Pandey here is footnoting time and again Prof. Rhys Davids, Buddhist India, London, 1917, and Im not sure how much of his writing is his own opinions, conclusions, sentiments or observations, or whether he has simply cobbled together his book from a plethora of others. In any case, here is a similarity to veins of thought Ive found in other Buddhist teachings, namely the belief that the human race is evolving through a series of ethical paradigms. My meditation teacher, Korim Fredrick Prack, told me he believes this to be so; and Robert Thurman, in The Infinite Life, equates a life forms physical characteristics and resultant capacity for intimate contact with its karma. The more highly evolved a life form is in physical terms, the more potential it has to transcend isolation and experience love and compassion. If we can surmise that there is karma, or that every action or thought is determined by preceding actions and thoughts, and in turn creates successive actions and thoughts; if we can thus surmise that karma conditions rebirth of the self from moment to moment, and rebirth of the self in successive physical bodies and lifetimes, that we have infinite lives and over the span of millions of lives, according to our karma, we move up and down the ladder of evolutionary forms from hells to heavens and back again; and if we take the Buddhist word for it that a human birth gives us the only life where we can exercise considerable choice over our actions, for example being compassionate

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or generous even when our animal-instincts are urging us otherwise, and break through the chain of conditioned rebirth to attain enlightenment and save all other beings from suffering; then could Varanasi play an important role in this world by storing within its synapses the potential charge for soul-shifting realizations? Whew, long sentence.]

With the rise of the doctrine of rebirth (which is very often hinted at in the Jatakas) actions and their consequences (Kammaphale) human life and its values, began to appear in a different aspect. The idea of life with an unending chain of repeated existences, prompted men to seek an escape. -Pandey, Ibid., p. 130.

[Once again, as per Thurmans re-capping of core Buddhist teachings in his Infinite Life scenario if you have infinite rebirths and all your thoughts and actions actually have direct consequences that affect not only yourself but all beings, who at one time or another have been your mother, your child, your enemy, your brother and so on, youre probably going to change how you live. Another note: heavily footnoted here in Pandeys book is Fausboll, Tr. Jataka, London, 1877-97.]

Benares which was now known as Varanasi or Kasi in ancient times is now being considered as a holy city owing to which devout Hindus speak of coming to end their days in Kasi, for the sake of Kasivah, i.e., the benefit presumed to be derived from dying in the holy city and the efficacy of funeral rites therein performed (Arch. Sur. of India, Fuhrer, p. 797.) To say anything about the archeological significance of this city, we will have to recall its glorious days in ancient times, owing to which Varanasi became a name familiar to Brahmanical literature, and ultimately a stage came when this name was converted into Kasi or Kashi. Much exaggerated account is given in ancient texts about Benares and therefore these texts are little to be trusted for throwing light on the history of Benares. -Pandey, Ibid., p. 137.

[Pandey, although almost exclusively relying on the books of others for his information (or maybe hes just the only one to openly admit doing so) manages nevertheless to undermine the bastions of commonly held assumptions which the other books trumpet. For example, he carefully avoids pledging allegiance to any one source by qualifying his descriptive passages, for instance, when he says

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Varanasi. is now being considered as a holy city (italics mine), or Much exaggerated account is given in ancient texts about Benares. (italics once again mine.) Not only does he identify Varanasis holiness as a supposed condition, and not a given; but he goes on to imply that all ancient sources have to be taken with a grain of salt. This is careful scholarship quite rigorous. Im happy to have Pandeys voice in the canon, when some much more grandiloquent authors leave much juicier passages in their wake (witness Mssrs. Chandramouli and Bhattacharya to follow.) And finally, in keeping with the rest of the books black-sheep-ness (despite its yellow cloth binding,) on the last page there is a black and white reproduction of a sculpture of the Buddha, seated in meditation with the caption below it] IX Nilakantha Avalokiteshvara Buddha Amitabha seated over this [sic] head. Pala Dynasty, 8th. Cent. A.D., Sarnath, Uttar Pradesh. (Courtesy: Archaeological Museum, Sarnath) Nilakantha Avalokiteshvara Buddha? So the Mahayana, or great vehicle Buddhist tradition (which emphasized that one should deliberately seek rebirth as a bodhisattva until all beings were free,) has its own blue-throated Buddha? What then does this make of Prof. Saraswatis Nilakantha Syndrome as an explanation of the various poisonous elements lodged within the Hindu neck of classical cultural Banaras? Could it be that Prof. Saraswatis Hindu classical cultural complex is itself lodged within the generous blue throat of an even larger and more inclusive continuum? Let us in any case return to the case at hand, that is, the special quality of Benares as a place. What gives rise to so much myth?]

I have lived in Kashi for some years and loved the place and its people. My love for Kashi is like my love for my own mother. Kashi represents immensely much of what I hold dear and sacred at heart. It is said that to know Kashi it requires inner sight, insight, sagacity, and not mere love. I write of Kashi because I love it. In this effort I hope and pray to gain sagacity. I was returning by train from Kashi after a long sojourn. I sat in the midst of many bhaiyas of Uttar Pradesh. An elderly person, a milk vendor in Pune, asked me a few questions about my trip to Kashi. Listening to my replies he spoke to me in typical colloquial Hindi not easily translatable into English. However, the gist of his remarks were, Hey sahib, what is the use of staying in Kashi and roaming the ghats and gallies, taking pictures of sadhus and people? Did you feel the light from within, His grace and benediction?he asked. With the bare eye and bare heart you cannot. Find the inner eye and seek the heart within, you will succeed, he said. I felt small before the old soul!

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I had wasted the time of my stay at Kashi. Ramavatar, the old man, had opened my eyes! -K. Chandramouli, Kashi The City Luminous, 1995, p.xi

[Actually this passage resonates quite a bit with things I felt while in Varanasi. And still feel. He loves Kashi like he loves his mother, he hopes to gain sagacity by writing about her, and an old man with the name of a god gave him advice which showed him the way to insight. For him, it was an Uttar Pradesh bhaiya whose name means something like Vishnu in his form as the god Rama; for me it was a Japanese shiatsu therapist with the name Shiva, plus a Japanese ending: Shivata. The irony of this took me ten years to realize, but hey. Sagacity is a time-based process.]

As history passes, Varanasi smiles, and smiling survives the mutation of Time. Time the Fearsome (Kala-Bhairava) is the Guardian Angel of Varanasi.

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Ganga Morning acrylic on board 2002

Ganga Afternoon acrylic on board 2002

Ganga Night acrylic on board 2002

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The life throb of other ancient cities touches us, if at all, very faintly. Names such as Tutenkhamen, Sargon, Gudea [sic], Nebuchadnezzar, Assurbanipal, Shehrezadi, - the Hsias, the Chous, China names that made history in the East and the West, soothe our chronicle-loving ears with faint melodies wafted from a very distant past. The sounds, and the associate pictures lift us away from our fevered existence and mental maladies, and carry us to other times and other livings. When man thinks of the past, he permits himself the luxury of a little roominess, and advantage of spaciousness. The distant past breathes of romance and freedom. The very unreal-real nature of pasts hoariness covers over strained nerves with a kind of drugged dream. But Varanasi in comparison is more hardy, stable, and grotesquely stubborn. Varanasi is matter of fact, and a sheave of fiction. Varanasi is orthodox unorthodox. Varanasi is die-hard, stubborn, liberal and informal. Varanasi is, because Varanasi has always been there, a mortally immortal city, a wounded defiance, a challenge to Time. But the tragedy is that we have been living in poorer times, when piety is a dying cause, faith an anathema, and soul a haunting chimera. The changes in our times have hit Varanasi hard; and in hitting Varanasi hard it has hit our soul. Our present has become a threat to our future. We had been accustomed to live in hopes. Now we live in fear and frustration. Stunned by entirely undeserved heavy and fast blows from a stark modern technocratic system, humanity helplessly stands amidst a shambles of its dream palaces. The cherished hopes for Man lies [sic] in splinters like fallen chandeliers. Man gropes and grovels amidst the ruins of his own making, looking for a spark of light. Harassed by fear, choked by sulphurous skies, haunted by planned but meaningless devastation and mass murders, organized by systems perfected through science, Man stands at a lands end, and faces a traumatic situation of cliff hanging brinkmanship. And this is the kind of life we propose to bequeath our posterity. It is a future killed by the present. We look for a god that is not. Like Jerusalem Undelivered we look for a Varanasi that is not, and yet is. We search for a faith lost through overspreading; and our widowed hopes reach for a new redemption named Varanasi. Varanasi retains that lost soul, despite the thrashings she has undergone. In searching for the lost Varanasi we search for our last [sic?] souls. -Brajamadhaba Bhattacharya, Varanasi Rediscovered, 1999, pp. 4-5.

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[Well, its certainly another extreme from the cautious pronouncements of Rajendra Pandey. On the other hand, this book was published when Sri Bhattacharya was 89 years old, having been born in Varanasi in 1910, spent most of a teaching career in Trinidad and Guyana, written 30 other books, many in Bengali, and not excluding the 2-volume Saivism and the Phallic World, as well as a book on Tantra. To say that his style is flowery and declamatory would not be inaccurate, but to deny its truth would be shortsighted. The world is changing, yes. Humankind, in the years of Sri Bhattacharyas life, has done some horrible, despicable and soul-sickening things to itself and the planet, of this there can be no doubt. On the other hand, not everyone is cowering in fear or hiding their faces from the skies. People are dancing in clubs, watching TV with their families, and learning how to meditate and be creative. I can understand an older person throwing up his or her hands in horror, particularly at the end of a long life during so much turbulent change; but to throw out the baby with the bath water is a disservice to both baby and water. I think Varanasi has something to contribute to the global community, or at least those among it who feel drawn there. In my research I have come to realize that Benares isnt the only pilgrimage destination in the worldthere are mountains, springs and crags throughout the world where the pilgrim can go on a journey of self-knowledge and renewal. Varanasi has been that for me in my life. Im not sure if the experience in other places of power is the same, or if theres any point in comparing them. As my advisor, David Lieberman said to me, Varanasi is every city. Is it? The many being the One? To me, that is an open question there is no doubt that by studying Benares, I have come to better understand every other city because Kashi formed around a watercourse and trade routes, shifted place over time, withstood successive invasions and demolitions, and is home to numerous cultures and religions who must co-exist in this way she is similar to other great cities. But there is still something in her alleyways and traffic, commerce and religion that is singular, enormously different, disturbing and valuable. The answer as to what that energy may be is, perhaps, impossible to utter. But the question as to the nature of Varanasis present existence, is very relevant indeed.]

As members of a community we naturally hold on to the ancient. Our past is our support, root, faith, bastion and escape at the same time. Our past is a dreamland we want to visit again and again. But Varanasi is more than a belief and escape. It is as firm as a living faith. If we have to continue and live, once in our life we have to feel in our fevered nerves the bygone spirit of Varanasi. In the name Varanasi coexist peace and logic, the ancient and the living, fanaticism and liberalism. The lonely, the crowdy, the purifying, the petrifying, the elevating, the degrading, the stubborn, the relaxed, the firm, the crumbling, all thrive side by side in Varanasi.

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Alley, 1996

[Odd how similar this is to lists I made while I was there.] Varanasi is Times caravanserai. [What does he mean? The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives caravanserai as meaning an inn in eastern countries where caravans rest at night, an inn or a hotel. Thats fine but what does it mean that time stays there for a while? Is even Time taking a breather in Varanasi?] Like love, Varanasi too has passed through its inevitable phases of wax and wan [sic], new and old, dream and trance, faith and skepticism, life and death, promise and betrayal. The price that modern life has been called upon to pay for a quiet simple existence is too dear. Dear because life has lost its essential value. Life is held too cheap. [Kvetching. Still, he may have a point, if what he means is that no-one will even consider living without all the labour-saving devices that take up so much time in our lives; automobiles, cell phones, computers and so on, each of them potentially a money pit, nerve-grater, cancer-giver, and distancing device between us and our fellow human beings. On the other hand, automobiles take us much farther than we would have gone, cell phones keep us connected to loved ones no matter where we are, and computers put millions of hours of research and cataloguing at our fingertips instantly. Mobility, communication and speed of access; to what end? I mean, other than a spot of style and fun.]

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But are not ruins the ideal fulfillment of all vaunted designs? Is not cynicism the ultimate of religious fervour? Ruins tempt and urge discovery. But is indeed discovery relevant? Homers Odysseus-complex, so eloquently and picturesquely versed, finally touches a white truth that there is indeed nothing to discover. Man and nature basically remain unaltered. Yet Varanasi demands discovery. In discovering Varanasi we discover a human heritage, for all the ancient prehistoric human habitations, Varanasi alone remains fresh and bustling, and compels attention. Why? * * *

Because in Varanasi the common mans good and evil has got so mixed up that it is difficult to pick clean values without colliding with the crossbreeds of ancient cants, and not too ancient credos. Varanasis long history ideologically presents a sordid picture of ruins of many futures. The durability of Varanasis reputation is based on peoples faith in reality of values. There is an allurement inherent in subjectivity of thinking. This leads us to reflect on the interplay of belief and faith. In its turn, this again compels thought to determine the role of values in seeking a peaceful life. Varanasi still assures and guarantees peace, the last quest of Man. Amidst all these contradictory but absorbing facets Varanasi, the Eternal, retains her undying virtue of continuity. It emanates a message that still lures the sick and the spirited, the demented and the meditative, the despaired and the reject, the scholarly and the religious, the idealist and the cynic. This is why Varanasi still continues to be the most attractive and compulsive must in a tourists calendar and a pilgrims itinerary. It is simultaneously a retreat for a recluse and a hermit, and a diversion for the eccentric and the pervert. [Hmmlets see I think Im somewhere in one or two places on these lists...] Weird sex, filthy lanes, indiscriminate crowds, vulgar decay, open raw filth rotting by baskets of flowers and trays of food, - verily Varanasi is a many-breasted Artemis. At every twist and turn cats, curs, cows and crooks unconcernedly cohabit with priests, paupers, princes and prostitutes. By park-corners, lane-bends and river banks a thug dramatizes, a bereaved weeps, a bull ambles by, or a mad man howls obscenities. A hearse passes, while a wedding process merrily winds along, beating drums and blaring brass trumpets. Mad dervishes sing their charming melodies. Bereaved widows howl their dirges. But unconcerned, the hot pastry sellers hawk their wares. A blind singer seeks a copper; a pious seeks a lingam; and a fraud looks for its latest victim. Values brush shoulders in the labyrinthine past, and confusing present of Varanasi. The contemplative, the spiritual, the abnegated, the emancipated bathe in closest proximity with the dirty, the rustic, the beggarly, the sick and the maniac. Differences of sex and age, of sectarian exclusiveness and religious distinctions get

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merged in the constant flow of the blue waters, of the sacred Ganga, - cool, deep, perennial and primordial. [Blue?] Varanasi is Ganga, Ganga is Varanasi.

Ganga morning boat ride, 1996

Varanasi elevates, Varanasi depresses. [Thats certainly true. Especially in my 2001 journals, the rollercoaster veers up and down from hour to hour.] Varanasi is free and gay. Varanasi is desperate and morbid. Lumbering bulls, dilettante donkeys, degraded lepers, comic monkeys, coiling cobras, illusive soothsayers, pestering beggars, apathetic clairvoyants dreamily stream past the crowded lanes with supreme unconcern Varanasi rejects all forms. [Form is emptiness, emptiness form/ the same is true of feeling, thought, impulse and consciousness the Mahaprajnaparamita Hridaya Sutra, or Heart Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism.] Varanasi was born old. Age has not forsaken her youth never touched her; time has not withered her; exposure has not robbed her of hidden charms. No brush of Turner ever played on the mystiques of her river front. Cold cameras could not contain her soul, or cover her openness. Repetitions have failed to rob her of her charms. Time has failed to make her go stale, lose her delicate savours, or pale her native hot tang. The magic of Varanasi continues to bewitch equally a hard core urban cynic, a know-all university archaeologist, a philosopher, a scholar, a sage, a meditator, a nautchgirl, and an enlightened saint.

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[I know hes starting to repeat himself, but its amazing how long he can go on for; and its starting to attain a certain incantatory quality, almost like religious ritual recitation, wouldnt you say?] Staying in Varanasi is a spell-stunned experience in a Time-capsule organized by a spiritual Hitchcock. Over all these phases, hangs of [?] a powerful human drama, like the lighted ceiling of a modern theatre, the unseen but enlightened Angel of religion and piety. For in spite of whatever contrary has been said about it, mans urge for a religious relief is as true as mans response to pain. Steady devotion confers peace on a beleaguered soul. As long as man would need survival, man would look for a religion of his own. Religion is fundamentally the lonely mans only companion. Loneliness is the ultimate of human living. Loneliness is a basic ingredient for creativity. What man lives by in his lonelier hours is a mans personal religion. Religion is a shrine of survival where man has to provide his own light. The subjective idealism of religion alone has discovered, maintained and preserved the moral vista of values, without which religions powerful authority would crumble to a handful of dust. The overcrowded loneliness of Varanasi acts for the religious as a cave does for a yogi. -B. Bhattacharya, Ibid., pp. 5-8.

[Amazingly and beautifully argued. Particularly the closing image of the crowd as cave. Left to quote is Richard Lannoy, the author who wrote the largest book on Varanasi I could find; he was a photojournalist in the Palestinian refugee camps shortly following the creation of independent Israel after World War Two. Finding the experience harrowing, he went to Varanasi in the late 1950s and stayed there for long periods of time through the 50s and 60s. Being a photographer, he took many photos of Benares, and tried to capture some of her essence, at least as much as he could with a camera and a foreign birth. He returned to the city in 1997, took more shots, and produced the book I am about to quote from, Benares Seen From Within. Many, many interesting points, and an apt wrap-up for Book One of this study:]

The real past of Benares is a past of the mind, upon which nobody sets any store other than its capacity to inspire the present. Its imperishable elements are moments of human experience. In fact, despite pitiable few material remains from its more ancient past, the eternal moments of the city are recorded in the written word, embodied in extraordinarily durably, still potent, sacred sites, and evoked by a few surviving art treasures of exceptional quality. On the other hand, these moments of heightened

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experience which I call true sacred drama can be recorded photographically even at this eleventh hour, just before the citys continuous way of life finally dissolves altogether. Living among the people of this extraordinary city opened my eyes to levels of psychological and spiritual awareness which we in the West, with our more externalized preoccupations, had thrust into the unconscious. Although the citys various belief systems and their respective symbolism are uniquely Indian, Benares has a way persuading one to confront hidden, but universal, human proclivities. Lewis Mumford, author of the magisterial The City in History, I met at the time of his lecturing at the London ICA in 1951. My point of departure for my study of Benares is a one-word concept used by Mumford to characterize the energy universally at the heart of urban culture: the tendency of urban peoples to generate cultural implosion. He shows how the ancient city concentrates certain spiritual powers, powers of higher potency and greater duration, of wider cosmic significance, than the ordinary processes of life. Mumford was adamant in his insistence that the first germ of the city is the ceremonial meeting place that serves the goal of pilgrimage. This is the essence of Benares culture and its sets the parameters of the present book. -Richard Lannoy, Benares Seen From Within, 1999, pp. 10-11.

[As I said earlier, Lannoy sees the Benares way of life as in its eleventh hour, and dissolving. He arrived for his latter visit to the city one year after my first visit, 1996. So, he is the first author with whom my experience of Varanasi dovetails. What was, to me, the tremendous excitement of discovery, was, to him, the poignantly sad exercise of documenting an endangered species. Well what can I say? The river of time does not stand still, even if, at Varanasi, it flows in the opposite direction. Nothing is permanent, is the Buddhist aphorism, save for impermanence. Still, there is some human agency involved.]

On my first visit to the city I purchased in the bazaar for a few pence a remarkable pilgrim map of Benares. This map, reproduced here, was just one variant in a series of similar cheap maps that were popular items of purchase among pilgrims. This map was a revelation to me, the first clue I stumbled on which indicated the true, but at the same time hidden, significance of Benares. Since I was already familiar with a medieval map of Jerusalem in the British Museum that was similarly organized axially, I could tell that whoever had executed this Indian map envisaged the sacred city of Shiva (seated lower right) as a circular microcosm, a structured mandala, a diagram of a divine entity as a paradigm of wholeness. A mandala, which literally means circle, is a diagram of the Cosmos, a centre, or that which surrounds, bounded by walls, with entrances at the four cardinal points. The word, cosmos, synonymous with universe,

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expresses the idea of an ordered and structured whole. The city of Benares is a mandala of the Cosmos. All the citys religious activity, and a great deal of its domestic life, its professional commitments, roles and responsibilities, its art and its world of learning are in some way or other informed by that mythical understructure. To put it plainly: the meaning of life for the citizens of Benares is to be found embedded in the cosmological understructure. Since the first millennium BC, possibly for much longer, the gods have represented and dramatized the entirely divinely ordered scheme of things, the cosmic environment inhabited by humans. Furthermore, human selfhood was also looked on as inseparable from the cosmic. Religion supplied humans with the means to identify individual and societal destinies with cosmic forces through the practice of ritual. And this is the aspect of the old integral Benares way of life which is still very much alive in the midst of chaotic decay. Metaphysically, even psychologically, at the heart of things it is now as it ever was: the self, the city, and the cosmos. . When I first reproduced the pilgrim map in The Speaking Tree in 1971 among other mandala-type symbols, the identity of Benares as cosmogram was not widely recognized. Hitherto, the citys status as a spiritual capital was seen by historians as little more than a coincidence of geography, commerce and learning. Its unitary base was ignored. Many strands of thought converged to assist a major shift of focus, including the popularization of such ideas as the Jungian archetype. The cosmic symbolism of the city as well as its physical structure and layout within the encircling pilgrims way, its privileged status as the chosen city of Shiva, an abode of all the gods, and contained of the whole world, lent itself rightly to being seen as the archetype which surfaces in every religious culture: the Centre of the World. This claim was originally made at a very early stage in the citys history and has been validated throughout India for a very long time. -Richard Lannoy, Ibid., pp. 440-441.

[Getting closer, much closer to what I felt the first time I arrived there, Richard Lannoy has also done what I am doing: retracing the paper pilgrimage footsteps of all the authors who have written on Varanasi, and then synthesizing what of them makes sense to him in his attempt to understand the effect the city has on him; or, Exactly what is it that is special about Benares that it can elicit so much attention worldwide? (Ibid., p. 437.) He cites the city as mandala, vis--vis the Panchakroshi pilgrimage circuit and its attendant diagrams, which Prof. Rana P. B. Singh describes and explains at great length in his own work. And Lannoy writes about everything, every conceivable topic that could be addressed, from the historic to the religious to the political to the cultural, ancient to present. Amazing! (And yet, like trying to understand any city as a totality, some things slip through. Nita Kumars attempts to interview metal workers as they were banging at the forge, the Dutch authors translation of Hindi dramas about the dark underbelly of

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Benares from four hundred years ago, Cohens work with the untouchables on the south side of the Asi endless microzoom.) And its exhausting. And a bit too much, at least for one sitting, or even ten or fifteen sittings. And I wonder where all of this explaining ultimately leads whether the initial experience, which had all the seeds within it of this further unfolding and realization, isnt enough. But here I am, doing it. Because its what Im doing. And yes, I will go back, if I can, to experience some more of the mystery which cant be, and yet must be, explained. The least I can do is to establish a guess as to how Benares got this way.]

Benares is what it is now because of its pilgrim circuits, interlinking shrines and temples, and the powers that manifest in them to different degrees. Kashi is a Cosmogram where the light of the cosmos concentrates and illuminates a sacred territory. Eck has rightly remarked that Benares has rarely been an important political centre, and the rise and fall of kings through its long history have no role in the tale of the citys sanctity told by its own people It is not the events of its long history that make it significant to Hindus; rather it has such a long history because it is significant to Hindus. (from Banaras: City of Light p. 5, by Diana L. Eck.) In contrast to its historical role as political centre, the uniqueness of Benares lies in the spatial alignments and structure that developed outside the normal parameters governing society. It is accessible to everyone regardless of caste specifically during the time of pilgrimage, when all normal distinctions are in abeyance. [Thats funny that exactly describes the experience of backpacking, too. There I was, in 2005, stuffed into the egg carton dormitory with 20 boys and girls from Korea, Israel, the USA, Australia, Japan with the Ganges river through the barred window, a stones throw from our sleeping heads, in the restless darkness.] There are five popular pilgrimage circuits which make the web of the cosmogram. Along with their related shrines and sacred spots they all represent some aspect of the mancosmos relationship. [And voila, thank you Mr. Lannoy, some of the values which I hold most dear, whether in regards to enjoying the city or aspiring toward enlightenment: a) the spatial alignments and structures that develop outside the normal parameters governing society. b) things which are accessible to everybody regardless of caste. c) the moments when all normal distinctions are in abeyance.] The presentation of wholeness the representation of the cosmos leads to the formation of a sacred geometry referring to the spiritual and archetypal dimensions of pattern/relationship, order/sequences and temporality/change. This frame forms a harmonious and sensual bond between man and his habitat the city.

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-Lannoy, Ibid., p. 443.

[Relating it back to the city]

Benares, in its unimaginable antiquity, belongs not just to Hindus, but to Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Christians. But it also belongs to everybody. I have come to the conclusion after many years that Benares is not jus a physical locality, a cultural entity, a historical marvel of continuity and a city on the Ganges. It extends deep into the collective consciousness of mankind, an archetype which infiltrates into the dreams of millions without its name even being known to them. Strangely, the closer and more detailed ones acquaintance with it all becomes, the more its unique particularity is revealed as based on the universal. A sacred city dreamed into existence over the ages, it is also a state of mind. As an old saying puts it: Benares is wherever you are. -Lannoy, Ibid., p. 449.

Bicycle repairman, Bengali Tola, 1996

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BOOK TWO: Places Within the Body

Varanasi, May, 2007

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Tirtha and Mandala

Pakalu & his younger brother fishing in the morning, 2007

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Mon. Jan. 15/07

9:30 pm

Snow has finally fallen last night, marking the first snowfall of this winter in Toronto. I am sitting feeling the heat from an old iron radiator, and Im perched on a roller chair on the warped wooden floor of this supposed-to-be mansion. It was apparently built a hundred years ago as speculation by a Jewish industrialist, on the edge of what was then a valley with a creek at the bottom of it. But the house and its neighbours (two others) were never used as mansions. The speculator went bankrupt, and the very first lodgers lived in single rooms subdividing what could have been regal spaces. The creek, Garrison Creek, was sunk into a sewer by city officials in the 1890s. Its valley was largely filled in with dirt from the subway dig in the 1950s. The house has now been owned for nearly thirty years by Larry, who spends half of every year in Latvia. He isnt Latvian. His ex-wife lives in the former stable house behind the supposed-to-be mansion. We live enfolded in time. It was by accident that I found out I am living in effect by a river, albeit one buried in a sewer. Since going to architecture school I have learned more about how my own city was founded by a body of water, bracketed by two rivers, named after rivers in England: the Humber and the Don. I have also learned how a system of ravines created by glacial runoff from the last Ice Age interrupts the Cartesian grid which Torontos military civilizers imposed. And my sojourn at the University of Torontos Master of Architecture program has enabled me to study the history and development of Benares, aka Varanasi, which I first visited nearly eleven years ago, in April of 1996. We are enfolded in change. My goal is simple: to understand how Varanasi instructs me as to the nature of ultimate reality. Reality is revealed in specific details, or specificity, said Adam Gonya, a friend of mine. So thats my question: how does a particular place function as a focal point for the sacred? Why that place, on that river? Actually, I dont really care why. Just, what does that city have to teach me?

________________________________________

And so I will engage on this, Book Two of a maybe endless search and fascination.

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The city with its divine inhabitants may be likened to the symbolic structure of the mandala. In a religious or ritual sense, a mandala is a sacred circle that represents the entire universe, its powers, its interrelations, and its grounding center. A mandala may be painted on canvas, like the vibrant, teeming mandalas of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. It may be drawn in the dust of the earth, as are the ritual circles of the Tantric tradition. A mandala may be constructed in architecture, as in the symbolic worlds of the Buddhist stupa or the Hindu temple. And a mandala may be envisioned in the divine plan of a city, as in Kashi. All such mandalas share a common symbolic structure. They show the plan of the entire universe, with its galaxies and its gods. The borders of the universe are guarded by fearsome and protective deities. The orientation of the world is emphasized by the presence of the four or eight directions, who stake out its farthest limits. And at the center of the mandala is a particular god or a particular Buddha who, like the still centering-point of the architects compass, grounds the ever-turning, everchanging multiple worlds of the periphery. The city of Kashi, with all its divine inhabitants, is such a mandala. The radius of its sacred circle is a distance of five kroshas, about ten miles, and around its borders are a multitude of guardian deities. Within this outermost circle are increasingly smaller concentric circles, having Shiva as their common center, especially Shiva as he abides in the citys inner sanctum, Vishvanatha Temple. The orientation of the city is emphasized by the presence of the eight directional deities, who are said to have become directional guardians here, at the source and center of all space. All the sages, all the tirthas of India, and all the gods have taken their positions here, within the sacred circle of Shiva. - Diana L. Eck, Banaras: City of Light. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 146-147.

The Tibetan Buddhist Yamantaka Mandala

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According to the Buddhist Tantra, the names of places called kshetra, peethas and so on, are mentioned for the benefit of simple fools who wander about the country. They are, therefore, interpreted as symbols for places within the body, that is to say, they are external equivalents of that which exists within. The beautiful verse underlying this theme reads as follows: When the mind goes to rest, The bonds of the body are destroyed, And when the one flavour of the Innate pours forth, There is neither outcaste nor brahmin. Here is the sacred Jamuna, and here the river Ganges, Here are Prayaga and Benares, here are Sun and Moon. Here I have visited in my wanderings shrines and such places of pilgrimage, For I have not seen another shrine, blissful like my own body.

-Baidyanath Saraswati, Traditions of Tirthas in India: The Anthropology of Hindu Pilgrimage, 1983, p. 11

Morning Ghat, May, 2007

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To dwell in a tirtha for nine months with a vow not to cross its sacred territory is called garbha-vasa. Living in a holy place for nine months is like living in a mothers womb (garbha), and hence this duration of pilgrimage is called garbha-vasa. The one who has performed this efficacious rite is freed from the cycle of re-birth.

-Baidyanath Saraswati, Ibid., 22.

Creating a tirtha by deifying land or natural objects: A large area is sanctified as tirtha. It retains its sacred character permanently. The sacred dwellings such as temples built on this place are of lesser significance. When temples in Kashi were destroyed by the Pathan and Moghul rulers, the tirtha maintained its sanctity irreducibly. It is said that there is not even as much as sesame seed in Kashi which has not a linga (the emblem of Shiva) every dust particle of this place is sacred. Thus, the sacred is in-built with the natural objects and places, and hence the importance of geographical categories like mandala, kshetra, etc. This trait of deifying the horizontal space is peculiar to North India. -Baidyanath Saraswati, Ibid., 37.

For the benefits of those who are unable to travel any long distance on pilgrimage, the tirtha comes to their door. And hence, there is a Dakshina-Kashi in the South, Uttara-Kashi and Gupta-Kashi in the northern Himalaya, a Gupta-Kashi in the east in Bhuhaneshwara, a western Kashi in Nasik (also Paithan) in Maharashtra, and one more Kashi in Mandi in western Himalaya. Pilgrimage to each of these places is endowed with the merits of the sacred journey attached to the Kashi of Vishwanath in Uttar Pradesh. The Puranas hold that Kashi and Kanchi are like the two eyes of Shiva. Similarly, there are several Ganga rivers, each flowing in a large area and thus covering the whole of India. The one who is physically incapable to bathe even in a nearby Ganga may drink its water or just remember it in order to be freed from sins at once. The Vishnu Purana (II.8.120-1) says: The Ganga purifies all beings from day-to-day when its name is heard, when one desires to see it, when it is seen or touched, or when its waters are drunk, or when one plunges into it, or when utters or sings its name; when people utter the name Ganga, even though living at a distance of hundreds of yojanas, their sins, accumulated in three births, are destroyed. Hence, Ganga is accessible every where, in all circumstances. -Baidyanath Saraswati, Ibid., 41.

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Ganga, 2007

[The interesting aspects here are that a tirtha can be created; and that once it is, the designation and its effect are permanent. In addition to which, given the proper dedication and devotion of the participant, the benefits of experiencing the tirtha can be unfolded, like a tent, anywhere. It makes sense when you credit the power of the mind, that is our mind, to create circumstances and determine how they will affect us. By focusing respect and belief on a river or mountain or temple, we benefit. Or, you can use your mind and body to heal your mind and body. Its the obverse of a victim mentality: instead of passively assuming the validity of excuses for eternal misery, you take the tools in your own hands and then use them to make the situation positive. This is not done in isolation from the natural powers that the earth has.]

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In the conspectus and conclusion in Part IV I have tried to listen to the mind of the Waters as an exemplary model for living in the world. But no one could force the Waters on someone else. The Waters reveal themselves or one looks for them. How can one interpret the Waters? Probably not at all. Avoiding the risk of destructive interpretation and who is not aware of the dangers lurking in any hermeneutic? I have taken recourse to an attempt at creative exploration and exposition of what the Waters say. The Waters think and, like any true symbol, have an opinion. That is why symbols make us too think.

-Frans Baartmans, Apah, the Sacred Waters: An Analysis of a Primordial Symbol in Hindu Myths, 1990, 4-5.

The space in the heart is the locus where is deposited all that is already ours or may be ours on any plane of experience. The intelligible plenitude inherent in what already is but not yet manifest, becomes so when the rock of the mind opens and the Waters flow.

Frans Baartmans, Ibid., 7.

The discovery of a design in the Universe relates Vedic-Indian society to it in a significant situation of being, meaning and truth. Why? They encounter an eventful universum by the accent of mutual receptivity and proximity between the totality of the universe and themselves. Their statements are no mere statements. They are acclamations, acknowledgements of the movements and the forces of life. What is the Vedic and later Indian vision for us, so-called Moderns? Nothing possibly, if we have lost the sense of surprise of the cycle of days and nights, droughts and floods, the flight of our planet and the circle of seasons. If we think that modern man especially Western modern man at present with all his gadgets and machinations is more than Man, then indeed the Vedic-Indian vision may seem to us a worn-out dress only to be shed. But if we think that Man is more than our own particular nook in the vast space of the Universes history, we might find in the Vedic Indian nonaggressive attitude towards the Universe and the world some explanation of our roots. And if we claim to want to be secular, then the saeculum, the ayus, the circle of seasons in the Universe, must be taken all the more seriously. - Frans Baartmans, Ibid., 8.

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Mythical consciousness is closely related to consciousness of the sacred. The sacred is not of necessity linked with organized religion. Religion is too limited a concept to accommodate the manifestations of the sacred. These are inexhaustible and transcend dogmatic and systematized belief in God, god or ghosts.

- Frans Baartmans, Ibid., 10.

[I agree with all of what he says, and in fact have said or felt all of it in some way, shape or form in the past year. All this study can do is pull strings together. Its enough. I may feel alone, in the day-to-day tug-and-pull of egos in the architecture studio, but these words of a man born in 1936 keep me company. I dont really know what the point of writing is, other than that I feel I must do it, and that time is short.]

Traveler descends to Ganga, 2007

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Such is the setting for a chapter on karma as the cosmic pilgrimage. Karma is not a fate, a deadening pre-destination but that what is to be done as the necessary and valid human existential reply to the Creators will and intention. I am the doer and I am the non-doer are equally an illusion if the agent does not put himself in a true perspective with regard to his being part and parcel of the cycles of the Universe and with regard to the claim he makes concerning what he does or does not. -Frans Baartmans, Ibid., 17.

[Karma as the cosmic pilgrimage! What a nice way of putting things! That is, ones duty, or personal legend (as Paulo Coelho puts it in The Alchemist, and no matter who doesnt like the book, hes right) is not only a sacred voyage undertaken for its purity and its own sake, but a sort of reason for living that is affecting the entire Universe, both symbolically and literally. Ut, the kettle is boiling.]

The promise of my survival and physical reappearance is the great lure! Karma, however, is not my survival, but the restoration of the Universal Totality asked from me. -Frans Baartmans, Ibid., 18.

Mans existence is founded upon a balance between two contrasting powers: eternity and finitude. Man, being body and soul, is the concretion of those two. He represents both. Man is a double entity, but one reality of eternal jnana [wisdom] and fleeting maya [illusion]. The possibility of a balance between the contrasting powers of eternity and finitude is successfully shown in the primary symbol of Apah, the Waters, as Vedic-Indian mind is the other complementary side of its rational-intellectual admission that the fundamental law of the Universe cannot be arrived at through only the rational mind. -Frans Baartmans, Ibid., 203.

[Right.]

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Alley to the River, 2007

Sunday, Jan. 21/07

Torontos situation between the Humber River and the Don River, analogue to Varanasis situation between the Varuna River and the Assi Stream, 2007

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Varanasi situated between two rivers: the Assi and the Varana (highlights mine)

Toronto situated between two rivers: the Humber and the Don (highlights mine)

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Tentative Project: Deify Don River through kshetra (ritual pilgrimage.) That is: meet the Don. See her waters, between sheet piles corrugated metal driven into riverbanks, placid flowing beneath pylons overholding the curves of bypasses unintentionally beautiful, cars a blip heartbeat of moved human cholesterol.

Overpass on the Don River, digital video still, Toronto, 2007

She says I reflect traffic. You listen to the Don. The river is a diachrometer of human growth along her banks. Or that is: without river, no city. Hence: river is city, city is river. Torontonians are ungrateful children, parasites clinging to Mother, choking her, dumping garbage into her. But Mother speaks always in a deep voice, which if you listen, also has something of danger. We will flood. Also, You will die. Do you want to listen to the voice of eternity, or not?

Graffiti on the Don River, digital video still, Toronto, 2007

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So, the human species gives meaning to this natural territory by intervention. Even so through built form the human can conceive of nature. Then, there is the question of being a custodian sure, we have an industrial heritage. Without it, we wouldnt be here. The railroad first brought large masses of people to Toronto in the 1850s and 60s, cut across the mouth of the Don, also raised a berm cutting off the downtown from the waterfront. It was all on reclaimed land, mind you. To care, we have to live post-industry. Through it all, however, I posit the truth being true. That is to say that the voice of God, gods, the Waters, water, will always have been the same. Its the choice of children to look beyond themselves and hear it.

Foot of the Don River at Lake Ontario, digital video still, Toronto, 2007

What this means, Im not sure. In India, as pointed out, deciding an area is sacred sacralizes it. But also, prior to that, it must also have had a power to it, some kind of crossing-over place where the underlying earth-energy was coming through the surface, a tirtha. No-one in India seems to be claiming that places outside India dont have tirthas. But they have managed to culturally incorporate tirthas into a cognitively and intuitively understood system of pilgrimage spots, visits to which guarantee a chance to accrue merit. Which is to say, experience of the divine is converted into a sort of cosmic cash, through which system you can acquire some sort of frequent flyer points or spiritual Air Miles. Ridiculous, but let us not forget: chicken or the egg.

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The River is always waiting for humans to experience her voice. Humans must create systems to understand. Human = construction.

Pulling into the Waterfront, Varanasi, 2007

All Im saying is that recognition of origins can do naught but humble us, also orient us. In a way, it sets us free. Because, if you tell a person, You are an energy form arising from the will of the Universe to know itself, and so is the rest of the Universe, it relieves you of the duty to worry about the narration of your culture, your country, your social class, your family, your profession, gender philosophers, popular culture or anybody else.

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It opens up to you what you already are, which innately has within it a will to achieve happiness. Getting to that entails, as Baartmans notes, an ability to let go of total rational structure and listen to intuition. He bewails the technological and the industrial. But technology and industry enable a framework for distribution of knowledge. That is, the bridge from which you look at the River, or the built-up shore, shows you the River. Its up to you to really listen.

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A map from 1887 showing the channelization of the Don River in Toronto, superimposed on its original bowed form. From Rick Bbouts excellent web article, QUEEN STREET: The life of a city stream: Of time & the river http://www.rbebout.com/queen/2pdon.htm , December 2001 / Last revised: November 13, 2002. Rick Bbout 2002 / rick@rbebout.com

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Im not sure where I fit into all of this, what I have to say to people cohered in clumps, nervous and therefore babbling about TV and clothing styles. Other than that, behaviour is purely that: an expression of the ultimate. We are the River!

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To understand the wholeness of cosmos man has developed a sense of its divine manifestation over the earth, and pilgrimage is accepted as the symbol of cosmic journey. The outermost sacred territory of Kashi is delineated by the Panchakroshi Yatra [pilgrimage] which is performed every year and attended by thousands of pilgrims. The study of sacred geography reveals several dimensions of understanding the deep cultural structure, experiential feelings and geomantic landscape of Varanasi. City in the ancient past is assumed to be the centre of cosmos, axis mundi, perceived and reflected in different contexts. In India, Panchakroshi Yatra is the only such territory where all the textual shrines are still existing and devotees pay visit to them on auspicious occasions as the purificatory rites. The fully developed mythology with respect to this sacred territory is narrated in a 16th century text, the Kashi Rahasya. Taking this text as base the sacred route, landscape and pilgrims involvements are narrated to understand the overall nature of human quest for his identity in the cosmos. With an unique amalgam of culture and landscape where faith and belief are the prime consideration, there emerges a new environment, theosphere to be interrupted in a better way in the frame of totality called as faithscape. - Rana P.B. Singh, Panchakroshi Yatra, Varanasi: Sacred Journey, Ecology of Place, and Faithscape. 1991, 1. 108

[Id say that, over the course of many books, years and authors, Prof. Singh is the one who really gets it and manages, creatively, to not only explain it but to tie together all the very many strands of Varanasis sacred space feeling and structure in a (mostly) readable and exciting way. But he couldnt have done it without Reverend Sherring and the rest, whom he in due course acknowledges. And I acknowledge him. And Lannoy, Saraswati, Eck and the rest. And now, further unraveling the connections of Varanasi to built form, Buddhism and life in the West, I might also explain that I have a Buddhist name, given to me when I took Buddhist precepts at the Zen Buddhist Temple in Toronto in summer of 1997 by Reverend Samu Sunim. My name is pronounced in Korean as Wondan. Written in Chinese characters, in my bad handwriting, it looks like this:

Circle

Mandala

As an old-fashioned, stone block name-stamp, purchased in Seoul, Korea, with the characters running from right to left, it looks like this:

Samu Sunim explained to us, as we took the four basic Buddhist precepts (not to take life, not to lie, not to take what isnt given, and to abstain from sexual misconduct), that our Buddhist name would have an outer, an inner, and a secret meaning. It was up to us in our lives and practice to uncover these meanings. The outer meaning of my name was given to me as Perfect Mandala, or Whole Mandala. When I wrote it on the blackboard for the Chinese students I was teaching at the time, they exploded in laughter and exclaimed, Circe Table! And I noticed on the Japanese money that the won character was yen in Japanese, the name for their currency, same to the Chinese currency, yuan, and the Korean currency, won, all of which mean circle.

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At any rate, such detective work aside, the relevance of my Buddhist name to this study of Varanasi is in its mandala application. Mostly because, as it turns out, according to Prof. Singh, mandala and Varanasi are very much connected.]

In Hinduism the spatial manifestation referring to the integration of the cosmos and human being is known as mandala which in ancient times incorporated to develop an ideal-city in accordance to the cosmological arrangement of space, better known as sacred space. The sacred space includes spaces that can be entered physically, as the outer geography of a holy land, imaginatively as the inner geography of the body in Tantric yoga, or visually, as the space of mandala (Brereton 1986: 526). With this manifestive sanctity, sacred space serves as means of communication with the gods forming a divine hierarchy (in Hinduism), and also as divine power which led to develop the tradition of pilgrimage in Hinduism with the motive of bhukti (religious benefit) and mukti (salvation from the transmigration). . Varanasi is one of the ideal-cities of celestial archetype where material expression to that of parallelism between macrocosmos and microcosmos are still existent (and referred as Kashi mandala). Its spatial framework is comparable to the diagrams in the construction of which art was not an aesthetic adventure, but technique in the service of liturgy (Wheatley 1969: 10). - Rana P.B. Singh, Ibid., 2.

[Thus, if it can be said western industrial cultures have forgotten the underlying energy frameworks of their landscapes, (i.e. the gods residing within them), then Varanasi as a still-existing and functional example of ideal-city mandala, can teach us something about how to realign with the wisdom we may have paved over and forgotten. Namely that of tradition, that which situates us, memory, and the lineage of teaching which is humanitys technology for positive evolution.]

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Sacred space. The same bells are at the entrance and exit, thus reminding the participant of how far they are from where they started, how close they are to leaving, and how their particular spot is similar to and different from every other spot on the circuit , 2007

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Ecology

Roadside faucet, Dasaswamedh Road, 1996

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Unconsciously we still know that the spirit of place is important to us. Now we must understand why and what it can tell us as we discover how to perceive it. -James A. Swan, 1991. Ed., The Power of Place. Quest Books, Illinois. (Quoted by Rana P.B. Singh, Ed.,Banaras [Varanasi]: Cosmic Order, Sacred City & Hindu Traditions, an Anthology of 20 Essays, 1993, 8.)

Varanasis unique spatial-environmental setting is the fundamental base for the growth of its distinct personality where the spirit of place is deeply rooted. For getting some insight of this power, a mass of sages, thinkers, ascetics, devotees and pilgrims have been coming to this city since ancient past. If Hindus have to choose the place of greatest spiritual merit, this city is the only place of holy order where wholeness emerges into a sacred territory. Various forms, patterns and ways of manifestation meet to transfer the macro-cosmos (celestial) into meso-cosmos (single shrine, or temple), thus ultimately and integrated structure is developed there. In the modern era of technocratic-cybernetic society, the question may be put on record that why to know such a city? Above all, since ancient past the basic human quest has been to know the place of man in the cosmic sphere. This is the city where traditions are continuously maintained and still alive in all its possible ways. Here emerges theology, faith, traditions, performances and the lifeworld all moving around the geomantic outline and faithscape drama of the city. To know our cultural heritage provides a key to understand our eternity of development. If present is the key to understand the past, the past would be the key to understand the future. In no way this ethics is an attempt to glorify our past, or to superimpose any dogma, rather it is a search in the spiritual dimension of human survival in terms of man-nature harmonic relationship. In this respect the ideal of deep sacred ecology refers to find true peace into harmony with the place where we live, as provoked by Carl Jung.

-Rana P.B. Singh, Ibid., 7.

[Carl Jungs name is often invoked in these discussions. So is Joseph Cambells.]

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Several years ago I had the pleasure of producing two public lecture programs for the noted mythologist Joseph Campbell. A special reward for this work was having dinner with Campbell. One evening I told him that I had been studying the meaning and value of place in human life as it seemed there was a loss of place consciousness in modern society. Campbell heartily agreed, and referred to the work of the East Indian scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy, who had pointed out that myths were frequently linked to certain places, and coined the phrase land-nam, a term derived from the Icelandic tradition of claiming ownership of a place through weaving together a mythic metaphor of plants, animals and geography of a place into a unique mythic story. I then asked Campbell if he had any special places. He thought for a moment, musing over a glass of French wine, and said that his three favourite places in the world were Delphi in Greece, Palenque in Mexico, and Lasceaux in France. When pressed as to why these places were important to him, after another draft of wine and some quiet reflection Campbell replied, Because I, Joe Campbell, felt more powerful there, and I dont know quite why.

-James A. Swan, Ed., Dialogues with the Living Earth: New Ideas on the Spirit of Place from Designers, Architects and Innovators, Introduction, 1996, 1.

[Felt more powerful there. Exactly. More yourself.]

The feeling of being in Varanasi, May, 2007

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People visit special places in hopes of special experiences inspiration, synchronicities, visions, dreams, encounters with animals, and even healings. I have interviewed well over a hundred people who have had unusual experiences while visiting special places. Anything is possible, but if you visit a place of power with respect and nothing out of the ordinary seems to happen, you did not do anything wrong. As Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones sings, You cant always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need. A miracle may happen when you are in a special place, but what seems to be often more important is what happens afterwards. Undertaking a pilgrimage to a special place is an invocation. It makes a statement that you wish to blend your personal presence with another presence, forming a unity that results in something larger than normal. Following a visit to a special place, sometimes there is an answer to your pilgrimage. It may be a phone call from someone, a creative insight, or a synchronous meeting with someone. If one believes that the earth is alive and that we are all part of a great golden chain of natural systems, then making a special effort to visit a sacred place is like a prayer. The Sufis, a mystical order of the Middle East, say that making a pilgrimage may make a good man better, but it may make a bad one better or worse, depending on the sincerity of his heart. In this age, when we have such great technological power, one learns from the special places of the earth that humility is always a good attitude to have when dealing with power.

- James A. Swan, Ibid., 10.

[A bit preachy, and a bit New Age-y, which encourages me to keep my distance; but, these stylistic qualms notwithstanding, all this endorsement of the benefits of pilgrimage draws me back in. It draws me in because no-one around me in 3-D space cares about or acknowledges the importance or validity of pilgrimage to a place of power. I undertook a pilgrimage to India in 2005, to see father-of-modernarchitecture Le Corbusiers design for the Punjab capital, Chandigarh, and the four most auspicious locations from the Buddhas lifetime: Lumbini (his birthplace, actually across the border in Nepal), Bodhgaya (place of his enlightenment), Sarnath (place of the first teaching, very near to Varanasi), and Kushinagar (his place of death.) My family was against the trip. The results were stupendous. To be fair to my family, they were against it partly because I didnt have any money, and I had to borrow it from them. Another reason was that I had already been to India three times. Could they possibly have understood what it was that drove me? No. But they could see how happy and well-adjusted I was after I got

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Chandigarh Legislative Assembly, 6:30 am, (a pilgrimage to Le Corbusiers Punjabi capital,) 2005

The Secretariat and empty fountain of the Assembly Building, Chandigarh, 2005

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back. On that trip I went to Varanasi twice. (These accounts are in Book One: Dogs Among Flowers and the Ashes of Corpses.) I found recently in the Rana P.B. Singh book that in 2001, at the time I was photograghed for the Hindi national daily, standing in the rain-produced confluence of the Godaulia nadi (stream) and the Ganga River at Dasaswamedh Ghat (apparently also an auspicious crossing, according to Diana L. Eck in Benares: City of Light), that particular month was ill-starred, paradoxically making it a meritorious time for pilgrimage, according to the astrologers. Did I know all this? No. Am I boring you? Maybe. But heres the crucial part. Moved by the eyes of my soul, I made decisions that others could not fathom. Yet, swaying like seaweed in the greater current, I was just dancing to the beat that rippled through me. Everyone has these resources available to them. Omens, personal legends, a quest, the voice of God, realization of the Ultimate. These are all ways of describing it. I get the feeling that rigorous academics are made uncomfortable by firm positive assertions, re: a purpose to life or design in the universe, or even a definite realizable Truth. But, like human building, academic research is a platform from which to measure the profound.]

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Biscuit dog on the ghat, May, 2007

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The quest of man in search of his identity and connectedness with the nature results to man-environment interaction through the media of culture and cognition. Sensory experiences and resultant responses take their shape in terms of a screen of knowledge and values, belief and emotion. In such a process world vision and views and spatial manifestation of cosmology are ways of systematic representation of spatial experience, memory, imagination and cultural exposure. The deep rootedness of mans interaction with nature shaped through the changes in space and time and ultimately forms the idea of landscape as structured, expressive, aesthetic, value-preserving and giver of sacramental feelings. In span of time man has developed symbolic structure to make his feelings and values in an organized form, that is how monuments are accepted as historical heritage. Of course even without humanized structure, there also exist distinct places and natural scenes which are searched by man as sacred places. - Rana P.B. Singh, Varanasi, a World Heritage City: Frame, and Historical Accounts, Ibid., 297.

[Prof. Singh is very perceptive. It brings me to a pass where I must confess, or ask, whether the constant reading and note-taking is necessary. Nothing Ive read isnt something I didnt already know, on some level. Its nothing special, I think, about me: whats true is true and has been true before I read about it. To read someone elses words on the subjects of sacred places, genius loci, the importance of cultural memory and reverence to placemaking, the travesty of ecological ignorance and damage, also from that of divorce from nourishing energy pathways in the earth I like to read about these, because so few people around me seem to feel they have the time to absorb these ideas, or do the footwork to open a dialogue with and sensitivity to their bodies, and thus their inherent life-energy. On the other hand, what is it theyre so busy doing? Watching TV, surfing the Internet, listening to music, convincing others how knowledgeable they are about _______________, desperately trying to shore up a defense against threats such as a lack of AutoCAD skills, or not having fulfilled some professors assignment sheets provisos Im not convinced. But I dont want to come off as some pompous, insufferable New Age bore, forever finger-wagging and lecturing about awakening to reality and healing negative emotional patterns. I have to take up the sword, that is, as when in 1997 I proclaimed to all who knew me that Id had enough of just reading about meditation, I had to learn how to do it. I was right then, and Im right now. I have to go back to Varanasi.

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I have to go there and fulfill part of a bargain with the Universe. If its true that all of us are linked together, the movement of one participant to a sacred city to achieve enlightenment is nothing but beneficial. Please understand: a) b) c) d) history is not over. Youre in it. You are not alone even as a succession of selves. There is a force of love in the world. The universe as we perceive it is a construction. By practicing awareness, you can see or experience more and more of the dynamics of that construction, and begin to intuit what lies beyond it. And heal it with forgiveness. e) When you engage in this process, you will become more compassionate and able to help others.]

Kill therefore with the sword of wisdom the doubt born of ignorance that lies in thy heart. Be one in self-harmony, in yoga, and arise, great warrior, arise. - Bhagavata Gita, 4.42. (as per Singh, Ibid., 297.)

Ganga from the rooftop of Homy Paying Guest House, May, 2007

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Russell places the origin of Western mysticism (which [he] calls logical mysticism, because it embodies theories of logic) as far back in history as Parmenides and as recent as Hegel and /[in] modern times [.] Russell suggests that mystical philosophy, in all ages and all parts of the world, is characterized by certain beliefs, all contained in a religious doctrine: This includes: The belief in insight, as contrasted with discursive analytical knowledge. The belief in a wisdom, penetrating, and coercive that differs from the slow and fallible study of outward appearance through a science relying wholly on the senses. The mystic person can become capable of certain experiences that leave a strange feeling of unreality in common objects. Experiences that are accompanied by a loss of contact with daily things, in which the solidity of the world around one is lost, and the soul seems ready in utter loneliness, for a kind of breakthrough experience, reaching out of its inner depths, in a dance of fantastic phantoms which have hitherto appeared as independently real and living (Russel, B., 1918. Mysticism and Logic, and Other Essays, London & New York: Longmans, Green & Co., p. 9.) This type of experience is often the means by which a mystic reaches for truth that which he doubts about common knowledge preparing the way for the reception of what seems a higher wisdom. There is doubt occurring at the beginning, a doubt that many might not pass beyond; but for mystics, this is the gateway to an ampler world.

The mystic insight begins as a sense of mystery, the unveiling of a hidden wisdom, which, in turn, becomes real. The sense of revelation comes earlier than any definite belief. Thus, the definite beliefs for mystics are reached because of their reflection upon the sparkle experienced at the moment of insight or revelation. - Ashgar T. Minai, School of Architecture & Design, College of Engineering, Architecture & Computer Sciences, Howard University. Mysticism, Aesthetics, and Cosmic Consciousness: A Post-Modern Worldview of Unity of Being. 2003, 183-184.

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Out of the darkness and striving toward the light - for a brief second Varanasi, 1996.

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I saw the light along the Ganga bank: I suddenly realized that was my home, where the earth spirit meets the divine the revelation of life. Alas! Now the feeling of attachment is superseded by consumerism. Attachment to a place is a prerequisite for developing a sense of the spirit of place. This sense of attachment provides emotional and spiritual sustainability to both individuals and the community. Attachment is an existential and phenomenological experience. The key to the future is in the commitment of human habitants living there who maintain this sense of attachment. Reverence the deeper vision of the sanctity of life; responsibility the connecting link between ethics and rationality; frugality grace without waste; and ecojustice all form the minimal core of intrinsic values for right conservation and preservation of the spirit of sustainability. In fact, reverential development is unitary in the broadest and deepest sense, combining reverence and sanctity of life with contemporary economic, social, moral, cultural and traditional premises to bring peace and harmony with nature. The fact that they may be difficult to implement in practice in no way negates their importance and desirability. - Rana. P.B. Singh, The Ganga and the Spirit of Sustainability in Hinduism: a Study of Banaras (Varanasi) in Dialogues with the Living Earth: New Ideas on the Spirit of Place from Designers, Architects, & Innovators, James & Roberta Swan, Eds., 1996, 105.

Morning ghat, May, 2007

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[In this essay Prof. Singh finally lets the cat out of the bag: all is not pearly in Banaras. The water is loaded with raw sewage and chemical effluents from Prof. Singhs own beloved co-cultural participants. He needs help. The Ganges needs help. I would like to help the Ganges. I would like to enable Westerners to visit and appreciate Varanasi. With reverence and a sense of responsibility. Well well well Jnanavapi Well.]

I have been thinking a lot about Toronto history lately. As a youth I felt some voice of Toronto Personified by monotonous surfaces which others didnt even notice or care about. Comforting, in their blandness. Football fields, stretches of road by the slaughterhouse, supermarket parking lots, snow on a high schools hill sparkling and banal, crisp.

Toronto street scene, 2007

It was boring. But a good, reliable ground, I thought, for flights of fancy. But, looking at Toronto today, I can see that the population is like a river that has overswollen its banks. There wont be a sense of place here for some time to come. Simply there are too many people from too many places and cultures too recently arrived to come to any consensus, or sense of continuity. Instead you get the cult of insular self-concern. Wait sir, wait sir You better wait, sir. -The Fall, Behind the Counter 123

So, its a quandary stay here and try to participate in this landscape with the wits I have, helping the people I can, or pissing off to India to navel-gaze as a perpetual foreigner and unofficial India, never-accepted Hindu. But but divinity is divinity. Banaras is Banaras. Beckoning beckoning Reckoning. -The Fall, Reckoning I know the pieces are here I just have to play them. Ive gotten this far the U of T has a great library, and the 24-hour architecture studio is the closest thing to a community setting for artistic endeavour, or village I could have asked for, replete with debates on Marxism at two in the morning; and a beautiful, gracious girlfriend not a stones throw away in Chinatown.

As you whinge and groan in your room I feel alive when I sing this tune. Hey student! Hey student! Hey student! You gotta get it through your head. -The Fall, Hey Student! This time, this place, this body, this mind, this heart, Saraswathi, Buddha, Ganga, Om.

Pandey Ghat evening 2007

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Saturday, Jan. 27/07 Thesis: a) There is such a thing as spirit of place. b) Earlier humans tended to react to it. c) Religions, rituals and myths grew around the spirit of place of various locations. d) Spirit of place came to feature prominently in the foundation of cultures. e) Building at, near or around a place with a marked character or spirit has often happened. f) Humans, having recourse to technology to further the pursuit of satisfying their needs, have developed methods of extracting materials and energy from the earth in such a way as to have forgotten senses which relied directly on the body and its innate capabilities. Perhaps we have gotten a bit lost in our extensions, which tend at any rate to be, at best, metaphors for our innate faculties. At worst, they are replacements that dull the original faculty. g) Building, when aligned with the spirit of a place, has a powerful effect on us. The effect may be beneficial, but not always in a soothing way. Awe-inspiring, yes. Easy, not always. h) There are some places where human building has aligned with the spirit of place to produce a sacred environment. i) The technique by which this alignment of body sensitivity, spirit of place and architecture happens, almost always involves religion of some type.

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Remembered quality of Varanasis urban space, Toronto, 2006

The earth is trying to speak to us. It is always trying to speak to us. It is always speaking to us, because we are part of it. If we listen to it, we will be able to hear the mystery of our bodies, and our presence. We may find out who we are. The pun is, we might find out, instead, what is us. That is, what we are an expression of. To summarize: a) There is a spirit of place. b) There is human building activity, caused by human needs. c) When human building augments, or respects, reveres or complements spirit of place, it is successful.

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Wrestling Gymkhana above left, then Vishnu Rest House, with Homy Paying Guest behind it, Pakalus tea shack postbombings, trying to appear inconspicuous to terrorists and police, thus a blue box wedged between pink Shiva temple and next building my neighbourhood, on the riverbank at Pandey Ghat, 2007.

This book charts the broad, generalized change of the sacred place from natural to artificial, from its ancient, primary form as a natural feature of the unaltered landscape, through the first embellishments of such locations by human beings, to full monumentalization and the building of temples. If it can be so put, this work attempts a natural history of the sacred place but only up to a point. There is no intention of following the entire shift of sacred place from natural origins to modern places of worship. Quite the contrary, in fact: this book focuses on sacred place when sanctity was still earthbound, still localized; when the balance between physical location and the workings of the human mind were still in some kind of equilibrium. Over recent millennia that equilibrium has become increasingly distorted. As ideas of sacredness have become more complex, more mentally constructed and more dogma bound, so religion has become increasingly abstracted from place. The global religions in their modern manifestations may have things to say about spirituality as they see it, but they have increasingly less to say about the sanctity of place. Their gods are largely off Earth altogether, and today most of us inhabit what the ancient mind would have considered to be a soulless geography. - Paul Devereux, The Sacred Place:the Ancient Origins of Holy and Mystical Sites, 2000, 7. 127

[A few interesting contentions firstly, that modern religions are kind of there, but not really offering much of use in terms of relating to the planet. Then theres the assumption that things were better when humans were ancient. Its hard to say whether this is utopian wishful thinking, as cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says people tend to do when discussing parts of the past which seem to have somehow been more pure and more balanced than today. Then there is Pankaj Mishra in his comparison of Buddhism in the Buddhas own lifetime and now, in An End to Suffering, which leads him to the conclusion that the world and human experience of anxiety and upset basically havent changed. I dont know if what Devereux is saying is true; or, even if it is, what can we do, aside from getting out more? Is he calling for a return to ancient earthconsciousness? Is that possible, when people have to be pulled away from their computers to spend some quiet time by the Don River? Or is the Internet a naturally evolved metaphor for the human nervous system that will help facilitate empathetic consciousness? But really, more than these qualms, I admire Devereuxs perspicacity in tracing the origins of both architecture and religion as emotional responses to the power of place.] There are, then, two basic factors involved in an understanding of sacred place: first, the physical nature and characteristics of such locations; second, the mentality that perceives them as sacred. The sacred place is neither mind nor locality, but the sum of both. Certain sacred places can retain their aura of sanctity simply because our senses can react in the same ways as they did in our ancient forebears. They provoke a sense of the spiritual within us now as then, because even though the way our minds work may differ from those of our ancestors, to a large extent the functions of our brains and psychological impressions span the ages. It could perhaps be an inborn need to experience place in such meaningful ways that explains why so many of us are attracted to powerful sacred places of antiquity. Such moments of contact afford us brief respite from the remorselessly secularized geography of the modern world. Sometimes we need holidays for our souls, not just for our bodies and minds. - Paul Devereux, Ibid., 11.

[That is definitely the effect of Varanasi. Chicken or the egg whether places are really special, or whether we see them that way because we have an inborn need to or whether we need them to, so we facilitate them, and then they really do become special, but then we remorselessly secularize them hard to say. The problem with choosing heroes and villains is that then youve created a story of dualistic antagonism. I like to think of it this way: Varanasi is powerful.

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Its the only place I have ever been and felt the power of it, in a way that it was also felt, recognized and mandated by thousands of other people. Either that, or many more of my experiences are commonly felt than I will ever know, as I had to say to my classmate Craig lately, who had just asked why I seemed so angry when making a presentation to the class about the history and current situation of the Don River. Our assignment for Studio was the design a school that would slot into a new housing development on former industrial land at the foot of the Don, where it has been bent unnaturally into an elbow, silt-filled, subjugated to straightening and hemming and clogging, as I acidly intoned to the class and professors, toggling through Power Point in the dark. I tried to think of an answer to Craigs question maybe I felt vulnerable, venturing an opinion within the bastion of modern architectures academe that we, modern Western humanity, have neglected our responsibility to the landscape that I dont feel the boundaries of my own ego stopping before including the men who made those engineering decisions in the past century even if it seemed irritatingly earnest to bring it up. Or I could have told him that Id unwittingly taken on the pervasive tone of outrage and disapproval juiced from the pages of these books Ive been reading lately, about how we have lost our appreciation for spirit of place Yet another tangle of opinion, concept and judgment, making divisions where there arent any.]

Riverfront architecture & garbage, Pandey Ghat, 2007

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Thurs. Feb. 1/07

12:46 am

"Ifa is a system of both religious wisdom and technical knowledge. It is an integration of the information needed to support life in the West African rain forest. In the region where I have studied Ifa, the rain forest stretches to the horizon in every direction. As you leave the town and enter the bush, the layers of vegetation block the sky. There are iroko trees with trunks the size of a house, surrounded by ferns and thick fan-shaped leaves. Literally thousands of plants, animals and insects share an ecological web at any given spot. Ifa teaches that this web is a matrix of spiritual power called ase. These invisible lines of integration that exist in the rain forest create what Ifa calls an opening into the 'invisible realm,' or Ikole Orun. These openings are called Igbodu, which means 'sacred grove.' It is within these groves that humans, animals, and plants join together in the ritual process of creating harmony, balance and community."

- Awo Fa' lokun Fatunmbi, "Ise Kekere Kan Ati Ase Ayie: The Ifa Concept of Work and the Power of the Earth." (fr. James Swan Ed., Dialogues with the Living Earth, 1996,) 63.

[It is beautiful. Also, Varanasi was apparently at one time known as Anandavana, or The Forest of Bliss.]

"In a real biological sense, trees are our home. That is the deepest meaning of the urban forest." - David Paul Bayles, Urban Forest: Images of Trees in the Human Landscape, 2003, 13.

[Shivata, the shiatsu therapist I spoke with in the wrestling gymkhana by the side of the Ganges in 1996, mentioned that trees were an example of how synapses continued from a living body into the ground, thereby communicating with humans through the power of place. At least, that's one way of understanding what he said. Richard Lannoy spoke of the archetype of the cosmogonic pillar, or earth tree, at the beginning of the universe, sprouting from Brahma's navel. Last night in a lecture, young architect Yoshihara Tsukamoto of Atelier Bow Wow said that he wants his practice, or rather his buildings to emulate the energy of

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a tree. When I asked him to explain more later, he said briefly that trees connect the air with the earth, or as I understand it, earth and heaven.]

Woman and tree on Dasaswamedh Ghat, 2007

What is the work of Man? Humanity? One with nature? Certainly. Is it true that we have a sense of stewardship for all of the world? We might. Are we all connected? Is there a narrative? Is it disappointing? No. If I am writing these words, it cannot be disappointing.

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"I wished to be part of my beloved southern Wisconsin and not put my small part of it out of countenance. Architecture, after all, I have learned, or before all, I should say, is no less a weaving and a fabric than the trees .... The world has had appropriate buildings before - why not more appropriate buildings now than ever before? There must be some kind of house that would belong to that hill, as trees and the ledges of rock did; as Grandfather and Mother had belonged to it, in their sense of it all." - Frank Lloyd Wright, in Visions of Wright, 2000, 56.

[Wright's genius included sensitivity to spirit of place, and a notion that architecture owes debts to and takes cues from natural forms and systems. Strangely though, he seems obsessed with our time and era, and an assumption of progress, dissociated from history, which means we must build better now than ever before. And, in addition, in his estimation, if I can believe the sentiment popularly attributed to him, he was not only the greatest architect of his time, but of all time. This is ridiculous. Yet, although it's an absurd weight to bear, it smacks of human tragedy... i.e., the onus to reinvent the wheel in one's own generation. Or to rebuild the world from moment to moment, again and again, exhaustively taking material from memory and crafting it to form a new cage to hold the world now. Not just hold, but make. And also imprison. It's a fear of death, which must amount to a terror of not being loved.]

"All forms of religion have a basic desire to function in harmony with their beliefs and I try to help them - to materialize their ideas in something beautiful for all of humanity. It's the architect's job. For architecture is not just buildings. It is the living spirit that builds."

- Frank Lloyd Wright, Ibid., 136.

[Frank Lloyd Wright can somehow make generalizations about all religions... and then, he can try to help them... once again, a tall order. The assumption that he knows all religions leads to the concomitant obligation to help them. Next problem: making a building "for all humanity." Is it likely that many people will be able to fly, take the train, or whatever and visit the building, even if they knew about it? What about the financial inequities that prevent so many people in the world from being able to travel? Isn't it enough just to build a good building?

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The only building I can imagine that really speaks to all humanity is the Taj Mahal, which was built by Shah Jehan, a moghul emperor, for his recently deceased wife. It is, in fact, a mausoleum. The architect is anonymous and the artisans who had produced such miraculous work had their hands chopped off afterwards, so that they couldn't produce works of such great beauty for anyone else. Shortly after its completion, Shah Jehan was deposed and imprisoned by his own son, in a cell which carefully allowed him a vantage point of the white marble memorial he had built to his wife, and the empty plot across the river where he had planned to build his own matching mausoleum, in black marble. It's the problem with ego: Shah Jehan was distraught by the death of his beloved, and we can all relate to that. The building is superb. Even people who have never been there, regardless of their ethnicity, religion, culture or social class, can feel a sense of awe from the divine symmetry and austere clarity and grace of the Taj Mahal. "It is the living spirit that builds." Maybe so. So, where is the place for ego? One can easily apply Freudian psychoanalysis to Wright - he was raised by a pushy and domineering mother, I believe his father left early, died or absconded, I don't remember. Wright had a deep need to be recognized. It's all very well - he did what anyone should do: he followed his dream and realized his contract with God. But shouldn't we all do the same? Why the discrimination between the "genius" and the "normal person"? The problem of designating the genius is all the normal people suddenly separate from him or her. Occluded, they may feel resentful. Mozart/Salieri. And, at the same time, the problem of designating normal people is that anyone not "in the norm", genius included, is now different from everybody, perhaps still miserable, and suffering the same need to be happy as anybody else, while others misunderstand.]

"In our fragmented and desperately ambiguous time the rhthyms of season, and the cycles of growth and decay that we engage with a gardener's care still allow us the sense of participating in a greater pattern."

- Moore, Mitchell & Turnbull, Jr., The Poetics of Gardens, 10. [Yup.]

"Natural landscapes are not yet gardens; it is only through the selection and composition of their elements and materials that gardens are made. To compose is the adjust the balances and tensions yin and yang - water and mountains, human order and

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the Tao of nature, sun and shadow, breeze and stillness, sound and silence - to create new relations that carry meaning for us."

- Ibid., 13.

[There it is. To live is to consume, to live in groups is to impact the landscape. As soon as you build, you make choices. Those choices involve materials that come from the reconfigured elements of nature, and they can either contrast with or emulate whatever forms nature takes on in different locales. To me, and to authors such as Moore, Mitchell and Turnbull, Jr., acknowledging spirit of place is key.]

"Some special places have the extraordinary power to serve as a metaphor for the whole world. The power often comes from a concentration, a reduction to essentials, and its effect is altogether to absorb us, to hold us in the spell of the place. Some natural arrangements of great rock monoliths have it, and some artful human arrangers of very much smaller stones have succeeded in capturing it as well. At Ryoan-ji, near Kyoto, the whole world appears before us in a naked rectangle of sand with just a handful of modest stones."

- Ibid., 51.

"Ryoan-ji speaks to us of miniaturizing, of squeezing the universe into the compass of a few dozen feet, and of simplifying, eliminating, suppressing, erasing everything that doesn't contribute directly to the central idea (and no question that there is a central idea at Ryoan-ji, however it may elude our attempts to pin it down.) In the late twentieth century, most of us have to miniaturize more drastically still, to get our whole world into the space we have at hand. Ryoan-ji demonstrates that out of rigorous, relentless reduction can come (as artists have always known) not a reduced and shriveled reality, but rather a vision, purified and freed, as grand as the universe itself."

- Ibid., 58.

[Varanasi as microcosm, then microcosm of microcosm, and so on, as Lannoy and others constantly re-state. Raw vista... extremes... solitude within crowd. Virtue within vice, as virtue as vice. Purified and freed, as grand as the universe itself.]

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"In Bali, art and nature reflect each other, as in parallel mirrors. Elementary themes are abstracted from the natural landscape, invested with meaning, and replicated in houses and temples and villages. They then rebound to become ways of comprehending and guides to inhabiting the bounded mountain-centered world itself. We, who do not live in a traditional, closed society on a beautiful tropical island, cannot have a landscape that offers such clarity, certainty, and all-encompassing unity. But we can gather our resources (however meager) onto a site (however small) to construct a clarified fragment, a vision of an ordered world, in a garden."

- Ibid., 79.

[They are trying to take cues from a traditional, devotional Hindu culture, whose living space is a mandala, and relate design practices from that culture, unified with its landscape, to our own time and place. Not only that, but the feedback loop from territory to myth, religion, building and back again is germane to my own understanding, at present, of the evolution of human built form in relation to the spirit of place.]

Thurs. Feb. 8/07 A week after my 35th birthday... have searched for "Zodiac", an Italian architecture journal from the 1950's recommended by Prof. Barry Sampson, and accidentally discovered on the university library's database an online, scanned manuscript of an English translation of some French philosopher from the 1820's named Dupuis, who says the common origins of all religions lie in worshipping the Universe, which is God, which is Nature, which we also are. Thus Nature is the work of God, and is also God. God is not to be found outside the Universe, and the Universe also creates itself, and us, as we create, and yet die, mere specks of dust, at least held up against Nature, whatever the point of that is. Nice to see corroboration cross-century, cross-language, cross-cultural, on a scanned page from a book typeset in 1820, basically saying what you've already arrived at. Onward.

________________________________

"The architect, alone or as the recognized leader of a group assisting and interpreting him, is a natural participant in the forms, in the new directions ever more vividly marked out by the thought and cultural developments of his time. From the sea of

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the unconscious in which these forms are stirred into life, emerge like shining islands the precepts of the masters and geniuses who were the first to reveal them to us. These forms, as we know, have been subject to a profound evolution as historical circumstances have changed; so that today they have an inner meaning that is not yet completely evident, since a crisis is still in the process of developing. From the moment in which the liberal world entered into crisis on the morrow of the first world war, the old architecture also went into crisis. A new human kind awaits now with anxiety, in every field, the means of its own redemption.... It is then necessary resolutely to turn to the happy, determinant necessity, that which sooner or later is destined to triumph over uncertainties, obstacles and immaturity: the necessity, the need for taking root, for finding again in the earth, in landscape, in traditions, architectonic forms, the love of men for their community, the whole and natural feeling for place." - Adriano Olivetti (?), Publisher, from foreword: "A new architectural magazine," Zodiac: International Magazine of Contemporary Architecture, Issue One, Edizione di Comunita, c. 1959. [Ideal vision... everything on the architect's shoulders... never stops to consider he/she may not know everything, also author does not seem to consider that maybe the architect just wants to, y'know, make some cool buildings, get famous, pay the bills, find love, get a new car/house, raise a family, etc. And yet, as always, also the truth of a possible distension of the "developed" world from a felt connection to the earth and natural systems.]

Calf and mother in pavilion on the Ganga, 2007

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"When we look at our task in its great diversity, we see that it actually embraces the whole life of civilized man in all its essential aspects: the fate of the soil, the forests, the waters, the city and landscape; the sciences of man, biology; sociology, and psychology; law, government, economics, art, architecture and technology. Since all these factors are dependent on one another we may no longe consider them separately. The will to see relationships is undoubtedly of much greater importance for the planning and shaping of the world around us than all ideas for the limited individual solution, no matter how perfect and practical they may be.... In our technological society we must passionately emphasize that we are still a world of human beings, and that man must stand in his natural surroundings as the center point of all planning and building. [Remarkable that Gropius, widely conceded one of the fathers of modern architecture with the Bauhaus, here pleads the case of nature and decries strict adherence to industrial production as an ideology. Also, no matter how little I agree with it, interesting to see that, in her classic Banaras: City of Light, Diana L. Eck also picks up the idea of the architect's compass as the "still centering point" of the universe, or somesuch...] Until now we have so worshipped our new idols, the machines, that our spiritual concepts of value have slipped away. Therefore we should first re-examine the fundamental relationships between man and man, between man and nature, and not yield to the special interests or short-sighted enthusiasts, who see mechanization as an end in itself." - Walter Gropius, also from 1st issue of Zodiac, from his article, "Apollo in the Democracy," 11.

Thurs. Feb. 15/07

"

Sacred Sites as Natural Altars

Walking back down the path to the water that afternoon, my knees and hands trembled. I felt elated, but shaken to the core of my being. As I wondered why, I thought of other sacred sights in the Americas and Europe to which I had gone as a pilgrim. At each of them I had found natural altars, some feature to which visitors were naturally drawn to meditate, make offerings, or pray. Over time I had arrived at an hypothesis that sacred sites are natural altars - the first altars, if you will. I also had experienced an integration or healing at each sacred site I had visited. The feeling for me seemed to be the result of opening into capacities greater than those with which I had previously identified myself. Those challenges to the smallness of my self-concepts had consistently prodded me into deepening reflection on how little I knew

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The Contemporary Man, Dasaswamedh Ghat, 2007

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about my real being, or about anything else for that matter. Rather than injuring my selfesteem, though, the humbling of my ego within the context of an ecstatic experience repeatedly had had the effect of making me feel more centered, happier with my life, and physically healthier."

- Debra D. Carroll, "From Huacas to Mesas: Altars as Mirrors of Ecstatic Experience", fr. James & Roberta Swan, Ed., Dialogues with the Living Earth, 1996, 139-140.

[So the inherent purpose of sacred sites is to enable the white middle classes of America and Europe to make an imagined reconnection to exotic "shamanic" cultures and feel "happier with their lives"? Notwithstanding the common tendency of just about anyone to demonstrate in their behaviour the exact opposite to their declared intentions, I can relate to Ms. Carroll's valuable experience in Hawaii.]

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Today in class we visited a construction site in North Toronto... it was perched atop a ravine, looking onto the Don River Valley. The house is approximately 20,000 square feet, all for one man. It featured a nearly entirely glass facade, which causes a cooling mass of fifty tons, as opposed to the two tons required by regular homes. It has oak "fins" on the windows, Cor-Ten steel in the garden, zinc panels, a swimming pool wall which recesses into the floor at the touch of a button, and a livingroom which can seat 150 visitors when the client has his friends over to perform some music. The sole environmental consideration seems to have been the inclusion of "geothermal cooling", a relatively new technique which means you stick meters of piping into the earth with refrigerant circulating through it, effectively cooling off your home in summer and heating it up in winter, due to the stable ground temperature just below the earth's surface. The geothermal system thus "rejects" the heat from all those windows; or, conversely, pre-warms the house's water in the winter. Personally, I think the "geothermal" craze will fade when it's discovered that it's damaging local ecosystems by heating and cooling the neighbouring earth in unaccustomed ways, just like factories who flush their hot water into local rivers or lakes upset the local wildlife populations there. In addition, no-one seems to have paused even for a moment to ask why so much jumping-through-hoops is being done for this man, just because he has a lot of money.

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There are homeless people living on the streets of Toronto... why does this man deserve a custom-built mansion taking the place of a demolished, previously-existing house, on the ridge of one of Toronto's oldest inhabited ravines? As our teacher decried in a measured formal tone the beauties of intricate window assemblage systems and CNC-routered steel templates being raised storey by storey to guide the construction of the bendy irregular facade, her eyes, darting from face to face in the crowd of students wearing boots and hardhats, betrayed uncertainty. It suddenly came to me... her intonations of "oak fin", "CNC router", and "a clerestory that widens from zero width and diminishes back to zero" were all magical in nature. She was invoking Credibility, the great god of architecture, who ensures that you are engaged in a validating and valorous activity. In fact, this is the coin by which architects allow the monied to make them into prostitutes: "You pay us to make us real." An architect who cannot build exquisite, difficult buildings is not a real architect. On the other hand, so what? It is indeed a human need to engage in that which validates our talents and aptitudes. Just like a beaver's teeth will grow so long they pierce its skull, if it cannot keep them filed down by usefully chewing, so too do architects need to take on engineering challenges and achievements of civic and aesthetic worth. I saw that need today in my teacher's eyes. Also, she was dismayed earlier this week when I showed her a sketch model for an elementary school which I had banged together the night before, and the roof had all these crazy outcrops and cutouts. She said they seemed random, and I guess unjustified from a formal or functional perspective. I can relate to that, but at the same time, I'd like to ask her to look past the curving, Aalto-esque facade with the Mies-ian pillars in the mansion she has been working on, and notice the forest in the ravine. I'd say, "Look at those trees. Can you build anything more beautiful than that?" No, you can't.

Other side of the River, 1996

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______________________________________________ We need to abandon our insecurity about having to build something cleverer, newer, more novel and more complex than all the other architects working for all the other rich clients who want chic buildings. Our ingenuity is not doing better than nature. But it certainly is messing up nature. On the other hand, our HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) prof says that lots of good new technology is coming in, to make sustainable building all the more lucrative and feasible. I am glad, and relieved, to hear an optimistic voice. In addition to which, as our HVAC prof says, showing a PowerPoint slide of numerous 19th century masonry building facades, decked out with arches, pilasters and ionic columns, The 19th century was about trying to build really heavy buildings that wouldnt fall down and facades that would keep the rain off and manage the rainwater. We can never go back to that. Does anyone want to go back to horse carriages? The Don Valley Parkway in rush hour would be knee-deep in horse shit. Nobody wants that. Hes right. The past is the past. The brick facades and narrow streets of old Toronto are nice. Horse shit, mud, coal smoke, soot and disease are not nice. We have to build today to suit the needs of today. The only teacher at architecture school to consistently mix jokes about sex, drugs and drinking with clearly explained Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning theory, sustainable building systems and cultural criticism, our HVAC prof is the man.

My favourite building in Toronto, 2007

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Feb. 28/07

7:50pm

I managed to contact Professor Rana P.B. Singh, one of the foremost living experts on Varanasi, by email today he knows Im coming to Varanasi. Im very happy about this! My HVAC prof agreed (verbally) to supervise my thesis. The Academy Awards were green this year, said Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore. There have been ads on TV for an agency which will guarantee your building is energy efficient, and articles in the newspaper about new business towers going up in the downtown core which are incorporating sustainable features. Everything is exactly how it is.

Entrances uncovered, Street signs you never saw. - The Fall, Winter

Im not so sure everything is worth getting so upset about. This flawed, perfect world is the ground of realization.

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Enlightenment

First boatride on the Ganges, first photo of Varanasi, 1996

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Mon. Mar. 12/07

12:00am

It is extremely difficult to get at the root of the cosmic energy, that perfect adept at assuming an infinite variety of forms. The consciousness to be apprehended and the power of concentration are one and the same. Being polymorphous by nature, it cannot be pinned down to any definite form or name or place, as for instance, the internal experiences of the Dhyana yogin. In the first instance, the attention of the meditator is silence in excelsis, this is transformed into light, the light assumes the form of space, the space in turn changes into movement. This is transmitted into air, and the air into fire, the fire changes into water, and the water into earth. Lastly, the earth evolves into the world of organic and inorganic things. The water from the rain takes the form of the juices in the grains and vegetables, which essences supply nourishment and energy. This energy takes the form of knowledge, courage, valour, cunning, etc. The limbless process goes on. Neither form, name, nor quality is enduring. Nothing is permanent or determinate. .

When the atomic consciousness became many and pervasive on account of its will and its instantaneous realization, the energy of the single atom diversified itself into many centers, each with its own particularity and will; hence the conflict. At any given moment, the innumerable centers express their will in a variety of ways; generally, the willing atom does not know the whither and what of its will, but the effect is bound to be there. The tangible result of the wills of the willing atoms is to be witnessed at the moment of cosmic destruction, when the whole universe is reduced to ashes. The loving wills are not cancelled altogether; the great moments of happiness in the world are the result of these wills. The characteristic of the individual energy to will is always operative. It is its essence and it owes it to the primordial energy. The primal energy that scintillated first is one and homogenous, but appears to be heterogenous due to ignorance. The quivering atomic energy is designated as the Great Principle by the Vedantas: the essential characteristic of the Principle is consciousness. The felt awareness expands itself into the ether, the expanse of the ether is the space. With a single quality this Great Principle became time, space and cause. Next came the three gunas and the five elements. The speed was simply immeasurable. The original scintillation moved in space and that was the air, the air gathered momentum and fire came into existence. The throbbing of the fire increased and became cold and that was water; the water cooled even more and that was earth. All the characteristics of the previous forms are crystallized in the earth and vibrate there; in

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virtue of this peculiarity there came into being innumerable varieties of living beings and vegetation, and the original quiver pulsates in and through their vital sap. The original will pervades the whole range of moving and immovable beings and is constantly active there. - Nisargadatta Maharaj, Self Knowledge and Self Realization, trans. into English from the original Marathi by Vasudeo Madhav Kulkarni, a professor at Elphinstone College, Bombay. Orig. title: Atmagnyana and Paramatma Yoga, published on April 8, 1963 under Maharajs title. Prof. Kulkarnis English translation edited and republished in 100 copies by Jean Dunn in 1978 in Bombay, posted by Ed Muzika on his website, innerquest.org/NisargadattaSR.htm, August, 2005.

I was first handed I Am That, a book of Nisargadattas talks on the nature of reality (translated and edited by Polish refugee and engineer Maurice Frydman, a friend of Gandhi and associate of Krishnamurti), as a trade for Pankaj Mishras book comparing the Buddhas lifetime and the authors own life in modern India, An End to Suffering. My trading partner was a Japanese-American employee of Microsoft, stationed in Bangalore, South India. He was in Varanasi to visit a friend of his, who happened to be staying at the same guest house as me.

Maurice Frydman, first translator and editor of Nisargadattas dharma talks

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I can only hope the Pankaj Mishra book benefited him at least one smidgeon as much as the immense treasure I found in the words of Nisargadatta Maharaj.

Nisargadatta Maharaj, app. 1963 (?)

Nisargadatta, a seller of beedies in Bombay, who died in 1981, also happened to be completely enlightened. He explains the relationship of material, mythos and cosmos in such a way as to stitch together all my musings on Varanasi thus far amassed. And answers to the nature and key of consciousness.

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The sum and substance of my teaching is this: Dont be dishonest to your vital breath; worship that only, abide in that only, accept it as yourself. And when you worship in this manner, it can lead you anywhere, to any heights this is the quintessence of my talks. Henceforth, you are to be identified with the vital breath. Then you will realize, like the sweetness in sugar cane, that this touch of I-am-ness, which is dwelling in the vital breath, will open up. So understand these words, this advice. Assimilate it, and so long as the vital breath is there, you are there and so is Ishwara [God]. In such simplified fashion, nobody has propounded this profound knowledge. July 15, 1980

- Nisargadatta Maharaj, from The Ultimate Medicine, Ed. Robert Powell, PhD. Blue Dove Press, San Diego, 1994, p. 207.

If you have accepted one Guru, implicit faith and complete surrender is very necessary. Serving the Guru is following whatever guidance he gives you through words. You must imbibe and become one with these words. Before you surrender to any Guru you are free to move anywhere, a free-lance spiritual seeker. Go anywhere, collect spiritual information, do what you like; but once you accept a Guru there must be complete surrender. Dont think that the Guru is some person; it is not so. The Guru is that beingness, and beingness is manifestation. All the world is beingness and that is the Guru.

- Nisargadatta Maharaj, from Seeds of Consciousness, Ed. Jean Dunn, New York: Grove Press Inc., 1982, p. 133.

[Thats it.]

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Fiction

After stepping in front of the subway car, he briefly saw red, then found himself on a small island. The transition was confusing, but he had enough time on the island to review it obsessively in his mind, relive (however ironic a word that might be) the situation in as much detail as possible, and eventually, to accept it. The island had three palm trees and a nest of dense undergrowth which he found very hard to get through. However, once he did, he realized he hadnt been the islands only inhabitant. Because he had so much time on the island, (the sun rose and set once every five hours, according to his estimation, and his watch had stopped working) he had the opportunity to comb every inch of it for any sign of anything. This is what he found: - one crumpled Camel filters box with no cigarettes in it - one unidentifiable clear plastic wrapper - one long human hair wedged in the crack of a small hand mirror. The mirrors surface was scratched and dimmed and he could hardly make himself out. The hair was colourless but may have once been blond. The back of the mirror said in small raised letters, MADE IN TAIWAN. This was the island. There was no food, no telephone, no refrigerator, no TV, no source of fresh water, no shelter from sun or rain. But he didnt feel a need for any of these things. Maybe the telephone he wouldnt have minded. You know how it is, when you suddenly find yourself with a bit of time on your hands, and you suddenly think of all the people you should call, or should have called a long time ago. Even the names of unlikely people drift up, such as ex-lovers or former unfortunate obsessions. But there was no phone, as such, so he had to use other means of talking to these people. He talked to himself a lot. It wasnt a habit he had cultivated in life, or at least he had not been aware of it. But here, he made a point of it. This is the sort of thing he might say Well fuck, nothings changing, is it. or, Its not much worse than it was before. But its not much better, is it. He noticed the rhetorical strain creeping in, and tried to erase it, but couldnt. It was part of his attitude, he realized, and had to develop an appreciation for it. At any rate, it was on a day when he noticed that the waves were moving in a repeated cycle of approximately eight minutes that a boat appeared on the horizon. Rowing the boat was Maurice Frydman, an apparently Polish man with white cotton clothing and a briefcase with a laptop computer in it. Maurice Frydman moored his boat to one of the palm trees and introduced himself to the islands heretofore sole inhabitant. I am Maurice Frydman he said in a flat voice. I will be your counselor.

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The other mans cuffs had frayed and his leather shoes were now scuffed. He looked at Maurice Frydman and wanted to ask questions like Where are we? and Who are you? and so forth, but only briefly. He had been on the island for so long now that the counselors appearance seemed to make sense. The fact that this may have been calculated occurred to him. Anyhow, Maurice Frydman adjusted his seating on the sand, opened the laptop computer and cleared his throat. Application denied. Excuse me? Application denied. Suicide application denied. What do you mean? Suddenly he felt a sense of loss, however absurdly, or failure. Your application for suicide has been reviewed, and we have found that you do not have sufficient reason to leave the life you have been given. Therefore, you will return, and resume living that life. But I dont want to live. He felt the same desperation welling up within him that he had felt the night before stepping in front of the subway car. Ahem said Maurice Frydman, looking at him with level eyes. Perhaps so. But why not? The man thought. He felt weary, suddenly, as if the weight of not sleeping for however many days or weeks it had been were finally settling in on him. Well said Maurice Frydman, after an appropriately long pause. And the man found himself in an airport in Southern India.

Local tenement from rooftop of Homy Paying Guest House, 2007

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May 3/07

VARANASI

I know what my job in life is to help people. _______ Everything else is a play in a paper bag.

Sat. May 12/07

CHILDHAVEN, KALIYAMPOONDI

Nothing at Kaliyampoondi has changed. Nothing, and yet everything. Heat wants to own all. The collection of sweat is not enough. The wind is hot. The clouds roll. The children are away on vacation. In Varanasi, the paving stones jammed into each other like mad drivers. Kids hung out. The place is half about gods and half about money. The place is small. As a tourist, youre a constant target. A walk over spats of betel spit and cow shit is likely to get you repeated offers to buy hashish or go in a boat; or at the very least you get stares. One creature stares at another. Ants, birds, mice, cockroaches, goats, cows, dogs do not stare. They gaze, they dont stare. Humans, aware of God, but unaware they are God, stare, at God. And shit. Nothing something nothing something. Dog flop, here in the wind pavilion, Kaliyampoondi baking ground. Bicycle bell rings. In my oblivion this bracket of life, short pocket memory of ridiculous architecture studio twenty four hour white painted crumbling former dentistry castle our building, old warped panels of original glass bearing witness to discussions of curtain wall glazing; time not acknowledged by fellow students. Their minds in memory not melted by Indian heat. Cold as chocolate bars in the freezer, they perambulate through artificial frozen dreams. My dreams are melted and gloppy, nougat and raisins and peanuts and wafer and caramel all riotous, topsy-turvy non-hierarchical and arbitrarily turning the shape of their bag, stuffed into a pocket crease on an Indian train. Co-occurring. Time, says Nisargadatta Maharaj, does not exist. Space and his sister came into being just like that, at the same time as consciousness. Whoops, the universe is awake. _________

Nobody asks me if I want to die. Want to die? The soft oblivion. Youre back: card rescinded. What is this parade of life? In Canada, you can take a walk. Order Starbucks. Everybody commercially self-ordered. And if you have a gut-

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problem, itll sort itself out. You can see a doctor. Or maybe you have cancer. Goodbye! The clown stops smiling. Here, take a train. Speak Hindi in the North. Tamil in the South. The locals, habituated to graciousness, love you. You cannot understand them. And every conversation finds its way to divorce, or sex before marriage. It is the custom in your country? Number one priorities in our lives: copulation, money, success, family. These are the drivers. The gun is set out of the gate. Go! Fuck you. Fuck you, smiling Death. Your skull helmet is actually a carrying case for brains, eyeballs, tongue and a throat. There is another way: reverse. Go backwards through the gate. _________

Rowing in the evening with Pakalu, photo by Luca, 2007

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Black dog and tan dog bite each other in play. Mohandas Gandhi, dead, looks on. Crows caw. The wind blows. Listen: there are no legends. There is nothing. Something just bit my shoulder. I killed it. Life ballet. Okay, there is something. The Self, says Nisargadatta Maharaj, is the universal spirit, Paramatman. The Ultimate, and so every individual, hanging off the bar like a passenger on the train, is a rack of clothing. So Momma, so empty, this smile, electric, I share with a child, kindness, what does it mean? The great men, unhappy. The great women maternal maha-eternal Sri Nisargadatta says, You all identify with the body, you think you are a man or a woman. This is mistaken. _________

Fathom try to fathom Explain I try to explain. But Ive gone so far, and couldnt even relate it at the outset that now Im back at the beginning, smiling. How was India? Good. _________

Sorry, my peers. Actually, I want you to understand me. I dont want you to think that I dont want to try. This mountain of flesh you must hate you must resent pompous, presumptuous, pushy. But if you could only see _________

There is in the end I think only compassion, and only love without words. Egos are insatiable, and thus no praise or curse will ever bring to a stop the doubts, hopes, fears or desires that come with self-ing. Helping others seems to consist mostly in reassuring them. You can do it Youll be okay Dont worry. That is reassurance. That means, find the effortless path, you are the effortless path, you are God.

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_______

In moments we spend like money, these are actually beyond money, these are value. Our consciousness is our only currency. Flies land on me sitting out at this table was meant to be relaxing, but they cant dig it. I jiggle my leg, to keep them at bay. Wind plays around. The cool burble brook voice of my pre-Buddhist personality plays keyboards on the paper as, never having answered to anyone, it doesnt feel the need to answer to anyone now. And why should it. Buddha, on the wall, eyes closed, smiles. He sits, pudgy-sole-footed, on a lotus, in the country of his emanation. Hes the pale beige of a Kshatriya, not a Japanese or Chinese or Gandharan or Korean or Thai Buddha, this one is Indian. My God, his country was hot.

Looking down to the Ganga, 2007 (photo by Luca)

I dont believe the great writers mean a fig. Who outside the literate few know of Pankaj Mishra, A.L. Basham, Rudyard Kipling, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Graham Greene, V.S.

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Naipaul, Orhan Pamuk, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Dickens, Aldous Huxley and the rest. Who, outside the art gallery crowd, knows of Paul Cezanne, Edouard Manet, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Odilon Redon, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Beuys, Oskar Schlemmer, Harold Town, and the rest. Who, outside of jazz fans, gives a toss about Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Pat Metheney, Pharoah Sanders and the rest. Etcetera. The lists of names of those whove listened and heard, breathed, fucked, worked, dreamed, breathed their last, gone; you think it matters? From whence have we originated, and whither do we go? _______

At my last critique this year, one of our studio profs took us to task for not saying enough during our presentation to defend our project, or even make a case for it to the visiting critics and house-bound professors. I think he meant, in his distinct irritation, that we were not marking out a polemic position, defending a thesis, or selling our vision of paradise. And another of our profs, also seeming of the same back-stabbing lineage, having previously labeled our project not only very good, but possibly great, said, as if in apology to our visiting critics, Im afraid we might have a filibuster here, whatever a filibuster is. [Note: please see glossary.]

Explaining final second year Masters project to visiting critics, University of Toronto Architecture School, May, 2007

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Listen, you people: Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Charles and Ray Eames, Fumihiko Maki, Charles Correa, Zaha Hadid, Herzog and DeMeuron, Tadao Ando, El Lissitzky, Antonio SantEllia, even the great Alvar Aalto, even my favourite architect Alvaro Siza and all the others are not heroes, and dont know anything more or less than anyone else about what life is about. DONT look to them for answers. Look inside yourself. The wind is blowing. Things are flapping. The tongues of my opinions are flapping. I wish everyone could be happy. _______

I dont know what I want. I dont know what my life is. I dont know what I want to do. As I sat in Varanasi, looking at the beautiful river, I just knew that my girlfriend is very valuable to me, and that Id better get home and take care of her and appreciate her and value her. Id like to get back to work; that pale shade of moss green in the AutoCAD file of the landscape architect we were transferring is still calling out to me, it wants to be sorted. I have duties to my family. And my friends, to help them, smile at them.

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Quyen with pig mittens, Toronto, April 2007

One place is the same as anywhere else. It isnt the SAME as somewhere else exactly, it just has the same stuff. Roads, light posts, stairs, doors, families, birds, coffee. Molecules. Karma. I have to go to Canada and order Starbucks. Sorry. _______

Oh, what a failure I am as an aspiring architect. I dont have a rational, analytical mind. I dont care about shiny new asymmetries. I dont think deconstruction is deconstructing anything. I dont want to maniacally fix every detail of a perfect house. Let the poor people live! Justify everything to yourselves, not someone else. So what if 156

you dont know why the roofline does that. Buildings are to support activity, not dominate it. Get a sense of your self in the place of things. Amen.

_______

And without the preaching, the inner assumption of a private gold mountain innerly sat on, what am I? Just another fat guy with a pen. Om.

Ideas for a future world in which humanity has diversified into two beings: light beings (unembodied energy only, who must live in water sandwiched between glass walls), and stone beings (blind, corporeal, who must live in darkened chambers with no openings.) Their worlds wrap around each other, but do not intersect. South India, 2007

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He never encouraged any to give up life in the world. He explained that it would only be exchanging the thought I am a householder for the thought I am a sannyyasin whereas what is necessary is to reject the thought I am the doer completely and remember only I am; and this can be done by means of the vichara [the constant thought, Who am I?] as well in the city as in the jungle. It is only inwardly that a man can leave the world by leaving the ego-sense; it is only inwardly that he can withdraw into solitude by abiding in the universal solitude of the heart, which is solitude only because there are no others, however many forms the Self may assume. - Arthur Osborne, Ramana Arunachala, published by V.S. Ramanan, President, Board of Trustees, Sri Ramanasramam, Tiruvannamalai 606603, South India, 1997 (South India.) p. 41-42

[Not only nicely written, but in the same Advaita tradition as Sri Nisargadatta. However, whereas Nisargadatta was born in 1897 or so, this fellow Ramana Maharshi was enlightened at that time, when he was eighteen.

A young Ramana Maharshi, saint of Arunachala

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I read on the Internet that an enlightened American teacher named Robert Adams used to see Ramana Maharshi standing at the foot of his bed and jabbering at him in a language he could not understand, until he turned seven years old. It was only when he told other people about the experience that he realized it wasnt normal. When Robert Adams finally made it to India, he patiently camped in a cave on the holy mountain Arunachala in Tiruvannamalai, South India, until perchance he spied the holy man walking on the mountain path. Hereupon, he ripped off his clothing and threw himself down naked, at the feet of his guru. Later, Bob Adams taught Ed Muzika in a park in Santa Monica, California. I have been to Santa Monica, on a class trip last year. Ed Muzika remarked that he had been taught by many well-known Buddhist teachers in and around Santa Monica. We focused on the architecture, though. Also, I didnt realize until reading these things on the Net that there was a holy mountain and had been a great realized teacher so close to Kaliyampoondi, where I have been returning to volunteer at the childrens home and visit the manager since my first visit to India in 1994. As a final note in the geographical coincidence (or not) department, I think I may have stayed not far from Nisargadattas home when I visited Bombay on my first trip to India, although of course at that time I was not yet a Buddhist, nor a meditator. Bob Adams apparently sat at the feet of Nisargadatta in Bombay for six months, but felt that Nisargadatta was needlessly imbuing the non-dual message with too much personality. Also visiting Nisargadatta several times in the 1970s from Sri Ramanasramam in the south was a British fellow named David Godman, a devotee of Ramana Maharshi, despite the fact of never having met him while he was alive. Nisargadatta appeared to David Godman in his dreams twice in one night, urging to come to Bombay for one more visit. Godman didnt, for some reason he can no longer remember. Nisargadatta died shortly after that. This I read on the Internet too, in Toronto, in the architecture school computer studio.]

May 14/07 I went to Arunachala with Sriram, we had left our chappals (sandals) in the jeep, in order to gain access to the temple compound without having to pay someone to watch our shoes. As we broke off from the group, we spied the gate to the mountain walk behind the compound was open, so we commenced an impromptu climb, despite the signs posted admonishing visitors from climbing without the proper permission from some office. It was obvious that the mountain was a god (was Shiva, said young law-student Sriram), and I was happy. It was painful to walk, after a while, though, as the path was series of rocks baking in the noonday sun, and we were barefoot. Mid-journey, at the top, we took rest at Skandashram, a retreat where Ramana Maharshi lived for seven years, between 1915 and 1922, and also apparently delivered his mother to Samadhi (blissful realization) shortly before she died.

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That place was beautiful, overlooking the huge temple complex and noisy town below, and the range of surrounding foothills. But, despite my knowing that the mountain was holy, having asked Sriram to stop babbling on the way up and appreciate the rare opportunity for contemplation, by the time we were walking down every pebble adhered to the sole of my foot became an agony, and my feet hurt so much that I had to periodically flop down on the mountain path and whimper. Anyhow, thank you, Arunachala. Thank you, Sri Ramana Maharshi, and thank you, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. _______ I know what theyre saying is true.

Fri. May 18/07 In Varanasi, I saw Srirams family, or rather they saw me from their boat on the Ganges in the morning, as I was sipping tea next to Pakalus chai shop. I already knew they would be in town on pilgrimage from South India, but was planning to call them on Srirams fathers cell phone after having my tea. I ran down the stairs, got on their boat, and was soon of on a labyrinthine tour of their Tamil guest house, where traditional South Indian meals were dropped onto imitation banana leaves in a marble eating hall, and then we walked barefooted through filthy crowded alleys to banging, clanging, dinning, smoky, sweet, humid, Hindu temples. Pressing in with the bodies swaying to get a glimpse of the deity, stopping into a recessed chamber to place hands on a lingam embedded in the floor, getting a red bracelet tied onto my wrist by a Brahmin who asked for a hundred rupees, and I gave him ten without thinking. It occurred to me at the end of the day, back in my guest house, that I had just been granted admission to all of the Varanasi temples supposed to be closed to foreigners. Amazing. And yet at the time I was barely aware that it was happening. Sounds like life.

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Srirams mother and sister, morning boatride, Varanasi May 2007

Srirams father, morning boatride, Varanasi May 2007

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Mon. May 21/07

PAHARGANJ, NEW DELHI

Had another 35 hour train ride, said goodbye to my chela, Sriram, on the warm, windswept Madras platform, and crossed back up north to Delhi. Im staying in the same lodge, Vansh Palace, which I found with the Austrian woman, Ursula, whom I met at the money change counter on the way in. She was arriving in India for her 18th time. I feel at peace. I feel happy. I love India. I love what time does here, how it rolls over and says baaaah. I love the light reflecting off of simple surfaces, the blue vinyl of the seat cushion opposite me on the train, or the powder pink painted wall of my hotel room. And the light says merely, Im here. And hammers banging here and there like pieces of a working class symphony overriding the fan say, We are alive. And the light inside the relaxed me says, I am. ______

P.S. I went to see Fariborz Sahbas Bahaii Lotus Temple today. It was lovely. ______

P.P.S. Every day in India I have been listening to Steely Dans Cant Buy a Thrill disc, their first album, released in 1972 (the year of my birth) on fat Sony earphones given to me by my brother in Massachusetts; plugged into a CD walkman from Vietnam, given to me by Quyen. I did try listening to Steely Dans third album, Pretzel Logic in the airplane on the way over, Joy Divisions 1978 debut Unknown Pleasures once during my stay in Varanasi, and the Falls Code Selfish (which I remember buying when I got back from my hitchhiking trip across Canada with Erik when I was nineteen), this time when I was in Kaliyampoondi. But, to be honest, only Cant Buy a Thrill could do it; magically meet the religious intensity of Indias blaring and jagged landscape with its perfect musical virtuosity, crystalline production and youthful vigour. O God, thank you. ______

Im leaving tonight, I believe, in a cab at midnight to take a plane at 5:35 am to Kiev, Ukraine, via which metropole I shall high me to Toronto, the birth place and raising place of Matthew Brown, and his body.

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Conclusion: all is good, all is God. Thank you words, for helping me. Reader, for your find attention. Universe: for stars. Ganga: for life. O vast view, forsake not thy children. To your rushing heart, black and light, take thy offspring, and, loving us, Set us free.

Street scene, Varanasi, 2001

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Glossary of Indian Terms

(Most definitions gleaned from years of my own reading, thus liable to subjective interpretation. Still, since these phrases have many implications and meanings, at least the reader can understand what I mean when I use them. Most of these words are from Sanskrit, but some may be from Pali, Hindi, Tamil or other local languages.)

Advaita

The non-dual wisdom tradition taught by Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj and many other Indian masters. Originally a reaction to unthinking adherence to ritual and focus on outer forms, advaita advocates an insight into the indivisible nature of Ultimate reality, wherein there is neither subject nor object. The bodhisattva (please see Glossary entry) embodying compassion in Buddhist belief. Gentleman, sir, guy.

Avalokiteshvara

babu

banarsi

Literally, of Banaras. Also refers to a pragmatic yet fun-loving, culturally refined yet dissolute kind of Varanasi attitude, shared by banarsi citizens, regardless of caste, religion or social class. A local Indian leaf-rolled cigarette. Considered by many to be more noxious than cigarettes, but cheaper. Nisargadatta had a business manufacturing and selling these, and also chain-smoked them. A traditional form of Indian dance. Part of the development of the Buddhas teachings over the centuries has included the recognition of many enlightened beings in the universe, working to save all beings from suffering. Thus the bodhisattvas are like deities in the Buddhist pantheon, or embodiments of enlightened virtues like compassion, insight or wisdom. Another understanding is that the bodhisattva is a person who attains enlightenment, and thus escapes the cycle of birth and death, but deliberately chooses to be reborn again and again until all beings are liberated from suffering. Supposed to be the mostly godly caste of the traditional Hindu social order. Typically the priests and teachers, favoured under British rule as well.

beedie / bidi

Bharathnatiyam bodhisattva

brahmin

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chai chappals chela Dasaswamedh

Tea boiled with milk, sugar and spices (like cardamom & ginger.) Indian word for sandals, or flip-flops. Student. Literally, ten horse sacrifice. Reference to an ancient ritual wherein the Brahmin king would let a horse wander for a year, during which no-one was allowed to disturb it. The area it wandered over would delineate the kings territory. Then the horse would be sacrificed and eaten, but not, it seems, before spending an evening with the queen. This ritual gives Dasaswamedh Ghat its name. A devotional hymn. Originally accepted as duty or obligation, understood in Buddhism to mean the practice of the Buddhist path, emphasizing compassion, mindfulness, meditation etc. Clothes-washer, laundry man or woman. Little shop. Two-ended village drum; much simpler than the tabla. Literally, sitting. In Buddhism, the Sanskrit word for sitting comes to denote sitting in meditation, and enters Chinese as Chan, Korean as Son, and Japanese as Zen. These names came to signify a branch of Buddhism which focused on insight through meditation. n [Sp filibustero, lit. freebooter] 1: a military adventurer, esp : an American engaged in fomenting insurrections in Latin America in the mid-19th century 2 : the use of delaying tactics (as extremely long speeches) esp. in a legislative assembly (Merriam- Webster Dictionary, 1974.) Laneway, alley. The correct pronunciation of the rivers name, somehow changed by Europeans to Ganges. Step, series of sandstone steps and platforms leading down to the Ganges River.

dharani dharma

dhobi dhokan dholak Dhyana

filibuster

gali / gally Ganga

ghat

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goonda / gunda guna

Thug, common street criminal. The gunas, or attributes, are three basic qualities which comprise the human personality. They are sattva, rajas and tamas. A religious teacher who can show students the way to enlightenment. Local work-out spot, neighbourhood gymnasium. Pertaining to the Jain religion, which is in the same family as Hinduism and Buddhism. Several Jaini tirthankars ( saints) were born in Varanasi. Folkloric tales from the Buddhas lives, previous to his birth as Prince Siddhartha Gautama of the Shakyamuni clan in Nepal. Suffix to a persons name, denoting respect. E.g., Gandhi-ji. Wisdom. Type of hard geological foundation which enabled settlement and construction along the riverbank at Varanasi. There is a kankar outcropping at Rajghat, just to the north of the Varuna / Varana / Varna River. Excavations show it likely that the earliest human settlements of Varanasiwere here, and over time the center of the city shifted south, to its present location between the Varuna river to the north, and the Assi Stream to the south (see map in Ecology section, Book Two.) Causative chain of events, each of which determines the nature of the next. Or, every action has an equal reaction. Pilgrimage route. A cool yogourt drink, can be made sweet or salty. An abstracted emblem of the god Shivas penis. Represents the active aspect of creation, insight, absolute reality. Usually sits atop a base incorporating the vaginal form of the yoni. Worshippers will anoint the lingam with flowers, water, honey, milk and offerings. Varanasi, as the City of Shiva, has many, many lingams, large and small, from wayside shrines to big temples. A sort of skirt, worn by men in their leisure time at home.

guru

gymkhana Jaini

jatakas

-ji Jnana kankar

karma

kshetra lassi linga / lingam

lungi

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Maa

Mother.

Mahadeo / Mahadev Maha means great, Dev means god. The Great God of Kashi is Shiva. mahatmya A traditional form of devotional or laudatory literature on a holy place in India. In modern terms, propaganda. A ritual diagram representing the cosmos, typically symmetrical, featuring a single originating point at the centre and unfolding geometries of increasing complexity spreading outward towards the perimeter. Temple. A religious or mystical syllable or poem, typically from Sanskrit. They are primarily used as spiritual conduits, words or vibrations that instill one-pointed concentration in the devotee. Mantras originated in the Vedic religion of India, later becoming an essential part of the Hindu tradition and a customary practice within Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism. (Wikipedia) Literally, mixed. In reference to food, mixed spices. A South Indian specialty: a sort of crepe, filled with stew of onion and potato, served with coconut chutney & sauces. Yum. Illusion. Connected to samsara (the life of delusion.) Release from samsara; realization; enlightenment. Greeting in North India; literally, I bow to the God in you. Dancing girl. The blissful state of non-objective realization, literally blown out. Understood by some to be the opposite of samsara, by others to be the complementary flipside of samsara, which is to say that both co-exist in a non-dual fashion. Auspicious Sanskrit syllable, actually combining the three sacred sounds ah, oh and um, representing the creation, sustenance and destruction of the universe, or the three levels of manifestation from absolute non-duality, to subtle energy, to material form. More simply, the name of God, and a meditative sound. Saying

mandala

mandir mantra

masala masala dosa

maya moksha namaste nautch girl nirvana

Om

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Om enables concentration and quiets the mind. Om mani padme hum A Buddhist mantra, or auspicious recitation of sacred syllables, very difficult to translate, but literally meaning something like, Hail! The jewel in the lotus. A Hindu mantra, or auspicious recitation of sacred syllables, difficult to translate, but literally meaning something like, Hail! All respect to Lord Shiva. Betel nut, lime paste and other spices, wrapped in a leaf and chewed. A mild stimulant, makes the chewers teeth, lips and tongue red. As addictive as tobacco, a major Indian pastime.

Om nama Shivaya

paan / pan

Panchakroshi Yatra Also referred to as Panchakroshi Road, or Five Krosha Road, equal roughly to Ten Mile Road, which is the most commonly traveled pilgrimage circuit around the periphery of Varanasis sacred zone. pucca / pukka Genuine or real, referring to the original sturdy clay construction of houses in Varanasi (and much of India.) Offering of symbolic items to a deity. For example, puja at a Hindu temple could involve burning incense, offering a split coconut, a lit wick held in a leaf bowl, a garland of flowers, or bilva leaves. Puja may involve a priest, or just the individual worshipper. "Tales of ancient times"; is the name of an ancient Indian genre of Hindu or Jain literature. Its general themes are history, tradition and religion. It is usually written in the form of stories related by one person to another. (Wikipedia) These are men who have given up worldly life to travel India as beggars, devoted to the ascetic god Shiva. A sadhu can be recognized by their beard, long dreadlocked hair, ash-smeared forehead, loincloth and brass trisula, or trident, the weapon of Shiva. They may spend their time in meditation, smoking hashish, or wandering on foot from one sacred location to another. The normal world of individuals moving around in ignorance of their true nature, thus causing a lot of harm (to both themselves and others)due to selfish actions. Realization that a permanent ego or self which requires constant defense is an illusion is termed nirvana.

puja

Purana

sadhu

samsara

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sannyasin

A religious renunciant, a wandering mendicant. An ascetic devoted to austerities. The colourful traditional ladies dress of India, comes in two pieces: a tightly-fitting top, and a long wrap-around drape of cloth. Sita and Ram are the two principal gods from the beloved Hindu epic, Ramayana, during which Rama must rescue his beautiful wife Sita from the clutches of the evil Ravana with the help of the monkey god, Hanuman. Book of Hindu or Buddhist liturgical writings. A large solid structure in three parts which contains a relic of a Buddhist saint inside. The three parts (a dome, a box and a pyramidal spire), have many symbolic interpretations, including the three stages of enlightenment. Pilgrims will typically circumambulate a stupa while praying. Rather than a single coherent system, Tantra is an accumulation of practices and ideas which has among its characteristics the use of ritual, energy work, in some sects transgressional acts, the use of the mundane to access the supramundane and the identification of the microcosm with the macrocosm. The Tantric practitioner seeks to use the divine power that flows through the universe (including their own body) to attain purposeful goals. These goals may be spiritual, material or both. (Wikipedia.) Tantric practices exist in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.

saree / sari

Sita Ram

sutra stupa

Tantra

tirtha

Literally ford or crossing, also applies to places of natural power, where it seems divine forces or cosmic energy are crossing over into the mundane world. Important as a metaphor for crossing over from samsara to nirvana (please see elsewhere in glossary.) Neighbourhood. Thus, Bengali Tola is the neighbourhood where people from Bengal settled. (Vajra Hero, Tib. dorje sempa) "Dorsem" is the buddha of purification. As the "action" or karma protector, he also manifests the energies of all Buddhas. Kagyu tantric practitioners focus upon Vajrasattva, in the above form as 'Solitary Universal Ruler.' Here the deity is an aspect of buddha Vajradhara. The lions that appear in some representations at the base of the deity's seat show he

tola

Vajrasattva

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shares the essential nature of Shakyamuni buddha. (http://www.khandro.net/deity_Vajrasattva.htm) wallah Worker at a particular job. For example, a rickshaw driver is a rickshaw wallah. A South Indian breakfast dish a kind of sour, steamed rice dumpling, which comes with a spicy sauce or chutney. An adept at yoga. Although yoga seems in North America to most commonly refer to a set of physical exercises, which may or may not include meditation or metaphysical aspects, Nisargadatta seems to use the phrase yoga more widely as any system for arriving at realization. Thus, as nisarga means natural in Marathi, the nisarga yoga stresses not effort or any particular method, but rather a relaxed attentiveness, and earnestness, to get to the bottom of what existence is about.

yiddli

yogin

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Bibliography

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Schoning, Pascal. Manifesto for a Cinematic Architecture. London: Architectural Association School of Architecture, 2006. Sherring, Reverend M.A. Benares: The Sacred City of the Hindus in Ancient and Modern Times. Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1868. Singh, R.L. Banaras: A Study in Urban Geography. Banaras: Nand Kishore and Bros., 1955. Thurman, Robert. Infinite Life: Seven Virtues for Living Well. New York: Riverhead Books, Penguin Group, 2004. Vidyarhti, L.P., Makhan Jha and B.N. Saraswati. The Sacred Complex of Kashi (a Microcosm of Indian Civilization.) Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1979. Yeats-Brown, Francis. Bengal Lancer. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1930.

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