When he shuts his eyes it is night

Good footage last week of the solar eclipse that swept northeast across swaths of Asia. Online videos showed worshipers observing the occasion in Varanasi, directly in the path of the shadow of the moon, where 2,500 folks gathered at the Ganges to watch a total eclipse for 3 mins 48 seconds, the longest time until 2132.

A scientific world paints eclipses as extravagantly, in its way, as poetically gorgeous mythology. One commentator enthused that scientists wait a lifetime for an opportunity like this to see the delicately streaming sun's corona, 2 million degrees centigrade. They describe the beading of light from the reflected irregularities of the moon into a gemlike ball of light perched on the corona as a wedding ring, which it exactly resembles.

In Vedic astrology an eclipse is a sun-eating dragon that swallows the moon. Being Indian mythology, there are different versions. In one, the culprit is Rahu, a frightening dragon who is all head. Rahu diguised himself so as to sneak a drink of the forbidden nectar of immortality churned during the Samudra Manthan, the famous churning of the ocean of milk. The Sun and Moon spotted him and told Vishnu, who lopped off Rahu's head before he could swallow the divine nectar. But the part that had touched the nectar, his head, became immortal. Rahu swore vengeance on the Sun and the Moon, and whenever he sees them he tries to gobble them up. Since, being bodiless, he can hold neither very long, they come safely out the other side, but their power is distressingly weakened.

Above is a Tibetan vision of Rahu as a demon with multiple heads. (There's a reason, of course, he has them all, but that will have to be the subject of another post.) When Rahu swallows the sun, the precaution of fasting prevents one from ingesting malefic influences afoot. Pregnant women must stay indoors and parents do not want their babies born on this day. To ward off the effects of the eclipse, folks undertake ritual bathing in purifying rivers and streams to cleanse their sins.

Something so momentous, ominous and beautiful as stealing the sun needs a story big enough to convey awe and respect for the impact on us of the primal powers of Nature. Religiously, this is huge. Divine space visibly invading and transforming human space for all to see. We don't treat phenomenal Nature so profoundly in the West. Man walking on the moon is, after all, human space invading the divine. Rainbows, maybe. We are able to see them as auspicious omens, as in this wedding story in last Sunday's New York Times.

There was plenty of science on the ground in India, but some were not impressed. In Taregna, some folks believed that the obstruction of the sight of the eclipse by overcast skies (it's monsoon season) happened for a reason. " The scientists have made a mockery of this divine thing. It is because of this that no one here could watch the eclipse," a devotee explained.

The title above comes from a Chinese legend about the celestial dragon—

When he shuts his eyes it is night

When he opens his eyes it is day

Heat lightning in the summer sky brings dragons to mind.

Can the Axis Mundi Be Televised?

There's a debate about televising darshan at the most prestigious and sacred of all Varanasi's Hindu temples, which is one of the most important temples in India. Kashi Vishwanatha, or Vishveshara, as it also written, refers to the ancient name of Varanasi followed by the name of Shiva that means"Lord of All.' It is the site of one of 12 jyotirlingas in India, where Shiva rent the earth with a fiery beam of light to connect heaven and earth (A website that tries to explain the symbolism of the jyortirlingas is here.) The materialized lingam with its hundreds of thousands of artifactual expressions was given by Shiva to his followers to remember these events. In Diana Eck's retelling, Shiva, the mountain ascetic, left his solitary life of devotion to marry Parvati, daughter of the Himalayas. He became a city dweller when the chose the beautiful city of Varanasi for their home. Eck:

By the time of the Kashi Khanda this city was said to have been the "original ground" created by Shiva and Parvati, upon which they stood at the beginning of time when no other "place" existed; the place from which the whole creation came forth in the beginning and to which it will return in the fire of time's end, the place where Shiva's linga, as the unfathomable symbol of the Supreme Lord, first pierced the earth.

Little surprise that Kashi Vishvanatha has been a focus of political and religious struggles across the centuries, razed and rebuilt by Hndus and Muslims, associated with figures like Akbar, the great and tolerant Muslim empire builder and Araungzeb, the Muslim Sherman so far as the destruction of Varanasi was concerned. It was built in its present form and location by Rani (queen) Ahalyabai Holkar of Indore in the 18th century. The application of new media (millennially considered!) to religious tradition might seem to be a Benjaminian threat to the aura, or what Rudolf Otto called the numinous. But the consequence projected in the news article below seems to be laziness by devotees rather than a dilution of the sacred or even an assault on it. (The introduction of church service by telephone in the late 19th century in the United States provoked like predictions of devotional laziness among Christian congregants.) And an official Shaiva site about worship, itself a new media platform, that includes videos of worshipers doing puja before lingas is witness to the complexity of the technology/presence dialogue. The contemporary political is clearly involved since the BJP is the source of this particular complaint. Here's the article about the controversy:

From evaranasi.com:

Senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and former Union minister Murli Manohar Joshi has objected to the “live darshan” of the ‘jyotirlinga’ in Kashi Vishwanath temple at Varanasi recently started on television.

“This technology will promote sedentary religious habits among the devotees. There is no alternative to visiting the temple physically,” he said at a press conference on Tuesday.

“We are not against technology, but physical ‘darshan’ is an integral part of Hinduism. Live telecast from the ‘garbhagriha’ of the renowned temple will enable devotees to have a ‘darshan’ sitting conveniently in their bedrooms,” Joshi said, adding, “I support those who are against the live telecast.”

The Kashi Vishwanath Temple Trust, which has been managing the affairs at the 18th century temple since 1983, has recently tied up with Tata VSNL and Tata Sky for live telecast from the shrine.

Talking to mediapersons at Varanasi, Joshi also reiterated the BJP’s stand on the Ganga Expressway project. He said it would not only destroy fertile land, but also pollute the sacred river. The former HRD minister, however, evaded a direct reply when questioned about the fertile land destroyed because of the Golden Quadrilateral Project during the NDA regime.

“Whatever has happened in the past should be forgotten and not be repeated,” he said. The BJP leader criticised the attacks on north Indians by Raj Thackarey and his party. “It happened in Assam earlier and now it’s happening in Mumbai. I appeal to all political parties to refrain from stirring up hatred.”

Much more to be unpacked religiously and politically. Stay tuned. A promising start may be provided by Philip Lutgendorf, writing in Lawrence A. Babb and Susan Wadley's Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia on the culture phenomenon that was the televising of the Ramayana in 1987 and 1988.

Tonsure Pilgrims: Where God and Globalization Meet

Briar Smith sends along this story about the Tirumala Venkatesvara temple in the Tirapati-Tirumala Hills of Andhra Pradesh, one of the richest temples in south India. Its prosperity comes from the sale of human hair offered to Venkeswara, an avatar of Vishnu, in the performance of samskara by millions upon millions of pilgrims to petition for divine protection. This form of samskara is called cudakarma. Some 500 tons of hair are said to travel from this temple each year to commercial processors who make it into hair extensions for a waiting Western world. Here are some accounts by devotees who have made the Tirumala trek.

This is wild. The self-mortification of the vanity of the faithful feeds the vanity of the secular; in the global circuit, enlightenment serves illusion. What does Venkatesvara think, I wonder.

It should be said the nearly $21 million annual revenues from 'temple hair' goes to the support of schools, medical centers and food for needy pilgrims, though it appears many donors are unaware of the ultimate disposition of the hair.

There are other distinctive forms of devotion at Tirumala, detailed here. They include walking up the long hill to Tirumala (a two and a half hour trek), lying prostrate and rolling around the temple chanting in gratitude for the protection of Venkatesvara (aftera preliminary purifying bath), offering one's weight in coins, candy, or something similar to the deity (this one often done by children), and giving to the deity the ornaments one is wearing at the time one takes a vow to the deity.

Floating Spectators

Back in June Camille Paglia commented here on Western ambivalence toward the atmospheric religiosity of other cultures: our indifferent superficial grasp of their histories, our bordering-on-condescension inclusivity in the absence of any deep spirituality of our own from which to encounter theirs, and (though Paglia is never guilty of this) the easy default to economics as a final arbiter of how successful any culture is. Obama in Cairo was her case study. Here's an excerpt:

I wish that the Cairo speech had been more specific and instructional about Muslim beliefs and culture. Obama's quick and late citations of Andalusia and Córdoba, for instance, could only prove baffling to the majority of Americans, who know virtually nothing about Moorish Spain. Obama's cursory two-sentence summary of the past relationship between Islam and the West -- jumping from "conflict and religious wars" to "colonialism" -- seemed vague and timid....It was also puzzling how a major statement about religion could seem so detached from religion. Obama projected himself as a floating spectator of other people's beliefs (as in his memory of hearing the call to prayer in Indonesia). Though he identified himself as a Christian, there was no sign that it goes very deep. Christianity seemed like a badge or school scarf, a testament of affiliation without spiritual convictions or constraints....Obama's lack of fervor may be one reason he rejects and perhaps cannot comprehend the religious passions that perennially erupt around the globe and that will never be waved away by mere words. By approaching religion with the cool, neutral voice of the American professional elite, Obama was sometimes simplistic and even inadvertently condescending, as in his gift bag of educational perks like "scholarships," "internships," and "online learning" -- as if any of these could checkmate the seething, hallucinatory obsessions of jihadism.

That cool, neutral voice swallows us. Hard to work around, impossible to jettison, not only because it serves us well for a great many purposes, but because even the most self-reflexive reform-ations of that voice, for all their usefulness and validity as an approach to cultural difference, can be just one more way of cultivating a posture of unassailability.

Words against passions, texts against bodies, scholarship against rituals. Different ways of understanding--not only in the East-West encounter but within any contemporary culture, most especially the United States.

Horse Soldiers and Corn Civilization

I've wondered whether this journey toward Hinduism would be as rewarding as my interest in Tibetan Buddhism¸which seduced me with the wrathful deities, the amazing religious and artistic tradition of indigenous Bon demons incorporated into Tibetan Buddhism as guardian deities. Those people have thought a lot about anger. The wrathful deities are unfailingly beautiful. Buddhism is a creedal faith, and so learning the symbolic structures is a form of devotion. Like Judaism, Hinduism is a religion into which you are born. Correct belief counts less than demonstrating ritual devotion. An unforgiveable simplification of both, but would I be as comfortable, as aesthetically taken, as intellectually impressed? Orientalist I thereby reveal myself to be, I knew the limits of my imagination were at work here, not any useful anticipation or judgment.

Which speaks to why I am going even beyond the academic goals I have. My first trip to Asia was in 2004. A colleague, Oscar Gandy, brought back pictures of temples in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Gobsmacked, as they say, I thought that any place that had those golden beautiful, ethereal spires, like nothing in the West, that was a place I had to go. That was it. And when I realized how much it was going to cost to go to that part of the world, I decided I needed to go to other places as well, Hanoi, now Ho Chi Minh City, and Cambodia. I went and was enthralled, though my experience of Cambodia was not so easily labeled. The next two summers I went to China, teaching, and then Tibet the summer before the March, 2008 riots. India was always back there. An ancient, astounding culture, sedimented in varieties and layers with a democracy on top. But I knew this was not a place to sail in and out of on atourist visa. So I applied for a Fulbright,and, amazingly, I am going in September.

And so I've been reading Diana Eck on Banaras and darsan (the beholding of the deity) and John Keay on history. Now in the middle of what may be the best of all, Wendy Doniger’s new book The Hindus. The dust jacket features a mature woman smiling mischievously from under a wide brimmed hat. A woman with a sense of humor and an optimism about the world. And that’s how she writes. What a perfect introduction. Aimed at the non-specialist, that’s me, but taking me and the culture seriously enough to explain things about its history in a way that makes me excited about what I'm doing.

I'll telescope some of the things she’s saying here. First and most important, no definition of Hinduism encompasses it definitively. No canon, no central institution of enforcement. Not even a settled creed. A relief, that. Doesn’t absolve me of learning everything I can, but relieves me of responsibility for authoritative statements, the lack of which would show how pitiful is my grasp of this huge civilization. It’s my own pace and piece of it I need to pay attention to, an alluvial process. My friend Barbara says of course I’m romanticizing it now, of course, because this is about understanding how a western academic with the usual set of romantic veils about the spiritual nature of India comes to term with the reality, just as Indians have to come to terms with their romanticization of American materialism.

So with Wendy Doniger’s help, I am laughing with delight at the things in the (ancient)history of India that are less foreign to me than I might imagine. A horse-crazy ancient culture (in the northwest and migrating gradually east across the north of India) of cattle rustlers. Growing up at the border of Louisiana and Texas, steeped in westerns, this is not so unfamiliar. Horse soldiers and corn civilizations, the great dynamic of civilized history. The corn civilization creates settled wealth and the horse soldiers redistribute it. Only in the south Asian subcontinent the corn civilizations grew barley and later rice. (It will be interesting to see what inroads corn, the American grain, has made into India, starting with Coca-Cola) And then there’s the horse sacrifice, an amazing thought. One might think Americans wouldn’t sacrifice horses, but they keep them as pets and feed them to pets. Most profane. I’m reminded of the print of Englishmen riding to hounds that hangs in the office of my brother in law in Texas, who loves fast, expensive horses under the hood, and collects guns, and gives my sister a big party at the race track on her birthday. A historically continuous symbolic diffusion of horse lore, dependence and familiarity tethers his imagination to a vision of hunting that admires the class system of English aristocracy, and is not unrelated to the imaginary of the Vedic kshatriya (members of the warrior caste). The same honor culture with its warrior's view of personal freedom and individualism. When I think of horse sacrifice, though, my only contemporary reference is the Godfather, where that gory horror of a beheaded favorite race horse ends up in the bed of the Las Vegas fellow who treats the godfather’s messenger without honor and refuses to make a deal. All this contrasts dramatically with my imagination of widows at Banaras, which shows how much I have to learn about both horses and widows. And that’s a good place to stop today.

Not quite yet. I think of this blog as a place to record general touchstones and reference points, analogies that help me keep track of things. Which I’m learning from Doniger, who deploys contemporary figures of speech and analogies so skillfully. No dry, dusty old Sanskritist, she.

Prakit languages are to Sanskrit like romance languages to Latin, the artificial or perfected language, p. 167. She explains that the preservation of the Buddhist canon in Pali as a broadcasting maneuver, “stretching the Sanskrit envelope” like Vatican II ejecting Latin from the Mass to make the liturgy more comprehensible across the landscape of worshipers. And her notion that the Upanishads are cliffs notes on the Brahmanas—Wendy Doniger, no insult to her, only to my status as a non-specialist—is my cliffs notes on Hindu history and won’t be the only one. Like other religious reform movements, Islam, Protestantism, Christianity, they do not replace but supplement an earlier faith. Vedic Hinduism, sacrificial, worldly, exists alongside vedantic Hinduism, philosophical, renunciant. p. 168. But no official schism, like Christianity. If there had been no official schism in Christianity, what then? Confusion for the faithful, that’s what. Anyway, about Wendy Doniger. 700 pages of text before the bibliography, and I’m underlining everything.

Distant Shores

I made some notes before I set up the blog to start thinking about India. This is from Saturday, July 18, 2009:

Walking in the city. Expected but still interesting things, like the gangly on the way to handsome adolescent mastering skateboard routines on the steps near the fountain by the AT&T building. He checks that I’m looking, launches a spin, it fails, he looks off as if the last thing he’s noticed is being observed; his expression registers nothing. He checks to see if he’s still in my line of vision, tries another, it fails, the same fascination with the horizon and not a muscle moves in his face. A lot of skill for a teenager, never acknowledging failure or embarrassment to observers. Girls do it with smiles, the other pole of concealment. I was reflecting on how much unoccupied sidewalk there is in Philadelphia on a July Saturday around noon from my house all the way to the Art Museum and back, 30 fast minutes each way. It’s clean, too, from the rain. Six weeks from now in Varanasi, it’ll all be different for me, intense and crowded and not swept clean. And hot. The familiar city entertains because it’s got an appealing amount of strangeness, very controlled against the background of what I know. Changes in the built environment take place on a different time scale than the streetscape, which ebbs and flows and laps the solid shores of the buildings and monuments, so nothing ever seems alarming. What will it be like not to recognize high and low tides in the social ocean.

What Am I Doing?

I'll be asking myself that question a lot. Here's what I plan to be doing, sound bite version. the ancient city of Varanasi is a good place to see a piece of modern India that's still deeply in touch with its traditional roots and to observe how that connection is expressed in public space. In the United States religious observances take place almost entirely indoors, and rarely manifest themselves in parades and festivals. Those are reserved for other kinds of celebrations, often patriotic ones. Pilgrimages are, for the most part, unheard of. We also have strict rules about the collusion of state and religion in public space, which animates, at the very least, what some religious folks would call a hostility to religion. I wouldn't go that far, but official indifference toward religion may be a more powerful way of depleting its force over the long run and certainly keeps the peace better.

As a political matter, religion is often publicly discussed, but the rites that embody it are private in the sense of lacking any official character. U.S. national rites, which often borrow religious trappings, are another thing altogether. And therein lies the interest. What a culture does in public it is officially interested in and approves of. National religion, or patriotism, is welcome in the public space of the U.S.; sectarian or confessional religion is not. South Asia and southeast Asia (as my focus) are quite different. To be continued........

Why I'm Writing

I'm writing for lots of reasons. Not the least is having a good excuse to experiment with a new-media platform for recording the development of my own interests and perhaps those of others, during a nine-month jaunt (sounds cheerful, and it is) to Varanasi/Benaras/Avimutka/Kashi, the many-lived city of Light, of Shiva, holy to all Hindus. As a newbie blogger, it will probably take a bit of time for me to find my feet, both in the technical operation of the site and in the voice I'm taking on. The topic is an adventure for me, combining long-standing interests in ritual communication associated with both religion and nationalism, and public space as an arena of social and cultural production, and taking these to a non-Western culture where these things are inextricably linked. This picture was taken in July, 2009, by my friend Kyle Cassidy, author of the terrific Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes. Kudos as well to the excellent Chris Holland, of Annenberg's IT staff, who has helped me learn how to do this.