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ravenFor the last couple of months, my grandmother has been living with my Indiana relatives, as to not let her green card lapse. She was there when I appeared over Christmas, and it was good to see her; she's eighty-two, speaks no English, has seen more change in her life than any ten people I know. One night after I'd been there a couple of days, I was hiding my head in a pillow, a defence mechanism after spending too much time with my Indiana relatives, and she was calmly telling me how much I take after my father, who is her eldest child. My aunt and her kids are loud, make a lot of noise - which I suspect was Dadi talking around the fact I don't know the Hindi for "extrovert" - whereas my dad is quiet and bookish, and like me, it damages his head to spent a lot of time surrounded by loud noises. I appreciated that someone had noticed this fact, and took my head out from the pillow. "In my next life," I said very seriously and clearly, "I want to be a tree."
Over a chorus of affectionate mockery, I explained: trees are sacred, beautiful, washed with sunlight, they can make their own food, they live a long time. Most of all, life as a tree would be peaceful. What more could you want, as a sentient being?
Always supposing, my aunt said, that you have a next life.
I laughed at that. Of course, my agnostic-inclined mind immediately fills in the blank there - perhaps reincarnation is a myth - but I come from a Hindu family and that's not what they meant. If I don't have a next life, according to them, it's because this is my last one: because this existence, this particular span of years, in this place at this time, is where this soul reaches moksha, nirvana, whatever you would like to call it. Where this soul, atman, becomes part of the greater spirit, Bhagwan, becomes pure and perfect and part of everything that exists.
I am a Hindu, too. This is one thing I know, maybe, that I didn't know a year ago. I don't believe in God. But I grew up in the wrong place for that, didn't I? I don't believe in the God of the western world, maybe. But I believe in... something. I'm not a random happening; I believe I'm more than my molecules, and that the world is, too. And that's enough, I think, for me to be a Hindu. That, among other things. I said, pacing up and down on the night I declared I wanted to be a tree, that I don't do puja every day, I don't know why it's important, I don't know what's important. I do what I think is right at the time, every time. What else do you do? What can you do except trust that you have the potential, the learning, the knowledge, the something beyond your molecules to do the right thing? Dharma, and by extension Hinduism, is about doing the job that's in front of you. It's not about the ritual, particularly - that's what we have the panditiji for, that's the job that's in front of him.
Have you ever been, Dadi asked, in a place outside of yourself?
The metaphor got a bit mangled in the translation, but I think I understood it - she was asking, is there anything you do that you fall into, immersed, that makes you forget the world around you? Well, yes, I said, I write. That's what writing is - the thing that takes you into another sort of space. There, then, she said, this brings you close to Bhagwan.
Do I believe that? I don't know. I do know that the idea is, to me, extraordinarily beautiful - that I, in writing (and others, in whatever they do) take the spark of divine fire in me and return it to whence it came. That in losing my sense of self, I learn what it is to be, all at once, everything. What it is I do doesn't matter, is the crucial part. As long as I lose myself, it's important.
I'm a Hindu, then. I'm a philosopher, too, in the very simple sense that I think philosophy is important. I was born into a position of incredible privilege. I have faith - in something, in the world, in humanity, in something. I don't believe, literally speaking, that this is my last life, or that souls do indeed reach nirvana through reincarnation, or that my dharma is reflected in my life or vice versa. I don't know what I'm doing when I take an aarti - whether I'm doing it for faith, or for comfort, or for some strange combination of the two. I am not religious, particularly, I barely speak Hindi, let alone Sanskrit, I was born so many thousands of miles from my roots that the family panditji calculated time zones into his blessings for me.
What's the point of all this? I said, once, that I probably wouldn't be an agnostic all my life. Maybe that's true. But right at this moment, I can be a Hindu and an agnostic at the same time. I haven't found religion. It was always there, in the background of my life, because it's not God, it's not the hope of heaven or eternal life, those aren't my concepts. It's a search for peace, for ways to think and live. That's enough.
The funny thing was, I thought all this through on Christmas Day. It had been a long, slow, very bright day, and Shivani, my twelve-year-old cousin, had asked me to come with her to see Alvin and the Chipmunks and I had been unable to think of any reasons why this was a bad idea, and then we got back and my aunt said, "You want to come to the mandir?"
"What's the occasion?" I said.
"Tuesday."
Tuesday is, indeed, the day of the Hanuman Chalisa puja. So we went. And in the snow, and the bells on the radio, I was missing Oxford a little, Oxford, where Christmas is magical in a particularly secular way, and thinking, and this is what came out. Happy New Year, to all. May you grow in dharma, may you live long and prosper.
Over a chorus of affectionate mockery, I explained: trees are sacred, beautiful, washed with sunlight, they can make their own food, they live a long time. Most of all, life as a tree would be peaceful. What more could you want, as a sentient being?
Always supposing, my aunt said, that you have a next life.
I laughed at that. Of course, my agnostic-inclined mind immediately fills in the blank there - perhaps reincarnation is a myth - but I come from a Hindu family and that's not what they meant. If I don't have a next life, according to them, it's because this is my last one: because this existence, this particular span of years, in this place at this time, is where this soul reaches moksha, nirvana, whatever you would like to call it. Where this soul, atman, becomes part of the greater spirit, Bhagwan, becomes pure and perfect and part of everything that exists.
I am a Hindu, too. This is one thing I know, maybe, that I didn't know a year ago. I don't believe in God. But I grew up in the wrong place for that, didn't I? I don't believe in the God of the western world, maybe. But I believe in... something. I'm not a random happening; I believe I'm more than my molecules, and that the world is, too. And that's enough, I think, for me to be a Hindu. That, among other things. I said, pacing up and down on the night I declared I wanted to be a tree, that I don't do puja every day, I don't know why it's important, I don't know what's important. I do what I think is right at the time, every time. What else do you do? What can you do except trust that you have the potential, the learning, the knowledge, the something beyond your molecules to do the right thing? Dharma, and by extension Hinduism, is about doing the job that's in front of you. It's not about the ritual, particularly - that's what we have the panditiji for, that's the job that's in front of him.
Have you ever been, Dadi asked, in a place outside of yourself?
The metaphor got a bit mangled in the translation, but I think I understood it - she was asking, is there anything you do that you fall into, immersed, that makes you forget the world around you? Well, yes, I said, I write. That's what writing is - the thing that takes you into another sort of space. There, then, she said, this brings you close to Bhagwan.
Do I believe that? I don't know. I do know that the idea is, to me, extraordinarily beautiful - that I, in writing (and others, in whatever they do) take the spark of divine fire in me and return it to whence it came. That in losing my sense of self, I learn what it is to be, all at once, everything. What it is I do doesn't matter, is the crucial part. As long as I lose myself, it's important.
I'm a Hindu, then. I'm a philosopher, too, in the very simple sense that I think philosophy is important. I was born into a position of incredible privilege. I have faith - in something, in the world, in humanity, in something. I don't believe, literally speaking, that this is my last life, or that souls do indeed reach nirvana through reincarnation, or that my dharma is reflected in my life or vice versa. I don't know what I'm doing when I take an aarti - whether I'm doing it for faith, or for comfort, or for some strange combination of the two. I am not religious, particularly, I barely speak Hindi, let alone Sanskrit, I was born so many thousands of miles from my roots that the family panditji calculated time zones into his blessings for me.
What's the point of all this? I said, once, that I probably wouldn't be an agnostic all my life. Maybe that's true. But right at this moment, I can be a Hindu and an agnostic at the same time. I haven't found religion. It was always there, in the background of my life, because it's not God, it's not the hope of heaven or eternal life, those aren't my concepts. It's a search for peace, for ways to think and live. That's enough.
The funny thing was, I thought all this through on Christmas Day. It had been a long, slow, very bright day, and Shivani, my twelve-year-old cousin, had asked me to come with her to see Alvin and the Chipmunks and I had been unable to think of any reasons why this was a bad idea, and then we got back and my aunt said, "You want to come to the mandir?"
"What's the occasion?" I said.
"Tuesday."
Tuesday is, indeed, the day of the Hanuman Chalisa puja. So we went. And in the snow, and the bells on the radio, I was missing Oxford a little, Oxford, where Christmas is magical in a particularly secular way, and thinking, and this is what came out. Happy New Year, to all. May you grow in dharma, may you live long and prosper.
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no subject
on 2008-01-03 03:44 pm (UTC)Your grandmother did a wonderful job of connecting writing to religion. I have had the exact same experience that you describe and it is interesting to think of this as a spiritual practice.
And, live long and prosper! Yay!
no subject
on 2008-01-06 10:14 pm (UTC)Live long and prosper! The funny thing is, I was reading Spock's World the evening of the I-want-to-be-a-tree conversation, and that's one of the things that got me thinking about it. Vulcan philosophy, such as it is, bears suspicious similarities to Hindu notions of dharma. I would be very interested to know where it's actually derived from.