From Himalayan Roads: Chapter Thirteen - Holy Places on the Gangetic Plain

Lumbini, Nepal

The spirit must be a burning thing. When it is sanctified and exalts it must vibrate like an empty tea kettle left on a gas flame. That would explain why my descent from the mountains down to these holy places felt like I was being pinched by the scruff and carried closer to an open fire; why, as I rode along the dull, flat asphalt, I became enveloped in a slow oppression of heat. All of the believers must have been reverberating with such hot intensity that they filled the atmosphere with it. 

When I arrived at Lumbini, the birthplace of Buddha, the foothills of the glaciated peaks that I had left that morning were but a thirsty desert wanderer’s delusion of oasis. The very concept quickly ceased to be fathomable. Ice and snow could only exist in fanciful dreams. By midday, all I could do was take a cold shower and sit under a fan and wait for the sun to resign from its relentless arrogance at the peak of the sky.

Lumbini is therefore best visited in the mornings, when a cool breeze still lingers from the night. When Gautama Siddhartha was a child, he must have also found that time of day to be a sweet pleasure. He must have escaped his life in the palace to explore the villages and paddy fields when it was still morning and the sun could not take his spirit away. Before he meditated under Bodhi trees, he must have passed languid days in the shade and daydreamed, desiring all those things that made him human still.

It is hard not to feel a reverence for the spot where Buddha was born. Though I am not religious and my spirituality wanes more and more these days, it did not stop me from feeling a certain power inside of the birthing stone temple. I stood behind a woman who genuflected to the floor, held her hands in prayer, and prostrated over and over again, lost in the rapture of the place. Others touched their prayer beads to a wall of weathered, golden bricks, believing the mere contact would bring Buddha’s spirit into each bead.

Outside of the temple, there was a giant Bodhi tree festooned with prayer flags. Monks and sadhus sat in vigil, pilgrims of many different lands. Tourists made offerings at the tree and gave alms to the holy men. They ignored the signs for silence, and they took pictures, many using Selfie Sticks.

 “Destroy the ego,” Buddha said.

There are monasteries in Lumbini built in designs from all around the world. Almost all are palatial, garish. Chinese, Korean, Thai, German. Gautama Siddhartha left this area to escape the cloistered life of his royal upbringing. Outside of his palace, just like here and now, he found poverty and sickness; there are still children begging, people with crippling disease, elderly gone mad. Buddha found the Middle Way as the way toward enlightenment, something between this abject poverty and the riches that these monasteries embody. That journey seems to have been forgotten.

But there is hope. The most Buddha-like thing that I saw while in Lumbini was a Chinese monk attending to three stray dogs whose skin had become mangy. He took each dog and tenderly rubbed a medicinal oil on them as they basked in the sun. He was unaware of the gawking tourists and did not seem to care about the opulence of the Chinese monastery. His attention was on these fellow living beings, these reincarnations that may have been past family members or friends.

From Lumbini I awoke early to make my way further south still, to India. My goal was to explore another holy place, one that would be even hotter and drier. In my mind it was infamous; everyone I had talked to about Varanasi described it in the same way: “It’s the most intense city I’ve ever been to.”

Varanasi, India

The falling of the sun in the early evening did little to make the heat abate. It filled the streets like a steaming liquid would, entering crevasses and nooks, drowning all of us in it. Shop owners sprawled out in their little stalls, dozing under whirring and clicking fans, their bric-a-brac going soft, as if melting. Rickshaw drivers pushed against the simmering heat waves, sweating as they carried corpulent women in saris to their desired destinations. There were men and women that you could tell had suffered that heat for a lifetime, who stumbled in the streets and whose eyes glared with the suggestion that they were driven mad by it.

But the Varanasi heat was not the sole threat. There was so much more that could drive one mad.

Boiling in the miasma was the fetid stench of feces and burning refuse. Full-grown, robust Brahma bulls made pit stops down through the streets and chewed at the trash. The beasts gave off their own scent as well—the smell of bulls, cows, of goats and mange infested dogs. The air was swollen with a black mélange of exhaust from the desultory paths chosen by motorcycles, trucks, and cars. And yet there was a sweetness in the squalor. A whiff of some redolent incense, the savory elixir of dough frying and chai being prepared. The veritable potpourri leaves one enticed and appalled, hungry and at the verge of vomiting.

If only it were just the smells. But there were the sights and the sounds too, the Everything that was happening in a glance. A sparsely robed sadhu, dreadlocked and bare chested, peddled past with a monkey clutching the side of his head. The clang and procession of Hare Krishnas singing, “Hare, Hare Krishna, Krishna, Hare!” Women in full, black burkas filed into the mosque at the call of prayer. Men were ironing their shirts out in the street, or getting a shave, or burrowing into a tangled nest of electrical lines to do some repair. Some men wore light-cotton shirts and trousers, others only loincloths, their foreheads streaked with pious and esoteric symbols. There were rakish men with vitreous eyes who came to me, grabbing me by the arm. I walked fast to avoid them and the heat hit me harder. Old women, without a drop of moisture in their baked skin, attended their piles of vegetables spread out onto blankets on the asphalt. They yelled caustic imprecations at customers asking for a fairer price. And as if through a miracle, a blind man, unassisted, navigated the melee all by himself.

Within minutes, I was swept through these streets by the rush of the Everything. I too felt like I was going to lose it. How can one live here and keep a semblance of sanity?

And then I was at the Ganges, the Everything having dropped me there, wanting me to experience more. I knew what awaited. I had been told by everyone who has come here before me. But I was not prepared.

Not too far distant, I saw the black smoke. The columns rose separately, spaced out on the shore. It looked industrial, a feeling that was highlighted by the austere Ghats that towered from amphitheater-like staircases, high and imposing from the river shore. There was a crowd watching. Almost none of the people were foreigners, which surprised me and made me slow my pace. Was I allowed to be where the Everything had taken me?

The flames from the pyres added more heat to the relentless day. The jumping embers crackled and railed against the wind. Men talked casually around the flames, as if it was nothing more than a campfire. I only saw one person who appeared to be more mourning, but it was difficult to tell.

The flames did their job well and the body was quickly blackened. The muslin wrap was now burning away, confessing its secret. Here was a head. Here a cheek. Here was an arm. A hand, raised. Fingers opened as if in farewell. In time the flames burn it all down. I wondered, was I watching a man or a woman? Was he young or old? Was she loved? Did she have a family? Was he a good person? What were his sins? Did he hurt others, or bring joy into their lives?

I pinched at the flesh of my forearm, feeling guilty for having muscle and skin and strength, for being witness to this other being as he becomes ash, for being able to think still and ponder and be shocked. I know that one day it will be me and it will also be those close to me and even those I have hated. If not cremated on the banks of the Ganges, then thrown to the wind somewhere, or buried or lost, and in time forgotten.

My grasps at sanity now raised one clear thought: This moment is important. It was a thought that saved me somehow. It lifted the guilt and the sadness. It was followed by another thought: What have I done with my life?

And the Everything winked and smiled at me.

I felt alright again, standing there on the banks of the Ganges. Varanasi had given me something important.