Category: Spirituality

  • An Evening in the Temple

    The temple was a little building complex built on a clearing in the center of open fields. To one side was a lake, whose occupants were provided cover by a tree and a rocky outcrop along it. The sound of percussion instruments streamed out steadily in a rising rhythm as one headed towards it. The silence amplified the sound. The beat rose, reached a crescendo and then slowed down only to return to that crescendo.

    Girls with jasmine flowers on their heads and lamps in their hands were lighting the lamps around the central structure of the temple that housed the temple’s deity, Devi. It had been an hour past dusk and we had reached there in our car and walked a small distance to reach the temple. I had a dhoti on with nothing above the waist. Wearing a shirt was prohibited inside the temple complex. The surrounding structure housed among other things a counter where we could pay for certain prayers and rituals, a hall with a low sloping ceiling with a narrow corridor in the middle to access a central courtyard. The surrounding structure also had a room for the priest and a kitchen.

    I thought what purpose music served in the temple. I think it served a complex social and ritualistic purpose. Socially, it signaled to devotees in the village that ritual proceedings were about to begin. Ritualistically, it provided pause and entertainment for devotees already gathered in the temple complex. Perhaps it served a spiritual purpose as well – to arouse Devi from her slumber so that she may shower her devotees with blessings. These conjectures are mine. I didn’t ask.

    The girls had finished lighting the lamps that surrounded the central structure. The priest chanted inside in a mixture of Malayalam and Sanskrit. The doors were thrown open. A devotee struck a bell hard. Others crowded a central corridor to seek blessings. The music played to its crescendo again. The musicians were local. They had day jobs and were not paid for playing at the temple. They did it as an expression of their belief. Temples might have once been centers where arts and architecture once prospered. Not anymore.

    In my opinion this is what ails Hinduism. Hinduism has been about silly rituals that provide opportunities to encourage in its devotees the arts and appreciation of architecture. People went to the temple not just to fulfill their selfish needs but also to entertain themselves. They did this through ways that encouraged auditory, oral, visual participation. Now temples are only centers to fulfill people’s selfish needs. The entertainers seem more selfish than the devotees. Selfishness is leading to the death of the temple. Older temples stand out as visual treats also because they are architectural marvels. The temples built today just mock them. There is no creativity – no inspiration.

    In the hall is a rangoli that takes the form of Devi. Her breasts raise above the floor as mounds. The priests use simple every day objects to perform rituals. Music accompanies the vigorous movements of the priest in and around the drawing. The ritual also was creatively done. In the end, in an act of destruction, the whole rangoli is rubbed with coconut leaves.

    As I walk out of the temple into the silent night, my mind is silenced again. People talk to each other in whispers. After a brief interlude of participating in the ceremony, their minds returned to chores left undone at home. I make a mental note of writing these random thoughts on my blog when I return home and then allow myself to get lost in the stars that twinkle. Millions of them.

  • Going back to the Temple

    Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as http://parallelspirals.blogspot.com. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on December 29, 2010 as per the time stamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    Between the age of 18 and 23, I didn’t go to temples off my own accord. I normally tagged along with family. It was during this period that I read Krishnamurthi and Osho. I was also a member of the skeptic gang and was trying to find a scientific way of defining God. In reference to this, at a recent lecture series, Jaydeep Mukherjee said that it was vital that science and religion be kept separate. Do not try to explain science with religion or religion with science.

    The ice started breaking on my freeze on visiting temples when I read S Radhakrishnan’s book “The Hindu View of Life”. I then differentiated between visiting temple for spiritual aims and visiting temple for ritualistic aims. A look back will show you that it is this ritualistic Hinduism that spawned Buddhism and the various reform movements in the 19th century. The spiritual Hinduism is not totally devoid of problems, but it does its best under the circumstances.

    It was Krishnamurthi who stressed on living from one moment to another, Osho re-emphasized it and introduced me to Zen Buddhism. My interest in Osho began when I read his critique of Krishnamurthi which was fun. It then went further when I heard the Malayalam film actor, Mohan Lal had “followed” some of his ideas. This turned out later to be not entirely true. It was around this time that my Orkut entry for religion turned from atheist to agnostic.

    There are not many places where you get to go and sit alone in some place in India without getting disturbed by a long forgotten relatives (apologies to all such relatives, but you’re timing does not help sometimes). I thought the temple would act as a refuge but I have not tried it yet. I have considered the temple, though.

  • Sound Advice

    Priority-wise, it simply makes sense to take care of yourself before you start searching for a higher meaning. You aren’t much good to anyone else if you’re unhealthy, a financial burden, or an emotional basket case. Fix yourself before you turn outward. It’s best for everyone.

    The Dilbert Blog

  • Aubrey Menen

    Aubrey Menen was what I was reading over vacations. He’s actually a guy from the early 20th century with an Irish mother and an Indian father (trying to explain the name). He has some different opinions, which you might just as well read:

    The Upanishads are held in awe by many people in the West, a number of whom had the satisfactory, not to say flattering, experience I have just mentioned. I did not. This may have been due to my Indian background. The Upanishads, though reverenced in the West are really not much read in India. The average Indian prefers the Bhagavad-Gita, a beautiful poem in which the Lord Krishna teaches us the noble lesson that we must do our duty to society. The duty under Lord Krishna’s attention in the Gita is to kill, maim or otherwise dispose of the enemy on a field of battle in a petty dynastic war. The Lord Krishna heartily recommends that this be done and done with a will. Indians, I have noted, have a liking for filling their minds with elevated notions which do not interfere with the business in hand. No book has ever been written which does this better than the Gita.

    The Upanishads, on the other hand teach no moral lesson whatever. The attitude in them is much like that of the Scottish philosopher David Hume. He wrote a book proving that there was no such thing as cause and effect. At the end of it he remarks that he has no doubt that his reasoning is correct, but as for himself, he has not the slightest intention of letting it affect him or his way of life. In the same way the philosophers of the Upanishads, after having led the reader into the very depths of his being, with shattering results to all his dearest belief, advise him to get up and go and enjoy himself like anybody else, with, they specify, horses, chariots, food and women. The verses in which this is said are as coarse as a hearty laugh and a slap on the back. How people manage to find God in such a book I cannot say, but I think it may be that they have a natural refinement which puts things decently straight.

    Liked it till here? Here’s some more:

    The Upanishads are, in fact, a supreme monument to the fact that, in matters of religion, the Indians are eccentrics. From the earliest times, the Hindu faith was outlined in the Rig Veda. This described the gods to be revered and how to worship them down to the last detail. For centuries, they were believed to be the last word on the matter, but then some philosophers decided they were not. Having taken due thought, they came to the conclusion that the gods of the Rig Veda were probably fictitious and that to worship them was quite unnecessary. In any decent and ordered society – that of the Christian Middle Ages, for instance – these daring men would have been promptly burnt alive.

    The Hindus, instead, studied these teachings, wrote them down, and then bound them up along with the Rig Veda. It is hard to find a parallel to this act in any other religion. It is as though in each copy of the Jewish and Christian Bible, the Pentateuch was followed by some lively chapters saying that Yahweh did not exist, that the Temple was a highly redundant institution and that the Ten Commandments were binding on nobody but Moses, who had probably invented them for his own convenience.

    Now the Western world is brought up to believe that black is black and white is white and anybody who attempts to muddle the two is an idiot. This opinion has carried us along the a triumphal way of scientific discoveries which have culminated, for the time being (or forever), in the hydrogen bomb. The Hindu has never thought in this manner. He has always felt that anybody who could prove that black is not black, white is not white, but both are really the same thing, is a very clever fellow and worth listening to. The result is that the Indians have invented nothing at all, except some ideas. One of those ideas is that the only way of meeting violence is to do nothing about it, but to go on minding your own peaceful affairs. I might observe in passing that if the bombs do go off, this will, obviously, be the only way of putting the world together again.

    These are lines from Aubrey Menen’s “The Space Within the Heart”, 1970. Read the book, if you can. Although there aren’t many paragraphs like the ones given above, you might find it an interesting read.