In the Footsteps of the Buddha

While I acknowledge that I'm terribly behind on this beloved blog 'o mine, I feel compelled to fast forward us all a few months to the present day and place. Bodh Gaya, Bihar, India. The poorest and most lawless state in the country. We are surrounded by dust-filled streets, extreme poverty, snotty-nosed dirty begging kids everywhere you look. Cows (and their endless piles of shit), goats, buffaloes, and wild pigs roam the streets. Packs of seriously mangy dogs howl throughout the night. Scantily-clad children cry and wail throughout the day. Ancient grandmothers squat in the streets and wave beggars' bowls in your face. Polio-ridden people with severe deformities crawl along the ground asking for help. It's not a pretty sight, so why, might you ask, have we braved a scummy three-hour train ride from the more tourist-friendly (yet still crazy) enclave of Varanasi to subject ourselves to this madness?

The answer is quite simple, but it's one that might amaze you. It's here that, 2,600 years ago, Siddhartha Gautama found enlightenment under the bodhi tree and became known from that point on as the Buddha. The Mahabodhi Temple where this all happened became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2002, and Bodh Gaya now yearly welcomes thousands of pilgrims (many of them Tibetan) who flock here from October to March to pay homage to this holy religion.

Monks of all ages, sexes, races, and colors abound. They sit snuggly in pairs atop bicycle rickshaws, pile out in masses from rusty auto rickshaws, share space with us at Internet cafes checking their email (so Western of them!), and a few even ride their own bikes, sporting hip sunglasses and talking on cell phones as they go. It's an odd sight to see, but a comforting one as well.

Amid all this "monk-y business," as we call it, shiny new tour buses (so out of place in India!) shuttle smartly dressed Thai, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese tourists to the endless plethora of temples. A few daring Westerners (including us) brave the noisy, dirty streets on foot. It's hard to believe such peace and spirituality exist amid such squalor. We're continually amazed by what our eyes take in and our minds find so difficult to process. The entire scene is a canvas of contrasts, and we are but a few of the subjects roaming among it struggling to find a glimmer of hope in a desperate spot on the map.

I knew India would be hard, but I don't think I expected what we've come to experience this past week. Varanasi was quite tame, despite its reputation. Perhaps that's because we'd spent all of November in Nepal, which I call "India light." Nepal seems a bit more civilized and certainly less crowded. We'd endured an afternoon in Kathmandu at Pashupati, the holiest Hindu temple in the country, and witnessed body upon body burning atop cremation pyres. You know that horrible smell when a few rogue hairs get caught in the blow dryer? Multiply that by about 1,000, and that's Pashupati. The Nepalese think nothing of it, but it's certainly a shock to the Westerner's mentality. Oddly serene despite the main event, that area prepared us well for Varanasi's burning ghats. We barely blinked an eye as we passed by a flaming mass one afternoon, and I clearly could make out the face and head of a charred human being. We didn't stay long.

Our three days in Varanasi were enjoyable, save for me getting sick on the second night, a massive sinus infection that I'm still battling. I can't seem to stay healthy on this leg of our journey, having just recovered in mid-November from a nasty cold in Nepal that even delayed our trek by a few days. After eight miserable days suffering here in India, I have succumbed to antibiotics and reluctantly am putting my faith in Western medicine. The salt water snorting and disgusting grapefruit seed extract just weren't able to complete the job.

Sometimes on this trip, we've been left with no other choice but to turn to the hard drugs, which is a serious challenge to our holistic views. We felt a low point the other day in Bodh Gaya when we purchased paper face masks, akin to the type surgeons wear on duty. The dust, dirt, and pollution here is overwhelming, and we're not alone when we wander the streets with masks on now. Just about every monk and tourist in the know sport them.

So back to Varanasi. We strolled along the famous Ganges, took in more crazy sights than we can process, and David even got his hand on a cricket bat, smacking his first pitch out of the "ballpark." The local kids cheered him on quite loudly, and we had a good laugh. We almost got run down by mad cows in the dark alleys; Molly got a tika from a funky sadhu at the Golden Temple; we watched a man grab a feather from a dirty street and jam it excitedly in his ear (Q-tips anyone?); we tried the local raw water chestnuts (and didn't get sick!) from the street market while rats roamed around the vendor's feet; and perhaps in our most daunting feat, survived the one-hour cab ride from the airport into town despite a non-working horn in the taxi and a seriously snarky young driver who tried to literally take us for a wild ride. David quickly told him he was messing with the wrong people. I chuckled. At first we enjoyed the serenity of no honking, but we quickly realized that despite being peaceful, it's downright dangerous in this country. I couldn't help but laugh, though, as we puttered along at a snail's pace behind bicycle rickshaws we couldn't pass because our driver couldn't hoot them out of his way. He would pound on the steering wheel in frustration while David and I just smiled slyly from the back seat of the cushy Ambassador.

We spent our last day there in Sarnath, where the Buddha gave his first sermon after attaining enlightenment. Who woulda thunk all this cool stuff happened here in this dust bowl of a region? You really do have to see it to believe it. We toured a few historic sites, wandered around the zoo (which sadly consists of a few scaly, near-death crocodiles and some small caged birds), strolled through a local village among plenty of staring faces, ate a decent late lunch at a local restaurant, prayed at the Tibetan temple, and yes, yet again, David managed to get in on a local cricket game, this one transpiring in the front yard of a Thai temple, much to the delight of a squealing gang of local boys. Baseball season might be over, but the spirit lives on in my dear husband.

Now on to Bodh Gaya. We braved our first Indian train ride and felt lucky that the Purattasham Express was only 35 minutes late that day. Other trains were three, four, or even seven hours delayed. Egads! And to think that only the day after we rode that slow boat to Gaya, masked bandits robbed that exact train on the exact leg we were on, and stabbed several people in the process of stealing their possessions. We've been told that our return trip from Gaya to Agra on Dec. 11 is on a safe section of railway, but I'll believe it when I'm happily sipping masala chai in front of the famed Taj Mahal. Please wish us luck.

We were crammed into 3AC, the cheapest class, with a seriously gross Russian couple who couldn't keep their hands off each other, and two Indian men who insisted on carrying on a cross-compartment conversation with another guy who perched on someone else's bunk across the aisle. The result was non-stop Hindi chatter for three hours and disgusting public displays of affection from a few skanky Slavs. Thank God we were only on board for a short while.

We quickly found an auto rickshaw to transport us the 30 minutes to Bodh Gaya but were dismayed when the driver took off with seven of his closest friends hanging all over the vehicle. We made three stops along the way to drop off and pick up more unannounced Indians. When we got to the guesthouse we'd requested, we found two local guys who spoke enough English to let our driver know in no uncertain terms that we weren't going to pay the agreed 100 rupees to play public taxi for the afternoon. He could either take our generous donation of 50 rupees, or call it a day: We weren't going along with the scam. After a few rounds of raised voices back and forth, he cracked a smile and accepted the grungy bill David handed him.

The guesthouse proved nightmarish, as the construction both inside and out that was promised to halt by 5:00pm was still going strong at 8:30 that night. As I was sick, I dearly needed my sleep, and David had to ask the manager three times to cut the band saws and hammering. Luckily we'd found a better guesthouse before dinner, and planned to move there the next morning. By some strange twist of fate, the manager of the offending place agreed with us the next morning that we shouldn't have to pay full price and that he wasn't honest when we checked in. To our surprise, he even gave us a conciliatory "sorry" on our way out. That's a first in India. People here rarely like to admit when they don't know something, or they've made a mistake, or both. We felt victorious in more ways than just our wallet.

We love, love, love the Mahayana Hotel where we're currently holed up for the week. Run by Tibetans, it's a pretty decent abode as far as Indian standards go, and has the added blessing of hosting many famous monks and lamas over the years. I believe it was even blessed by the Dalai Lama himself and is named after the sect of Tibetan Buddhism that His Holiness follows. We feel at home in this place and have befriended the kind front desk staff during our stay. There are usually a few monks hanging around the lobby when we retire for the evening, which is a nice way to retire each night.

We spend our days sleeping late, touring the endless temples (just about every country with a Buddhist culture has at least one temple here), sitting in meditation, sketching and writing in the shadow of the famed Bodhi tree, and even getting a blessing from one of the most revered Tibetan lamas, His Holiness the Seventeenth Gyalwa Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, who happens to be here in Bodh Gaya for several months. We had planned to visit him in Dharamsala a few months ago but ran out of time, so we consider his presence here to be most auspicious. He's intensely connected to the Dalai Lama and bravely managed to escape in 2000 from Tibet to India when he was only 14 years old.

Despite being very interested in Buddhism, I had no idea what this lama looked like or how such a blessing by him would be bestowed, so when our turn came to offer our kata (white scarf) to the monks, I handed it over to the first monk in line, who placed it around my neck. I then bypassed the money-donation-receiving monk (no offense intended but we just weren't in a rupee-giving mood that day) and was then handed a red silk cord by another monk. Thinking these guys had to be the assistants and I still had more to go in the "ceremony," I trotted off in search of a more ancient-looking, austere holy man. To my dismay, I was ushered downstairs with the rest of the common folk, and I emerged dejected on the lawn to find David. Still wondering what had just transpired, I asked him, "Which one was the main guy? Did I miss something? What just happened in there?" David shrugged and figured we must have had an unknowing moment of sublime spiritual attention showered upon us. I was still confused, though. "Who was the holy man? Maybe he's not here today. Maybe those guys were just stand-ins?" Untrue to my Buddhist self, I figured there had to be more bells and whistles associated with this blessing thing.

We walked back to town, still perplexed but treasuring the holy red cord around my neck and my now-blessed kata. We stumbled upon the Burmese temple on our way back and decided to leave our katas there upon the Buddha in offering to a country that could use a few blessings these days. When we got back to the hotel, our beloved front desk friends asked for my help in editing an English announcement they were making about the Karmapa's public appearance the following day. Seeing this as a perfect entry into asking a most embarrassing question, I shyly said to one of the Tibetans, "You know, we got a blessing today from His Holiness, but I'm not sure which guy he was." The man just shook his head and laughed. "You don't know what the Karmapa looks like?" No, I replied sheepishly. I assumed he was rather old. "No, he's quite young, in fact, with glasses." Ah, so that was him, I mused.

I think now, in reviewing the website above, that the monk who placed the kata around my neck is indeed one of the most holy Buddhists alive today. Sadly, I wasn't very present during the entire five-second event, but today I'm much more at peace with the experience. Bodh Gaya has a way of doing that to a person: Putting you in a place of serious introspection, allowing divine wisdom and grace to take over when the most human of efforts fails. It's okay that I was blessed but didn't recognize the blessing. It's okay that I'm now wearing that shiny red cord as a bracelet because it's more at home there than dangling around my neck. It's okay that I haven't completely arrived on my path to enlightenment. In fact, I have a long, long way to go.

I still have much work to do on this planet, and Bodh Gaya is just one more stop along the journey. Albeit, it's probably the most amazing destination (save for Lhasa) in which I've ever plopped myself down. Perhaps I'll catch a glimpse of the Karmapa on the street today. It could happen; his sister walked out of our hotel lobby this morning in my presence, and now I at least have an idea of what he looks like. As the locals all like to remind us, "Anything is possible in India."