In Hot Pursuit

April 20, 2002-Birth Of Buddha
(photo:Stupa)

Our guide in Varanasi is called Amman. He has his master’s degree in archaeology and is working towards his PhD. He has guided many Israelis and is conversant with some of the tenets of Judaism. He’s a close friend of Kumar although Amman has been guiding for eleven years. He’s a devout Hindu and goes to the Ganges daily to bathe at dawn. He was Goldie Hawn’s guide and appears briefly in her TV special about the elephants. We added in a tour of Sarnath for the afternoon of our arrival and Amman was a treasure of information. He said that the tour group he took yesterday got off the bus at Sarnath, decided it was too hot to tour, and got right back on the bus. We promised we would’t do that, but there were times I felt like changing my mind. It was 4 PM and still over 100 degrees.

Varanasi is named for the two rivers that flow through it and into the Ganges, the Varana and Assi. Its other names are Benares, a mispronunciation by the Muslim invaders, and Kashi, meaning City of Light (knowledge). The major attraction is the Ganges River where 14,000 pilgrims come to bathe daily. But Sarnath, just 5.5 miles away, is an equally holy place to Buddhists. Chinese and Japanese pilgrims come in droves.

Amman first took us to a museum where we saw statuary from 272 BC. He explained that around 563 BC Buddha was born into a royal Hindu family and sheltered from the world until he was twenty-six years old. When he went out into the world and saw the sickness and evil, he began his journey to enlightenment. Buddha means the Enlightened One. He didn’t set out to create a religion, but was intent on developing a philosophy that expanded on Hinduism. One of the changes was that he was opposed to making statues of gods.

In 270 BC, Emperor Ashoka, a Hindu, won a major war, but when he saw the carnage on the battlefield it disturbed him. He was attracted to the pacifism of Buddhism and converted. He wanted to spread the new ideas in the world, but couldn’t use statues to convey the stories and teachings. He created an ingenious method of communication. He built enormous columns that had writing as well as carvings that told the story and taught the lessons. As we looked closer, there were faces hidden in some of the decorative carving. We saw a metal column in Delhi that has survived, unrusted, to this day. In this museum, we saw the top of a sandstone column that had been buried for hundreds of years, unearthed, and is still as shiny and luminous as the day it was constructed. Scientists are still trying to figure out the secret of why the lime and honey wash that was used to create and preserve the sheen has lasted so long. I’m trying to figure out why the British didn’t cart it home with them to put in the British Museum. The next emperor departed from Ashokas non-representational form of Buddhism and introduced statues. There are still some Buddhist who eschew statues to this day.

By the time the 5th century rolled around and statues were starting to be made of Buddha, there was no one left who had seen him. In the statue we saw, he’s depicted as being lean and fit reflecting the artist’s impression of what a noble man looked like. The Chinese image shows a large belly since that was their view of nobility. Buddha is always shown in three poses: meditating, preaching, or blessing. The death of Buddha, or what is commonly called the sleeping or reclining Buddha, shows that he had the perfect death. He had reached more than Nirvana (moksha).

Many of the early converts were from the lowest caste of Hinduism and were attracted to Buddhism because it treated everyone as equals. They were used to gods and images of gods and felt the lack of a goddess in Buddhism. They created Tara, goddess to Buddhists.

Hindus worship the sun, fire, and trees. Brahma is the creative force, Vishnu is the protector, and Shiva is the destroyer of bad elements. We saw several depictions of Hindu statues and sandstone carvings that managed to survive in spite of being in a museum that has no climate control and where geckos roam freely behind the glass of the showcases.

We left the museum behind us and walked to the excavation that’s the centerpiece for the area. It’s the place where Buddha preached his first sermon to his five disciples. Ashoka erected a stupa marking that spot. It’s about 110 feet tall. Its massive base and some of the cylinder remain. Amman explained that a stupa is more important than a temple to Buddhists. It’s a solid cylinder housing relics or can just be commemorative. Ashoka also built a monastery for 10-15,000 monks and a convent for nuns at the site. Moslem invaders ransacked it all. The ruins of a temple are visible where Buddha sat to meditate. In 1891, a Buddhist from Sri Lanka set out to revive Buddhism in India and built an exact copy of the temple near the original. There’s even a tree that comes from a graft of the original peepal tree under which Buddha attained enlightenment.

Dripping with perspiration and bursting with the amazement at the place where we’d just walked, we were returned to the hotel to revive ourselves. We thought a walk in the garden would be relaxing so we set off along the jogging path that wound its way through the roses. We didn’t get far when we noticed we had to be careful to duck under low hanging electric wires that ran off at odd places like a web spun by a demented spider. The mosquitoes added their touch to our outing and we soon took shelter in the air-conditioning of our hotel.

Tomorrow we have to be ready to leave the hotel for the river by 5 AM. We will visit the Ganges, the crematoria, and take a rowboat ride on the river. This could be entitled, “The Horowitz Family Goes Boating With Corpses.” We’re told this is the authentic India, the India where time didn’t advance. This is the India where religion and daily life are one.

Toby