Bodhgaya - Words or Path?

I sat under the tree where Buddha found enlightenment.  It was quite a beautiful tree, and pilgrims had come from all over the world to pay it honors.  Throngs of Tibetan refugees were scattered around, performing a ritual where they stand straight up, then lie down, stretch their arms toward the tree and rise again.  Each cycle is one "prostration.", and they will complete 100,000 of these over the next month to show their humility to the Dharma.  Meanwhile, groups of monks meditated to find some of that sweet realization and clarity that Siddharta found 2600 years ago.  Then there was me, soaking up all the magic and serenity with my best attempt at a calm, aware, Buddha mind.

Eventually this mind moved from the present ambiance to its history.  Siddharta's story played out in my head.  The Noble Prince viewing suffering for the first time and rejecting his fortunes to find the remedy of suffering.  The Young Seeker, learning from the aesthetics and moving into a cave where he meditated for six years.  The Skeptic, questioning the methods of the aesthetics and finally accepting a bit of food before sitting under the Bodhi tree.  The Buddha, who sat under the tree, this tree in fact, and found enlightenment.

This historical Buddha offered quite an interesting contrast to the hordes of Buddhists in front of me now.  Buddha himself rejected the wealthy, the aesthetics and all other worn paths.  He came to this tree to find his own answers.  Meanwhile, the rest of us come to this tree to celebrate his answers.

This balance between  borrowing others' wisdom and unleashing our own innate wisdom became a prominent task during my stay at Root Institute for Wisdom Culture, where I studied Buddhism and meditated for six days in complete silence, speaking only in discussions and debates with the resident monks.  I wanted to plug the holes in my spiritual understanding of the world and untwist some of the contradictions in my practice, and I hoped Buddhism could lend a helping hand.

To be fair, I found a lot of truth in Buddha's teachings that did just this.  Saying that, I saw just as many holes and knots in the Buddhist philosophy and practice as my own..  My major insights came when some Karmic Words cracked away at my thick skull, and a beam of my inner wisdom was allowed to shine through and spread.  These gleams of insight sometimes agreed with the teachings, but just as many times they disputed the teachings, which did no damage to their ultimate truth or utility in my eyes.  Even though I'm still a few major epiphanies away from finding and creating a really meaningful spirituality, by the end of my stay I felt like I had come a long way, due just as much to my own doubt and skepticism as my acceptance in the teachings.

So, while I suppose Buddha's words are quite helpful in giving us direction and support, ultimately its his path we must follow.

Varanasi - Public Cremation

Ashes to ashes.  Dust to dust.  I've always know this.  I've always known that one day all of the world's children will return back to Earth so that new life can be created.  Yet, the process itself is subtle in its continuous and lengthy manner, so this idea of recycled matter and life remains just that, an idea.  Never an experience.  Unless you visit Varanasi that is.

While strolling past cows, beggars and mystical pilgrims on the Ghats of the Holy Ganges, a group of burning woodstacks on the riverside caught my attention.  If I had read Lonely Planet more closely (or at all), I would've known why these piles were burning and what they contained.  Instead, this information was revealed by watching two young men haul a dead body wrapped in white cloth from the river and drop it into the flames.  I was at the cremation ghat.

Most people nonchalantly walked past, ignoring the ceremony as if it was a flier plastered on the side of a building.  I on the other hand, was mesmerized.  From a distance of about 20 feet, my gaze stay fixated, never wandering from the body that was now submerged in flames.  I watched as the body became black and slowly crumbled into the fire like a dying, cracking leaf.  When I could no longer make out the body from the pile of sticks, I walked closer for a more discerning vantage point.

From this angle I could confirm that the majority of the body had ceased to exist.  However, one shin still maintained some sort of charred resemblance of a shin, for it laid on the edge of the fire where it's hunger was weaker.  Meanwhile, the foot laid completely outside the grips of the flame, fully intact and appearing alive as it ever had been.

Now only 10 feet away, I focused my entire mind, my entire being, on that shin and foot.  The fire slowly ate away at the shin while the foot remained untainted.  Eventually the shin became so withered and brittle it could no longer support the weight of the foot.  It cracked like a twig, and the foot tumbled toward me.  This brown foot, the last piece of physical evidence that within those flames lie the ashes that once constituted a human being full of joy, despair, dreams, struggles and love, sat a couple feet in front of me.  Quickly, a man knocked the foot back into the fire with a nondescript branch before attending to other business.  There were still many more bodies that needed to be cremated.

We all know that everyone is going to die one day, but we know this the same way that we know the South Pole exists.  Surely though, this intellectual concept of the South Pole is a far cry away from waking one morning to piercing cold and sweeping snowfields.  With the same sudden shock of waking in the Arctic, the idea of impermanence exploded from a corner of my mind and permeated into everything around me.  Every person and every thing was burning, hurdling toward non-existence.  Each moment a cremation suspended in time.

This new world existed with me for a few hours before giving way to my normal methods of perception and life.  I'm not really sure if realizing impermanence in this manner is ultimately helpful or not.  The vacant face and dazed constitution I possessed for those few hours certainly wouldn't serve me well on a first date, or really any task for that manner.  On the other hand, maybe consciousness of our Death could help us live life more meaningfully.  Moreso, maybe seeing everything as a cremation is a doorway to seeing the other half of the equation, everything as a birth.  Either way, whether it's useful or not, whether I acknowledge it or not, those few hours were reality.