My friend and I separated on a drizzly, windy corner of Howard St. in Baltimore. She boarded a bus back toward her house in Hampden, and I considered running back to Mariner Arena to find out what the printed program had meant by substituting the traditional Diwali fireworks with what the program called "virtual fireworks." They were scheduled to start at 9PM, but I was a long way from DC and dependent upon public transportation, so I bought my light-rail ticket and waited in the light rain.
The headlights of three different light-rail trains illuminated the mist and passed me by before the train I was waiting for squeaked to a halt and opened its doors for me.
Inside, I pulled the printed program out of my backpack and leafed through its pages, sounding out the names of the Indian oncologists, dentists, and real estate agents, whose business-card-sized ads sat stacked inside text reminding celebrants of the meaning of Diwali.
The days leading up to Diwali all have a special meaning. Five days before Diwali, it is a good day to go shopping. Four days before marks Krishna's slaying of Narakasura. Three days before is the day of Lakshmi Puja, and two days before is Govardhan Puja. Puja simply means "worship," roughly, and Govardhan is not a god or goddess, but a holy mountain. The day before Diwali is a holiday for celebrating the relationship between brothers and sisters.
Overall, the celebration of Diwali is meant as a celebration of good over evil, as symbolized by the lights.
Paging through the program, I lingered over a full-page ad for the temple I'd attended for Navaratri. Here I learned that all of the Deities in the temple are modeled after other existing Deities, so that, the temple claims, a walk through the worship space is "equivalent to visiting several temples in India."
Turning the page, I happened upon an essay about Vedanta written by Vijay Kumar, a self-described "disciple of Swami Chinmayananda," which was printed opposite an ad offering best wishes for the contestants of the 14th Annual Miss India-DC Pageant.
Swami Chinmayananda? That was the name printed on the banner at the Vedanta table. I skimmed the rest of Kumar's biography: organizer of Vedanta discussion groups, member of the Washington Interfaith Association, IT Engineer for the Pentagon.
Interesting. I began to read his essay.
Kumar: Vedanta affirms the oneness of existence, the divinity of the soul, and the harmony of religions.
The lights flickered inside the train car whenever the driver blew her horn for us to cross an intersection.
A few seats behind me, a group of young women gossiped loudly about another woman who was not present, mocking her weight and appearance. They used coarse language to speculate that the woman – who rarely dates men – is probably a lesbian, and a really slutty one too.
The noisy women carved up the missing woman's body and described each part to each other – her bad teeth, her damaged hair, her stretch marks, her skin.
Kumar: Vedanta asserts that you are essentially divine. God dwells within our own hearts as the Supreme Self.
In front of me, a man boasted on his cell phone about cheating on his girlfriend.
He laughed that the girlfriend has no idea what he's up to. He called her ugly names, pridefully describing how he fulfills her highest (and only) worth by using her body for sex.
He talked loudly about how much that sex might hurt, because of how aggressively he pursues what he wants. After he paused for a moment for other end of the line to speak, he said, "She better not cheat on me. I'd kill that fucking bitch."
Kumar: The Atman is never born, nor will it ever die. Pure, perfect, free from limitations, the Atman is the Brahman.
And what is the Brahman? Kumar describes it this way: "According to Vedanta, God is infinite existence, infinite consciousness, and infinite bliss. The term for this impersonal, transcendent reality is Brahman. … Who is God? Consciousness. What is Consciousness? You can go on and on."
The conductor blew the horn and the lights dimmed. We had arrived at the end of the line, and I boarded my bus for the next leg of my journey. I had thought I would pass the time by reading an article on "untouchables" in the 21st century that was featured in a copy of the Indian American that I had picked up, but my bus had no overhead lighting. It also had no cruel and noisy passengers, so I sank into my seat in the silence, as if at a Quaker meeting, and reflected on the day.
Diwali celebrates the Atman as the inner light. The victory of good over evil is the victory of Krishna over Narakasura, is the victory of light over darkness, is the victory of the Atman over… what? I do not know a Hindu term for inner darkness.
I do know this: I know that while English-speakers may tend to translate Atman as Self or Soul or Inner Light, the root meaning of Atman in Sanskrit is actually "breath."
And I know that in Sanskrit, Atman is not the only kind of breath. There is also prana, as every student of yoga learns. ("Breathe in, breathe out.") Atman is spiritual, prana is physical.
I thought about how the word for "breath" in Koheleth (“hebel”) has come to mean something hopeless, while the breath of the Atman is deeply hopeful.
I thought about the difference between "breath" and "a breath." I wondered how true scholars of Sanskrit and Hebrew might negotiate the difference between hebel and Atman.
A breath...
a gasp...
a moment…
an eyeblink...
a flash before darkness.
Breath...
inspiration...
animation...
illumination…
light.
Add a character to the short play: The guru says that life is Atman. Now add a character locked in struggle with the new addition. The guru says that life is prana.
Now ask each of the characters: What happens to us when we die?
In my reading, Koheleth says we are finished. My sense is that the teacher, the philosopher, the quester, and especially the preacher would hedge about this, though. They would insist that by viewing the text of Ecclesiastes through the lens of the other 65 books of the Bible, we can find hope for eternal life. The preacher (and others?) would insist that we can only find this hope if we allow ourselves to be born again through Jesus Christ.
The gurus, of course, would say we are born again and again and again.
The Atman never dies. We struggle to break the cycle.
And Jesus has nothing to do with it.
Showing posts with label Narakasura. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Narakasura. Show all posts
Friday, October 31, 2008
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Diwali: Festival of Lights (Lakshmi Puja)
I had celebrated Diwali one time before this year.
Four years ago, a deaf friend of mine who is married to a deaf Indian man (neither of them identifies as Hindu) invited me to a combination Diwali/Ramadan celebration hosted by the Greater Washington Asian Deaf Association.
This was before I was truly competent in ASL (I had a hard time following the details of the skit depicting Krishna's slaying of Narakasura), and also before I understood how the Muslim calendar works. I didn’t get up to speed on the Muslim calendar until last year. I had failed to attend a combination Yom Kippur/Ramadan break-the-fast to which I had been invited, and I thought to myself, "I should have gone, but hopefully I will find a combination celebration next year."
Nope.
While both the Muslim and Jewish calendars follow a lunar cycle, the Jewish calendar adds a leap month every four years or so, to keep roughly aligned with the Gregorian calendar. The Muslim calendar does not do this, and loses therefore about 11 days per year, sliding backward along the Gregorian calendar, spiraling its holidays throughout all of the seasons. Though Yom Kippur and Ramadan overlapped last year, this year is a Jewish leap year, so the holidays separated. They will not again overlap until 2038, when I will be 64 years old.
When I attended the Diwali/Ramadan four years ago, the new moon that meant Diwali had arrived was the same new moon that signaled the end of Ramadan, but since the Hindu calendar also follows a leap-month strategy, the two holidays won't be linked again for another 27 years. In 2035, Diwali’s new moon will fall on Halloween, and will trigger the beginning of Ramadan the next day, on Samhain/All Saint's Day.
This year, Diwali’s new moon happens this coming Tuesday, October 28. We'll be entering into the Hindu month of Karttika, the Muslim month of Dhu al-Q'idah, and the Jewish month of Chechvan. Also, Diwali and the new moon mark the Hindu new year, so... Happy New Year... again.
When I started looking for a Diwali celebration this year, I discovered that the Hindu (and some Jain) temples in my area were all cooperating together on a collective Diwali Mela, to be held on the Saturday before Diwali (yesterday) at Mariner Arena in Baltimore. The event was scheduled from noon to 10PM, so I decided to attend in the afternoon, and then use my Diwali trip as an excuse to visit a Baltimore friend in the evening.
I caught a combination of Metro, bus, and light-rail to Baltimore on a very windy and slightly drizzly late Saturday morning and arrived at Mariner Arena around 1:30.
I paid my $5 for a ticket at the downstairs box office and followed my nose upstairs to where I could tell lunch awaited. Lining the corridors where vendors normally sell nachos and hot dogs and beer sat tables overflowing with vats of biryani and chana masala and dal. Platters mounded high with pakoras and samosas sat next to giant bowls of mint chutney and tamarind. The food was selling for a flat fee of $5 for any two menu items on a plate. Starving, I bought a double for $10 and took a seat in the arena to chow down while listening to the musicians playing bhajans on the stage.
Mariner Arena can hold 11,000 people. It is home to Baltimore's soccer team, but more often it hosts shows like Disney on Ice, Motocross, or Ringling Brothers' Circus. Inside, three levels of stadium-style seating, in a U shape, look down on the large, sporting-event-sized floor, with a wide stage at the flat end of the U.
On the floor, about thirty or forty rows of chairs provided prime additional seating for watching the stage, and behind those rows were assembled fifty to sixty booths made of blue curtains and metal piping for vendors to sell their wares. Several hundred people filled the arena, some sitting in the stadium seats like me, plates of food balanced on their laps, while others milled about the booths or lined the seats on the floor.
I wore a dark flannel shirt and jeans and felt that I did not look terribly out of place among the men, who ranged from low-end casual to business suits, with only the very occasional kurta. The women, on the other hand, skewed toward maybe 75-percent traditional dress, which, seen from the height of the stadium seats, presented a delightfully classy and colorful sea of humanity.
After bolting my food and pitching my plate, I made my way down to the floor to see what I might see. In addition to the predictable booths for saris and jewelry and Hindu art, I saw booths for life insurance, blood pressure testing, and services for wiring money to India. Booths for kids offered the chance to fill in black-and-white lotus drawings with glue and colorful powders, as well as children's picture books about the gods and goddesses, and dolls manufactured by Mattel labeled "Barbie Goes to India."
Other booths offered vast arrays of Bollywood films and music, cosmetics, oil lamps, the services of traditional wedding decorators, and back issues of a magazine called The Indian American that has placed Barack Obama on the cover of its current issue. I thumbed the literature on the table of the Vedanta booth, reading short sections of text about how to interpret the Upanishads to reach self-realization and cosmic consciousness. The man staffing this booth never stopped talking on his cell phone while I stood there, but I took note of a banner overhead that linked the booth with someone called Swami Chinmayananda, so I made a note to follow up.
Elsewhere on the exhibition floor, I looked amongst the assorted god and goddess figures for a Lakshmi.
I have a small silver Ganesha statue that a friend gave me for Holi in the spring, and I thought I might like to place a matching goddess of wealth next to him, as America gnaws its collective nails over the economy. Alas, all of the Lakshmis were painted in garish colors that I didn't like, though I did see some attractive Buddhas fashioned in silver (which was a surprise to me).
The cultural program began around 2:30, with each of the temples allowed about fifteen minutes of stage time for a performance. Each temple took its turn presenting choreographed dances, often dedicated to a god or goddess (Ganesha, Shiva, Lord Nataraja the God of Dance), with some described without a god-reference ("a Gujarati folk dance," "beats from the State of Punjab"), and one described as "a hymn to God, the Divine Life that is our best friend in every way."
After about three temples' presentations, I noticed that either by design or by happenstance, the performances did not seem to involve men, boys, or older women. Only girls and young women were taking the stage to sing and dance, and I reflected that if I were a young Hindu boy I might likely feel jealous. The highly stylized choreography looked fun to perform, and the fanciful costumes looked fun to wear. Most of the pre-recorded music was loud, fast, inspiring, and exhilarating -- with a heavy beat that wouldn't have been out of place in a nightclub.
Later, during the time I slipped out to purchase a dish of masala chai ice cream, a boy-performer did take the stage. He was the drummer for a female dance troupe, and when I returned with my sweet treat, he stood at the microphone praying. The boy called God our creator and our sustainer, but did not mention any names like Brahma or Vishnu. And when he called on God to give us prosperity in the new year, he did not mention either Lakshmi or Ganesha, with his connection to auspicious beginnings. He asked God to guide us all down the noble path.
After a few more dances, a man in a suit took to the stage to announce the start of Lakshmi Puja.
While he spoke, several others -- men in suits, one man in a saffron-colored kurta, a woman in a rose-and-white sari -- began to transform the stage. They brought out two large images, about the size of college dorm-room posters, framed in gold, and leaned them against a long table covered in a gold cloth that was already sitting to the rear of the stage. The image on the left showed Lakshmi, two arms raised, two arms outstretched, standing on a lotus flower with a white elephant emerging from a river behind her. The image on the right showed a pink and white Ganesha.
Between these images, the men and woman placed a huge pile of bananas, and then they rolled out a red cloth on the floor before the images. At the corners of the red cloth, they rolled out two more red cloths, forming an inward-slanting rectangle with its arms open toward the audience.
The man at the microphone asked for all of the board members of the Association of Hindu and Jain Temples to come to the stage, along with two children from each temple. The adults who came forward knelt on the first red cloth, facing the images. The children knelt on the two other cloths, facing the audience. While the man at the microphone spoke about Lakshmi and Diwali and the New Year and thanked various people, the other men and the woman provided the kneeling worshipers with various objects -- cups of water, and red plates covered with I knew not what.
When the man at the microphone was finished, a different unseen man began reciting prayers in Hindi. His words triggered actions among the worshipers on the stage. They touched or moved things on their plates, or raised their hands above their heads.
Occasionally, the praying man would give a partial instruction in English ("now the rice and flowers," "now the mango leaves," “run the rice through your fingers"). He paused to give voice to drawn-out ohms occasionally, and every now and then, from somewhere, a bell would ring. This went on for nearly forty minutes.
Whether Hebrew or Arabic or Hindi, Latin or Greek or German, there is possibly no other boredom in this world like the boredom of listening to never-ending prayers in a language you don't understand.
I know this is my fault for not knowing another spoken language, and I know I'm totally in the wrong for thinking this, but as much as I wanted to enjoy and learn from the worship of Lakshmi, I found it irritating. “Enough, already,” I thought, as the prayers grew repetitive and monotonous, “I'm sure Lakshmi gets it.”
I selfishly wanted the program to return to the dances ("Entertain me!"), and to top it off, my phone kept vibrating with my Baltimore friend apparently trying to contact me about our evening plans. I felt like a jerk for not answering my friend's call as I outwardly respected the ceremony taking place on the stage, and like a bigger jerk for inwardly barely respecting the ceremony at all.
When a bell started ringing non-stop, I hoped fervently that it might signal the end of the ceremony.
It did. The adults rose and warmed their hands over oil lamps situated on the table behind the two images. The man in the saffron kurta began tossing flower petals over everyone, and then the children rose to warm their hands as well. The stage began to clear, as the man in saffron moved the oil lamps to the edge of the stage. Men and women from the audience drew near to the lamps, placing their hands above the flames, then touching their faces, running their fingers through their hair, and bowing with a namaste.
I should have at least offered Mariner Arena my own namaste before rushing outside to call my friend back, but I did not.
Four years ago, a deaf friend of mine who is married to a deaf Indian man (neither of them identifies as Hindu) invited me to a combination Diwali/Ramadan celebration hosted by the Greater Washington Asian Deaf Association.
This was before I was truly competent in ASL (I had a hard time following the details of the skit depicting Krishna's slaying of Narakasura), and also before I understood how the Muslim calendar works. I didn’t get up to speed on the Muslim calendar until last year. I had failed to attend a combination Yom Kippur/Ramadan break-the-fast to which I had been invited, and I thought to myself, "I should have gone, but hopefully I will find a combination celebration next year."
Nope.
While both the Muslim and Jewish calendars follow a lunar cycle, the Jewish calendar adds a leap month every four years or so, to keep roughly aligned with the Gregorian calendar. The Muslim calendar does not do this, and loses therefore about 11 days per year, sliding backward along the Gregorian calendar, spiraling its holidays throughout all of the seasons. Though Yom Kippur and Ramadan overlapped last year, this year is a Jewish leap year, so the holidays separated. They will not again overlap until 2038, when I will be 64 years old.
When I attended the Diwali/Ramadan four years ago, the new moon that meant Diwali had arrived was the same new moon that signaled the end of Ramadan, but since the Hindu calendar also follows a leap-month strategy, the two holidays won't be linked again for another 27 years. In 2035, Diwali’s new moon will fall on Halloween, and will trigger the beginning of Ramadan the next day, on Samhain/All Saint's Day.
This year, Diwali’s new moon happens this coming Tuesday, October 28. We'll be entering into the Hindu month of Karttika, the Muslim month of Dhu al-Q'idah, and the Jewish month of Chechvan. Also, Diwali and the new moon mark the Hindu new year, so... Happy New Year... again.
When I started looking for a Diwali celebration this year, I discovered that the Hindu (and some Jain) temples in my area were all cooperating together on a collective Diwali Mela, to be held on the Saturday before Diwali (yesterday) at Mariner Arena in Baltimore. The event was scheduled from noon to 10PM, so I decided to attend in the afternoon, and then use my Diwali trip as an excuse to visit a Baltimore friend in the evening.
I caught a combination of Metro, bus, and light-rail to Baltimore on a very windy and slightly drizzly late Saturday morning and arrived at Mariner Arena around 1:30.
I paid my $5 for a ticket at the downstairs box office and followed my nose upstairs to where I could tell lunch awaited. Lining the corridors where vendors normally sell nachos and hot dogs and beer sat tables overflowing with vats of biryani and chana masala and dal. Platters mounded high with pakoras and samosas sat next to giant bowls of mint chutney and tamarind. The food was selling for a flat fee of $5 for any two menu items on a plate. Starving, I bought a double for $10 and took a seat in the arena to chow down while listening to the musicians playing bhajans on the stage.
Mariner Arena can hold 11,000 people. It is home to Baltimore's soccer team, but more often it hosts shows like Disney on Ice, Motocross, or Ringling Brothers' Circus. Inside, three levels of stadium-style seating, in a U shape, look down on the large, sporting-event-sized floor, with a wide stage at the flat end of the U.
On the floor, about thirty or forty rows of chairs provided prime additional seating for watching the stage, and behind those rows were assembled fifty to sixty booths made of blue curtains and metal piping for vendors to sell their wares. Several hundred people filled the arena, some sitting in the stadium seats like me, plates of food balanced on their laps, while others milled about the booths or lined the seats on the floor.
I wore a dark flannel shirt and jeans and felt that I did not look terribly out of place among the men, who ranged from low-end casual to business suits, with only the very occasional kurta. The women, on the other hand, skewed toward maybe 75-percent traditional dress, which, seen from the height of the stadium seats, presented a delightfully classy and colorful sea of humanity.
After bolting my food and pitching my plate, I made my way down to the floor to see what I might see. In addition to the predictable booths for saris and jewelry and Hindu art, I saw booths for life insurance, blood pressure testing, and services for wiring money to India. Booths for kids offered the chance to fill in black-and-white lotus drawings with glue and colorful powders, as well as children's picture books about the gods and goddesses, and dolls manufactured by Mattel labeled "Barbie Goes to India."
Other booths offered vast arrays of Bollywood films and music, cosmetics, oil lamps, the services of traditional wedding decorators, and back issues of a magazine called The Indian American that has placed Barack Obama on the cover of its current issue. I thumbed the literature on the table of the Vedanta booth, reading short sections of text about how to interpret the Upanishads to reach self-realization and cosmic consciousness. The man staffing this booth never stopped talking on his cell phone while I stood there, but I took note of a banner overhead that linked the booth with someone called Swami Chinmayananda, so I made a note to follow up.
Elsewhere on the exhibition floor, I looked amongst the assorted god and goddess figures for a Lakshmi.
I have a small silver Ganesha statue that a friend gave me for Holi in the spring, and I thought I might like to place a matching goddess of wealth next to him, as America gnaws its collective nails over the economy. Alas, all of the Lakshmis were painted in garish colors that I didn't like, though I did see some attractive Buddhas fashioned in silver (which was a surprise to me).
The cultural program began around 2:30, with each of the temples allowed about fifteen minutes of stage time for a performance. Each temple took its turn presenting choreographed dances, often dedicated to a god or goddess (Ganesha, Shiva, Lord Nataraja the God of Dance), with some described without a god-reference ("a Gujarati folk dance," "beats from the State of Punjab"), and one described as "a hymn to God, the Divine Life that is our best friend in every way."
After about three temples' presentations, I noticed that either by design or by happenstance, the performances did not seem to involve men, boys, or older women. Only girls and young women were taking the stage to sing and dance, and I reflected that if I were a young Hindu boy I might likely feel jealous. The highly stylized choreography looked fun to perform, and the fanciful costumes looked fun to wear. Most of the pre-recorded music was loud, fast, inspiring, and exhilarating -- with a heavy beat that wouldn't have been out of place in a nightclub.
Later, during the time I slipped out to purchase a dish of masala chai ice cream, a boy-performer did take the stage. He was the drummer for a female dance troupe, and when I returned with my sweet treat, he stood at the microphone praying. The boy called God our creator and our sustainer, but did not mention any names like Brahma or Vishnu. And when he called on God to give us prosperity in the new year, he did not mention either Lakshmi or Ganesha, with his connection to auspicious beginnings. He asked God to guide us all down the noble path.
After a few more dances, a man in a suit took to the stage to announce the start of Lakshmi Puja.
While he spoke, several others -- men in suits, one man in a saffron-colored kurta, a woman in a rose-and-white sari -- began to transform the stage. They brought out two large images, about the size of college dorm-room posters, framed in gold, and leaned them against a long table covered in a gold cloth that was already sitting to the rear of the stage. The image on the left showed Lakshmi, two arms raised, two arms outstretched, standing on a lotus flower with a white elephant emerging from a river behind her. The image on the right showed a pink and white Ganesha.
Between these images, the men and woman placed a huge pile of bananas, and then they rolled out a red cloth on the floor before the images. At the corners of the red cloth, they rolled out two more red cloths, forming an inward-slanting rectangle with its arms open toward the audience.
The man at the microphone asked for all of the board members of the Association of Hindu and Jain Temples to come to the stage, along with two children from each temple. The adults who came forward knelt on the first red cloth, facing the images. The children knelt on the two other cloths, facing the audience. While the man at the microphone spoke about Lakshmi and Diwali and the New Year and thanked various people, the other men and the woman provided the kneeling worshipers with various objects -- cups of water, and red plates covered with I knew not what.
When the man at the microphone was finished, a different unseen man began reciting prayers in Hindi. His words triggered actions among the worshipers on the stage. They touched or moved things on their plates, or raised their hands above their heads.
Occasionally, the praying man would give a partial instruction in English ("now the rice and flowers," "now the mango leaves," “run the rice through your fingers"). He paused to give voice to drawn-out ohms occasionally, and every now and then, from somewhere, a bell would ring. This went on for nearly forty minutes.
Whether Hebrew or Arabic or Hindi, Latin or Greek or German, there is possibly no other boredom in this world like the boredom of listening to never-ending prayers in a language you don't understand.
I know this is my fault for not knowing another spoken language, and I know I'm totally in the wrong for thinking this, but as much as I wanted to enjoy and learn from the worship of Lakshmi, I found it irritating. “Enough, already,” I thought, as the prayers grew repetitive and monotonous, “I'm sure Lakshmi gets it.”
I selfishly wanted the program to return to the dances ("Entertain me!"), and to top it off, my phone kept vibrating with my Baltimore friend apparently trying to contact me about our evening plans. I felt like a jerk for not answering my friend's call as I outwardly respected the ceremony taking place on the stage, and like a bigger jerk for inwardly barely respecting the ceremony at all.
When a bell started ringing non-stop, I hoped fervently that it might signal the end of the ceremony.
It did. The adults rose and warmed their hands over oil lamps situated on the table behind the two images. The man in the saffron kurta began tossing flower petals over everyone, and then the children rose to warm their hands as well. The stage began to clear, as the man in saffron moved the oil lamps to the edge of the stage. Men and women from the audience drew near to the lamps, placing their hands above the flames, then touching their faces, running their fingers through their hair, and bowing with a namaste.
I should have at least offered Mariner Arena my own namaste before rushing outside to call my friend back, but I did not.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)