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No 164 - 2001
5 Indian Faith Encounters by Fr Peter Bowe OSB
During Lent 2001 Fr Peter was asked to spend six weeks at Asirvanam, a Benedictine monastery outside Bangalore, South India, giving courses and being available for the formation of the young monks. He had been in India before, notably for nine months twenty years before. Now there was the opportunity to experience the rich culture of the south once again and renew acquaintance with the vibrant spiritual traditions of the different faiths so ardently practised in India. How can we not say that the Spirit is alive and at work in these faiths too?
TIRUVANNAMALAI
TAMIL Nadu, South India, is a delight! We were travelling by jeep. I could feel the distinctive country air and hot landscape, the excitement of travel at dangerous speed along the narrow roads arched over with trees, buses and lorries, but few cars, racing with blaring horns through the poor roadside villages, bumping over the dried wheat and rice which the villagers lay on the road to be threshed by the passing vehicles. All around were strange, arid, rocky hills rising up. A blazing sun was overhead, the mean, thatched mud-huts of the very poor scattered about, and the occasional town we tore through packed with the teeming millions of India about their noisy, cheerful business.I spent the whole morning in the magnificent Dravidian Temple for which the town is famous, and which was the real reason for my return to Tiruvannamalai. Leaving sandals outside as required, I entered through the high and richly carved gateway. The temple was thronged with people coming and going, all sorts and conditions of men and women and children, much larger than I remember, full of life and bustle and worship. Pujas were being performed in all the shrines, the bare-torsoed, ash-smeared and lunghi-clad Brahmins, threads hanging like deacon stoles on left shoulder, doing brisk business with Vedic chants and arati (fire-worship). The many temple tanks were busy with bathers in their fetid waters. The temple covers 24 acres and has four huge gopuras (gateways), the tallest being 217 feet high, and many smaller inner ones, set in the walls of the five main courtyards laid out one within another. Unfortunately they are now overlaid with thatch for renovation, for they are centuries old, all exquisitely carved with depictions of the sacred tales of the Mahabharata.
Under its mandir (canopy) stood the temple elephant patiently. I found the inner sanctuary at the heart of the temple and entered. Crowds were flocking in for puja, though this was no special day, even a crowd of schoolchildren. I went into the puja too and no one minded, for Hinduism is all-inclusive. I made a number of clockwise perambulations around the shrine, as much to view the worshippers and the place as from devotion. And eventually, when I saw an Indian doing the same, I summed up enough courage to take some discrete photos. Several sadhus called me to their lesser shrines dotted in far corners and hidden gardens, and insisted on doing puja for me - against a bargained fee of course! For all this, the temple was a place full of prayer and worship and life, very much as the temple in Jerusalem must once have been. Faith is manifestly part of daily life, quite as much as business and family, and the rituals too, which are so strange and foreign to the western mind, simply fit into the modern Tamil's routine as much once they did into that of their forebears. No aggiornimento in this liturgy, and no need!
Once the midday heat had subsided, I took a rickshaw to the ashram on the outskirts of the town where the renowned saint, Sri Ramana Maharashi lived till his death in 1950. Twenty years ago I had been less impressed; perhaps I was then less prepared. Now I was struck by the atmosphere of prayer and meditation. There were some westerners there, and the halls and simple shrine room were filled with people meditating and sitting in silent devotion. Then on the hour, five young brahmins, in the charge of an elder, started up theVedic chanting. Aged perhaps 12 or 14, they were, like our altar servers, keen and busy and just as distracted! Such youthful participation I have seen also among the young monks of Tibetan monasteries, for boyish enthusiasm for getting involved is the same the world over, indeed another form of devotion. This ashram was a spiritual place, filled with the soul of Ramana.
BANGALORE
One Sunday a small group of monks and nuns made a fascinating interfaith pilgrimage from Asirvanam monastery into Bangalore city. We visited in turn a Jain Temple, the Kailas Ashram and Rajarasjeswari Temple on the outskirts of the city, a Sikh Gurudhwara and finally a Muslim College. In each we were most warmly welcomed and in the first three we attended worship, naturally of quite different styles.The Jain temple was at a busy city cross-roads. The faithful were arriving, as they do each day, for morning prayers and puja, having specially bathed and dressed in clean white clothes, some with the masks which Jains, out of respect for their sacred principle of non-violence, wear to prevent harming living beings in the air with their breath. In the compact, exquisitely carved, marble temple, with a perambulatory outer raised section and an inner domed shrine open on three sides, a most devotional atmosphere prevailed. A small group of youth was singing bhajans accompanied by tabela (finger drums) and small harmonium. The Jains were most hospitable: we were led around the shrines and into the inner sanctum, and Jain beliefs were meticulously explained. For Jains, like Buddhists are agnostic, the gods and idols are not thought real in themselves, rather symbols of human attitudes, aspirations and fears, so that worship is really about one's own integration in oneself and with the world around. Purity, right living and service of others are hallmarks of their faith.
Next we visited the Hindu Temple where a festival in honour of the guru's birthday was in progress: loud drums and blaring conches, a gaily decked processional cart some 40 feet high for the idol, crowds pressing all around. Bare-chested swamis in saffron lunghis abounded, younger ones in white. One came forward to give us a smiling welcome and conduct us directly to the aged guru in the thick of the melée. One by one we squeezed through the press towards him and he received us each most warmly; then into the exquisitely carved and decorated temple, carefully constructed in symbolic human and cosmological measure, right into the inner sanctum where a noisy crowd pressed to receive the blessing of the god with the arati-fire and the prasad at the hands of the brahmins, all the while low murmuring of Vedic chant being punctuated by clanging bells. Given honoured places in front of the shrine, we signed ourselves with the holy sandalwood paste and red tilak. Afterwards, out in the hot sun, we were taken for refreshments to the ashram of the monks.
Then to the Sikhs - so different! We arrived as prayers, this time in Urdu, were in progress and we squashed into the packed gurudhwara, squatting on the floor. At the conclusion we were welcomed in English and invited to share the lunch provided for all downstairs. A delicious meal of rice, dahl, chappati, vegetable curry and curds was served to about 300 seated in rows on the floor. Afterwards we returned upstairs to hear about the simple Sikh faith. Sikhs worship the one God. The Guru Granth Sahib, the sacred Book, takes centre place in the temple, and reading the scriptures together with a spirit of service comprises the core of their devotion. I was reminded of the sola scriptura of Luther, a contemporary as it happens of Guru Nanak, the Sikh founder.
Finally to the Muslim college. We were disappointed to find that the imam we hoped to meet was away, but others welcomed us and demonstrated motions of the Muslim five times daily prayer, served us with tea and spent some time in discussion with us.
So, at the end of a day in which we had entered into four quite different religious traditions, I found myself reflecting that the Sikhs seem to demonstrate the best of what I am more familiar with in the Protestant tradition, and the Jains, with their attention to detail, to purity and to non-violent living, to mirror the tradition of some committed religious confraternities and orders. But it was the Hindus, with their powerful symbolism and lively popular participation, whom I most warmed to as closest to the sacramental tradition of my Catholic faith. I reflected that, were I not already Catholic, I might well find it most natural to turn to the throbbing human symbolism, even sacramentalism, of South Indian Hindu faith to express my human longing for the divine! The stunning ancient Tamil temples, awesome in their architectural grandeur and powerful symbolism, are deeply spiritual places and have quite captivated me. But however that might be, at least I know that the rich treasuries of faiths other than mine not only expand my horizons and open up converse with other men and women, but more importantly also water the deep wells of my own spirit searching for God through Christ.‡
Index
Douai Society Dinner, May 18 2001 Extracts from a speech by Abbot Geoffrey Scott OSB
Fr Adrian Hastings 1929 - 2001
Pre-Vatican II Catholic: The Case of Oliver Welch by Adrian Hastings
Impressions of El Salvador January 2002 by Fr Alexander Austin OSB
Music at Douai March 2001 - February 2002 by Fr Oliver Holt OSB
St Mary's Parish Studley by Fr Paul Gunter OSB
New Mass Setting: Roxanna Panufik's Douai Missa Brevis by John Rowntree
Go to index of Douai Newsletter.