Shunya's Notes

A Sunday in São Paulo

I often think of Brazil as the most diverse, complex, and beautiful country in the Americas, and I am fortunate to have traveled through many parts of it. Its wild nature is famous enough and its society is an intricate patchwork of global and indigenous cultures. In June 2001, I spent a Sunday walking the streets of São Paulo, a city that strongly reminds me of Bombay. It is the most energetic and cosmopolitan metropolis of Brazil, its financial and entertainment hub, and a city of great opportunity and strife. Of Brazil, I wrote in an essay:

Futebol, sun, sand, sex, hard bodies, music, dance, tropical fruits, and drinks—picture-postcard Brazil. But there is plenty to ruffle this youth-worshiping light-heartedness and hedonistic living in the present: extreme wealth disparity, urban violence, corruption, unemployment, illiteracy, high birth rate, cast off children, the horror of growing old. Children are ubiquitous in Brazil—half the population is under twenty. Evangelists strive for their souls in small towns and big cities ... Yet, Brazil has also made important strides. Communication, roads, transportation, housing projects, drinking water, and sanitation have come a long way. Multiple races and traditions coexist reasonably well. Villages and large cities rarely betray the kind of crushing poverty one finds in many other developing countries.

Here is some footage from my Sunday in São Paulo, with ordinary people, downtown, Liberdade (Japan town), evangelical Christians, soccer fever, street musicians/performers, sleaze district, prostitutes, the homeless, etc. The most hilarious part is that of a Japanese-Brazilian man in a public square, bursting spontaneously into dance—which later morphs into martial art moves—all to atrocious Christian pop!

(Music soundtrack by Adriana Calcanhotto, Cesaria Evora, Jerry Mulligan, Jane Duboc, Gal Costa, Caetano Veloso, and Gilberto Gil.)

A Child of God

I ran into her in Dharamsala, home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile. She was a pilgrim at the festival of Buddha Purnima, which celebrates the Buddha's enlightenment.

I don’t know her story. I regret not speaking to her, or even inquiring about her. I confess I was too dumbstruck, able only to take this photo from across the road, approach her to drop some coins in her bowl, and slip away.

Her teeth and hair suggest she is young. Is she a victim of fire or chemicals (accidental or criminal)? Does she have a family? How does she regard herself? What is a typical day in her life?

White Desert, Egypt

The Western Desert, a vast expanse that starts at the western bank of the Nile and continues well into Libya, is the desert of deserts. Covering a total of 2.8 million sq km and bordered by Libya in the west, Sudan in the south and the Mediterranean in the north, it is a world of desolation and beauty -- and one of the few places in Egypt where you can go for days at a time without seeing a soul. Five isolated but thriving oases dot this otherwise uninhabited expanse: Kharga, Dakhla, Farafra, Bahariyya, and to the north-west of these, Siwa.  (—LP, Egypt).

In Jan 2003, Usha and I traveled through four of the five Oases in Egypt's Western Desert (or Eastern Sahara), including a special excursion to the hauntingly beautiful White Desert, known for its otherworldly white chalk rock formations. In Farafra, we hired a 4x4, camping gear, a driver who doubled as a cook, and drove about 50 km over shifting sands.

Usha, with her keen eye for detail, spotted seashells in the sand, a thrilling discovery for us. It is one thing to know that the Sahara was once below the sea, another to see proof of it. Also visible are remains of ancient lava flows—bits of lava rock rolled around for millions of years, eventually turning into lots of black spheroids, inch-wide in diameter. Our "tent" had two right-angled walls (to act as windbreakers) and no roof. We saw a gazillion stars and the white rocks looked beautiful in the moonlight. But even four blankets didn't feel enough when the temperature dropped to near freezing that night. Here are some scenes from the trip, set to some music I like from north Africa.

A funny aside: The book Sahara, describes "four major ethnic groups of the Sahara, including the [Muslim] Tuareg, whose men rather than the women wear veils ... Tuareg women tell the men that 'a child can sleep in the womb for years, or even forever.'"

This [provides a cheating] wife a welcome and convenient pretext for representing to her husband in a respectable light any increase in the family that may have taken place in his absence.

Ghost Town in the Levant

Scenes from my visit to Quneitra, Syria, 2001. (Wikipedia on Quneitra.)

Teotihuacan, Mexico City

In early first century CE, Teotihuacan was just a hamlet. Its population then grew as people from the Valley of Mexico began arriving there. With a larger labor force at its disposal, the local rulers grew richer and devised a master plan for a new city with the great building projects of the pyramids of the sun and the moon. The plan was inspired by the Aztec conception of the universe, and indeed, as the place where the universe itself originated. It also made Teotihuacan the grandest city in Mesoamerica during the Classic Period.

Teotihuacan's control of the obsidian mines at Otumba and Pachuca allowed it to centralize the production of obsidian goods, some for domestic sale, the rest for export. With this, and its monopoly on the distribution of Thin Orange pottery, Teotihuacan developed a trading system that embraced almost every region of Mesoamerica, including places as far away as the Maya area, the modern state of Guerrero, and the area around the Gulf of Mexico.

Teotihuacan's metropolitan feel, its trading system, and the religious prestige it accrued from its giant pyramids and related ceremonies, attracted a floating population that enriched the quality of life in the great city. At its peak between 150—450 CE, it stretched over 30 square km and had a population of between 150,000 and 250,000.

After flourishing for centuries, Teotihuacan collapsed c. 750 CE, partly due to adverse pressures from the new population centers that sprang up on the Mexican plateau. However, evidence of fire, and the systematic, devastating ways in which the buildings lining the Avenue of the Dead were destroyed point to the main cause of its collapse being internal rebellions. [—Preceding text adapted from a display at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia (Mexico pics).]

Here is a ten minute video from my second trip to Teotihuacan in July 2002, along with Mexico City footage from the Zocalo, Plaza Garibaldi, and the excellent Museo Nacional de Antropologia, which contains many artifacts from Teotihuacan. 

Sex in the Park

My previous post (From the Outside, Looking In) sparked a discussion between myself and a friend on the assumptions we make about other people. In this context, something my friend said reminded me of an amusing encounter Namit and I had in India, one which illustrated for me my own simplistic notions about Indian Muslims who wear the burkha.

We were walking along a grassy, boulder-strewn hillside overlooking the city of Bhopal. There's a tiny, rusty old amusement park at the top of this hill, with a miniature ferris wheel and a couple of other whirl-y rides, where families come for picnics. Outside this happening zone, the grounds are like a little wilderness park and there are fewer people, mostly a few adolescents trying to sneak off with their friends, newlyweds wanting to be alone, and a few random walkers like us. Suddenly, far from the small crowd of families on holiday, we heard men shouting behind a stand of trees. This being India, where everything is everybody's business, we wandered over to see what the matter was. We found a man and woman standing with their hands tightly clasped to each others', the man yelling red-faced at another man who was yelling back with equal vehemence. The woman, who stood quietly with her head bent, was covered in a full burkha—not even her eyes were visible behind her veil, which is quite unusual in India.

As soon as we approached, the single man brought Namit into the argument, making his case against the couple. His accusation was that he'd caught them in flagrante delicto out in the open. Having sex in public is illegal (public lewdness), he claimed.

Bihar

The State of Bihar, in the eastern part of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, is amply watered by the Ganga and its tributaries, and there is no denying that the landscape here—particularly during the early monsoons when we visited—is among the loveliest in India. So many views of the land, rich in untapped mineral wealth, are crossed by broadly curving, slow rivers. Roads and fields are fringed with palm trees and a profusion of wild, tropical vegetation. Rural vistas end along the curves and jags of low, green hills under a soaring sky, blue in the sun or darkening with the promise of rain.

This land also claims an illustrious history as the onetime center of the subcontinent's culture and politics. Its name, Bihar, is derived from the Sanskrit vihara (Buddhist monastery), and it was here, 2,500 years ago, that the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment sitting under the Bodhi tree. His Jain contemporary, Mahavira, the quintessential master of non-violence whose teachings reach into modern times in the form of ahinsa (ahimsa) and Gandhi's ideals, also originated from this region.

           

Nobody's Land

A Journey to the Pantanal, Brazil

"Cuiabá is the city of mangoes. We don't buy them, just pluck and eat," says Rizardo, our wildlife guide. Riding in the bed of a pickup truck, we are going down the Transpantaneira, a dirt road that runs 145 KM south into the Pantanal, one of the world's largest freshwater wetlands in Mato Grosso state, Brazil.

I understand what Rizardo meant when we get to the first fazenda, or private farm -- mango trees galore, alongside those of guava, papaya, lemon, coconut, grapefruit. The mangoes he likes, he tells me, are borbon and pequi, not rasa or coração de boi. After lunch, I rest in a hammock and watch a sly-looking toucan struggle with a hard-shelled fruit. On a branch above, a blue-green macaw nibbles on a ripe guava; partly eaten ones lie scattered on the ground; they are pink inside. It is hot and humid but a breeze is blowing across the parched farmland.

I am here with my friend Laura to see some of what is the largest concentration of fauna in the New World. Nearly half the size of France, the Pantanal features 700 species of birds, 200 species of fishes, jaguars, ocelots, armadillos, anteaters, tapirs, agoutis, marmosets, iguanas, anacondas, otters, capybaras, and other "exotic" animals. The Amazon hogs the limelight for fauna stats but to see wildlife in wide open spaces, the Pantanal is the place to visit, even when many species rarely oblige. Last year, I went to the Amazon via Manaus and saw precious little in the wild. (The highlight was the Amazon River itself -- miles upon miles wide even at its halfway point to the Atlantic, a sea unto itself. Yet the jungle lodge I stayed at boasted of famous visitors: Jimmy Carter, Bill Gates, Helmut Kohl, Hollywood icons, prime ministers, kings, and princes of constitutional monarchies. The entourage of the Prince of UAE -- so went the salacious gossip at the lodge -- included four muscular bodyguards and twelve stunning Brazilian girls.)

My first impressions of Cuiabá -- northern gateway to the Pantanal and a frontier boomtown -- proved deceptive. We flew in from São Paulo at 3 A.M. The only people we saw from our cab were a few gum-chewing young women on street corners, inappropriately dressed for any weather. The town appeared non-descript and dusty. Streets were grimly lit, some not at all. When we reached the hotel that we had booked from São Paulo, its doors were locked and the lobby was dark. Many minutes of frantic knocking brought forth a grumpy man who handed us the key to a musty room with bare walls and an anemic bulb.

Bodh Gaya

Bodh Gaya is the single most sacred site of Buddhism. It was in the forest here that Prince Siddharta sat under a tree and achieved enlightenment two and a half millennia ago. From here, he went out as the Buddha to teach his Eightfold Path to the masses. The tree was soon enshrined within a stone fence, and the marking of this holy spot later grew to include a stupa, which was overbuilt by larger and larger stupas, a temple, and other markers (such as stone lotuses) noting just about everyplace the Enlightened One had so much as placed his foot during the period of his epiphany. The famous tree is now called the Bodhi tree (Bodhi is Pali for enlightenment; it's also called a pipal tree, or Ficus religiosa), and the village around it is known as Bodh Gaya.

The bounteous, sheltering Bodhi tree that stands here today is said to be the 3rd generation descendant of the very tree under which the Buddha sat. A cutting of the original tree was sent to Sri Lanka by Ashoka's daughter, where it flourished. A few hundred years ago when the original died, a cutting was brought back from Sri Lanka. The area around the tree and its associated Mahabodhi temple is serene; monks and lay Buddhists come here from all over the world to meditate.

Inside the temple, the wealthy international Buddhist trust that cares for the site has taken great pains to "modernize" the setting. What is actually a dank, cave-like temple cut from black granite, has been painted over in bright colors with thick layers of high gloss paint. Padded linoleum covers the floor, with a small patch cut out for offerings. A chandelier lights the interior and spotlights focus on the Buddha's statue inside a clear glass enclosure. The ancient statue, carved from the same black stone as the temple, is now immaculately coated with gold. They have even installed air conditioning, so one can feel the blessings of the Buddha immediately upon entering his timeless presence. There is nothing left of the look, feel, or ambiance to suggest that this is an ancient Indian site, as opposed to any ordinary modern temple. This is not entirely a bad thing in a living temple; modern pilgrims can be very comfortable here. But as an archaeological treasure, it has been defaced.

A Journey to the West

Journey to the West, "China's most beloved novel of religious quest and picaresque adventure," was published in the 1590s in the waning years of the Ming dynasty. The novel's hero, "a mischievous monkey with human traits ... accompanies the monk-hero on his action-filled travels to India in search of Buddhist scripture." * It is "an extended allegory in which ... pilgrims journeying toward India stands for the individual journeying toward enlightenment." * Indeed there aren't many books in which "go west, young man" would be a call to go to India.

The inspiration for this novel was a journey made by a 7th century CE Chinese man, Xuan Zang (or Hieun Tsang). Though raised in a conservative Confucian family near Chang'an (modern Xi'an), Hieun Tsang followed his brother into a Buddhist monastic life (Buddhism had come to China after the collapse of the Han dynasty in 220 CE). A precocious boy, he mastered his material so well that he was ordained a full monk when only 20. Disenchanted with the quality of Buddhist texts available to him, he decided to go west to India, to the cradle and thriving center of Buddhism itself. After a year-long journey full of peril and adventure, crossing deserts and mountains, meeting robbers and kings, debating Buddhists on the Silk Road and in Afghanistan (where he saw the Bamiyan Buddhas, recently destroyed by the Taliban), he reached what is now Pakistan.

He spent 17 years in India, traveling, visiting places associated with the Buddha's life, learning Sanskrit, and studying with Buddhist masters, most notably at the famous Nalanda University. His erudition seems to have brought him fame and royal patronage in India when in a religious convocation "in Harsha's capital of Kannauj during the first week of the year 643 ... Hieun Tsang allegedly defeated five hundred Brahmins, Jains, and heterodox Buddhists in spirited debate." *

For his return, he gathered hundreds of Sanskrit texts (sutras), loaded them on pack animals, and set off for Xi'an. Many of them got destroyed en route but he still managed to bring back 657 books. It was the time of the Tang dynasty in China, best known for its cultural effulgence akin to the Guptas of India (not the least because Shunya came into being then :). The Tang were Buddhist and, like the Guptas, major patrons of Buddhism.

Upon his return and for the remaining 19 years of his life, Hieun Tsang worked with a team of linguist monks to translate many of the 657 books and wrote a commentary on them. He also published an account of his travels which is now a precious historical record. He founded the Faxiang school of Buddhism whose ideas live on in the Zen variant. When Buddhism died out in India, its texts lost forever, these translations would become the only version of the Indian originals -- like the many Classical and Hellenistic Greek texts we know only via Arabic translations made during the so-called golden age of Islam in Baghdad.

The Tang emperor, Gaozong, supported Hieun Tsang's enterprise. He even built a pagoda -- now called the Big Goose Pagoda -- to house his translations, many still in use and displayed in a small museum on site. Outside the entrance stands an elegant modern statue of the man. It is said that the emperor canceled all audiences for three days when he heard of his death.

Like Chinese food in India, Buddhism altered its flavor in China. The core ideas of Buddhism were threatening to Confucianism, which, above all, stood for hierarchical relations, social order, respect for authority, orthodox family values, practical success, and ancestor worship; it had evolved no sophisticated reflection on the meaning and purpose of life. The notions of an individual spiritual quest, self-knowledge, and monasticism -- so central to Buddhism -- were quite alien to Confucianism. What therefore arose in China was a "defanged", "Confucianized" Buddhism. And just as an intellectually deficient devotional Hinduism edged out Buddhism in India, Confucianism too would push back Buddhism in China only a few centuries after Hieun Tsang (though it would never disappear as completely as in India).
   

(Note: Xuan Zang is variously spelled Hsüan Tsang, Hiuen Tsang, Xuanzang, Hiouen Thsang, Hsuan Chwang, Hsien-tsang, etc.)