The Buddha & The Bruddah

It was a long, overnight train ride from Siliguri, that horrible place I was stuck in for the night, to the city of Patna. In Patna I would transfer from the long distance, overnight train to a local commuter train. Basically going from a train with padded bunk beds stacked three high to a train with wooden seats and a lot more people.
Most of the people on the long distance train were tourists, foreign and domestic, and families moving across the country. The local train was just the local people of that area traveling from one town to the next for work, family, etc.
On the local train I sat with a group of 3 men who were traveling from Patna to the city of Gaya, a 4 hour ride. One was a government administrative employee in his 60s traveling for work, one was a shop owner in his 40s traveling to buy goods and the third was a student in his teens traveling back to school. Their English was very broken but we were able to have conversations the whole trip down.
I asked about their lives, they asked about mine. I learned what the different markings on a person's forehead stood for, such as a streak of vermilion in the part of the hair signifies marriage and the dot on the forehead is just fashion. There are also quite a few different marks, lines and symbols that can be on a person's forehead to signify a particular sect of Hinduism that that person follows.
The man in his 60s read my palm with half humor and half seriousness, the shop owner asked about how much I made and the student wondered how I communicated with anyone if I didn't speak Hindi. I tried to explain what charades meant. They were all very interesting to talk to and we even had a few laughs along the way.
When we reached our destination, the government worker warned me to watch out for touts and gave me his business card. He told me if I ran into any trouble to give him a call. All were really nice guys.
The local train ride would be followed by a half hour autorickshaw ride to my destination for the day, which was the town of Bodhgaya. Bodhgaya is the place where the Indian Prince, Siddhartha Gautama, attained enlightenment, 2,600 years ago, beneath a bodhi tree and became the Buddha, meaning "Enlightened One." His teachings would develop into the Buddhist philosophy and religion. The Buddha would spend the rest of his final life cycle days preaching the ways to enlightenment to others before going on to Nirvana.
There is now a temple on the very spot that Buddha attained enlightenment and right behind the temple is the bodhi tree. OK, so not the actual bodhi tree, that one was cut down by the angry wife of an Indian Emperor who was a big proponent of Buddhism. Fortunately, before the tree was murdered, the Emperor's daughter took one of it's saplings and planted it in Sri Lanka, the island just off the southern tip of India. Years later, a cutting from the tree in Sri Lanka was brought back to Bodhgaya where it was planted in the very spot where its grandpappy once stood.
Now, sure, initially you're thinking, "Hey, that's not even the real tree!" But remember, in Buddhism, nothing is permanent and material things like that shouldn't matter. Then again, if you subscribe to that belief, the temple itself probably shouldn't be there either. Nor the seven souvenir stands right outside the gate of the temple. Or the ice cream and milkshake shop right next to the souvenir stand. Or the, well, you get the idea.
While walking around the temple grounds, which are a nice quiet break from the bustle and dust of the town, there are many people who are engaged in meditation, prayer or listening to lectures while sitting in the shade of the bodhi tree (which I must say is a very large, beautiful tree). Many of the faithful perform a particular routine of prayer which includes going from the standing position with hands together, to a squatting position, to a laying position where you slide your hands out above your head, putting you into a fully prone position. Most of the people doing this routine are on smooth planks of board which are probably about 3 feet wide by 9 feet long. They grab hand size pieces of wood that are laying on the board and ease their weight onto them as they squat and slide forward, the pieces of wood servings as a kind of sled. They seem to do this repeatedly for hours, but do it with such fluidity as to make it look easy, though I'm sure that the novice of this routine walks away at the end of the day with a more than a few blisters.
Most of the people performing this routine appear to be Indian or from somewhere in the Himalayas. There is, of course, the occasional foreigner who is trying this out, as many tourist who travel through the area try to submerge themselves in the local culture. Under this last category of people was this one foreigner who was performing the routine. She was probably in her twenties and white. You know the type, from one of those white countries in Europe or North America. The kind who goes abroad and thinks she has blended into the local culture but really hasn't. While all the other people were doing their routines in various, out of the way spots in the immediate temple grounds, she was right in front of the tree, almost in the way. She was in sweatpants and had these leg warmers on her hands to try to cushion the blisters that had no doubt started to form. She was red in the face. There was nothing smooth about it. On more than one occasion I noticed her looking at her watch, checking to see how much longer she needed to do this. The only thing that was missing was Richard Simmons in a Saffron one piece and Olivia Newton John's "Let's get physical" over the loud speaker.
That night I met a guy from Canada, named Graham, who seemed to be the more serious Buddhist type. He was on a 6 month pilgrimage to all of the holy sites connected with the original sect of Buddhism, the one closest to the original teachings of the Buddha. Over dinner one night he explain to me how there were different teachings of Buddhism in different parts of the world and each one with its own qualities depending on which culture it was absorbed into. He told me a few stories from the life of the Buddha that dealt with Buddha's everyday life, like the time the Buddha arrived in a town with his many disciples and a local family took them in and were going to feed them. The Buddha sampled the food before the disciples and pulled the cook aside and said, "Please don't feed this to my disciples, it is so bad that if I wasn't the Buddha it would have killed me." I believe this was actually the first recorded case of the Ghangida.
Graham spoke of how one of the most important concepts was to get rid of the things that weigh us down spiritually and emotionally. I interpreted this to mean that I needed to go through my backpack, which was far too heavy and overfilled, and weed down the things I really didn't need. With his inspiration I got rid of about 1/3 of the stuff in my pack including the airline pillow I had been dragging around and the giant workout rubber band I had been meaning to exercise with. Not to mention a bunch of unneeded clothes and towels. I took all this stuff down to the front of the temple late that night to a little campfire that was surrounded by a family of street people. Hopefully by now they are a little more rested and in better shape.
Graham and I spent a lot of time talking about giving hand outs to street people, which was a common discussion in Kolkata when I worked at the clinic. Mother Teresa's highly recommends against handouts and encourages any donations to go to a charity who can do more good. The thought is that a lot of the money given in handouts goes towards drugs and drinking. This is nothing new to anyone who's lived in a US city with homeless people. Graham had an interesting view that was completely Buddhist in that you have no control over what happens to that money once you've given it away. He said we give donations solely to make ourselves feel better and cannot expect to have any control over what happens to that person we've given a hand out to once we've given it. We also cannot say whether or not that money will be used to help or hurt that person. He's got a point, but I still feel it irresponsible to do anything, even give a handout, without considering what its consequences might be.
Right outside the temple grounds I sat and spoke with a man from Bodhgaya who was one of the souvenir vendors. He said he had grown up in Bodhgaya and seen it change from a small quiet town to a dirty, bustling tourist destination. On the rickshaw ride in from Gaya, I saw that there were green fields surrounding the town of Bodhgaya but once you hit the city limit it was full of the usual garbage, traffic and air pollution. Like many other Indian cities, Bodhgaya had expanded well past what its infrastructure of roads and sewage could handle. He told me that the temple use to just be open on all sides and you could wander in and out whenever you wanted. Now it had a tall wall around the grounds and you had to pay admission to go in. A large touristy shopping area had developed right outside the main gate of the temple.
The vendor told me about the different castes and which jobs they would hold. He told me that much of your life was determined by which caste you were born into, from what your job would be, to who you would marry, to where you could be cremated. I asked him why people who were in the "Untouchables" caste didn't just lie about what their caste was and start anew. He looked at me like I was crazy. He said you are what you are. He also said he liked his caste. I guess it's so ingrained that the thought of lying or switching castes is unthinkable. I think it also has to do with the caste system being reinforced by the Hindu religion. What caste you are born into is suppose to reflect how you lived in a previous life. If you were a bad person, you were moved down in caste in the next life, and if you were a good person you moved up. Meaning that the lower caste people did bad stuff in a previous life and are paying for it now and the only way out of it is to make this life good so you would hopefully move up next time around. Lying about your caste to get a girl or a better job probably moves you down 2 or 3 castes in the next go around. The vendor told me that Buddhists are outside the caste system. He also told me that Muslims, too, were outside the caste system because they were all horrible, violent people, though I don't think you would find that in any Hindu teachings. I suppose finding another group to hate is a prerequisite for some people.
You can't come to a place like Bodhgaya and not think about the hereafter or higher beings. It made me think back to Mad Dog, the guy from Washington State who I worked with at Mother Teresa's. Mad Dog had an interesting take on religion and God, which appeared to me to be based on various TV shows and films from the 80s. Mad Dog felt that almost every religion in the world worships a being that ascended from the sky. These beings then passed on other-world knowledge to the people in exchange for worship. And as reward for worship, the being or beings would protect the people. Mad Dog felt, of course, that these beings were aliens, which is not really a new concept, you can see it in films like StarGate, Star Trek and Planet of the Apes (sorry, I love that movie and had to work it in again). The thing with Mad Dog is that he acknowledges the aliens and still wants to worship them because he's thankful that they passed on whatever knowledge to us that they did and also because they are sitting out in space protecting us from other aliens who would maybe come and harm us. I wonder what caste the vendor would put Mad Dog into.