Saturday, January 22: Ramanashram and the Temple of Fire

1/22 Tiruvannamalia

Lou Hawthorne was right when he told me that visiting ashrams would be a welcome break from India. "India is all around you all the time," he said. "What you'll really need, as a westerner, is to get AWAY from India!"

Eric, a Hollander I'd been following around the temple trail, had been there the day before me. I hadn't been at all impressed with the Aurobindo ashram. Just a bunch of people sitting around a dead guru's tomb, so I wasn't really interested in going to see the tomb of somebody named Ramana. "Why would I visit the ashram of somebody I hadn't studied about," I asked him. "I mean, what does one DO at an ashram, if you're not already indoctrinated?

Eric, not one to lecture, simply said, "you go there and try to stay open to whatever happens, to whoever you meet..."

He'd told me too, that there was a path to the top of the mountain with a great view of Tiruvannamalia, the famous Shiva temple of fire with its four huge gopurams, in the middle of town. And that's the only reason I went.

The first person I met before I'd even arrived. A little lost, I spotted a thin young man with blond hear wearing orange pants strolling down the side of the road, a plastic bag in one hand "You look like you might know the way to the ashram," I called to him. "I'll show you!" he replied, climbing on, and we pointed the way. He was so light that I could hardly tell he was there. I weave through yellow rickshaw taxis blowing their ridiculous toy horns, buses, and bicycles, until we got to a place where about a hundred orange-clad sadus sat patiently in a cleanswept dirt courtyard.

I parked the bike, and we gave our shoes to an attendant. We got round metal disks in return with numbers on them, and walked barefoot inside the courtyard, amongst the sadus and peacocks and monkeys, and white people in hippiewear and some Indian tourists. A peacock shrieked and quite inelegantly ran by us stepping high and trailing his feathers in the dirt. Bouganvilla hung from the rooftops of several low buildings painted white. Large trees shaded the whole place.

"How did you happen to come to this place?, I asked him. My guide, tall and gaunt with honey brown hair and olive green eyes, looked like a Californian but turned out to have an accent like a Transylvanian vampire.

"When I first came here I felt that it was a very holy place," he answered, in a completely Transylvanian vampire accent. I thought he must be joking, but as he continued talking, I realized that he wasn't. "You will see yourself, how you might get this feeling," he said, in his guttural trill. Come with me and I'll show you the samadhi... do you know what is the samadhi?"

A "samadhi" is the tomb where the body of the guru lies. I'd seen Sri Aurobindo and The Mother's shared samadhi at the ashram in Pondicherry. It had been made of marble. Devotees, or those just wishing to pay respects or absorb the vibe or simply do what everyone else was doing, circumambulated it three times, then sat down nearby, always facing it, to meditate. In Pondicherry there was a bit of a quiet, sacred feeling to the place, but here there was a palpable sense of spirit, and I immediately felt what he meant.

When we approached I heard chanting, in many different tones. Under the bougainvillea and through the doorway of a building the size of a one-bedroom house was a large cool room with a floor made of marble where people sat here and there, mostly cross-legged, in meditation. In the center of the floor is a raised platform, gently staircased, at the top of which is the samadhi, covered in flowers. Casually arrayed down the staircase, several priests and boys in ritual robes sat chanting in different tones, low and high, to make an almost-song that later I found was Vedic chanting, done at the samadhi each morning and evening. My guide and I flowed into the stream of people, about twenty, perhaps, who were circumambulating the samadhi. The chanting carried me along, and it felt the most natural thing in the world to be doing, to follow this Transylvanian New Age hippie around a dead guru named Ramana who never did anything since he was 16 years old but sit in a cave at the top of the hill behind us and "emanate."

Well, there's a bit more to it than that. Ramana was concerned with the method of "self-inquiry," believing that the thought "who am I?" will destroy all other thoughts to break our false identification with body, mind, senses, and personality.

Here, as in Pondicherry, there is no real doctrine or required practice, but there is a powerful feeling in the air, a cool, easy acceptance of the spirit initiated by this person.

We circumambulated ourselves right out of the room again and out into the courtyard, and "Ronnie" (I'm sure his real name would have been unpronounceable to me) led me into Ramana's bedchamber. "I always come sit for a few minutes here after doing that," he explained. I followed suit. This room was smaller, and dark, unlike the spacious lightness of the samadhi room. There were about a dozen people sitting in meditation. Two cushions were available at the other side of the room. We walked to them and sat. I could have sat for a much longer time. It was peaceful in there. The others were completely absorbed in their own thing, and I quickly became absorbed in mine. It's so nice to just take a moment, a few moments, an hour, I thought, just to sit and concentrate, or to collect one's thoughts or just rest the mind. This concept, this practice, had been completely unfamiliar to me until the day in the crystal meditation chamber at Auroville. There didn't seem to be the pressure here, in India, that I've felt before when I've find myself in a meditation group at home. I'm sure that this feeling, this ease of it, comes from having it available and natural. Not one Indian would question why someone had come all the way from the other side of the world to pay respects to a dead guru and to meditate. Why don't we have this in America? I pondered. Because we make our religion political? We are supposed to be able to worship freely but we pretend that religion doesn't need to be taught. We don't teach comparative realign in schools. Whose fault is that? My knee-jerk reaction is to blame the religious right, their insistence that because they know they are right everyone else is wrong, and force, though the support of laws that prohibit any act that falls outside of their minority value system. I sat, and was aware of the marble floor, of the other beings inside of the room with me, but, like in Matrimindar meditation chamber, was aware and unconcerned with them at the same time. "So is that what is truly happening, or is that my knee-jerk reaction?" I asked myself again. Either way, what can be done? That is a difficult question. Spirituality is lacking in my American culture, and it this gap shows in every aspect of our lives. What can be done? What can be done? Or more appropriately, how can I deal with my own gap in knowledge? My concentration was intent, but somewhere I sensed that Ronnie was getting up, and I followed.

Outside I thanked him, and he showed me the path up the mountain to the top of the hill, the hilltop with the view and with (which Eric didn't tell me) Ramana's cave ashram. It was paved lovingly in stone and wide enough for two people to pass. As I walked higher in the midmorning sun the sound of horns blowing in Tiruvannamalai was brought to my ears by the breeze. Sweat trickled down my back and I shifted my day pack off to remove my long sleeved shirt.

"Put the pack in front of you," spoke a sadu sitting on a rock at the side of the trail. I jumped. Had he been there just a second before? "The monkeys will creep up and snatch it away. Come sit a moment. Rest."

"Where do you come from?" he asked, politely.

"The USA," I answered.

"I am a wandering sadu. I live in a small ashram over the hill. I have wandered here for almost three years. My time here is nearly over and then I will travel elsewhere. I live from the generosity of the people who come here. Ramana's cave is only 15 minutes more walking up the hill. You must now offer me something."

I stood up and dug in my pockets, coming out with three rupees. I put them in his outstretch palm and he looked down at them.

"These are only three rupees," he said.

"Yes, only three rupees," I echoed, not quite knowing what else to say.

He pressed his hands together and blessed me, nevertheless. I pressed my hands in namaste, and continued.

"This temple in Tiruvannamali is the location of the head-chakra of all the world," said Gelena, the Slovenian woman who'd fallen in step with me. So far the ashram had provided me with three interesting characters. This Gelena, pronounced Jell-ina, had shorn her dark to within a half-inch of her skull. Her small body, delicate as a bird's, was hung with loose-fitting gypsy pants and a white silk shirt with the sleeves cut off.

"It's true," she said, seeing my skepticism. "It is a very important place. I can feel its holiness, you will too."

Yes, I did feel it. The ashram did give me a peaceful feeling, with this striking, single-peaked mountain behind it. It has the ambiance of a church you can live in.

During the full moon, which had occurred only a day before I arrived, hundreds of thousands of people flock here to visit the temple and to circumambulate the small mountain. Galena said it had been spectacular. We each sat on a boulder looking over the valley. She told me that she has been coming to India every year for 20 years. "Lately it is better to stay away from my country," she sneered, and I wondered what experiences she must have escaped from. She has visited many corners of India, she said, but her favorite place is Bijar where she spent two years teaching weaving to the local tribal women. "It is really wild there," she said, with a glint in her eye. "The people, they are really tribal, not like living in villages, really, truly tribal, and move around all the time. And the land is wild. You can get in trouble there. They are sometimes dangerous people." She hesitated. "Not like here."

I was about to ask her if she had run into trouble there when two German women walked up talking loudly to each other, shouting to companions down the hill. They walked toward us, talking, and stood between me and Galena, seemingly oblivious to us. Galena and I stopped and waited for them to even glance our way, so that we could greet them, but they didn't even look near us. Nor did the half dozen others who joined them and sat down on the rocks yelling loudly to one another. It was obvious our conversation was over.

"Tourists," sneered Galena, and we walked together in silence the rest of the way up the hill to the tiny ashram that surrounded Ramana's cave. "It is so crowded here," she commented, in her Slavic drawl. "It is HIGH season, I must remember."

Crowded or not, this place, too, had a powerful spiritual feeling to it. Just a simple whitewashed building with a spring and some icons of deities, all looking out over the valley. I liked this place.

That evening when the temple opened again at 4:30 I went to take a look around. There was scaffolding on two of the four tall Dravidian gateways called gopurams, but it didn't minimize their impact. The temple here represents the element of fire, and there were offerings of fire all over the temple grounds. Here and there a small dish of oil burned, and devotees came to gather the smoke into their hands and onto their heads.

It became dark, and the fires appeared more dramatic. A group of 30 or 40 women in red saris saw me and my camera, and implored me to take a photo of them. They were small, tough-looking women, obviously on pilgrimage to here, in their red saris at the temple of fire, and they almost fiercely demanded it. I complied, and took their address, and then it was time for darshan.

How did I find myself in the inner sanctum with these women, in the middle of them, all dressed in red and pressing so closely around me. There was a doorway and I entered curiously, and suddenly there was a lot of shoving. Before I knew it I was crammed into a tiny room, people pressing all around in the dark and then we were shoved in front of a deity where a priest gave blessings to everyone who put a rupee in his silver plate. A young boy, a teenager, stood on a ledge, naked to the waist, his hands together praying and shouting in a wavering song-voice to Shiva. He was in such a frenzy he had to be contained. The priest held his arm and brought him down from the ledge, gave him the ash and tried to quiet him and push him out of the sanctum. The faces of the short red women peered up at me from all around as we were shoved slowly forward. The priests fire was choking us with smoke, and groans of prayer came from everywhere, echoing in the tight little chamber. My hand found the plate, my coins hit the silver and I was given the ash, finally I was given the ash. The curious priest's eyes met mine, there was a nod and some blessing in a language I could not understand and then more shoving until I was out thank God! in the temple hallway again breathing air without smoke.

I sat with the crowd as we opened our packets of ash wrapped in tiny bits of newspaper, and streaked it on our foreheads. A woman helped me put mine on, and dabbed some red powder on too. Then everyone rose, to leave, or to continue the ritual. I stood for a while past another idol where people stood and prayed, some circumambulated it three times, as was proper, very quickly in a frenzied pace set by the action in the inner sanctum. Outside there was no relief in the hot night air. More fires, and fantastical figures from every surface. An elephant gave blessings for rupees at one place. Monkeys crawled over cupids and devils.

Outside was no better. A rock concert blared from the street corner at my hotel. I slept fitfully, and rose at 6 a.m. to leave for Chidambaram.

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