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As my feet began to hurt, while doing the parikrama (circambulation) walk around the city of Vrindavan, I did part of the walk barefoot. The pavement was intolerably hot, but the earth on the sides of the road felt smooth, refreshing and motherly, even when the path met with the occasional stream of water and turned into light mud. I unexpectedly enjoyed having my bare soles meditating on such a tender support. And in spite of being tired, I felt incredibly at ease inside my body. Most of the people around me were walking the same way. But I was the only one holding leather shoes in my hand.
During the pilgrimage, we constantly took off our shoes (how many times a day?) - before bowing in front of an old sacred tree, girdled with strings and fronted by dozens of little hanging bells, or before entering any place, e.g., the Sri Krishna museum in Kurukshetra, Shivanananda’s home in Rishikesh, a classroom or different bookshops in Varanasi, and of course innumerable meditation halls, holy caves and temples... absolutely everywhere. A young Indian asked me once: “Do you really keep your shoes on when you go to church in France?”
India’s identity depends largely on its feeling about feet: so would I say after my first journey in this country. Not so much because it was labelled “pilgrimage”, a word which generally evokes going on foot to a sacred place (we did most of it by bus!).
Although I have not witnessed the big Indian crowds swarming and rushing, with or without a stick in hand, on the road for successive pujas, khumba melas, bhaisakis and other religious meetings throughout the country, it is obvious to me that Indian civilization is more based on respecting the human feet – and bare feet - than any other western(ized) nation I know.
Being barefoot is a sign. In the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Delhi built by the Mother, you don’t approach Sri Aurobindo’s memorial shrine with your shoes on. If you want to communicate with the great Invisible, even sandals will indicate a failure. They would isolate you, I guess, from the spirit of Mother Earth. And Earth is actual cosmic energy, taking you by its vibrations beyond the practical side of life, beyond the immediate visible, beyond the veil of maya. Bare feet keep you strong on your legs, establishing your connection, unconsciously, between earth and heaven. The water of the rivers pours down from heaven, and runs on the ground or dives deep inside the earth. Our various feet-dipping sessions in the Ganga river, or in some auspicious prayags (river confluents), or ponds all meant, I would say, a specially purified contact with our planet Earth, whose very components we are made of, as astrophysicians now tell us.
Do you remember the marble footprints of saints, or even of gods, like Shiva’s, we discovered on the altar of some holy places, and which people respectfully touched with their fingers before caressing their forehead? One of these testimonials was in the courtyard of that temple in Rishikesh, where a great saint - whose name I’m alas forgetting just now – left his body. But his footprints stay there to testify that he really once inhabited, and departed from, this world. Why his footprints, and not his heart in a shrine, or his skull, or any smaller relics, even a tooth, as western superstitious and materialistic piety might well have it ? We noticed that in India touching somebody’s feet still is a sign of reverence. You don’t kiss them, you just bow and touch. Is there anything more mobile in the body than our feet? What people ritually worship in temples is just a trace, the image of a print, something immaterial, just a symbol of our divine moving energy. I read once that the lowest caste in India, the shudras, were born from Brahma’s feet. A message of hope perhaps…
And I remember Indian people’s habit of eating with their fingers. And my yoga master, smiling at us Westerners, whose fingers without direct contact with food any more, had lost some essential sensibility. So in food also would there be an essential energy? Of course! No hungry stomach needs a demonstration of that.
So, India’s first lesson for me was recapturing some of the earth energy while becoming aware that we sometimes use unnecessary mediums, between her and our body. Divine energy? Cosmic energy? Words make no difference to me.
And now, a troubling question.
How does such a beautifully moral, religiously structured civilization as India keep breeding so much social injustice, so much unbearable poverty, so much human indignity as can be witnessed all over the country on roads, in villages, suburbs and downtowns? Destitute people, crippled old and young, starving beggars, homeless for life, and abandoned children with babies under the arm in such an ubiquitous, endemic quantity? Isn’t there something horrifyingly questioning in this?
Let’s be clear: I’m not such a naïve Westerner either. I lived several years (and travelled) in various countries of South America and North Africa where physical misery also can be met at many corners of the streets. But never and nowhere did I experience such a quiet evidence that this state of things should belong to a normal society, that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with living peacefully all one’s life next to crowds of under human outcasts…
I know this feeling is partially unjust, that the government of India is struggling, although slowly, against these historically rooted prejudices; I know that most Western “democratic” countries only too often also show a shocking lack of social solidarity. But my primary uncomfortable feeling about the pilgrimage in India remains this: we travelled rather comfortably and we were beautifully received everywhere by monks, and by either religious or lay people, while scores of miserable human beings were dying underground as it were, in indifference and rejection. Our walk in Vrindavan brought this impression to the fore. A mere emotional feeling, you will say. Okay!
This is a kind of emotion, anyway, I do not want to overcome, even by means of yoga. For such emotions lead to deep thoughts. To the realization, for instance, that it is impossible to live quietly in countries where some human enjoy the status of human beings, and some others are confronted with the status of qualified subhuman.
And to the realization, for instance, that actions as led by Hariharananda Mission towards children, (I discovered this fact very concretely) in Champawat, Haridwar and Uttarkashi (and the various Ark of Love centers in South America), are the most effective way of helping the abandoned, especially in India, according to the ethical struggle India is leading against social rejection. Offering material and spiritual comfort together to orphans, to destitute widows, to poor girls is indeed great: it takes care of the complete nature of human beings, of those who need it most. Photos sent by Swamiji months ago tried to convey this truth to me, but I had to participate in this eye-opening pilgrimage to get a real understanding of how, and how much, poverty and indifference had to be fought here. I’m happy to have seen children playing, working, singing and dancing.
Coming to that point, I realize that my question found its answer. Frenchmen, it is said, are distinguished by their passion for equality. So be humbly thanked, India (both by my feet and my spirit!) for a fruitful journey through your most unequal realities.
Perhaps a pilgrimage to South America should have to be considered one day? Even if the saints in this hemisphere are not exactly of the type of those we respect in India. But this is a chapter of a story which no Ganesha has written yet…
Gilles |
