To the Sadhu Who Buried Himself Underground
The prevailing rumor back then was that the candle company was paying off the electric company, and no one was surprised when the power went out. Bijali khattam was one of the first things I learned to say in Hindi. Gossip, though, was more reliable than the electricity, even in the holiest place in Buddhism, and I knew you’d come to town because I’d heard you were asking for money.
At the gates of the Burmese Vihar, the resting place for pilgrims where I was staying, you told the abbot that you would be burying yourself underground for ten days, without food or water, pledging to slow your breath and your heart rate, a display of spiritual dexterity at once audacious and sublime. But the abbot laughed and kept the gates closed. If you survived, he’d said, then he would give you money. No one knew yet that you, a sadhu—a wandering Hindu ascetic who owned nothing more than your loin cloth, your trident, and your brass bowl—were collecting alms to rent a diesel-powered generator.
Although I did not watch your subterranean descent, I later saw for myself your underground chamber, like a tiny grave. But as you were lowered down, I heard the fanfare from half a kilometer away, while a handful of your devotees installed themselves nearby with a two-headed drum, and sang for you, sustaining your samadhi as they would for the subsequent 10-day, 24-hour-a-day round of Hare Krishna, Hare Rama. They jerry-rigged loudspeakers to the telephone poles, so the whole town could hear, too.
*
Bodhgaya, India is where the Buddha found enlightenment 2,500 years earlier and where I arrived as a restless eighteen-year-old in the fall of 1994. As part of an undergraduate Buddhist studies course, I was spending several hours a day in mildly agonized meditation, while Anagarika Munindra, our gentle Bengali Dhamma teacher, spoke in ways I now see as direct, but then seemed enigmatic. “Moment-to-moment,” he repeated.
Munindra-Ji also taught us to be “watching-knowing” our thoughts. The “watching” meant observing the mind itself: noticing the tendency to replay the past or fantasize about the future or simmer in irritation or regret. The “knowing” was the awareness to not mistake those feelings and compulsions, which came and went, with ourselves. During breakfast, we were also supposed to be “lifting-knowing” our spoons and “swallowing-knowing” the oatmeal.
But I grew up in the reticent Midwest, where no one named, let alone admitted, any feelings, ever. In the version of the Protestant Work Ethic with which I’d been raised, hardship was a virtue, pleasure was suspect, and expressing an emotional state would have been seen as an imposition. Instead, we kept mum, trafficking in sighs of disapproval and flaring our nostrils to infer judgment. When someone asked me how I was, I always said I was fine.
So although I’d come to Bodhgaya eager to explore the Buddhist tenets of compassion and interdependence, I was also flustered by teachings that lead me back to the banalities of my own thoughts. Philosophically, mindfulness made sense. To be watching-knowing was to see the present moment renewing itself over and over. But rather than unearthing a kind of tranquility on the roof of the Vihar, I peeked through my eyelashes to see what boys were sitting near me, frustrated that I’d come all the way from Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio to just to sit there and fidget.
*
“That you were underground and these men were cheering you on so unapologetically was, to my earnest, adolescent curiosity, the original punk rock.”
The afternoon you went underground, it was tea-time when the chanting exploded out of the loudspeakers with shocking fervor. Under the shade of the guava trees, I ate Good Day biscuits in the Vihar courtyard, listening while the Burmese abbot, in his lawn chair by the gates, dismissed the spectacle of your followers’ singing with a wave of his hand. For the rest of the evening, from the cold shower to the library to the rooftop, I heard the chanting from everywhere. But after weeks of dust and sun and rice and dal, I was giddy at the diversion, and I assumed the whole thing was a hoax.
That night, though, I was on the verandah when the electricity cut out for the first time since the chanting began—bijali khattam—and the relief that followed ricocheted across the rice paddy. Until, moments later, the generator rumbled to life. The loudspeakers crackled and your devotees kept going. Kept slapping the drum. Hare Rama. Hare Rama. Rama Rama. Hare Hare.
I brushed my teeth by candlelight and, with a pillow over my head, eventually fell asleep. In the middle of the night, I woke up and saw that the fan was circling; the power had come back on. But instead of the same three or four guys who’d been chanting all day, a group of kids had commandeered the microphone. Hysterical with joy, the screeching children kept the mantra aloft, and that became its own nightly ritual.
During the days, the men came and went in uneven shifts, a continuous, if occasionally hoarse, 240-hour cycle of pick-up kirtan. Sometimes I heard them burp through the loudspeakers. Sometimes I heard them spit. All day and all night, the same syllables, over and over and over. The chanting was not beautiful or melodious, and yet I envied your devotees’ lack of inhibition. I felt like I’d spent my entire life trying not to inconvenience anyone. That you were underground and these men were cheering you on so unapologetically was, to my earnest, adolescent curiosity, the original punk rock.
But as time wore on, the chanting was also making me edgy and exhausted. With or without power, the singing was so loud and so constant that it registered like a physical sensation akin to pain. Some nights, I didn’t sleep at all; other nights, the chanting echoed through my restive dreams.
Munindra-Ji joked once or twice about “listening-knowing,” but otherwise, he remained unfazed. Rather than illuminating, though, I found his equanimity as confounding as the chanting itself. Gritting my teeth in bewilderment, I wondered why someone didn’t do something to stop the chanting, because I still believed quiet could be enforced. Years later, reading about a Dutch tourist in Burma who was jailed for three months after unplugging a loudspeaker, I gaped in familiarity at his desperation.
During meditation, I half-heartedly noted the warmth of each out-breath on my upper lip, but most of the time, your devotee’s chanting only aggravated my discomfort—in the soupy heat, with the guilt forever lodged in my stomach, and in my conviction that I’d already failed at whatever spiritual insight I’d hoped to have gleaned. Though I was meant to be directing loving-kindness at all beings everywhere, I only sometimes included you in my offerings. I didn’t blame you, exactly, but I believed your followers were making every day harder.
*
By the tenth day, everyone wondered if you’d escaped or died. Under the ruthless mid-day sun and the even more ruthless loudspeakers, I squeezed myself into the crowd gathered on the dusty clearing near the riverbed. Women in pink and orange saris put towels down on the dirt, under their babies, whose eyes were lined with kohl. Old men in dhotis squatted while they smoked. Businessmen from town, who’d closed the gates on their shops for the occasion, pulled up on their Vespas. We all stared at the three men, in blue plaid lungis, who sat cross-legged on the ground, chanting louder in anticipation.
Then, another sinewy man, in a threadbare tank top, began to gingerly shovel up the grey dirt. When he exposed the top of a narrow chute leading to your chamber, the whole mob leaned in closer. Together with another man, they plunged their arms down into the earth and pulled you out, your legs still folded into a pretzel. We all cheered as the men laid you down and began massaging your limbs. Slowly, you raised your arm. You were alive.
I never knew if the Burmese abbot made good on his word, but you left town and the chanting stopped as abruptly as it had begun. That night, on the roof of the Vihar, I did luxuriate, at first, in the relative hush. But I also realized how many other sounds—mosquitoes, bus engines, cycle rickshaw bells, motorbikes, off-hours roosters—had been there all along.
For ten days, I’d felt my impatience wax and wane and wax again, all while the kirtan held steady. For ten days, I’d been annoyed, certain that once the air was calmer, I would be, too. But then the quiet did return and my mind was as noisy as ever. During meditation, my feet still fell asleep, the sweat still pooled at my sternum, and I was still antsy, preoccupied with doubt and yearning.
Munindra-Ji had been teaching about impermanence, describing how because all phenomena were in flux, the mind was forever clinging to what we hoped might last or steeling against what we didn’t want to accept. Even as the sensations, objects, or experiences we deemed pleasant or unpleasant changed, grasping and aversion were the impulses that see-sawed us through life and created suffering. Watching-knowing was the antidote. But while intellectually, I understood the concept, it was you who helped shift my perspective on the experience.
Because if the air was finally still but my mind was not, I had no choice but to consider the corollary—that perhaps quiet could not be withheld or denied. Perhaps contentment could not be granted or taken away—not by the sputtering echo of a generator, not by the nightly blackouts, and not by my own feelings of inadequacy.
Once the chanting ended and my exasperation did not, the futility of blame began to emerge. For as long as I could remember, I understood everything—from my sense of self-worth to my reaction to the weather—as conditional. Contingent on whether or not someone flared their nostrils in my direction or I flared them at myself. Now, for the first time since arriving in Bodhgaya, I glimpsed the prospect of a different understanding of self—one that was not seeking comfort or approval. A self that was not waiting for silence in a world where sound, like joy and like sorrow, would always come and go. Which is not to say that I overcame the inclination to condemn the mosquitoes or the bus horns or my aching knees. But rather that as I heard the call to prayer echo from the storefront mosque across the field, I began to trust in the possibility of an internal quiet that had nothing to do with sound at all. And that, I suspected, as the dogs barked in the street below, was moment-to-moment. That was watching-knowing.
About the Author
Liesl Schwabe's essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, and Words Without Borders, among other publications. She served as a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar in Kolkata, India and currently directs the writing program at Yeshiva College.
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Header photo by Ramakrishnan Nataraj.
