Well-grounded Faith Is Alive And Well Today

When I went to India to do the Himalayan CHAR DHAM I saw very few foreigners (I met only two Americans the whole trip), but a great many Indians from all over India. The burgeoning and prospering middle class in India is finding time and resources to take this considerable vacation to further their spiritual life.

The Char Dham YATRA (pilgrimage) is to four temples located in the Himalaya high country, each near the headwaters of a major river: Yamunotri on the Yamuna, Gangotri on the Ganges, Kedarnath on the Mandakini (a tributary of the Ganges), and Badrinath on the Alaknanda (another Ganges tributary). The temples are approached by roads, but they are twisty, bumpy and treacherous roads through the Himalayas, the highest and most rugged mountain chain on earth. Only Badrinath is accessible by road; the others are accessible by trails ranging in length from 1 kilometer to 14 (8.5 miles), which are paved with concrete and/or cobblestones, but are still only trails. The 14 km one to Kedarnath has a 5000 foot elevation gain. The complete yatra takes about 12 days.

Yatris (pilgrims) come by the busload to hike in to these temples; some rent horses and their wranglers for the longer and steeper trails, a few engage coolie seats that are borne by teams of four men, and a very few avail themselves of the helicopter service that flies from Gourikund to Kedarnath, over that 14 km trail. The bustling business that caters to this stream of yatris, continuous from spring until fall each year, bears witness that Hinduism is alive and well in India in today's secular, corporatocracy-dominated world. It is only natural to ask, what does it have going for it?

In the Christian-dominated West, Hinduism is understood as polytheism, belief in several gods instead of one God. Likewise is it understood in the Islamic world. Even a brief look at its mythology would bear out this assertion: gods have supernatural powers, but they respond to such human qualities as ambition, jealousy and revenge. It is easy to assume in the West that such a religion is archaic and obsolete. But even a brief trip to India dispels that idea. Hinduism maintains that a fundamental aim of the faith is to bring order out of chaos. It does that, but one must add another result, if not an initial aim: survival in an environment of adversity. And adversity there has been, centuries of it: For many years, the British tried to stamp it out as being "mere idol worship"; this followed centuries of efforts, often cruel to the point of unbelievability, of Islamic rulers to stamp it out. If nothing else, its survivability has commanded respect.

Like all cultures, India was once a tribal society. As a tribal society its characteristics are essentially unknown; it was so long ago. We can only assume that it was more or less like tribal societies that exist today: Native American that survives only in remnants; Arctic, African, New Guinean; all these are fast succumbing to Western society. As a rule tribal societies are monotheistic, they believe in one God or one Great Spirit, but they also believe in spirits of place: of rivers, lakes, mountains, etc.; and of person characteristics which are not unlike Jungian archetypes. As spirits subordinate to the Great Spirit are they worshipped, or only venerated? It is hard to determine the difference, and very easy to come to a prejudiced decision. At any rate, the tribal societies of India suffered the fate of so many other tribal societies around the world: they were conquered, and the conquerors replaced the bottom-up structure of the society with a top-down one, dominated by a priesthood with political ambitions. They found in polytheism a convenient way of weakening the masses: dividing up their loyalty among several "gods", and so making it easier to rule them. Centuries later it was forgotten that polytheism was originally brought about for political reasons. But at any rate, spirits of place became gods: so what was the spirit of place of the Yamuna River became the goddess Yamuna; that of the Ganges River became Ganga, and so on. The Aryans, an early conqueror of India, had a pantheon of all male gods.

Hinduism, which arose in the centuries following the Aryan invasions, did not try to turn back the hands of the clock and re-establish the bottom-up structure of tribal society. Dedicated to bringing order out of chaos and determined to survive, it sought a middle ground. Yamuna and Ganga became female goddesses, along with many others. And where Christians and Jews have the Bible, which keeps alive many tribal society values, such as genealogy, and a priesthood not averse to washing people's feet; Hindus have a fluidity and flexibility in the structure of their DARSHAN (gathering of people to worship at specific places and times) and their PUJA (form of actual worship). To see a darshan might remind a Westerner of a three-ring circus, as the many subcults within Hinduism all do their own thing.

There is no way to prove this, but I came away from the yatra with the distinct feeling that what occurs to people doing the Char Dham is what tends to happen in Spain on the Camino: that religious aims are gradually, gently and inevitably replaced with spiritual aims - for those that did not start the yatra with spiritual aims. Yamuna the goddess reverts to the spirit of place of the Yamuna River. In Hindu mythology Yamuna is associated with Adithi, a sort of sky goddess, in turn associated with infinity, the Milky Way, source of life in the universe. As a spirit of place Adithi is like a Mother Sky, a feminine counterpart of the Father Sky of Native American lore. In the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" one may have felt that part of himself or herself at the end, watching the unborn space baby. Similar considerations of spirituality can be made for the other three Char Dham temples and their respective sites.

Hinduism may owe its strength and its survivability to being a GROUNDED religion, remaining close to its spirits of place: as they say, sacred places. Christianity, Islam and even Judaism have lost most of its grounding, calling themselves "portable" religions; although Islam tries to retain a bit of it with Mecca and the HAJJ of its believers; and all three try uneasily to retain some if it in the Temple Mount of Jerusalem. The religions of Native Americans, and other tribal people, gains strength in grounding to spirits of place. Quite likely this is the real thing that the yatris take away from their Char Dham yatra.

Grounding ourselves

It doesn't take a Native medicine man to tell us what Jungian psychology/philosophy already tells us: that in our experiences with a particular place, be it a river, lake, mountain or a house that we once lived in, or a temple that we visit; that we leave energy there that we can later experience when we revisit it, even years later. Whether one calls that nourishing the spirit of place and then is nourished by it, or something else, depends on his definition of spirit (and other things). Native people, and for that matter Hindus, in general dont know that much about Jungian psychology as related to places. They know just that the energy is real.


Copyright (c) 2009 Dave Smart