Great Buddha Gym for All Mens and Womens by Sallie Tisdale

Author:Sallie Tisdale [Tisdale, Sallie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shebooks
Published: 2014-07-06T04:00:00+00:00

Because of the fog, many trains had been delayed, and others canceled altogether; the remaining were full of crowds heading to the holiday festivals and political rallies in the cities. Varanasi was just four hours away by express, but the only seats left were on the 3:00 a.m. train. We hired Umesh again. “How long will it take to drive to Varanasi?” we asked the hotel clerk.

“Four, five, maybe eight hours.”

We made good time on the highway, passing through toll stations crammed with high trucks—“BLOW HORN”—stopping a few times at gas stations in search of toilets, not always with success, and once for a meal at one of the roadside cafés called dhabas. We asked Umesh about his wife, who is a computer programmer, and what it was like to grow up in Bodh Gaya, and his marathon drives with tourists and businessmen. Empty fields stitched together in a quilt by low berms, a man defecating by the road, children standing open-mouthed in the dirt yards of small houses, a slow line of men in dusty suits walking in single file. Billboards, a crowd of low buildings.

“I don’t like Varanasi,” said Umesh, smiling and shaking his head.

We crossed a bridge over a shallow trickle of river, and Umesh left the highway to double back under the bridge onto a dusty road. Any trick is allowed in the jam and roar that is Varanasi traffic. The banks of the river are closed to vehicles; we could reach our hotel only by boat or on foot, but Umesh thought rickshaws could get us close. He made the deal in a moment. Quickly we climbed up on two cycles with our luggage and waved good-bye. We’d been on the road about five hours.

When I first thought of coming to India, it was Varanasi that came to mind. Varanasi (Benares, Banāras, Kāśī) has been a city for 2,000 or 3,000 or 5,000 years, depending on how you count cities and how you count years—a daunting, cosmopolitan, renowned, and to some terrifying city. I was drawn to the Hindu rivers, as I have been drawn to religious places and devotional practices all my life. As a child, internalized and rather solitary and outspoken all at once, I imagined being a Catholic nun, an actress, a kibbutznik, a firefighter—something with a shared and bound shape, identity, and community as one. When, as a young woman, I sought (not for the first time) a functional religious path and found my home in Zen, it was something of a cosmic joke. Zen Buddhism can confound all our attempts to make ourselves a certain shape. Instead it drives us to be who we are, which is often a surprise. It is filled with formal structures—robes, rituals, ceremony, signs of shared belief—but none of them is necessary; none of them is sacred. All, nothing; yes, no. Yes. I tried to imagine growing up in a world like that along the banks of the Ganges: a community where clear lines are

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