[Reader-list] The Power of Sublime (conversion)

[S Fatima]

The power of sublime
Tarun Vijay
 
Does it matter if the ice lingam at the Amarnath cave
has melted down? No way, said Gurinder in Jammu, who
has come with a group of ten for the pilgrimage. Every
step we take for the shrine is a fulfilment and the
journey itself is a reward, no matter whether the
physical ice lingam is visible or not. The same
sentiments were echoed when the bomb blasts en route
to the shrine had disrupted the yatra and not a single
yatri went back out of fear or apprehending more
trouble. The journey continued. 

What makes the common, people, otherwise busy in their
own life-earning a living through various professions,
to face bitterest odds and risk their lives to make
such pilgrimages just for a darshan , a holy see? And
this has been continued since time immemorial. They
undertook such arduous journeys when there were no
facilities, tracks and communication systems. Pilgrims
would do their afterlife rituals before they left
home, knowing well they may not return live. The
harshest pilgrimages were Kailas Manasarovar yatra in
Tibet, Hinglaj in Baluchistan and Amarnath in Kashmir.


All these have continued uninterrupted till the
contemporary times of global warming and the changing
contours of the journey's management. Yet what has
remained unchanged is the flow of faith and
enthusiasm. Most of the Hindu pilgrim centres are in
the heights of the Himalayas, defining the sublime
beauty of nature under a reigning solitude which
provides space to introspect and evaporating egos with
the mighty silence of the mountains. This itself is
like experiencing the gods, whether the physical eyes
could see Him or not. 

Love, the passionate complete surrender devoid of any
demand for a return gift transforms into an
unflinching faith. And there hangs a beautiful story
of Yudhishthira in Mahabharata. On their bodily
ascendance to the heavens in the higher Himalayas,
experiencing the odds in the steep climb near what is
known as Badrinath today, Arjuna became irritated and
angry and asked his elder brother, O Yudhisthira, what
makes you to love this rude, rough and difficult
Himalayas, where I find nothing but rocks, dust and an
unfriendly environment. Yudhishthira smiled and said I

don't love the Himalayas because it gives me something
in return, I love it, for being just what it
is-Himalaya. Obviously true love doesn't expect
converting the beloved. 

It is this power of the sublime, the one way love or
the faith, that has made Hindus survive the centuries
of vicissitudes and upheavals facing the most cruel
and barbaric forces of their times. Hindus never used
clichés like 'harvesting the souls' or 'liberating the
heathens and the pagans' from darkness. For them the
world remained as a family- vasudhaiva kutumbakam and
their prayers, whether at the birth or death rites,
always wish good of all human beings and the nature.
Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinah, Sarve Santu Niramaya -let
everyone be happy, everyone be without diseases,
including the human beings, mountains, rivers,
vegetation and animals. 

This message of karuna -the compassion reverberates in
the entire Asia even today where Indian philosophers
had gone centuries before spreading the teachings of
dharma. In Kashgar (Xinjiang, China) I was taken to
see beautiful Mor stupa inside Gobi desert, built
about 1600 hundred years ago, during the time of
Kumarjiva, an Indian monk, who went to Kucha after
having learnt teachings of Buddhism in Kashmir. He was
arrested by an arrogant Chinese general for preaching
Buddhism and kept behind bars for seventeen years till
an emperor freed him. He continued his preaching,
influenced the local population with his scholarship,
earned the title of Kuo-shih meaning 'teacher of the
nation' and is still revered by Communist China with
great honour. He is no longer an 'Indian' but a
perfect Chinese Buddhist monk, like other great saints

Kashyap Matanga, Gobharana and Samant Bhadra, the
latter is famous as a Bodhisattva who came from India
on a white elephant and to whom an entire Mountain
Emei Shan is dedicated. He is worshipped as the
protector of China.  

Compare this with other 'missionaries' who introduced
inquisitions, destroyed temples, bombed Bamiyan to
'serve' their faith. Christopher Columbus described
the purpose of his voyage to the King of Spain in
these lines, ".....for the end which I suppose to be
earnestly desired by our most illustrious king, that
is, their conversion to the holy religion of
Christ..." 

And what happened after Columbus thought he has
discovered India? 

Famous anthropologist Jack Weatherford has portrayed
the Columbus impact in his book Indian Givers in these
lines: He seized 1,200 Taino Indians from the island
of Hispaniola, crammed as many onto his ships as would
fit and sent them to Spain, where they were paraded
naked through the streets of Seville and sold as
slaves in 1495. Columbus tore children from their
parents, husbands from wives. On board Columbus' 
slave ships, hundreds died; the sailors tossed the
Indian bodies into the Atlantic. Because Columbus
captured more Indian slaves than he could transport to
Spain in his small ships, he put them to work in mines
and plantations which he, his family and followers
created throughout the Caribbean. His marauding band
hunted Indians for sport and profit - beating, raping,
torturing, killing, and then using the Indian bodies
as food for their hunting dogs. Within four years of
Columbus' arrival on Hispaniola, his men had killed or
exported one-third of the original Indian population 
of 300,000. Within another 50 years, the Taino people
had been made extinct' The population of the United
States prior to European contact exceeded 12 million.
Four centuries later, after the missionary 
'discoveries', the count was reduced by 95% to 237
thousand. 

So when a thought and a social life are attacked to
'harvest', it reacts in different ways. Indians abroad
are doing well, living and re-establishing 
their age old attributes of love, compassion and
brilliance, but back home their religion, social
traditions and way of life are under grave threat 
from the same forces who gave Columbus, Stalin and
Gazhnavi. Any effort to convert a Hindu means deriding
the values of compassion and violating his faith, the
oldest one on this earth, which recognizes that all
paths lead to god. Universal brotherhood demands
respecting the other faith too as true as yours. It's
a different attitude from being tolerant. 

But Hindus are being forced to realise that not all
paths believe in equality and they do not respect our
way even if our ashrams in Hardwar and Rishikesh
display the images of Christ and inscriptions of Allah
in order to emphasize unity in diversity. From Sai
Baba's centers to Ramakrishna Mission, this spirit of
sarva dharma sam bhav (equal respect for all paths) is
prominently at work. But there will not be a single
Christian or Islamic centre which would show a respect
for Hindu icons and ways of worship as a reciprocal
gesture or as a mark of their universal spiritual
vision. 

Recently The Economist reported (June 28, 2007): The
Catholics' ultimate boss, Pope Benedict, is less
flexible. He may feel that because we live in an age
when acts of religious accommodation are possible—and,
for the sake of world peace, necessary—it is more
important than ever to draw doctrinal lines in the
sand. In his recently-published book, Jesus of
Nazareth, he seems to be saying that "much as we
respect one another and accept one another's right to
exist, there are important things on which we cannot
agree." 

He refused to accept that Islam too can be a way to
reach God. Last September he had quoted in Germany a
Byzantine emperor who had called Islam irrational and
violent. In India he had given a call to convert
Hindus and make the present millennium an Asian one. A
Hindu would have said just the opposite. Hence it's
necessary to accept the right of all faiths to live
their own way and abhor converting others. Asserting
right to convert is to force Columbusisation in this
age and times, forgetting the holocaust museums
erected in the land of Indian Americans. 

While the world witnessed unspeakable barbarities by
the Jihadis, Stalinists and Maoists and the Americans
still remember with horror the mass killings during
Columbus's voyage to their land with a mission to
'Christianize ' the locals who he mistook as Indians,
the striking contrast with the 

way the Indian masters preached abroad nourishes the
universal values of love and coexistence. 

In fact the Vedic universe symbolizes the concept and
the spirit of the United Nations as a whole minus the
controls of the US and other veto-

powered members. Unfortunately the neo-colonialist
mindset of a section of the Hindus has developed a
special dislike for anything Hindu 

without even trying to understand the inherent message
of the great way of living, the Dharma , genuinely.
They fall into the din of aphorisms. They 

have created an atmosphere where to talk anything
about Hinduism, to protect and support its icons, to
reform and organise the Hindu society 

looks like a God-ordained responsibility of the RSS
alone, pushing even nationalist slogans Vande Mataram
and Bharat Mata Ki Jai as the sole' 

intellectual property' of the Sangh Parivar. 

This is ironical because every Hindu, in whatever
party or the organization, has an equal responsibility
and a right to safeguard Hindu interests. 

It's their outlook if they don't own it up. If a
section of the Hindus start feeling dispossessed and
is compelled to Islamise their response to be 

heard and recognized, the forces working to
de-Hinduise our land alone would have to share the
blame. 

A nation lives on her traditions and culture and if a
majority is made to feel embarrassed about it, the
future would look like a Saudi kingdom, with 

a façade of faith but perpetually dependent on the
forces from abroad for its safety. 

Assuring Hindu dharma flower means supporting a
liberal, democratic space, a natural bastion of
freedom of thought, worship and speech. It 

abhors a mindset that stones a Rushdie image in
Islamabad or Teheran and asks for his head, no matter
our deep differences with his writings. 

In this beautiful earth, there is no alternative to
understanding others and helping them to know us
better through sublime, placid civil dialogue. 

Symbolically on one hand is the instrument of Yoga and
on the other are the nukes and Osama's bombs. The
choice is clear. 

The author is the Editor of Panchjanya, a Hindi weekly
brought out by the RSS. The views expressed are his
personal. 

(printed in Times of India, 4 July 2007)


		
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