Some Notes on India

"I began to realize that the entire land of India is a great network of pilgrimage places–referential, inter-referential, ancient and modern, complex and ever-changing." – Diana Eck, from India: Sacred Geography











There might be more questions to consider when thinking about the history of India than right here at home in America.  To dig any deeper than the 1500's on the North American continent is a difficult matter.  We find out more and more about the true original settlers of our land, the native Americans, every day, but it comes in archeological smatterings and much tapestry of linking tribal stories and buried dwellings.  India is a vast and diverse country with ancient underpinnings.  As with other countries, continents, we do not talk about India as somewhere merely with a modern beginning but would speak of it in the same breath as China, Mesopotamia, Africa and the like.  In her introduction to India: Sacred Geography, Diana Eck reveals that she finally found a unifying thread to weave her own story of an India she knows and has lived – that India, in all its diverse religious leanings (Buddhism itself had began near Benares, or Kasha, City of Light), could be revealed as a vast network of routes to seek religious awakening, or what is commonly called pilgrimages, whereby the pilgrim sacrifices much security in order to either find our simply co-experience an unity and awakening.  Taken as a whole, and understood as not something that happens with a brief minority, but great majorities of people, the cycle of giving up something in order to move along a known spiritual route for the same of great understanding, lead Eck to perceive the idea of Sacred Geography. Such a revelation seems to quickly brighten the map of India. What may be initially imagined as a vast and foreign entity, strung through by the world-renown Ganges River, and set off by a seemingly unusual language, becomes something more of a rich-veined map, full of the same sort of character many modern viewers might think of when they remember Gandhi the movie.  Benares is the spiritual capital of India and a place that is seen internally as not only a pilgrimage stop-over, but for many, a sacred city to lay oneself to rest and many bathing ghats (baths on the Ganges along the banks of the city) are cremation zones as well as baths for ritual.  The imagined geographical zone of comfort could be thought of the same kind of compliment that we hope many Americans experience when they visit great and beautiful wild lands as a compliment to churches.