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There we were, travelers on the road to India and Nepal without the slightest idea what to expect. We had the stories of others who had made the trip and recounted their adventures. There were three sorts of travelers: those who went for the experience, those who went with some sort of spiritual quest, and those who were enslaved in the tourist trap.
We had no spiritual quest. We went for the experience. We first went to London and searched for the fabled Magic Bus to India that we had heard about. We found a connection to it eventually on a notice board in the American Express offices and got two seats.
Now I have read much about the Magic Bus travelers; the hippie freaks; the flower people; the pot-smoking viscerally-bound free loving travelers.
Where they were I don't know. When we got on the bus, they had all disappeared. They were not tourists, that is certain, but they were from different backgrounds, different cultures and different beliefs, not the homogeneous set of mindless hippies you hear about. We were all wide-eyed adventurers with open minds and hearts, nothing more and nothing less.
In one book, I have read about voyagers with "Flared jeans customised with shells, mirrors, patches or embroidery, collarless shirts with three buttons, tie-dyed bare feet (ankle bells, flip-flops or leather sandals optional), flowers (in your hair)"
Perhaps we were on the wrong bus. Frequent beards? Yes, I suppose so, but long cotton skirts were more the order of the day. The only common factor was backpacks of one form or another.
I remember that on this trip the way through Afghanistan had been canceled. There was great unrest and war in Afghanistan was just over a year away. Gen. Sardar Muhammad Daud Khan, the king's cousin, was then president and prime minister. In 1978-79, when we made the trip, Daud was deposed by a group led by Noor Mohammed Taraki, who instituted Marxist reforms and aligned the country more closely with the Soviet Union.
We were forced to run a more southern route through Pakistan. No one would have been the least concerned to have passed through Afghanistan, however.
It is difficult to point to specific moments when an experience turns into something that changes character or the mind. That is particularly so when it is a total experience like India, Sri Lanka and Nepal were in those years.
INDIA
We were not on any spiritual quest, so Ashrams and Indian seekers and Gurus were not part of our life in India, Sri Lanka and Nepal.
Putting things in the correct place, it must be remembered that Ninette was a Jewish Atheist and I was an Anarchist without religion, but with the strong admiration and support of Jewish culture and learning. Ninette was not a follower of ceremony and laws, but held firm to the original dignity and the original Jewish ideals of scholarship, dignity and honesty, which have been so lost today. She was firm in her Jewish ideal of "Tikkun Olam - healing the world", but had not at this moment found a way to put it into practice.
It was therefore the inequality that we found in India that made its mark. When you are traveling among the people, which was our aim in the cheapest place possible, then seeing people defecating in gutters in the street, uncovering for your meal a bowl of rice and curry that in moments was black with flies, seeing in a "civilized modern world" still the remnants of a caste system, seeing the memorials of Gandhi wasted and overgrown with weeds, seeing death on the streets as a common occurrence and seeing the loss of Indian cultural identity falling already under the first waves of as-yet-unnamed globalization makes a lasting impression.
This is not the India seen by most who know it is there intellectually but never experience it. Seeing tourists running from place to place from tourist site to tourist site in "glamorous rickshaws" the bearers virtually victims of their owners, with their families sleeping and eating under the flimsy rickshaws at night; seeing child beggars by profession trained as thieves and maimed deliberately for survival as hawkers because there was little other choice; this was our India of the streets.
We were filled without the virtue to do anything, simply at that time we were there as victims of their experiences. We visited Hindu temples and in the first was an incident that shows how our views of the world were different.
We entered the temple doorway and there a young man kept pointing at my shoes and insisting in Hindi that I must do something. I thought that he was like the thousands of other Indians trying to sell something, namely shoes. I said no firmly, but he was more insistent. I was angry at him and told him to "screw off", looking to my right I saw that Ninette had removed her shoes and was smiling.
I had reacted with my aversion for all society, she had understood that this was a shrine where shoes must be removed out of respect. There you see the difference between us at that time. My mental judgment of what was correct and incorrect (was open to making error) and Ninette's romantic and compassionate understanding of what was required was closer to the truth.
Later, much later, my aversion was tempered and lost with the presence of "no-mind" and Ninette's romanticism and compassion left behind its social, educational and religious roots and became a true inner compassion. We had a lot to learn, but we were putting the first foot forward together without knowing where we would go.
The glamour of India was there alright and we tasted that also when we bought merchandise ourselves, like any other capitalist, to sell. Here in India an observer would have been able to discern however a difference between us. I was touched mentally, while Ninette was touched viscerally.
However, spiritually for us India held nothing, although we appreciated the necessity of Hinduism and its inherent sense and beauty, so we decided to go to Bodhgaya. Naturally, by train.
To a foreigner the rail service is Chaos itself unless you are a master of the system. I don't know how we managed, but we traveled in a boxcar with a few Indians and a host of cows. We sat and slept on a platform of wood raised about four feet from the floor. The princess had left behind her throne and knew it to be of no value, compared to this.
Now there is something else that we learned about the Indians at that time: age and color meant little if you were not an "untouchable" and the Indians were at any social level courteous but with an insatiable curiosity. "Where are you from?" with a smile was almost always the first question and conversations were punctuated with the nod which meant "no" and the shake of the head which meant "yes".
One could fill the pages of a book with details, but never touch the essence of small experiences and human contacts at quite a different level where the social, mental and psychological spaces are reduced.
Agra
At Agra one can discover the great Taj Mahal. We arrived in the Magic Bus and the ride had assumed a subtle form of democracy and strangely the driver allowed the group to decide variations in the route, probably due to the failure to pass through Afghanistan.
Most of the civilized world have heard of the Taj Mahal, and the romantic history connected with its generation. Here, less than a lesson I present a difference in our original contrasting visions as realist and romantic. The Taj is certainly a magnificent structure and beautiful, but the romance was set aside in my mind by the fact that even then, in the late seventies, the poor could never avail themselves of that beauty because one had to pay to enter the gates and walk along the artificial lake to reach the Taj. I rejected that idea and refused to enter.
Ninette on the other hand with her love of beauty and romance decided to pay and enter with a fellow from the bus.
The interesting fact that will allow readers to best understand this voyage and its results is to perceive that we fully understood and appreciated the other's decisions.
Now that sounds very nice, but what does it mean in practice? It meant that as Ninette gradually let go of the romanticism, replacing it with a sensitivity and sensuality which was not an egoistic grabbing at romance and beauty, in turn I was able to mellow my own hostility towards all that I considered immoral and gradually correct and touch a deeper sense of Dharma commitment.
Bodhgaya
The original unadorned Mahabodhi temple
Anyone seeing Bodhgaya today is not seeing Bodhgaya. They are seeing a religious trap. The forms of spiritualism are there, supported by the Mahabodhi Temple itself, but the old Bodhgaya has disappeared midst the religious venomous mushrooms called temples and the presence of the greedy eyes of wealth seeking and religious power.
We arrived from the station happily on horse and cart and the roads were unpaved and really just earth, dust to rising dust, like Dharma. There was a local football match going on in a field without trimmings.
The Mahabodhi temple was marvelous, for it was a part of Dharma and India. Now it is a battlefield for its possession. Years later in a visit I made alone as a Theravadin Master, the Bodhgaya Mahabodhi Temple was closed for the visit of the Prime Minister of India. I was within the temple grounds as a guest and had the unique privilege of seeing the temple ramparts and the grounds filled with destructive weapons at the ready to kill. It requires no comment.
There were various groups of different Buddhist faiths with their different robes and methods of meditation. The Tibetans were most frequent at that time, making their prostrations and the Theravadin and Zen followers were few.
Of course there were Hindus and foreigners but the temple area was not overwhelmed with thousands of ant-like human creatures trying to find liberation precisely where it is not.
The Bodhi tree was marvelous and standing free like Dharma always is.
Now it is fenced in and covered with the ribbons of pomp and ceremony.
We saw and felt a tree that was not imprisoned by the human mind. No more and no less, with all the Life Force that it transmitted. We saw Buddha as no different than that tree. That is the true Dharma. That is a more powerful message than a thousand sutras and a million mantras or ten million prostrations.
The imprisoned Bodhi Tree
It was mid-February and the Dalai Lama was there. Who was the Dalai Lama?
We had no idea except that he was a Tibetan Buddhist. The tens of thousands that accompanied his later visits were absent. We went into the place where he was speaking. There were questions and answers and as we were unused to ceremony we were startled by the forms of address to him that were almost idolatry.
Curious, afterwords, we decided to accept an offer made for a private interview. We both accepted with curiosity. Today that would be unthinkable.
We found a charming young fellow who was with humor, honesty and devotion to his work. There was no mention of China or any political matter. In fact Buddhism was not mentioned at all.
We chatted as any trio of acquaintances might chat. I suppose his guides and helpers were there in the background, but they were not apparent.
We were curious, and found him willing to communicate at a ordinary level and when he talked about himself it was with an honesty which was surprising. He spoke of his teachers and the fact that he found the most difficult task the control of anger.
I admired his honesty and simplicity at that time, but Ninette was touched by the sincere mixture of truth and acceptance of what was in and about him. It was rather like she imagined being born to be king without the option of abdication. He was for her not the Dalai Lama that pulls the strings of politics, but a young man who had taken on a role that was inevitable and that beneath the robes was a real person.
That seed I believe was an important thing for her, for later in her studies when she was within her three-year retreat at the seminary of Mahabodhi Sunyata she did not fall beneath the rites and ceremonies, but was able to unmask the truth of Tibetan Buddhism and see the true Dharma beneath while she was immersed in the higher levels of Mahamudra and Vajrayogini practice.
Perhaps her Dharma seed was planted then.
Varanasi
When you are standing with the Hindus in the water of the Ganges with devotion completely surrounding one, what do you think? Of life and death? It is very nice for the tourist Czars and armchair philosophers to talk of these, for it sells tickets and articles, but the truth is that one's thoughts are only of human suffering.
The primary task bathing in those waters with devotion is survival in the face of suffering and the avoidance of an unfavorable return after one dies. There is no waiting for the last moment of forgiveness. It is not sins that are washed away, it is personal impurity here and now.
What strikes one is human faith in something greater. It matters not that the faith may be misdirected or an error, what matters is that the human creature finds it difficult to live within suffering if there is no faith to cling to. For Ninette and I that is what was shocking.
Ninette had never concerned herself with suffering, but here it was and she felt that no bathing would wash it away. So why is there suffering? That was her question. The answer was also clear, we make it ourselves.
The question that remained unanswered was, why?
Religions have their answers, but they are unsatisfactory.
LIFE
DEATH
The Ghats have not changed much in Varanasi.
Manikarnika is the most propitious of the Ghats for cremation. Once the skull splits open the soul is said to rise to paradise. The remains after cremation are cast into the Ganges and the family then wash away their own present spiritual impurities in the same river.
Such is Death for the Hindu. Life and death is not apart, but for Ninette life and death were merged in those moments in quite another way.
We return at Death to where we were before birth. Where that was at that moment she was not certain.
Patna
Today in Patna there is no ferry service to cross the river Ganges, there is the Mahatama Gandhi Setu, one of the longest bridges in the world, which was inaugurated in May 1982 by the then Prime Minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi.When we passed to reach Nepal there was a ferry service.
It was on that ferry that Ninette found the immediate answer to the question of suffering. Still the question however was applied with respect to the suffering of others.
It happened on the far side from Patna. When the ferry reached the shore the Indians who crowded the ferry, as was there custom crowded together to be the first ashore for whatever train service was available.
We were not used to crowds so tightly packed together especially when we saw that to go ashore there was just a single wide plank, sufficient at most for two abreast. For those aboard we had the feeling that the situation was not unusual. But then we saw that the pushing had become more frantic and first one of the disembarking passengers was pushed from the platform into the water. Men, women, it seemed to make no difference, and it didn't stop. What is worse, no one seemed to care.
We stood back, with another foreigner called David, horrified by what we were seeing. These few words cannot describe the scene. When we heard of the overcrowded Indian ferries capsizing we understood why. "Me first", is the universal human battle-cry.
AN OVERLOADED BOAT ON THE GANGES
That was the answer for the question about the cause of human suffering, you see; selfishness and uncaring. This was an extreme situation, but when one looks at what is called civilized behavior that same selfishness and uncaring is present.
At that time, for Ninette, no answers were evident. Faith and commandments certainly didn't appear to work. Perhaps there was no answer.
POWER AND SUFFERING
The next lesson was really quite simple and evident: There is both physical and mental suffering and while karma may increment suffering of the mind, power indeed reduces suffering of the body.
That came home subsequently after we had trudged to the train from the ferry. We couldn't find a place in the train where we would not be part of a claustrophobic mob. They were used to lack of space, we were not as yet accustomed to that. We walked slowly and desolately after the previous experience to the end of the train. There was a boxcar there. The large wooden door slid open and three grinning policemen in their khaki uniforms told us we could come it.
We were foreigners and white. That made a difference. We enjoyed a comfortable ride for much of the way as no Indians were allowed in. Then at one point they reached their destination.
The sergeant told us to simply open the sliding door of the wagon at each stop and simply say, "Police with prisoners". Indeed it stopped flat in their tracks anyone that even considered coming into that wagon.
We were part of the "Power", and we found ourselves accepting that role.
Later when we considered this it was a dreadful realization. In effect we were no better than they. In later trips we rejected such privileges, but here we did not.
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