Be Here Now all over again

Here is a story from my first years in India along with a few facts about life here in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains.

On our first trip to India, my former partner Ashish and I planned a weekend trip to meet his sister, Sangita, and her husband in Shimla. Early one morning we began our journey on a treacherous mountain road, racing 225 km across northern India in a small rinky cab with a madcap driver--even by Indian standards. He careened and jammed, reducing the almost 7 hour trip from McLeod Ganj to under 5. It was only my second long trip by car in India. This is not a myth: the roads and the driving are unlike anything in the West. Over 350 people a day die on the roads, which in a population of more than a billion plus seems small, until you figure into the calculation that fewer than 10% of the population use cars. It takes some getting used to.

The British Raj selected this idyllic spot for its summer headquarters when the heat of the plains became too much for their thin blood. It’s almost a mile and half above sea level. Shimla is now the capital of Himachal Pradesh. It’s actually a more picture perfect Indian hill station than our humble McLeod. There’s a pedestrian mall that you can now get up to via elevator, with a substantial Anglican Church, a handsome stock of colonial buildings, offices and so forth, still in use, lots of restaurants and coffee shops. A few of the fine bungalows that the highly placed civil officers demanded for their families and staff have been preserved. 

One of the oldest small gauge railroads in India used to shuttle the overlords, their families and extensive retinue up the steep mountain. It doesn't seem to connect to one of the Indian Railway stations anymore, but it’s kept running as a tourist attraction. You pay your fare, ride a couple of stops, get off, cross the track, and wait for an uphill train. We’re not talking Six Flags. We’re stepping back at least 150 years into the British Raj.

For Hindus, Shimla is also revered as one of the traditional holy sites of Lord Hanuman. This goes back to ancient times. A very recent addition to the landscape has been a huge statue of the monkey god, 108 feet, higher up on Jakhu Hill (an anomaly in a land of the metric system, but probably something to do with the cost of concrete and getting to a mystic number. It’s very tall). 

Early in the afternoon Ash, his sister, her husband and I took the little train down. On the way back up Sangita said that she’d heard of a small temple that might be worth a visit. We either walked or grabbed a quick cab from the train station to a very typical Indian temple. Inside the gate one of the baba’s was breaking coconuts and pouring their milk over the bonnet of a devotee’s car; I noticed that it was not a brand new car; perhaps a new owner was trying to wipe the karmic slate clean in anticipation of treacherous mountain roads. We squeezed past and came to a large hall where there was some intense chanting going on, surprisingly active in terms of devotional practice, not the usual thing you see in most Indian temples where people line up, pay some cash and get a blessing. And as a Hanuman shrine, it was overrun with hundreds of monkeys scarfing up tons of bananas set out as offerings. Monkeys are particularly nasty creatures, and living in a temple courtyard does not make them civilized. People in the courtyard were posing with the monkeys using their smartphones. Saturday outing at a temple. The depth of the devotions was refreshing, but there was a lot of family talk in Hindi, and after a few pictures for the folks back home, I wandered off alone. 

The temple was built into the side of a hill. I descended to a lower level below the main hall. There was a smaller, highly decorated temple on another small courtyard. I wandered in, and was greeted by a life-sized statue of a baba, sadu, or monk, lots of fresh flowers and food offerings. I’d stumbled into the samadhi shrine of the temple’s founder. I bowed, turned, and was about to leave when it hit me, really hit me! I know that guy. The very lifelike, full color, idealized figure was definitely a person that I’d seen in photographs. I pulled out my phone and within a few minutes had solved the mystery. It was Neem Karoli Baba, Ram Dass’s guru. It was not his main temple and ashram which are further north in Uttarakhand but perhaps we’d found a subtemple, or the temple of one of his Indian disciples. Neem Karoli Baba was not from the plains of India. He’d spent his life wandering the hills of northern India. The deity, his protector, not quite sure how to describe the relationship, was Lord Hanuman. 

The pieces tumbled together. I knew Ram Dass slightly. You’ve probably heard about Ram Das. Who hasn’t? He wrote a wildly transformational book called “Be Here Now.” I’d invited him to Hartford Street Zen Center to give a talk, and went to a retreat with him at Spirit Rock in Marin. I met him on four or five occasions. He was extremely gracious and lively. During my tenure as Director of Maitri, I asked him to come to Hartford Street to do a kind of fundraiser. I remember that it was after Issan had died, and Steve left because Phil did the introduction. We sat zazen in the small zendo with an overflowing crowd. He sat in the teacher’s seat and, why I remember it clearly, his head was on a swivel, bouncing around, while all the zennies were stiff as boards. 

Then he kind of chuckled and said, “oh yes, no-self, I have to remember that I am in a Buddhist crowd even if the notion entirely escapes me.” He talked about his vision/efforts to create a center for conscious dying, maybe he even had a location picked out, but the idea was to offer a kind of ashram for people who were dying and interested in trying to practice various conscious exercises, including mediation, during their dying process. He abandoned the idea because no one was interested. Then he asked me about the hospice. I said that we had no requirement that people be particularly conscious while they were residents during their last bit of this-life-alive time, but that we were committed to making life as normal and pleasant and pain free as possible. He smiled and nodded. 

Then I organized a prayer vigil for, as I recall, AIDS Remembrance Day, a joint service at Grace Cathedral with Hartford Street. I think that Wells Fargo gave me money, and the California Council for the Humanities was my co-funder. I am writing about that day now for the Issan Book so I have researched some of the particulars. It was on a Sunday in October of 1991 when there was that huge firestorm in the Oakland Hills. I had asked the Dan Berrigan whom I also knew slightly, to speak. He had just published a book about taking care of people with AIDS called “Sorrow Built a Bridge.” At the last minute he was unable to get a flight from New York, and Dean Alan Jones asked Ram Das to step in which he did, very comfortably blurring any doctrinal demarcation. He and Ram Das were in some kind of “Big Name” meditation practice group. He was wonderful, speaking openly about being gay which is something he did not do when “Be Here Now” first came out.

It’s Anglicanism so not a bridge too far. But this small temple in the Indian hill country was definitely not a talk by a western guru to an educated audience. I was right in the mix of it, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the culture of “Be Here Now.” Amazing.

Then I think Frank Osteseski had him do a kind of workshop at Spirit Rock, post stroke. You had to wait for a long time for him to speak, which he described as giving your mind time to dress itself in words, something that he hadn’t noticed before his stroke. It was a very wonderful experience. And he talked about how much he missed playing golf.