This sacred land

V.S. Naipaul, in his India: a Million Mutinies Now, reminds me that this is the second place I’ve traveled where the land – it’s mountains, rivers, pools, rocks, trees – has for millennia been alive and sacred.  “The land was sacred …. Religious myths touched every part of the land …. Story within story, fable within fable: that was what people saw and felt in their bones. Those were the myths, about gods and the heroes of the epics, that gave antiquity and wonder to the earth people lived on.”

The other similar land I’ve walked, sometimes with aboriginal, first peoples, guides, is Australia. But then, the memory of that returns me to our own First Nations’ experience of the land and its elements, then further afield to a globally-shared “primitive” experience of living inside a meaningful, responsive, providing land – actually where earth, flora, fauna, stars, sun, moon, the elements are all alive, significant, surrounding, embodying, pulsing like a moment of conception or like being afloat inside a great mother. 

Just consider all the flying, floating beings we have seen depicted here in India’s old myth-, legend- and chronicle-based paintings, moving through and between such solid, fantastic skyscapes and landscapes.

During this our brief, glancing encounter with India, we have seen so many signs of a land experienced as so deeply meaningful, life-significant …

… the sacred trees in the villages above Naggar, incense sticks, candles and scraps of red and saffron cloth tucked into their hollows

… a prayer-flag-sprayed rocky outcrop over Dharamsala

…  the Jains’ sacred Mount Shatrunjaya, now covered with a preposterous fairyland concoction of temples, but where the faithful still make offerings of a few rice grains and flowers

… the holy Yamuna, Saraswati, Brahmaputra, Indus, Narmada, Godavari, and Ganges and many other lesser-known rivers, each spiritually alive today, even if now dammed and filthy (the Ganges is among the most polluted major rivers of the world with, I read, fecal coliform levels near Varanasi more than hundred times the official Indian government limits)

… those countless yakshas and yakshis – guardian, protecting beings – associated with lakes and wells and tree roots across India, indeed across so much of southern Asia; yakshas benevolent and fearsome; yakshis voluptuous, wide-hipped, fertile; both members of an extended family of creaturely earth stewards, like the serpent-nagas seen curling up temple pillars along the Himalayas, peering towards the mountains as if daring all comers

… and  Mount Kailash on the India-Tibet border, its profile suggesting the glowing aura around Shiva’s head, a sacred place in the Bon, Buddhist, Hindu and Jain faiths, variously understood as Precious Snow Mountain, Water's Flower, Mountain of Sea Water, Nine Stacked Swastika Mountain, Shiva’s home and a symbol of om, the place where the Jain’s first leader experienced enlightenment, the navel of the universe for Buddhists, a place of eternal bliss, for Bons the abode of the sky goddess Sipaimen.