The City of Light

Hindus believe Varanasi is the most sacred place on Earth and many try to make a Pilgrimage here at least once in life. In fact many people come here to die because they believe that to exit the body here will mean liberation (moksh) from the cycles cause and effect (karma) and that no more lifetimes will be necessary. It is often called the “City of Light”
Because of the belief that your karma will be erased if you die here, Varanasi is the retirement location of choice in India. Think Florida but replace the golf carts with rickshaws and the golf courses with a polluted river and the dirtiest dust and grime you can imagine. Evidently there is a medical facility just outside the city limits that many of the elderly will not go to for there that death will come while they are there.
It has been said that if you only visit one place in India and you want to get the whole Indian experience you should come to this city. Now I know why. Everything here is distinctly Indian by a factor of ten. While the poverty, pollution, and filth are excessive, so is the spiritual fervor.
Yoga, meditation and devotion are at every corner, but so is the commercial exploitation of that faith. For example, when we first went down to the main Ghat where all the action is said to happen we were accosted by tons of people wanting to take us to gurus (teachers), to sell us flowers to off the river, to take tours of the temples, and beggars telling us that we can work off our bad karma by giving them money. (They are selfless that way.) It is not just that they are selling such things it is the pushy and relentless nature in which they do it. It is like they all trained at a Radio Shack employee convention or something. You can’t leave the store unless you buy something and if you do buy something you will now need something else to go with it.
My personal favorite was a persistent gentleman who wanted to give us a boat ride up the river; his sales pitch being, “I can take you to a place in the river where you will see many floating human corpses.” A few years ago when Laci Peterson’s body and that of her unborn son washed up in the San Francisco Bay, the whole country was in shock. While the twenty-four hour news service had a disgusting news orgy with it, there were not boat trips being offered to see. Here, death is a tourist attraction. We passed on the boat ride. From what I have been told, it is likely that we will come across a floating body while we are here and I am ok with that, but to sell tours to see it is disgusting and tasteless. (be sure not to tell Fox News or they will be here with camera crews)
There is something powerful about this place though. You can’t help but get swept up in the bhakti (devotional yoga) of this place. Even thought there are car horns, it is the chants that stand out. Even with the plentiful amounts of car exhaust, it is the incense that I will remember, and even with the polluted river which doubles as the city sewer system, you can’t help but drop down to pray and meditate when you are near it.
This morning, we took a sunrise boat ride up river to see the thousands of people in their ritual bathing. Young and old, short and tall, skinny and fat. They all found their way to the river to dip in to its spiritually cleansing water, to drink from the Mother Ganges and to offer prayers for another day. Some may have prayed for a loved one, others for world peace, still others for and end to poverty. I know if I drank that water I would be praying for my own healing.
At the end of the river we were invited to witness a cremation on a funeral pyre. There was a body tightly wrapped in white cloth, which was burning. Oddly it didn’t bother me. In fact I found it very liberating. In America, we try to ignore death as much as we can and when we are forced to deal with death, we embalm the corpse and put makeup on it, something that always seemed more creepy than comforting to me. Here it is right there in your face. Your body is temporary home so don’t get too attached. Your body will be ash soon, so you had better take the time to find the bigger part of who you are. I’m not suggesting that we put funeral pyres on the peers of the San Francisco Bay, but it is a nice exercise to really look death in the face instead of pretending it doesn’t exist and then acting all surprised when your time is up.