Loose Reflections, not Loose Movements

I wholeheartedly recommend Alex Medin’s summary of the principal Yoga Upanishads included in last year’s Namarupa (starting from this issue http://www.namarupa.org/volumes/1402.php). As well as being a straightforward interpretation of these works, they have been studied and explained by a yogi with a remarkable practice of both the physical and more esoteric aspects of this discipline. I strongly recommend reading Alex’s articles in Namarupa yourself and looking into these Yogopanishads on your own, but there are a few ideas that have stuck with me and keep on coming back. One is the introduction to the Mandala Brahmana Upanishad, in which the sage Yajnavalkya travels to the sun to receive learning on the truth of atman. “Since this knowledge is not possible to gain with mere words, Lord Narayana conveys to him the eightfold (ashtanga) path of yoga, together with jnana.” (pg. 4, Issue 14, Vol. 4) It’s a beautiful root cause for the origination of the practice of ashtanga yoga: ashtanga offers a direct experience of understanding atman. The root reason of why something came into being is often sought and/or explained in Sanskrit texts, and though this one may seem obvious to some people, I can totally visualize this sage making his voyage to the sun like some yogic Jules Verne character to discover why we have ashtanga yoga.

Another image from one of these Upanishads would be an excellent starting point for a short animated film and bounces in and out of my head now in some yoga practices. The first Upanishad that Alex summarizes is the Varaha Upanishad. Within the physical yogic practices described toward the end as pranayama practices and exercises to lift the prana using bandhas, it’s mentioned that the pranava (OM) should be visualized in different places within the body. Sure thing, my next asana practice after reading his article (which was a led class), I was imagining the OM all over my body, in my elbow, resting on my wrist as I reached up in utthita parshvakonasana, nestled in my hip in that tight sore spot in the back. The pranava is everywhere, all-encompassing, imperishable, but I had never considered that it’s in my body beyond when I utter the OM. I had only imagined the OM in the zone where sound emanates (this is what pranava is by definition, this vibrational hum), from the diaphragm and up through the lungs, the sternum, the base of the vocal chords, reverberating through the head and out the mouth and nose. Just as one can experience the breath as a representation of Brahman moving throughout your body, so one can imagine the OM throughout your being, and not only in a still practice of meditation and/or pranayama as suggested in this Upanishad.

This should come as no surprise, as the breath is commonly conceived as universal and our link to the gods and the Vedas (see below). Really, the OM is one and the same as Brahman, so visualizing an OM (the visual symbol or the sound) inside your body or it moving with the breath or residing in any location anywhere should not be a strange thing. Brahman is the OM, it is the Vedas, it is the breath of the divine (the utterance of the Vedas); it is also prayer (hence the name of the Brahmin caste, the priestly ones whose office it is pray for everyone and everything). The root of Brahman, br.h बृह् (also seen in Br.hadaranyaka Upanishad or Br.haspati), is a verb meaning to grow, to rise high(er), to expand, to swell, in limited contexts to sound or to shine. The breath is one form of this swelling of the spirit (dictionary definition of Brahman), this expansion which in the Vedas can be viewed as something akin to an outpouring of the heart in worship of the gods.

This is something I had understood the breath to be in my ashtanga practice but I had never imagined it taking on the physical appearance of the Omkara before (ॐ). Now I had a new way for my mind to wander while Sharath was counting to five and fellow yogis were panting and struggling their way into asanas: mentally seeing the Omkara in different spots all over me. It hasn’t been a hindrance to the practice; it is a further realization of what the practice is and we all are. People walking around everywhere with their bodies and insides covered in Omkaras, but not spotted like milk cows or cheetahs; OMs are packed in every inch and millimeter, leaning up against each other and stacking in 3 dimensions, even folding in on each other like fractals. This is the universe. As I imagined it in an animated short, the OMs would have to be the visual version (ॐ), rather large on characters’ bodies and something like how lotuses and cakras sometimes decorate gods’ bodies in Hindu iconography, as auspicious lakshmana marking hands, feet, shoulders, cheeks, eyes, etc. The animated short I already made in my mind with OM-flowered people may have been tangentially inspired by the 2009 animated film Sita Sings the Blues (check it out – it’s very sweet and a nice post-modern interpretation of the Ramayana story). http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/

Returning to the breath and Vedas above, an examination of the Upanishadic treatment of breath is fundamental to an understanding of asana yoga practice. First, from a physical point of view, breath is the involuntary entrance and exit of air into the vacuum created when we move muscles and bones, enlarging or shrinking the space inside our bodies. When we consciously breathe, we don’t really inhale or exhale, we extend and contract muscles to move bones (ribs, etc.) and then air fills the newly-enlarged vacuum or leaves the space. We don’t actually pull air into our bodies or push it out. We are not responsible for the breathing process, and only are initiators of changing the size of the vacuum when we are actively “controlling” our inhalation and exhalation. One portion of the Upanishadic view (according to Daddy Advaitist Shankara) is that 1.) the Vedas are the breath of God because they were “breathed”/uttered by Brahma, the highest (because when speaking, air is exhaled). 2.) The breath of Brahma (the Veda, Om, the imperishable) is like the breath of purusha.

Purusha can be alternatively defined as man or God and in fact is both man and God in Advaita Vedanta as envisioned by Shankaracharya. So when Daddy Shanky says that the breath of Brahma (the Vedas, Om) is like the breath of purusha (and curiously the comparison is not the breath of purusha is like that of Brahma), both man and God are implied in the comparison, but Shankara is especially distinguishing that this element of man (breath, breathing) comes from Brahma (=Veda = the Om that is omnipresent). Your breathing is similar to the utterance of the Vedas; the Om is similar to your breath. Your breath is reminiscent of the Vedas, which was the breath of Brahma. Concentration on your breath in asana practice is like focusing your mental energy on the Veda or on Brahma, the universal Soul, itself. An awareness of breath in your yoga practice is an awareness of this presence and that this element of us comes from the Om.

This image of Hanuman revealing Sita & Rama enshrined in his heart was painted by a member of the Patua Caste in 1880. I'm sorry this image has nothing to do with my post but I love it so much I had to include it!

Some wisdom from the illuminating light of Deepak Dongre Bhat (whose name means illuminating light)

Here are a few remarks from my Sanskrit teacher, Deepak Dongre Bhat, that I found particularly amusing over these months.


One was a comment on the 2 “abstract expressionist” paintings hanging on the wall in the living room where we do class. They are bold colors and swirls and your usual not-so-good art that in this case I’m sure was really more of an emotional and creative release in some angst-filled moment of yogism than any attempt at an artistic statement. After weeks of having class in the same room, one day he blurts out while entering the room, “I don’t understand these paintings! This is not a painting of anything: I cannot see God or animals or plants or anything!” I responded, “Yes, you’re completely right.” Hindus are the complete opposite of Muslims: if there is no form they start to worry.

One comment was when I was asking some finer points about the idea of the imperishable in some Sanskrit terms. Although he publicly only tells people he has degrees in vyakarana (Sanskrit grammar) and jyotisa (Vedic astrology), he completed the same degree of vidvan in Vedanta that Guruji did. He doesn’t tell people he has this degree because, according to him, you have to study Vedanta individually with a guru to be an expert in it and you have to dedicate your whole life studies to it. So Deepak (my teacher) is like a secret pool of Vedantic knowledge covered in a shell of boring grammar and the ambrosia only sometimes leaks out without him realizing. As we’ve been reading Shankara commentary of Gita these days, I’ve coerced a lot of Vedic ideas and philosophy out of him without him realizing as he helps me understand the text. At one point I was trying to ascertain how he was so sure that in one context this “imperishable” (akshara – which is coincidentally the name of the restaurant in Dasa Prakash, which I think is the bomb, yum yum) meant “Om” and not God or Brahma or anything else which "imperishable" sometimes refers to, and his immediate response was, “Is it not Om that is everywhere in the universe and has always been? Omkara has no beginning and no end!” I think I answered, “Yeah, alright.”

Another one was last week and my favorite (this is the lead-in to my next blog entry). There’s a Sanskrit term “praja” which generally is understood to be offspring or men or people/subjects of a king (like in “svasti prajabhyaha”. But really praja can be any living thing or being (which I didn’t realize) so my teacher defines praja as “that which is born through heavy effort”. I was making some silly and unthinking comment about how it didn’t seem to me that something like a frog was born through particularly HEAVY effort (egg to tadpole floating in the water seems nice and light and easy to me but probably quite heavy to the wee frog itself!) so I was clarifying this idea of heavy effort (prakṛṣţa), like “How heavy? What do you mean by heavy?” His explanation is, “If you take some wheat kernels or rice and put it in a vessel and put on a tight lid and you leave it for eight, nine months. Then you come back and open the lid, will there not be some few small beings in the vessel?” (and he’s showing with his fingers how some of the kernel germs will have shot up green shoots – he doesn’t mean any vermin or insects that will be moving around in there). And me, “Yes, yes, now I understand.” That’s heavy effort for the green shoot to sprout out of the germ, just like the tiny tadpole, struggling to break free of the egg remains which nourished him while growing.

प्रकृष्टेन = through heavy effort

Prakṛṣţa = long, drawn forth, protracted, heavy/great effort, how one’s yoga practice should be before things are effortless, which I think it also fitting because prakṛṣţa also can also suggest a transcendent excellence in some references. Prakṛṣţa is the toil or effort, like ploughing a field (kṛṣţa) which sets up or prepares for a thing (you may be aware that the body is considered to be a field in Hindu thought, as in kṣetrajña = the knower of the field, ie. the soul [the soul knows the field of the physical body]).

More to follow on my idea of asana as prakṛṣţa…

Monkey Business

Monkeys are by no means unique to India nor are they as ubiquitous as everyone makes them out to be. They do make it an exciting subcontinent – you always have to close your doors and windows, can’t leave anything on the motorcycle, and make sure you hide your bag of peanuts (and not just in your lower pant pocket). They can be horrifically ugly, as I discovered traveling through Orissa on the east coast and as this photo above demonstrates. They can also be adorably cute, especially if there’s a mother with a wee baby clinging to her. The eeny weeny monkey baby seems so little and helpless but it’s important to remember that the baby is hanging on to mother and not mother holding the baby (like cat and kitten or human and human baby); he is still responsible for not dropping out of that treetop and some day, on his own, he’ll let go of his mother when he’s able to climb the branches on his own.

Many places have monkeys, but in my understanding monkeys sometimes keep more to their own (many parts of Asia) or become subjugated by humans, kept in cages for human entertainment (I know of examples in Colombia), definitely separated and put in the animal domain.

Monkeys are interesting in India because the divide is not so clear. All old world monkeys have opposable thumbs like us. In the north of India the apes are big. So big they come over and steal your glasses like some school bully, and unless you’re fast or offer food, you’re going to be blind til you find the next optician’s. Or they steal your Lonely Planet guidebook on some remote mountaintop and they’re so mean-looking you don’t dare to try to grab it back and just watch as the primate tears and eats page after page, leaving you guideless and not knowing when the next train departs for Haridwar. (This is a friend’s story- I’ll leave out the details of how she used subterfuge and kicked the ape to retrieve the half-eaten, monkey-eared book, of which the yet-untraveled regions had already been digested.)

Mountain monkeys -Himachal Pradesh (northwest of India)

My friend’s foot-to-foot combat with the monkey is somehow representative of monkeys in India today, as in the past. Competition for terrain is complicated as urban and village sprawl take over more and more land area, but the monkey can adapt more easily than most animals to city life since he’s pretty much like man anyway, except doesn’t dress up in suit and tie to go to work. This tension between man and ape isn’t perceived in India as conflict, except in the monkey’s random acts of destruction and petty theft scavenging for food. As with most things, Indians are quietly passive in their non-reaction to the monkey’s mission to sneak into your home and eat every fruit and nut he can get those four hands on, later exhibiting his “I’m king here” stance on your rooftop and balcony. The Indian man’s best defense against monkey vandalism are screens on windows and locks on doors but that seems to be man’s only assertion of his superiority and it’s pretty laissez-faire.

Elephanta monkey contemplation

Monkeys are obviously not humans but it’s a blurry divide, the main differences for me being A.) amount of body hair (in some specimens) B.) agility and C.) the monkey always does what he wants to and humans wish they could (this includes climb the walls, play all day, laugh and tease friends, run and jump around everywhere – basically do parcour and do it well all day long - , play with his tail, copulate, masturbate anywhere and anytime, steal your food and eat it, steal my food and eat it, and tear your motorcycle seat to shreds, just for the heck of it). I don’t want to paint these apes too harshly; they are also capable of and display a vast array of “human” emotions: nurturing, love, affection, intimacy, sharing, helping the other, grooming, fear, and I would swear an appreciation for the ephemeral beauty of life, as I observed on the other coast, on Elephanta Island near Mumbai. As this mother held close her nursing baby, she breathed in the aroma and beauty of a small flower, possibly with more sensitivity than you or I would. She transected the nurturing mothering act with a moment of intimacy and union with the flower, the sort of union achievable in ekāgraha dhāraṇa, a contemplation bordering on meditative union.

Himalaya monkey

I’m not going to try to make like monkeys do everything humans do and more but I’ll tell you who does – Valmiki, India’s storytelling grandfather, the man who wrote the longest and oldest work of fiction, which is theoretically not fiction but rather one version of part of the history of India focusing (mostly) on one great, god-like and beautiful king (who is also incidentally God), Lord Rama. I don’t need to exaggerate the doings of monkeys because this man Valmiki already did it, and did it throughout a large portion of what’s considered to be the longest ever and definitely oldest ever book in history. While monkey could be seen as competing with humans in most contexts and environments, Valmiki makes monkey into man’s ally and shows the necessity of this symbiotic relationship.



Finishing off some monkey business



Valmiki’s juxtaposition of monkey and man is not coincidental as it has always been ever present in India. His treatment of man and monkey relations is more remarkable. Of course these Ramayana monkeys aren’t really monkeys but rather the offspring of gods and the like who with great strength and many abilities assume the form of numerous monkey species, numbering in the millions and millions. They’re not monkeys but they spend all their time pretending to be (while they can take on the form of man or of creatures ten or one hundred times their size or of anything else, it seems – typically they’re described as “as large as a mountain” – now that’s one big monkey). The fact that they keep their monkey form by choice means it must be a lot more fun than an anthropomorphic one or any other for that matter. These monkeys do everything that any human does (talk, eat, get drunk, stay up late at night), and surprisingly, as they take a heroic, leading role in the book, they do these things better than humans would or could. Rama’s alliance with the monkeys is double-fruited, beneficial for both sides, but the fact that Rama chooses and uses monkeys to help his victory as opposed to humans, who could just as easily have helped him in massive numbers, helps demonstrate Valmiki’s point. The inherent monkey nature/animalism which we all share (but which we can subdue and/or transcend temporarily to achieve our goals) is projected onto this monkey form as a contrast to the ideal, god-like human form.




Finally, a more interesting Adam & Eve story,
according to Tibetan tradition

 

So the progression/transformation/change of the monkey characters is the most interesting part of the story, just as is the monkey/human overlap. When the monkeys overcome their monkey nature and use their higher qualities they achieve great things, join forces, cross great oceans and defeat enemies. Curiously enough, when the monkeys have achieved great things (the moment of finding Sita, the return to King Sugriva after discovering Sita and doing reconnaissance of Lanka, etc), they revert to their monkeying around, jumping, kissing their tails, wreaking havoc and getting drunk and tearing things apart. On the surface the message seems to be that if we humans can overcome our monkey/animal nature (and get over that grief, please!!!!) we can achieve greatness, an idea that’s prevalent in many yogic and Brahmanic texts. (And then after doing good and transcending “animalism”, we can also celebrate, loosen the slack and monkey around again afterwards, too!)

In the Ramayana, the monkeys are the ones who save the day, not Rama, who’s supposedly an ace-archer, god and the ideal king but who just sits around moping in his grief, hopeless, useless and apparently quite helpless without monkey Hanuman. So much for the greatness of man or god. I like to think Valmiki is suggesting the necessity of animal cooperation, union with the other and a common life mission between man and beast, because man apparently can’t do anything on his own, in isolation.

Hanuman shrine at Banganga Tank in Mumbai,
 where Rama thrust a spear through the earth

It’s curious because so many big words praise Rama as the best, but he almost never does anything heroic except kill a bunch of demons (10,000 in one sitting) with massive bloodshed (kill, kill, kill, then think! he even has to be reprimanded by his wife for so much thoughtless destruction) and heap brotherly love on dear, moon-faced Lakshmana (which I agree is well-deserved, as Lakshmana is the best brother ever!). Rama isn’t painted so well; frankly, he’s totally incapable of getting over his grief and loss over his abducted wife and dead father, incapable of getting on with life (the message is stated pretty clearly by different characters repeated times through the book). Some king!

Our monkey hero Hanuman, on the other hand, is soft-spoken, always thinking before speech and action, and he doesn’t just save the day sometimes, he saves the day EVERY TIME in the book, except for two instances where birds save the day (1. an aged vulture reveals where Sita has been taken and 2. aruda, the eagle mount of Vishnu and King of the feathered race, undoes the serpent fetters trapping Rama and Lakshmana during the war on the island of Lanka). Humans pretty much never get anything done right on their own without animal friends, and always animals who can be seen as competition or horrible creatures (vultures eat the dead and are considered gross in Indian culture just as they are ominous and bode badly in the west).





The man of my dreams

 

It’s pretty crazy actually because the monkeys also almost never do anything right without Hanuman. Sugriva is the monkey king who befriends Rama, and supposedly a great upholder of dharma and correct action, but I feel pretty ambivalent about him because he ruthlessly gets Rama to kill his brother on the throne in a political twist after having previously abandoned the same supposedly dear brother to his certain death, trapped underground while fighting a demon – there seems to be a lot of latent jealousy and unrighteousness here. He also takes his dead brother’s wife and does a lot of copulating with her, totally ignores his promise to help Rama, spends his days and nights reveling in parties, drunk and having lots of sex, for nights and weeks and months, while despondent Rama is gloomy and desperate and unable to act and poor Sita, such a beautiful queen, is left suffering and fasting alone, even without a change of clothes, held hostage in the most beautiful garden on what’s supposed to be the most beautiful island ever with the most organized city ever while being offered the greatest riches by Ravana, who’s actually depicted as quite dashing and attractive and massively strong, correct in his actions, an excellent king for his people and ensuring prosperity for his race! Plus he’s got the most beautiful airplane-like mode of transport, a white vehicle called Pushpaka that flies in the sky and transports you superfast. Sounds rough, huh! According to everything described in Ramayana, I would actually prefer to stay with Ravana on the most beautiful island ever and ride around in his huge airplane the size of a palace grounds; he seems like a perfect and respectful man except for him having 10 heads. Ravana, by action and word, isn’t such a bad guy except for the fact that he’s on the wrong side, thinks he’s the best (he seems to be from his actions as well) and has a pretty big ego (duh, he’s got 10 heads). Sita suffers because she chooses to. Ravana is a great king and a great man (Valmiki’s words, not mine) and she doesn’t go with him because she’s already married and likes that wimp Rama and because Ravana is bad because he’d already destroyed Indra and all the gods, gandharvas, etc in order to reign all-powerfully. By act and word, Ravana is neither as bad as people think he is, nor is Rama as fantastic as people think he is. It’s all pretty ambivalent actually.



But I was explaining how Sugriva is supposedly the best monkey king ever, ruling with dharma, but he just spends his days and nights (and months!) decadently, having sex with lots of monkey girls and monkeying around. The whole while, Hanuman is upset that the king isn’t keeping his promise and he is the one who insists that Sugriva take action and help Rama, the god, who is unable to help himself. So yes, once Sugriva is convinced, the rest of the monkeys clean up their act fast and come from all corners of the earth (or the subcontinent) and save the day quite fast. They’re given a month to find Sita, and then humble Hanuman makes his heroic leap to Lanka, finds Sita, wins her friendship, on his way back decides to kill most of Ravana’s progeny and burn down most of the city. Then the monkey architect Nala is enlisted to build a bridge so all the monkeys and Rama can cross to Lanka to start the fighting (because no man would be able to do this). In battle, while Ravana’s forces use weapons, the monkey troops are so resourceful and use tree stumps, branches and rocks to fight, demonstrating independence (non-dependence on other things to be successful, one of the principles in the Yoga Sutras). At one point (actually two instances), when Rama and brother Lakshmana are totally bloodied and wounded, Hanuman makes a leap to the Himalayas and brings back magical curative herbs to heal their wounds. In an endearing act, unable to recognize which herbs he needs to take back, he actually picks up the whole mountain and carries it back to the injured, of course being considerate enough to jump back again to Himalaya and return the mountain to its place!

Topiary of Hanuman carrying off the mountain,
he's got the mountain in his right hand,
a mace in his left and a silly hat (Mumbai)

So yeah, the monkeys save the day, point made. Rama only managed to kill Ravana through the use of a verbal weapon bestowed by god Indra (a verbal command/magic mantra which makes the magic weapon appear to do the deed). So it’s not like Rama even did it with his own powers. There are so many charming details I could share but it’s better to experience these oneself upon reading. Then you can see for yourself that human/god Rama, all the gods (all the hosts of gods rooting for Rama to be victorious, as they had been destroyed and had their powers taken away by Ravana), humans and all the world are unable to manage without the animal community and without friendship to help get beyond one’s moments (or years) of weakness and one’s grief. In this story, the animals are crucial for re-establishing a proper balance on earth. Just as animals were a vital part of the “society” and for survival of the human community thousands of years ago when Ramayana was created, so do we today need these animal friends who, despite possibly being perceived as competitors on our turf, are necessary for our physical survival and emotional and psychological well-being. I’d present more examples to defend my argument of the animals’ role in ensuring the emotional well-being of Rama and other humans, but as I type I can see a monkey out my window, kissing his tail in contentment and jumping with delight because he’s managed to swipe somebody’s nut stash……