4 am in the morning, I am having a quick shower after going to the bathroom, Indian style, and trying to wake up. Chadar around my shoulders for warmth, eyeglasses tucked safely into my pocket where the monkeys can’t steal them and ransom them for bananas, I walk past the sleepy desk agent, through the gated door, and out into the dark, decrepit alleyway.
I walk briskly through the quiet over the uneven, dusty ground, eyed by lounging cows and a dozen monkeys of various sizes, and head for the main street where even at this hour people are, like me, heading to temples on foot or rickshaw. At this hour the walk is peaceful. I only see a few dozen people on the way to the Mandir, where I will crowd into a beautiful temple room along with two or three hundred others for mangala arati, the morning worship of the deities of Radha and Krishna, the divine lovers.
Radha, whose name is always mentioned first, is the feminine half of God, the embodiment of joyful love, and a model for worshippers, who take her love as their ideal. Krishna, better known in the West, is God as alluring lover, the masculine divine, the embodiment of beauty, playful and hypnotizing. I am in Vrindavan, the heartland of Krishna in India, a small town whose very dust is considered sacred and which is believed to literally be an incarnation of heaven on earth. Vrindavan, which is struggling under the weight of modernization, development, and pollution. I am very fortunate to have guides here– people who have lived in Vrindavan and neighbouring Govardhan for decades engaged in spiritual practice– who are opening up this place to me. I have heard that many westerners have a tough time here. Culture shock is part of it, but another part is the effect that the last few decades have had on the region.
The streets are congested with traffic– bicycle rickshaws, motorcycles, scooters, taxis, cows, monkeys, dogs, and increasingly, ludicrously out of place luxury sedans and SUVs. The sacred Yamuna river which flows around the town is famously polluted, and the cracked and broken streets lined with frightening sewers. Plastic garbage is everywhere, there being no infrastructure to deal with its maddening arrival here. Despite all that, daily one can see pilgrims and residents circumambulating the holy town, some bowing full body to the ground every few steps. They do this doggedly, unphased, as vehicles speed by inches away sharing the road with refuse and strange looking puddles.
The streets are filled with people holding the little bags which contain their japamalas or prayer beads, and all day and all night it is common to hear people loudly chanting and singing divine names. There was a particularly rousing chorus of dozens of people shouting Jaya Radhe! (Victory to Radha!) around 1:30 in the morning, seemingly a nighly ocurrence. The temple spaces are beautiful and joyous, the cultivated green spaces vibrant, and the days I spent here were filled with magical human—and animal!— connections and beauty. Yet inherent to the experience of modern Vrindavan is cognitive dissonance caused by the poverty and chaotic pollution, something which weighs more and more on both residents and visitors.
On one of my days in Vrindavan, Leela, a woman from Kazakhstan who has lived here for two decades and is now fluent in Hindi and a master guide to every inch of the place, took me to a small family farm. We began walking down Parikrama (“circumambulation”) Rd, Leela amazingly barefoot, which is the proper way, so your feet can touch the sacred ground. We wound our way through honking, gas belching vehicles and avoided the cow dung. Suddenly we walked between two dilapidated storefronts and down a narrow alley between some small apartments. When we came out into open space, we also came out, seemingly, into another time. Verdant green fields stretched before us dotted with modest trees, kissed by golden sunlight. Fields of small sacred tulsi trees met us, and then fields of lush flowers, a riot of colours grown and harvested for the temples of the town– said to be five thousand in number.
We walked along the fields and came to a small house with an outdoor kitchen- a small stove fueled by cow dung, low earthen walls, a rope-bed, and chairs. The family that lived there fed me thick homemade rotis (the famed brajbasi roti) and intensely spicy subji with a side of a whole pickled amla fruit. As we all sat and talked a peacock walked by, and monkeys came down from the trees to see if there was anything worth thieving. The air smelt delicious, and the open, peaceful, colourful fields were mesmerizing. I felt like I was transported back in time, even to the fabled five thousand years ago when Radha and Krishna, in their human incarnations, are believed to have played joyfully in the local forests.
Tradition says that everyone who lives in Vrindavan is a saint. The dust of the streets purify sin, the river frees one from worldly bondage. The flowers and trees are souls voluntarily reborn here to offer nourishment and shade to pilgrims. Even the monkeys, who the locals feed, calling it “monkey seva” (monkey service) are yogis and monks who fell from their purity and are here to work out their karma. Those who come as pilgrims or live here for religious reasos strive to keep this metaphysical vision in the mind, a vision paradoxically intimate, physical and this-worldly at the same time.
This is the dissonance and challenge of Vrindavan. One is warned not to offend the locals, who– appearances sometimes to the contrary– are all spiritual beings. Every leaf, every tree, every cow, every particle of dust is sacred, even as the street-ditches flow with polluted water and the flower fields are lined with discarded plastic bags and bottles, and many residents bear the marks and behaviour of impoverishment.
The locals and pilgrims are not unaware of the tragedies of poverty and pollution. Here and there graffiti calls for a clean, green Vrindavan, or pushes back at the encroaching agenda of development for profit. A number of local and international organizations run by devout lovers of the region protect cows or advocate cleaning the river and stopping litter and pollution. Friends of Vrindavan cleans up garbage, plants trees, and works to restore bodies of water, while giving out annual Green Awards to local leaders. The government has announced plans to dredge the Yamuna and periodically supports various clean-up efforts, though without proper infrastructure things quickly get out of hand again.
Being in Vrindavan, then, requires a commitment to a spiritual vision that transcends the symptoms of pollution and corruption which locals would say come with the kaliyuga, or our present degenerate age. While I was there I deliberately indulged in this spiritual vision, and found it beautiful, heartbreaking, and provocative. How does one firmly refuse the begging of a nine year old girl without causing offense to her or the others present, and with an authentic attitude of respect? How does one walk down a street, firmly convinced its every inch is sacred, while sidestepping a broken tile above polluted water, a tangle of electric cable, a leaking garbage bag?
Vrindavan is a distinct physical locality, of course, but it is more than that. “You can not enter Vrindavan by purchasing a ticket,” goes a local saying. It is also said that wherever a devotee of the divine lives, that place is Vrindavan. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is a sixteenth century bhakti-yogin saint revered there. It is said that one time he wanted to go to Vrindavan and his disciples rerouted him, not wanting to be apart from him. “Oh Lord, they said, ‘Wherever you are, there is Vrindavan.’” These two sayings have echoed in my mind since I had to leave the dham, the physicality of that sacred space.
If anywhere can become Vrindavan, can where I live become it? How would that happen? What would that mean? How does one purchase a ticket to get there? One might accuse my quest of escapism, or fear that seeing where we live, despite its poverty and pollution and ecological collapse, as a sacred realm, would lead to “spiritual bypassing.” I don’t think so. Imagine walking down the street seeing everyone as a saint in hiding—even from themselves— careful not to give offense. Imagine seeing all the trees, the cats and dogs, as souls there to offer gifts or work through karmic challenges of their own. Imagine seeing the earth as purifying and the green spaces, no matter how modest, as divine places where the divine plays.
I suspect this is better than dwelling on the obstacles and losses that surround us. Maybe the ticket to Vrindavan is re-enchantment, a new embrace of the divine not for the sake of acquiring a bigger bat to use in the culture wars but for the sake of an entirely different battle, one for the ecology-embedded human being with all of our dreams and longings. The cost of the ticket is love. Isn’t it love which enchants some human being in our eyes, making it so, as Tolstoy said, all humanity stands on one side and they, alone, on the other?
Without this love for the beings that surround us– vegetable, animal, and human– we live in what philosopher of religion Ken Wilber called “flatland.” Flatland cannot inspire us to serve and protect its denizens. The root of this love is love for the divine– that which plays and hides within all the living beings we interact with. The vulnerable divine, which condescends to live as a spark of eternity, an atom of infinite value, within every being we see, rendering is at once numinous and worthy of our care. Seeing this is “Vrindavan vision.”
To live in a re-enchanted world re-enchants we ourselves. This is something we badly need. As Jon Foreman, lead singer of Switchfoot, sings, “Love alone is worth the fight.” Vrindavan vision shows us a world worthy of love, one whose divinity is perceptible and whose pristine state is not lost but right there, just out of reach, something that is uncovered again through our angle of vision and enlivened by our care.
Photo by Tapos Roy Arjun: https://www.pexels.com/photo/colorful-figurine-of-hindu-god-16354650/
Enchanting. Made me feel like I was there.
Glorious