Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
withstanding, Christianity has tended toward the anthropocentric. Our holy figures are all
human, and live in the human sphere, which—some people argue—explains the West's ra-
pacious approach to its environment. Perhaps things would have been different if God had
given Jesus the head of an elephant. And you know we Christians would have an easier
time connecting to the rest of nature (and less trouble stomaching evolution) if there were
a monkey in the Holy Trinity. Alas, we have no Ganesh, and no Hanuman.
Even worse, Christianity spent centuries promoting the idea that wilderness was either
fodder for our dominion or a source of evil. The Devil was not in the details; he was in the
woods. Of course, that's not true anymore. Now, we
love
the woods, love nature, and save
our fear and abhorrence for the dirty and despoiled places, precisely because they no longer
count as natural. I guess that pent-up Judeo-Christian negativity had to go somewhere.
So, for a long time we were semiotically handicapped in the West, and there was no
chance of us worshipping our forests. (What are you, an animist?) Besides, the world of
forests and rivers and mountains was not the world that counted. All that mattered was the
world that came after this one, a Kingdom that needed no conservation.
But don't get all dewy-eyed about the alternatives. It seems humanity will find a way to
ruin its environment, whether or not it's holy. The funny thing about vesting the physical
world with divine meaning, as in Hinduism, is that the world can retain its sacred integrity
whether or not it gets treated like crap.
Years earlier, in my visit to Kanpur, I had seen pilgrims taking bottles of Ganga water
home with them to drink as a curative—a curative laced with sewage and heavy metals.
When I asked one man about the quality of the water, he told me he wasn't worried. “It
can't cause disease,” he said. “Because Ganga is nectar. It can't be made impure.”
And because a holy river has such purifying power, it is actually the perfect recipient
for all your most impure waste—sewage, corpses, and so forth—which by mere contact
with the water will be cleansed. So there is no paradox in the state of India's rivers after all.
Their very holiness speeds their ruin.
From the crown of its ridge, Maan Mandir commands a blinding view of the surrounding
plain. To the west is Rajasthan, hills rising against the horizon. Our media handler, a skinny
sadhu called Brahmini, showed us around the temple and down to the lower buildings,
where we would be staying that evening. His manner was gentle, almost shy, and although
he spoke with a faint lisp, his English was good. He used it to provide a detailed and un-
ceasing account of Shri Baba's work.
