Today is the 10th of March 2005 and I am at Rajaldesar a village of about 30.000 inhabitants and 1400 years old that has even built a stadium for sports. They are proud of it as they invited me to see it immediately. I asked myself why is it that they are spending money in that before taking care of the open gutters with filthy dark waters. But, who is to decide where the priorities are to be set? What will the good number of pigs; dogs and cows roaming around the entire India will do if they did not have some garbage to eat here and there? I have noticed how easily cows here eat carton paper. Once again, energy is transformed in so many ways our minds can’t understand.
I hope to be walking tomorrow. It will be my second day walking in this yatra, something that will give me strength in my body and fortify my spirit making me enjoy nature and people around.
This India is another world, tremendously difficult to adapt to other concepts of cleanliness just to mention my greatest aversion, but at the same time a world so rich spiritually speaking that is so far ahead from the childish Europe that has forgotten its tolerance, whose future may be doomed as so many empires fell down to ashes according to history and as Professor Musafir Singh, the Head of the Social Work Department at the Jain Ladnun University, reminded me.
The Bible recounts how Sodoma and Gomorra were destroyed by Yahweh as not a single just person was found in it. To a certain extent my “clean” culture is dying. Let us just think of Switzerland, the famous country for its development, banks, chocolates, organization…unfortunately it has the highest rate of adolescent suicides in Europe.
My concern with that culture of mine is: Why there is so little love and understanding among members of the same family? Why so much gender violence and abuse? It is very unfortunate.
During my first day walking I sometimes got separated from the big group. I was having a formidable experience and living something I could not believe: I am walking through the Thar dessert. At a given moment I was far away from a monk I was following some 200 meters when a caravan of three to four camels were advancing along the road. On top of the carts pulled by the camels there were very interesting ‘Rajasthany’ types. I could not stop me from taking a picture, but of course this was another sign more of my foreign outlook which provoked a youngster to get out of the caravan and ask me for money. No doubt I was aware that I could have been robbed. Happily I was seeing how the monk was looking from time to time backwards to send me his protection.
I was wearing my military Spanish boots and after a couple of hours walking I felt the sole of one of my feet was on the verge of creating a blister. Happily it did not come out. I gave me a break and waited for the big crowd to come and took several pictures of Yuvacharya moving along the road with the monks and lay followers.
The truth is that I have started this “Vihar” knowing that I would face several difficulties, but I also expected to find sometimes beautiful encounters of all types. That is the fact when I am offered a wonderful house to sleep or a well laid table to eat. At the same time, most people greet me gladly and smile heartily seen a foreigner in this Yatra.
One of the great things I am learning while participating in this long yatra, is to me the fact that you have to be moving constantly. You do not stay at a place more than three days. One cannot settle down and feel the comfort of putting everything nicely organized to one’s liking. Besides, I and Arpit Dugar (from the Terapanth Media Information Centre) are more fortunate than others as we are always given a room to set up our computers and do our work. By the way, mine has to do with some translations in Spanish so that many more people may know about the activities that Jain Terapanth perform in the whole world. Of course, one thing is to be taken into consideration, and that is that Spanish speaking people can only take advantage of Preksha meditation as it is taught in Ladnun through English, for the time being.
My second day walking some 13 kilometers, departed from Rajaldesar to village Jogania. At the first village I was most lucky to meet again by chance with Anju Dudheria, Anita Dudheria’s sister who is studying ‘Science of Living’ at Ladnun University with whom I got acquainted along the month of February 2005. This is the type of little miracles that make life so interesting. I knew, as she told me, that I may encounter her on my yatra but did not expect it to happen so soon. Anju invited me to her mother’s Haveli where I met a couple of members of her family and had dinner that day and lunch the subsequent one.
She was most nice to show me different rooms of the Haveli, some of them belonged to other members of her family. In one of them I could see how ancient ceiling paintings were loosing their clarity due to dampness, and unhappily there were sections of the ceiling completely apart. To my dismay there was one room whose roof had disappeared and you could see the walls full of almiras (little open cupboards with fancy arched tops) with nice Indian paintings exposed to all kinds of deterioration by the atmosphere. When Anju saw my face she told me that we Europeans pay, in general, more attention to these things.
On the other hand, you see plenty of bicycles rolling whose cartons and plastics were protecting it when one buys it, and they continue wrapping them as a means of protecting them, at the expense of a nicer look. Once again, how do you take care? How do you not? These are the difficult questions to answer with just one type of logic. That is one of the reasons why it is so important to travel to other countries, as you realize there are many ways of doing the same type of thing.
The ‘Ahimsa Yatra’ goes on, as the encounter with nature, step by step. I enquired, through Arpit Dugar, a monk named ‘Muni Ranjeet Kumarji’ not knowing English, why he was not putting anything on his head to prevent the sun from causing him a headache and he told us that he had to endure it, that only very old monks are told when they can walk with some protection.
Probably one of the most difficult things in all these religious institutions has to do with obedience, to not being able to make decisions on your own. In a way your ego is constantly put to a test until you resign it gladly; on the other hand it seems as if you became a child all your life. You have not to care about anything, someone else thinks for you. I admit that this is a facile commentary made from an outsider and perhaps thesis may have been written on these types of aspects.
The great problem with the mind is that it never surrenders, and in addition mind never loves, so we should allow ourselves the benefit of the doubt when the behavior of these ascetics is not easily understood through the way of thinking of the individualistic autonomic personality I carry with myself.
Happily these monks, nuns, samans and samanis (a new category of monks and nuns that are given some flexibility in their rules), are much taken under the care of the lay followers, which treat them with extraordinary respect. They both need each other.
When yesterday 14th March 2005 I was talking with a group of youngsters, at a stop in the yatra, that surrounded me, as they usually do, impressed by my external different appearance, someone came to me and told me ‘Munishri Kumar Shramanji’ wanted to talk with me, the girl Romica, who spoke beautiful English, told me:
“You are very lucky, they have called upon you”
and I moved towards Munishriji.