Buddham sharnam gachchami - A Buddhist Journey

Recently, during a journey in Israel and Palestine, I was reading John Power's book "A bull of a man: images of masculinity, sex and the body in Indian Buddhism". It made me reflect about Buddhism and other Eastern religions. The idea of writing this photo-essay with images from different countries linked to Buddhism, came while I was reading it.

The title of this post, "Buddham sharnam gachchami" refers to a Buddhist prayer and it means, "We refuge in Buddha".

The above image of a monk is from Ulangom in Uvs province of Mongolia. I love the strong red background of this image.

In this photo-essay, I have organised the images according to countries and let me start with India, where I had my first contacts with Buddhism when I was a child.

India

My first memories of Buddhism are linked to Boddh Vihaar on the banks of Yamuna river in Delhi. My aunt used to live on Ram Kishore road next to I.P. college in the early 1960s. During holidays at her house, we sometimes walked to the river across the Grand Trunk road. In my memories, at that time it was a small road with little traffic. Across the road was a sandy expanse leading to the river.

Boddh Vihar (literally "house of Buddhists") was a small unpretentious building at that time.

During late 1970s, when I was doing internship at Safdarjung hospital, with my friends, we often took the Mudrika bus to go to the Tibetan shacks that had come up next to the Boddh Vihaar, to eat steaming bowls of noodles.

I went back to that place a couple of years ago. It has changed completely with big roads, busy traffic, new inter-state bus terminal and buildings. The river seems far away and hidden behind the buildings. The next image of Buddha is from the Boddh Vihaar, that also has a new and bigger building now.

The next image is of Garuda, the giant bird from Hindu and Buddhist mythology. The spread of Hinduism and Buddhism in east Asia had taken Garuda to other countries. It is also the name of Indonesia's national airlines. It is usually depicted with blue horns and a humanoid body. The most famous Garuda in mythology is called Jatayu in Ramayana, who tries to stop Ravan, the demon king, from kidnapping of Sita.

Another childhood memory linked to Buddhism is from Birla temple in Delhi. My school was next door to the temple and during lunch break, often we took our lunch to the temple. One of my favourite places there for eating lunch was under the elephant statue near the Buddha shrine.

Foreign tourists often stopped to take our pictures while we ate. Sometimes, women sat near us under the elephant to get their pictures taken. I wonder if our pictures were used as examples of "those poor malnourished Indian kids"!

Often I wandered inside the Buddhist shrine to look at Buddha's life story painted on its wall. The elephant in the dream of queen Maya and prince Siddharth's encounter with the sickness, old age and death, had deep impact on me.

Recently, I was back in Birla temple to revisit those childhood memories and was shocked by the locked gate that separated the rest of the temple from the Buddha shrine. To visit the shrine, you have to come out of the temple. The wall paintings were dark and worn while the tiny golden Buddha of the shrine was closed behind a grimy glass wall. I came back saddened by this visit and so I am not presenting any image from that shrine.

Instead the next two images of Buddha are from the Cottage Industries emporium and the new airport in Delhi.

Mongolia

I had some of my more profound encounters with Buddhism in Mongolia. During one of my first visits in Mongolia in early 1990s, I remember the Gandan monastery in Ulaan Baatar as a forgotten place reduced to ruins. Mongolia had just come out of the communist rule and India had sent a Buddhist monk as its ambassador to Mongolia.

During a more recent visit, I found the place completely changed with a restored giant Buddha statue with striking blue eyes, and the courtyard full of Buddhist monks and colourful stupas. The next two images are from that visit to Gandan.

However, my most beautiful encounter with Buddhism in Mongolia was in Ulangom in the north-western aimag (province) of Uvs. A delegate of Dalai Lama had arrived and a meeting with Buddhist monks and general public was organised. The next two images are from Ulangom.

Thailand

Between 2007 to 2009 I visited Thailand a few times. These were opportunities to visit the numerous Buddhist temples and shrines in Bangkok. The next three images are from those visits.

The next image is from a shop selling Buddhist and Hindu statues in Bangkok. In Thailand, icons from these two religions are sometimes found side-by-side. I love this image because it seems to be telling a tale about the increasing pollution of our cities, so that even Buddha is forced to cover himself to avoid breathing those noxious fumes.

I also visited the ancient city of Ayutthaya once and loved its ancient temples with their evocative ruins. The next image is from this visit.

Vietnam

Like Mongolia, in the 1990s Vietnam had also come out of communist rule that had discouraged the role of religions in the society. Thus, there are not many ancient Buddhist places to visit, though some of them have been restored over the past 2 decades. Stupas in Vietnam, like the one from the ancient city of Hue in the image below, seem very different from the Mongolian stupas. Buddhism in Vietnam also has frequent references to to the phoenix, which I have not seen else where.

One of the ancient Buddhist temples in Vietnam, Ninh Phuc pagoda near Hanoi, has also been restored and peopled with monks. The next four images are from this pagoda.

I had also visited Buddhist temples in India, Nepal and China, but these visits were before I had found my passion for photography. So they are not represented in this photo-essay.

Italy

The last and the only non-Asian country in this photo-essay is Italy, with a Thangka exhibition in Bologna, showing Boddhisattva tales.

A Bull of a Man

John Power's book "A bull of a man: images of masculinity, sex and the body in Indian Buddhism", is about male gender role in Indian Buddhist writings and art.

"Gender" is about defining and building of male and female roles and norms by the society and the culture. Usually gender studies have focused on female roles and norms, and there is hardly any works on male roles and norms in Asia. Thus, Power's book is unusual in that sense. Here is a glimpse of the kind of issues the book touches on:

"In contemporary Western popular culture, the Buddha is commonly portrayed as an androgynous, asexual character, often in a seated meditation posture and wearing a beatific smile... Buddhist monks, such as the Dalai Lama, have also become images of normative Buddhism, which is assumed to valorize celibacy and is often portrayed as rejecting gender categories... In Indian Buddhist literature, however, a very different version of the Buddha and his monastic followers appears: the Buddha is described as the paragon of masculinity, the “ultimate man” (purusottama), and is referred to by a range of epithets that extol his manly qualities, his extraordinarily beautiful body, his superhuman virility and physical strength, his skill in martial arts, and the effect he has on women who see him..."

Reading the book made me think about my own attitudes to spirituality and sexuality. Even if I do accept the role played by sexuality in ancient India, as demonstrated by books like Kamasutra or temples of Khujraho and Konark, I think that my feelings about spirituality are dominated by ideas of celibacy and renunciation of worldly pleasures. Thus, reading about sexuality and Buddha made me feel vaguely uneasy.

Power touches on the reasons of this unease in his book:

"Why has the supremely masculine Buddha depicted in the Pali canon and other Indic literature been eclipsed by the androgynous figure of modern imagination and the ascetic meditation master and philosopher of scholars? Part of the reason probably lies in the backgrounds of contemporary interpreters of Buddhism and the blind spots that every culture bequeaths to its inhabitants...

... most modern scholars of Buddhism were born and raised in societies in which Judeo-Christian traditions predominate, and even those who are not overtly religious have been influenced by them. The great founders of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions — Abraham, Jesus, and Muhammad — are not, as far as I am aware, portrayed as paragons of masculinity, as exceptionally beautiful, as endowed with superhuman strength, or as masters of martial arts..

If one compares the way the Buddha is portrayed in Indian literature with descriptions of Abraham, Jesus, and Muhammad, a number of striking differences appear. Abraham and Muhammad were chosen as prophets by God, but their exalted status was not a recognition of their spiritual attainments over many lifetimes, as with the Buddha; rather, Abraham and Muhammad were chosen because they were chosen. God designates some as his messengers and then provides them with missions, but a buddha becomes a buddha by consciously pursuing a path leading to liberation and cultivating a multitude of good qualities over countless incarnations in a personal discovery of truth..."

The question in my mind is, have we in India (and other countries) become estranged from our own traditional ways of thinking, which accepted human sexuality as part of life and of spirituality? Are we influenced by dominating Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions of the Western academics? Is that why recently there was so much rage against the sexual imagery in Wendy Donninger's The Hindus?

The figures of Buddha, Boddhisattvas and Jataka stories touch unabashedly and lustfully on sexuality in Power's analysis. I found the book very refreshing and thought provoking.

Let me conclude this photo-essay with another of my favourite pictures. I found this statue of meditating Buddha draped in yellow silk in Ayutthaya (Thailand) absolutely amazing for its colours and feelings of serenity.

Usually my photo-essays are about images. This one is a little unusual because the written part is as important as the images. I hope that it will make you think!

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Boats from around the world - 25 amazing wallpapers

Boats with the background of lakes, rivers and sea can make for some wonderful pictures and thus make great wallpapers. Here is a selection of 25 of my favourite images of boats from South America, Africa, Europe and Asia as high resolution wallpapers for you. These are images that I have clicked during my travels to different countries over the last deacde.

You are welcome to use these images in any way that you wish, in your blogs or websites. Please do remember to give credit to me (Sunil Deepak) and give a link to this page.

Click on any picture below to open it in high resolution in a new window. If you do not know how to use the wallpapers to change the appearance of your computer, laptop, Ipad or other devices, check the Wallpapers tab above for more information.

Remember that each of these wallpapers is in high resolution. Thus, each file can be from 0.7 to 1.3 MB. If you have an old computer with limited RAM (less than 1 GB), you may need to downsize the image before using it as a wallpaper.

So here we go with 25 amazing high resolution wallpapers for you!

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I hope that you have liked these wallpapers. Please share the link of this page through Facebook or Twitter or Google Plus.

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Down the musical memories lane

This post has been stimulated by the book “How music works” by David Byrne of the Talking Heads music group. It is about my musical memories as well as, presentation of some of my music related images.

David Byrne’s book has been a revelation – bringing an understanding about an area about which I had never thought before. Most persons like or even love music. Yet, we have no idea about how music is made and appreciated today. In the book, Byrne writes:

“Just as theater is an actor and a writer’s medium, and cinema is a director’s medium, recorded music often came to be a producer’s medium, in which they could sometimes out-auteur the artists they were recording.”

This surprised me very much - would you have thought that recorded music is a producer's medium and not the medium of the artist singing or playing that music?

When films had changed from the silent era to the talkies, there was a big change and suddenly actors who had dominated the silent movie era, were left without work. Similarly, each technical change related to the music recording and distribution – from radios to gramophones to tape recorders to CD players to MP3 players, affected and changed the way the music was played, recorded and understood, Byrne explains in his book. Where you played the music, from a jukebox in a noisy bar or in a concert hall, also influenced it. For example, why does an average song’s duration is around three and a half minutes all over the world and across different languages and cultures? Read Byrne’s book if you like music, it gives you an insight into things about music that today we take for granted.

My musical memories

My first memories of music are linked to the Bush transistor my parents had bought in 1963. It was the time when Laxmikant Pyarelal had come out with Parasmani and were dominating all music charts. It was the time of Amin Sayani presenting the Binaca geetmala on radio Ceylon. Listening to radio Ceylon was not easy, finding the station on SW2 was tough, but there was no choice because at that time there were no sponsored programmes on Vividh Bharati. Guide had come out in 1965 and I remember the first time I had heard Kishore Kumar singing “Gaata rahe mera dil”.

Amin Sayani also did 15 minutes long film-trailor programmes that presented the main story, actors, some dialogues and songs from new films. I remember listening to one such programme about “Phool aur patthar” and Meena Kumari’s voice from that film.

Around 1966-67 I had first seen the gramophone with the handle on the side, that you had to crank up to listen to the LPs. One day I will also have a gramophone, I had promised myself.

Late 1960s had introduced me to the English pop music at my cousin’s home, when I had listened to "Delialah" by Tom Jones and the "Sunshine girl" by the Herman's Hermits.

Around that time I had discovered Forces’ Request on Delhi B on Friday evenings and thus found out Cliff Richards and Jim Reeves. Songs like “Outsider”, “The lemon tree” and “To sir with love”, had become my favourites.

During the 1970s, I had discovered the Hindustani classical music. My uncle had introduced me to “Nirguna bhajans” by Kumar Gandharav. Going to night concerts on Rafi Marg, and listening to giants like Vilayat Khan had suddenly made me appreciate Indian Ragas.

During 1970s, I still remember the first time I had heard Prabha Atre sing “Tan man dhan tope varun” and Mehdi Hassan sing “Awaraghi”. And I remember my first concert of Kishori Amonkar.

In the 1970s, my aunt had shifted to the staff quarters of Janaki Devi college in Rajendra Nagar and that had given opportunities to listen to maestros like Bhimsen Joshi and Pandit Jasraj.

I had come to the European symphonic music and the opera music only after I had come to Italy in 1980. Dvorak’s “In the new world” was the first symphony that I had liked and slowly it had opened the doors to appreciation of other composers, from Verdi to Beethoven. On the other hand, though I loved watching the operas like Aida and Madam Butterfly, I could not appreciate listening to them for a very long time. It is relatively recently that I have started enjoying listening to operas.

Over the last three decades, my work took me to different countries of the world and I started appreciating music from other languages, like Arabic music from Egypt and traditional polyphonic singing from Mongolia.

A visual music tour

Once I started searching for images related to music in my archives, I found that I have hundreds of them. Selecting a few for presenting here was not easy and I had to discard many images that I liked very much. Any way here is my selection.

Let me start with images of music from India - India has such a rich tradition of folk-music, Hindustani and Carnatak music and of course the film music. I like all the different kinds of Indian music.

Today where ever in the world you may live, you can usually listen to music from your country through the internet. However in the 1980s and most of 1990s, it was not so - finding Indian music in Italy was not easy. However, Hare Krishna groups had Indian bhajans and I remember buying a Hari Om Saran music cassette from them once. The image below of the Hare Krishna persons singing and dancing is from Prague.

Prague is also where I saw the wonderful sculptures of blindfolded musicians and dancers by Anna Chromy.

The next image is from London underground, that has a rich tradition of buskers playing music at tube stations and in the metro train. Acoustics of some of the tube stations is marvellous and some of the music I have heard in the tube station sounded absolutely amazing. Like I remember once listening to a busker playing Ravel's "Bolero" on a saxophone at the Piccadilly station, it was the most beautiful rendering of this music that I had ever heard.

London also has the long-standing musical show on Queen's Eddie Mercury - do you remember him singing "I want to break free"? Listening to him, made my blood pulse.

The next two images are from Vienna (Austria) - folk musicians from Slovenia and the statue of Mozart.

The next two images are from Brazil, from a school that teaches Amerindian and Afro music traditions to children to create awareness and respect for these two cultures that are often looked down in contemporary Brazil.

In different parts of the world the dominating cultures mean that the traditions of the indigenous people are seen as "inferior" - music can help us in changing perceptions and helping people to appreciate the value of other cultures. When I had visited the school in Brazil, I had asked myself if in India, the songs and music of Dalits and tribal groups have specific cultural characteristics in different states of India and are similarly ignored? Perhaps someone who knows more about this, can answer my question?

The next two images are from Mongolia. Mongolian traditional singing uses polyphonic sounds to create a special kind of music. I love these ancient melodies, usually sung by men, that seem to come from somewhere deep inside them. The second image has chanting of Buddhist prayers by the monks, an ancient tradition of sacred music that has the power to touch me deeply.

During my journeys in China, I had the opportunity to listen to both traditional music as well as the pop Chinese music. While ancient Chinese traditions received a blow during the cultural revolution and were ruthlessly crushed, in the last twenty years, many of those traditions have re-emerged. The next image presents a guy singing a modern song.

The next two images are from the annual buskers' festival held in Ferrara (Italy) in August. I love the street artists and thus I like visiting Ferrara to listening to them from different parts of the world.

The last images of this post are all from Bologna, the Italian city where I live. Bologna is culturally very active city and every visit to the city centre presents some new opportunity for listening to live music.

The next image is from the music museum of Bologna, one of the most interesting museums that I have seen, presenting notations, music books and instruments from different parts of the world.

The last image of this post is of Dr Ashwini Bhide, a Hindustani classical singer from India, during her performance in Bologna. I like her singing very much and one of her bhajans, "Ganapati vighnaharan" is my favourite. During her concert in Bologna, she had sung that bhajan for me and it remains one of my most cherished musical memories.

I hope that this post has stimulated your musical memories! Wish you all an enjoyful walk down your musical memories lane.

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