INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

stance, Buddhists adopted and still are using various ritual methods for the disposal
of Dharma texts containing the teaching of Buddha. To avoid destroying older and
damaged manuscripts the texts would be placed within another sacred image (caitya)
or under newer texts, and sometimes shredded and mixed with building material
used for construction of monasteries. 379 Even if the pursuit of writing texts has been
considered a low-caste occupation in the oral tradition of Brahmanical Hinduism,
followers of the various Bhakti traditions and popular cults in India have given religious
scripts a symbolic and devotional treatment analogous to icons of deities and
sacralized humans. 380 Living at the riverbank of Ganga in Varanasi I occasionally
observed local Hindus consigning malformed or damaged religious texts of smaller
and larger sizes to the river.
The very existence of these ritual behaviors suggests that the disposal of sacred
texts once consecrated evoke powerful religious values associated with both the spiritual
content and the physical form of these texts. In different religious traditions people
seem to have all the motives for giving their sacred scriptures a ministration similar
to deities or human subjects of exalted status. The physical text may be seen as a
positive theophany which reveals words of supernatural origin and embodies a divine
presence that has been invoked through series of consecration acts. The religious
scripture may be held sacred because it contains a teaching which provides instructions
on the way towards salvation and articulates a godly plan for humans. In either
case the religious scripture or text is attributed sacrality which points to something
supernaturally larger beyond its worldly manifestation. The fear of contamination,
misreading, and human neglect are sufficient reasons for giving the text a respectful
handling. Through acts and behaviors religious people think they secure and respond
best to the sacred nature of the text, but in reality their actions are the ritual management
by which they impute sacrality to the text and simultaneously underscore the
ethos that this particular text should be treated differently than other books in the
profane realm.
In Sikh worship there are ceremonies that seem to serve no other purpose than
to venerate the Guru Granth Sahib. The true Guru dwelling within the scriptural
copies of the Koran in tombs, whereas their co-religionists in Indonesia burn the Arabic writ and
all papers containing Koranic verses to pay proper respect to the revealed divine words (Information
on Muslim practices in Indonesia was provided by Andre Möller, Lund University). At
the end of the twentieth century Christians in Sweden were similarly burning unusable Bibles
on the plea that the Holy script should not be sacrilegiously thrown into the refuse (personal
communication with Anders Jalert, Lund University).
379
See e.g. Walser 2005, Veidlinger 2006.
380
In consecration rituals of crafted statues of Hindu deities, for instance, the image is
considered an ordinary matter until the supernatural power is ritually invoked and thereby
made present. Through ritual acts the object is believed to be transformed into a manifestation of
the deity or supreme teacher which can be seen, worshipped, and treated with the greatest
respect. When the Hindu deities have fulfilled their temporal duties of attendance during
festivals or in temples they are ceremonially immersed into a river to be dissolved by water.
204
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008