Rude Awakenings - Forest Sangha Publications

^0 T R E A S U R E 06and under the bed a photograph album. Here was Ram with the presidentof India, also a Sikh, here was Ram solemnly with other VIPs whostirred no memories in my mind. I gave him one of the photos of Nickand myself, and one of the cards that someone had given me as a joke:“Venerable Sucitto Bhikkhu” in copperplate, and underneath it in smallcapitals: “alms-mendicant.” He was pleased; I was pleased. You realiseyou need this stuff in order to be able to make the invitations and theblessings, the gestures that count. And to see the richness. For him whatwas unnoticeable, but which I carried away like a jewel, was the invitationinto his life; and the perception that here was a family of six, cheerfuland bright, yet living in one room—most of which was bare.In the evening I was with Nick in the white space of the gurdwara.The place was gently throbbing with the evening kirtan; two men, oneon a harmonium and one playing tablas, singing verses from the AdiGranth. The attention of a scattering of human forms was held in itsflow. Wrapped in so much cloth, the men and the women all lookedhuge, and their relaxed stillness gave them dignity. Nick, red-bearded,his head wrapped in a cloth, looked like a Sikh, albeit some cousin fromMars. They all seemed easy, flowing along in the spirit (and maybe evenin the verses) of Kabir, Guru Nanak, Guru Angad, Guru Amardas, GuruRamdas, Guru Arjan.As with Buddhism, this spiritual outflow had started informally, notfrom a wish to create a new religion, but simply to purify and point tothe truths—and to the false grasping—in current practices and ideas.Like Buddhism, the way of the Gurus had sprung from the mysticsource of personal revelation that keeps bubbling up through the crustof Vedic Brahmanism, and from which religious forms get depositedlike silt.Sometimes it’s the conflict between religions that cracks the crust. Inthe first half of the fifteenth century, when Islam was establishing itselfin Northern India, Kabir, a Muslim by birth, took discipleship from aHindu guru and saw beyond the form of established religion:1 8 3