January 30, 2010
Groundnut Soup
January 30, 2010
Drowning the Bodhi
Sunlight blazed on the orange robes of a half dozen Buddhist monks strolling along the Kandy Lake outside the Temple of the Sacred Tooth. (Catholics have nothing on Buddhist fetishes!) The color vibrated in the lowing light the way day-glo hunting vests glow among the surrounding flora during deer season in Vermont. I am struck by vast chasm that cultural codification that span. Where my initial recognition of the orange color is a connection to hunting culture, here the color orange has a decidedly different contextuality.
The color orange is one of five sacred colors in the Buddhist religion. Blue denotes confidence; yellow, holiness; red, wisdom; white, purity; and orange is the color of being without desire. After seeing the monks in the Western Union money transfer office the other day, I have come to conclude that such huge and vibrant orange robes are necessary to be reminded of living without desire at every moment of the day. Otherwise, one might be tempted by the most trivial of materialisms.
As I circled the Temple of the Sacred Tooth, searching for the entrance, I was directed by several three wheel taxi drivers into the Kandyan Cultural Center, a building right up against the temple. Thinking that this might be the entrance to the temple, I went in and paid 500 rupees, which led me into a theater seating about 500. On stage was the first dance in a performance titled “Traditional Kandyan and Low Country Dances of Sri Lanka.” As I glanced around the audience, I quickly realized that this performance was solely produced for tourists. Half the seats were filled with Westerners, mostly husbands and wives of retirement age who had booked a tour package that including Kandy as one of the destinations.
Without hesitation, I immediately decided the entire proceedings were not something for my more refined and sophisticated tastes. I mean, I was traveling with Dr. Sinharaja Tammita-Delgoda who was producing the first truly traditional vannan dance performance in more than 20 years. How could I, someone with such elite connections, deign to sit and observe this bastardization of Sri Lankan culture constructed purely for the uninformed Western masses. By the time I found a seat, I was ready to turn around and leave, but I didn’t. How different am I, really? I’m here to gaze on a culture that is as foreign as landing on the Mars. Why not accept the fact that I am not so different than these pensioners with a hankering for something beyond the trimmed boarders of their own backyard.
So I sat.
This event was not something covered in the pages of the Lonely Planet’s guide to Sri Lanka. The Kandyan Cultural Center’s performance was below their standards for inclusion, though they did find it important to include the British Garrison Cemetery and the Victoria Gold & Country Resort, which to my mind offer even less interest than a incredibly energetic and musical tourist scam.
What we witnessed was a sort of amuse bouche of ten traditional dances from around the country. Each one lasted about three minutes so I assume it was an excerpt of a longer dance. At times the performers seemed thoroughly engaged in the dance and at other times bored out of their minds. I’m not going to transcribe the “Programme English” that was supplied, but I will say that the drumming was spectacular.
The drum is the traditional instrument of Sri Lanka. They have no wind instruments. In this way, perhaps, Sri Lanka has more in common with Africa than India. The complexity of the drumming patterns were so powerful that I felt my heartbeat shift to follow the rhythm. This is not the first time I have seen drumming here. In fact, I attended a party a week ago in Colombo where a group of young men gather monthly to sing and drum. We sat in chairs and on the floor until 4am as various participants picked up a drum and began a song. It was a strange experience to see these well-educated young men—yuppies, in fact—so connected to their traditions. The host Chamila, Ranjan’s brother-in-law, got his MBA in Britain. Most of the others also did their graduate studies in the West, but every month they got together to sing and drum as their parents and ancestors have done for generations.
I could see this degree of devotion when I finally found the entrance to the Temple of the Tooth. After passing through a security checkpoint where I was patted down (In 1998, the Tamil Tigers set off at bomb at the entrance to the temple.), I stepped into a world that was almost exclusively Sri Lankan. Nearly all of the audience members from the Kandyan Culture Center did not make their way a hundred feet down the street to the temple, but instead climbed onto their buses to meet a dinner schedule that I am sure was running tight.
This evening was the Full Moon Poya celebration, the first of the year. In Sri Lanka, the arrival of the full moon each month is a national holiday. The January full moon is important because it is the first one of the year. This evening thousands of Sri Lankans crowd the steps leading up to the temple. We are all lined up to look through the door into the room where the gold coffin that contains Buddha’s tooth resides. According to legend, the tooth was removed from Buddha’s mouth while he was burning on the funeral pyre and then spirited away to Sri Lanka for safety. Here in Kandy, the seat of the Kandyan kingdom, it resides after being stolen by the invading Indians, confiscated by the Portuguese and crushed to a powder, and stolen by the British, only to be returned in the 20th century to its rightful place in the Temple of the Tooth. Much of this history is disputed however. According to the Sri Lankans, in all the instances where the tooth was taken, it was actually a fake tooth that was spirited away and the real tooth lay hidden in a secret place. So the real tooth was never destroyed by the Portuguese.
What I could see of the relic was a three-foot tall dome shaped sarcophagus made of gold. Though I could get no closer than one hundred feet to it, the power of the relic to everyone around me was clear. Women were crying. Others carried offerings. Whole families sat on the hardwood floor and prayed. All the while drummers beat the hide of long drums secured horizontally across their abdomen. The smell of incense and bodies was overpowering. Even though the evening was cool in the mountains, the interior of the temple was as hot as an oven. At one point, I wasn’t sure I could breathe so I pushed my way down the steps and outside where rows upon rows of oil lamps and incense were lit in prayer. As I breathed the cool night air, I stood and looked at the oldest Bodhi tree in Kandy across the courtyard leading from the temple. More than three hundred years old, this fig tree is just beginning to mature as it can have a life of 3,000 years. According to legend, it is under the Bodhi tree where Gautama Buddha found enlightenment. This tree is festooned with colorful prayer flags. This evening hundreds of adherents make their way to the tree to pour a bowl of water on its roots and say a prayer. I wonder if it is possible to drown a tree with a diameter of 20 or more feet.
