IN THE PRESENCE OF SHIVA
Wednesday before lunch Shilpa invited me to come along as she was visiting a priest, Dayalpuriji maharaja Mahadev, 12 kilometers away in the Hargangeshwar Mahadev Temple to borrow a mower from him since the Ashram’s lawnmower had broken down. There is a lawn near the science building that needs to be mowed before important visitors come next week. It is the only lawn that I have seen here or anywhere in India lately. The lawnmower, when we finally picked it up was an ancient electrical lawnmower that looked as if it was on its last legs.
But the important part of the visit wasn’t the lawnmower, it was meeting the Mahadev, who greatly impressed Shilpa because he had turned a dirty and decaying temple complex into a beautiful place with a big park just beyond the road in and a brand new guest house for visitors with the temple being beautified and clean.
She was right. I am putting on photos of the different Shiva Lingams including the large brass Lingam deep in a cave carved into the rocks where legend has it that the Pandava Brothers, eons ago, in the great Hindu epic the Mahabharata, once rested or meditated.
The Mahadev sat on is special seat with devotees around him, all dressed in orange. He was a very pleasant man with an erect figure who welcomed us and then led us around.
The Shiva Lingam are familiar to me as are the other images of the gods including Ganesh, the elephant headed god and the son of Shiva.
Everything was familiar and not strange. But afterwards when we were back here in the Ashram I began to wonder how much I sensed, or could even be aware of, of the power of Shiva and the feeling of awe that Vikram who had come with us and had a mark put on his forehead must feel, or how much of the power of Shiva Yogesh felt the other day when he bowed in prayer in another Shiva temple.
I was just a curious outsider, blind to the sacred power of Shiva. And I realized that Yogesh, if he were to visit Asheville and attend a missionary Baptist church would be as uncomprehending and even baffled as I was today in this Shiva temple. How would a Christian fundamentalist go about explaining the power he felt in the presence of a man, impaled like a thief on a cross, a man from Palestine dead for 2000 years, to a worshipper of Shiva who had a yellow mark on his forehead and worshipped Shiva in the form of a phallic stone symbol surrounded by flowers with water or milk poured over it, Shiva, naked to the waist with matted hair and a cobra above him with an elephant headed son? Would he even try?
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 