The Interrogation Of A Hill

1.

To enter the Ajanta caves in western India is to go back in time, more than 2000 years, and enter the world of Buddhist teaching and worship. It is to eat with your eyes transcendent, towering sculptures of the Buddha, sculpted from the raw basalt of the earth. The caves are carved into a seemingly nothing-special, yet capacious, hill that is part of the western ghats, a long range of mountains that stretches from northern to southern India, thought to have formed during the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwanasome. This whole western coast of India may have come into being when it broke off from Madagascar. The hills formed from intense volcanic eruptions that resulted in what are called by geologists domal uplifts, making the rocks ancient, around two thousand million years old.

2.

I have some questions for this nothing-special hill that comes from living in the Anthropocene and from an acute awareness of the human hand on the face of the earth. I am sparked to investigate the hill’s perspective on all this, to interrogate her sense of time in her seemingly endless lifetime. Does deep time allow you to laugh at us humans who at most span a century? How does it feel to be part of eons of existence?

3.

It is December 2022 and the Ajanta caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, have beckoned my two sisters and me for a visit. Beckon, as in, why travel all the way from America to our homeland and not squeeze in some cultural and historical sightseeing? Beckon, as in, fulfil a longing to connect with the ancient Buddhist world, at least on my part. This trip to Ajanta is the final leg of a three-week Indian journey for us. We are close in age and spirit and united in a mission to honour our dead parents and to attend the wedding of our cousin’s daughter. The Ajanta Caves are a side trip; the main mission has been to release our parents’ ashes into the Ganges in the holy city of Varanasi where they met and married. Their recent deaths, just nine months apart, have drawn us to travel together, to both grieve and celebrate their remarkable lives. The regional language spoken here is Marathi, my mother’s native tongue which she studied as a linguist and wrote several books about, elucidating the grammar and syntax of the language that fed her soul with its poetry and stories. Poems would emerge from her like rabbits out of a hat and she took such delight in sharing them, translating them into English because my sisters and I had lost our knowledge of Marathi soon after we immigrated to America. She was aware of the magic of words and how they were strung together, a love she so generously encouraged in me. It feels good to be on the soil of her birth. What is your native language, esteemed hill? 

4.

The origin story of the caves goes like this: the southwest monsoon brings months of rainfall from June through September. As early as the second century B.C.E., monks spurred by King Ashoka’s zeal for Buddhist teaching, inhabited the region in great numbers. They needed shelter from the unbearable heat that preceded the torrential rains of the monsoon, and then they needed cover from the rains themselves. And so, at the behest of the local king, rock excavation began.

Workers drilled vertical holes into the hill’s side, and inserted timber into it to break away large chunks of the rock, cutting away a large portion of her flank. The large flood basalt of the Deccan plateau gave way to human hand as lay and artisanal stone cutters, with iron and stone implements, chipped away at the raw material of earth to shape images, a simple rounded stupa representing the Buddha, a tree, or footprints, unadorned pillars, and viharas, simple cells for meditation.

Over the next 600 years, 29 caves, with ever more elaborate carvings and paintings and Buddhas so tall that they demand one’s head be craned all the way back to absorb the full scope of their being, would require extensive excavation of the basalt rock. Basalt is lava, silica, and minerals, the child of volcanoes, of fire and heat, bursting to the earth’s surface, but no doubt primordial, perhaps a result of the Big Bang. It is a soft rock, easier to break into than, say, granite. My hand is drawn to caress it, to feel its rough, hard texture, to admire its pockmarked black skin, to wonder how my ancestors could ever have been drawn to the crazy task of finessing it into a likeness of an enlightened being. It underlies more of earth’s crust than any other rock type. Crust makes me think of bread, of nourishment. Is that why the Buddha was carved into this rock? To nourish our spirits, to awaken us to the temporality of all that is living, to teach us to release our attachments that cause our suffering?

5.

Dear hill, do you converse with the river that courses below you? The caves overlook the Waghora River. The river wends in a picturesque snake-like curve at the bottom of a densely wooded gorge, and the hill that rises above it, within whose womb the caves reside, follows the bend of the river. Perhaps river and hill speak to each other. I would like to imagine they do.  Water and rock, cooing to each other like a pair of mourning doves, helped by small-leaved mimosa, neem and tamarind trees (with their hairy brown pods and delicious sour flesh), that quiver and rustle when receiving the breeze. All part of a conversation heard by homeless monks as they took shelter from monsoon rains.

The hill is shaped not unlike the bald head of a monk herself. I look up to take in her nicely rounded dome, draped in a sparse canopy of trees, dry yellow grasses and low growing vegetation. That is how she appears now. Hard to say how she appeared all those centuries ago when she was mother to a dense jungle of vegetation, and human and non-human animal life. She was lost to generations, the caves buried in dense overgrowth when Buddhism more or less vanished from India by the end of the 12^th century. It is John Smith, a captain of the Madras Army, part of the British Empire, who is given credit for the modern re-discovery of the caves in 1819. He was on a tiger hunting expedition and by the time he discovered them, the British had spent almost 100 years colonising and extracting riches from India. They cleared large swathes of territory for agricultural plantations and timber. The forest in the western ghats was severely fragmented due to human activities, especially clear-cutting for tea, coffee, and teak plantations from 1860 to 1950. Later, I will ask the hill about this violation. But first, I’d like to ask, What did it feel like to have parts of yourself tumble and fall away? Your hip, your loin, your thigh? What was that like? What is the feeling of being carved into?

6.

The hill begins to speak. She responds much in the way my mother would respond. In fact, I hear my mother’s voice with a slight edge of annoyance: “What kind of question is that? Meaning, what kind of silly question is that?”

I had asked my mother late in her life if she thought about her own death, and how she felt about it. She had looked deep into me. “You don’t choose when you die, or when you are born.” Her small body was tucked comfortably into the sofa from where she could look out of large paned windows at the wooded area behind her home. She was a little Buddha herself.

Is that the way you felt? I ask the hill. 

Yes, what choice did I have?  

7.

We troop up the dirt path – my sisters, our cousin and his wife who have accompanied us, and our guide. Swarms of schoolchildren dressed in blue uniforms swirl around us.

One of the first caves we encounter was built in the later centuries of construction. This is a vihara, a multi-tiered dwelling much like a dormitory, with many small cells for meditation. It appears that hundreds of monks could have taken up residence here.

What did it feel like to have your belly crawling with monks? 

Again, oddly, I hear my mother’s voice. “Have I told you the story of Yama, the god of death, and how he was given the king’s daughter for safekeeping? One day Yama had to take a bath so he swallowed the girl because he could not leave her alone, but the girl herself had swallowed her lover, and when Yama swallowed her, she took out her lover and they played together in his belly without Yama even knowing. So, you see, even the god of death does not know what is going on inside him.”

Are you saying you were unaware of all this activity? 

What I am saying is that things happen over which you have no control. 

I step across a stone threshold and crouch to enter one of the tight meditation rooms carved into the rock. I have been meditating for several years in the Vipassana tradition, the practice that asks you to see reality as it really is. It is dark and cold in the cell, as you might imagine a windowless room with only one small doorway. I sit on the stone bench and close my eyes. I feel the stillness of the air. What could it have been like for a monk to spend hours in this dank coffin of a room and watch his mind spin? The Buddha called for his bhikkhus, his students, to see things as they truly were, to observe how all thoughts, sensations and feelings arose and passed.  The monk must surely have found his mind spinning like mine does, thinking of lunch or dinner, or if there would be enough to satisfy his hunger. Wondering if enlightenment, the complete non-attachment from suffering, is even truly possible. Did the monk adore his mother, the way I did mine. Did he get news of her death too late to attend to her, as I did?

8.

In one of the large halls, our guide has us sit on the dirt floor around him. He tells us he is 70 years old, that he has worked in these caves for decades. His body wears his age well— he has a bushy head of greying hair, and a touch of a pot belly. He suffered many years from crippling arthritis, we learn, that was cured by a daily practice of yoga, pranayama, and two hours of kapalbhati, sets of vigorous exhalations. The Bhil people who live above, on the hill, helped him. “Come again in March or April,” he tells us, “when the crowds are thin and spend time with the villagers who will cure whatever ails you with their special knowledge of plants.” Neither the native plants of these hills, nor the people who tend them, are mentioned on any of the informational plaques.

The Bhil people are among the most ancient forest dwelling communities in India. The western ghats are one of the world’s ten “hottest” biodiversity spots in the world. They have over 7,402 species of flowering plants, 1,814 species of non-flowering plants, 139 mammal species, 508 bird species, 227 reptile species, 179 amphibian species, 290 freshwater fish species, and 6,000 insect species. Many undiscovered species live here, and at least 325 globally threatened species thrive here as well. I wonder if the Bhil people find their world dismantling from climate change. I fantasize that I will return in the dry heat of March, but I know the likelihood is minuscule. I will never know this place, never have a relationship intimate enough with a landscape to know which plant will heal a stomach ache, which a headache, or which will bring salve to a mosquito bite. Our family uprooted many times, first from India to America, and then from city to city in America as my father climbed up the academic ladder. We moved almost continuously throughout my childhood, a pattern that has continued into adulthood. My knowledge of plants comes almost exclusively from books, books whose paper is made from trees, trees that are rudely harvested from hillsides such as this.

9.

What was it like when tigers roamed here freely? 

Not just tigers! The hill responds. Why have you forgotten the elephants? The nilgiri taur, the Indian gaur? Do you know you greedy fools have brought to near extinction the lion tailed maque, the nilgiri marten, the chevrotain, the langur? Do you know about the 56 genera of flowering plants that are considered endemic here? What about the frogs, the tree frogs, the ants, the fish, the butterflies and the bees? Do you think it’s only the tiger that is gone? Do you think I had just one child, my daughter? How can I not hear the magnitude of what she tells me?

10.

The final question then. Do you grieve all this loss? 

There is silence. I wonder if the hill has heard my question or if I have pushed too far. In her long silence I think of the grief that most closets me. At age ninety-four, my mother’s death was not tragic or unexpected, still I mourn being parted from her in this physical world. Lord Krishna says to Arjuna in The Bhagavad Gita, “Death is certain for anyone born, and birth is certain for the dead; since the cycle is inevitable, you have no cause to grieve!”

I ask myself if the personal grief I feel is the same as the grief that comes from the knowledge of the destruction of our planet. The ache for my mother is simple and pure. She loved me, I loved her.  My grief for the earth sits atop a hill of rage, fear and helplessness. Rage for the never-ending dependence on fossil fuels, mining, extraction, and wilful deceit and greed. Fear for my children and for the generations beyond theirs. Where will they live in this burning and flooding world? Helplessness because no individual action seems enough. To feel grief seems to excuse complicity and inaction. It is too passive.

Still, looking out over this beautiful gorge, I consider love, because grief grows from love, and that is the best kind of suffering. It is in beautiful places that I connect most deeply to life itself. It is in these caves, inhabited as they are by the spirits and ghosts of those who carved  from basalt a testament to the teaching that is meant to offer us a path (but not a promise) to  nirvana, that exalted destination free of the cycle of birth and death, that I am offered my  departed mother’s voice, coming from the hill.

“Even I will die.” It is the hill speaking. “Even I will die.” Her voice is clear and strong.

I hear the river flowing in its stream bed, the sharp call of a wood thrush or maybe a parakeet, the song of the wind through children’s voices and their skittering footsteps echoing from the prayer hall. There is movement over my head. Maybe a bat taking flight. All of it brings me closer to the moment when my own breath will cease.

How then am I to live? How then?