Of Gods in Big and Small Places

I like little shrines in wayside places: nestled against grim green hills, sitting atop lone black stones, on mud islands in the middle of a rushing river, clinging to the edges of curving hill roads under old, old peepul trees....
Sometimes these shrines are little temples with conical roofs, faces of the tiny Gods within them covered in vermilion and chandan. Sometimes they are lonely mazaars draped in frayed green chadars whose silver ruffles flutter in the mountain breeze. Sometimes they are moss grown grottos cocooned within the heart of the hill, the Mother inside a little blurred behind the dusty glass.

On your way up or down the mountain, you can stop the car anytime at these shrines. You can then stand by them and say your prayers, as you wish, in any words you want, either old prayers from your childhood or new mantras learnt over the years. Or if you wished, you could simply not say anything at all, standing in silence and letting your soul do it's talking with the Gods. Then, if you wanted, you could bow down and touch your forehead to the stones in reverence. You could click a few snaps of the shrines on your phone and even selfies, if you wanted to and send those to old friends. If you felt like, you could even place a few coins at the feet of the icon. If there was the stem of an old candle on the alter, you could light it if you happened to have a match box on you. And all the while, knowing that if you did not want to do any of these things, that was quite all right too. On those lonely roads where few ventured, there was no one to stop you, no one to tell you how to pray, what to say and how to be, no one to come between you and those Gods.

We are at a famous Tibetan Buddhist temple. Inside, there are serene shrines to the Gods of the Tantric influenced Tibetan Buddhism, the wise and mighty Guru Padmasambhava, the compassionate Avalokiteshwara with his thousand eyes and thousand hands, the beautiful Green Tara, mother and nurturer, the Kalachakra or the inexorable wheel of time, all larger than life, all serene and very sacred. A monk in deep maroon is pouring yellow water into the sixteen brass bowls kept at the feet of the Gods. A little boy around four or five in his curiosity has climbed up a wooden step trying to get a closer look. The monk admonishes him harshly,
"Get down, get down, get down!!"
The boy retreats slightly scared, pulled back by his apologetic Mom.

I am peering interestedly at a tall wall cupboard full of ancient Buddhist texts, wrapped lovingly in red and yellow cloth and stacked neatly in vertical rows. The accompanying placard says that these contain the entire teachings of the Buddha, translated from the original Pali/Sanskrit into Tibetan many hundreds of years ago. Suddenly I hear a commotion behind me. I turn back to find the monk gesticulating to a man taking photographs:
"No no!! No photo."

He is unduly rude in his tone and coarse in his gestures, just like he had been to the little boy. The man taking photographs appears stung by this needless rudeness.
He retorts defensively, 'I didn't know."
The monk barks at him, "Written outside." In broken Hindi.

The persistent rudeness seems to bite the guilty photo-taker. He shouts back: "You don't have to be so rude. You could have said the same thing politely. I had missed the sign."

But the monk is haughty and continuously rude. As another fellow accompanying the photo-taker puts his arm around the monk and tries to calm him down, I hear the photographer still protesting, "Here in this sacred temple, you have no right to be rude. This is a temple.......! How can you be so rude here...this is a temple, a temple........." But under the pin-drop silence of those beautiful Gods, the man's protests peter away into garbled mumblings under his breath....

I exit from the sanctum quickly for the spell of divinity cast by the Gods has cracked. Though I don't condone the photo-taker's raising of voice, I cannot help but agree with the spirit of what he says: here in the sanctum of sanctums, in the presence of the Gods, how can a priest, a man of God and that too such a beautiful, compassionate God, be rude and intolerant of such tiny trangessions?

He was right, that short tempered photo taker: in that temple, the monk had absolutely no right to be rude.

That is why I like small wayside shrines. The Gods there have none of the haughty indifference of these large and famous temples. Alone, sans their human interpreters and interceders, they are kind, compassionate and tolerant, as Gods should be. And that is why I like them, for they are my kind of Gods.