Love of the Ganga
Friday, October 26th, 2007I fell in love with the Ganga (Ganges) last year while doing puja. Although I had bathed in the river at Varanasi, Rishikesh and at the confluence in Devaprayaga, my real love affair with the Ganga began one Sunday afternoon in Northern California.
Myself and a student drove up to a secluded cove on the banks of the Russian River, near to where it empties into the Pacific ocean. The day was glorious. Each of us had some karmic hand-me-downs we wanted to give back to the broad, flowing waters for cosmic recycling.
Every puja includes a moment when the water to be used during the ritual is turned into the Ganga. Water element is nourishment, and the ultimate nourishment is rasa, the indescribable sweetness of all life.
Rasa attracts us through the sweet taste of everything from donuts to a kiss, to a beautiful snow-capped mountain, to surrender at the feet of our Guru, and to the unalloyed, unattached enjoyment of life just as it is that Self-realization brings.
During puja, we use ritual gestures, called “mudra,” and ritual chants called “mantra.” From a dualistic View, we are engaged in a transformation of ordinary water into the cosmically nourishing waters of the Ganga and other mytho-spiritually important rivers in India.
From a broader perspective, we are participating in an ocean of svamudra (self-expression). The embodied gestures, vibrations, and wisdom virtues of mudra and mantra are Self acting upon Self in order to enact the lila or Supreme Play of Self-recognition.
As players of this Supreme Game, we do not transform anything. We discover and recognize the essence virtues– the sweetness, playfulness, supple beauty and primordial intelligence of water element–manifested here in the human world as “Ganga.”
And so, performing Ganga puja, I squatted at the river’s edge to repeat these ancient gestures of svamudra. The water danced with light, and its rhythmic currents pulsed under my hand.
We reached the moment for relinquishing our unwanted tensions, represented by ritual and other objects we had brought to give back to the river, now Ma Ganga. We waded out through the shallow waters to where the deeper current moved the river toward the sea.
As we walked, the entire volume of water, and everything present to our senses from horizon to horizon, began to move in one continuous wave: the river, the sky, the land, the hills, the sun’s light, the birds, and our small forms. This beginningless, endless wave of aliveness swept up our offerings.
This Ganga wave also swept away limited View, the limited View that keeps us from recognizing the Supreme adaptability and sweetness, the naturalness of life in all rivers, all waters, and in the shining intelligence and youthful exuberance of water element present everywhere.
Since then, I have felt the sweetness of the river rising and spreading out in me to meet Ma Ganga, to meet life.
Recently, I read that the Ganga may be more swiftly and severely affected by global warming than other rivers on earth. “According to a U.N. climate report, the Himalayan glaciers that are the sources of the Ganges could disappear by 2030 as temperatures rise.”
The sadness of this is directly felt. But it also may be that in offering Herself as one of the first on the endangered list, Ma Ganga will draw us close to Her sweetness again as we attempt to rescue her most renowned manifest form.
As it says in the Tantras: We rise by that which we fall. Having fallen so far from Her, our own waywardness creates an opening, an opportunity for our inevitable return.
In Ma’s love,
Shambhavi
Firefly Multimedia