The retreat at Bor Dharan ended with a puja and the next morning we were driven out of the jungle straight to the airport where we caught the morning flight to Delhi. There we were met by a Buddhist friend who is a senior Buddhist servant. It was Independence Day and he’d come straight from Shah Jahan’s Red Fort where the new prime minister was giving his first independence day oration, this being the equivalent perhaps of the American president’s State of the Nation address. Our friend was not at all impressed - although his wife seemed genuinely inspired by the rather visionary appeal of the speech. He spoke for an hour or more without notes, which made a big impression on everyone, and struck a very idealistic note, especially promising to get all poor people bank accounts and vowing to clean up India! Our friend was not convinced that he could achieve anything. It seems that prime minister Modi has a very positive view of Buddhism, at least as he conceives it. He seems to be an orthodox Hindu and therefore regards the Buddha as the ninth incarnation of the God Vishnu, but in almost every speech he gives, apparently, he mentions the Buddha with great warmth and positivity. Mr Modi is the leader of a government dominated by the BJP, a somewhat right wing Hindu nationalist party, which is closely allied to the RSS, a very large “cultural” organisation that is dedicated to the ideal of Hindhutva - Indian culture being defined in terms of its indigenous religions, not those brought by invaders of both recent and the more distant past. It seems that the RSS is also promoting the idea of Buddhism as a great Indian religion and especially sees this as a way of gaining alliance with other Eastern nations, since it is through Buddhism that Indian culture has at all impacted on the rest of Asia. Quite what all this means we spent a lot of time debating. Our friend then took us to the Delhi railway station and installed us in our rather comfortable first class carriage and we rattled off into the night, talking of many things. We were deposited in Gaya as the sun was rising and were greeted by Buddhavajra and mitras from the community. It was immediately apparent that the climate here was a good deal less comfortable than Maharashtra, not that it was especially hot, although it was hot enough, but it had been raining consistently enough to have raised the humidity without lowering the temperature. By the time we got to Bodh Gaya and walked across the fields to our house I was already soaked.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 08:12:39 +0000
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