City of Death
Short meditations on impermanence from the Charnel Grounds
On holy pilgrimage, now approaching my 69th year in this old bag of bones. This dream is so real - surreal, really - so why not peel back the skin and feel what’s exposed in the noon day sun...
Ever since a Nagasaki glioblastoma detonated in my father’s brain, in 1977, my life has been a long meditation on death and our collective dying.
Contrary to popular opinion, there is nothing morbid about that! Zen Hospice was the most joyous workplace I’ve ever been a part of. It is our avoidance and projection of grief that has led us all into planetary hospice.
It took that nuclear fat boy 30 years to find its meaty target in the basement of my dad’s brainstem, but not before it imprinted its outlines on my own genetic PTSD code. It took 48 more for my meditations to finally land in Manikarnika Ghat - pronounced ‘gu-hat’ btw, not ‘got’ - on a 108 degree farenheit April day next to this 6000 year old eternal flame.
The smell of burning flesh mixed with cow dung and human sweat colors my concentration before the Kalachakra sadhana can commence.
Is this my first time here? Will it be my last?
Bodies burned here after being bathed in Mother Ganges escape the jaws of Yama, Dark Lord of the shadowy Underworld.
This is what liberation looks like.
Every day here at the largest and most auspicious cremation grounds in the world - at present a construction zone with concrete slabs piled along the banks and backhoes clawing the earth, as the heat from the fires wrinkles the air - at least 100 bodies are liberated atop raised beds of dead tree limbs.
The ghat (steps leading down to the holy water) operates around the clock, every day of the year, just like Kalachakra, the Wheel of Time, but like Maha Kala, too - beyond death.
Dying is celebrated here. It’s a fortunate place to end up, unlike a morgue or a funeral home. No 6 feet under here.
100 corpses a day. Do the math...
Even if that fire has only been burning since the 5th Century, as the non-local historians contend, that’s still 58,400,000 grateful dead, give or take, all off of one ever-dancing flame.
If the locals are right, make it 219,000,000 pampered and perfumed bodies burned to ashes and then discarded, lovingly swallowed up by Mother Ganges, who peacefully flows and soothes the eastern horizon behind all the mayhem and commotion of Benares, City of Death.
If the glaciers continue to melt not far upstream from here, and the world continues to heat up like Manikarnika on this scorching April day, then this beginningless river will dry up, exposing her bed of ashes and countless grains of sand, and the eternal flame will quietly be snuffed out, never to burn again.
Who will escape Lord Yama’s death grip then?
Here is a picture of men mining for the gold of former fingers and teeth in the ashes of the dead on the banks of this Holy River of Life:
Why does this feel like an apt metaphor for Western Civilization, still profiting from death at the end of time?
Still not grasping that it’s gold fever that’s driving the heat engine extinguishing life’s dancing flame?
“Yes I feel like I’m dying from mining for gold.”
(Cowboy Junkies)
Have no concern. There is wood enough for all here.
Pay the wood man his due. He’s gone to all this trouble for you.
And listen to the travails of this Earth, a tale of lament from the charnel grounds:
Our Mother gives and she gives, of her body, blood and toil.
We take and we take, reaping fire, flood and oil.
Flashing our gold bling LOL! Like tourists taking selfies at the charnel grounds!
Oh yes, there’s a plot waiting for you here, too, when your taking is done. When you’ve plundered and squandered, cut and run...
A place to rest at long last, slumbering - under the dying sun...
P.S. This meditation dedicated to my expert local guide, Mohit, who led me to the eternal flame, and the sage from Bangalore who pulled me from the fire just as he sensed me offering my internal organs, body fluids and flesh up to Shiva on this baking hot day, Keshava:
I have a small biz -sized card under my mac on which I have had-written 'Thanks to Impermance —Everything is possible!' Jolly comforting in these times, perhaps always.
Thanks Tom for taking me on a trip back to the holy river - I was there for a day in my late 20s... on route at that time to living in the home of my Irish ancestors where I have now been these last 3 decades. There is something glorious about that place, that slow moving body of water and goodness, hearing about the eternal flame and all those millions of lives.
Sorry not to have been much of a correspondent... setting up a tiny online ecoversity community these last few months has had me busy, but this week I was sharing some of your essays, also housing much wisdom.
Greetings from a strange period of uncloudy, sunny days here in Eire, hope its not too hot there and best wishes for your journeying. I did like meeting your guides in this post too. Best wishes to you all.