Behind The Mask ~ THE CHAINS OF
CONVENTION
While
in India in 1993, I had a discussion with a Muslim
I met outside the Taj Mahal, and among the things
he said to me was "The right hand is good, the
left hand is bad". When I asked him why this
should be so, he replied, "Because our Holy Koran
says it is". Upon my request for further elucidation,
he explained: "Well, the right hand is for eating
with, and the left hand is for toilet purposes".
Unwilling to let such gross unreason go
unchallenged, I then said: "But if you wash both
hands with soap and water after answering the calls
of nature, they will both be clean, and there will
be no question about one hand being better than the
other".
With this conversation still fresh in my
mind, I went into a restaurant and ordered a right-handed
chapatti (Indian unleavened bread). The waiter looked
puzzled and asked what I meant. I said: "A chapatti
made with just the right hand". "No such
thing!" he retorted; "we must use both hands
to make chapatties!" "Ah, but I thought
the left hand was bad and only to be used for toilet
purposes", I said. "We wash both hands",
he said sullenly, but I wasn’t convinced, and
abandoned my idea of eating chapatties.
I went to another restaurant nearby and
sat on the verandah, and while waiting for the food
I had ordered, I observed an old man pull down his
pants, in full view of everyone, and squat over an
open drain across the narrow street from where I was
sitting, and calmly and unconcernedly do his thing,
using a can of water that he had brought with him
to clean himself afterwards! This must have been his
regular spot! And people were passing by within arms-reach
of him! But this is not unusual in India; in fact,
the country is just one big open toilet, where people
do it anywhere and everywhere: on the streets and
in the fields, just wherever and whenever—so
it seems—the mood comes upon them. Beautiful
beaches and other scenic spots are befouled, and one
really has to be very careful where one is walking!
I got the impression that they consider themselves
invisible while doing it, as they seem oblivious to
everything going on around them. One can see rows
of men along busy highways and railway lines in the
early morning, separated from each other by just a
few meters, hard at it, with traffic streaming past
(women work the night-shift, apparently, as they are
seldom to be seen); indeed, some of them gaze up at
the buses and trucks as they go by, and smile! It’s
quite remarkable to people unfamiliar with such habits,
but to the natives it’s normal, of course. Perhaps
they feel claustrophobia inside an enclosed toilet,
or maybe they just like to be close to nature and
see the sky and hear the birds sing while doing it.
Mahatma Gandhi’s exhortations to dig
latrines obviously went unheeded. Even in the major
cities of India, people urinate wherever they feel
like, and government attempts to rectify this by building
urinals have been in vain. Never, anywhere, have I
seen so many public urinals as in Delhi, and never,
anywhere, have I seen so many people peeing anywhere—anywhere
except in the proper place, that is. Consequently,
many visitors associate the acrid odor of urine with
Delhi; it’s omnipresent, even in the tourist
areas! Not just this, but many urinals are avoided
because some people use them to defecate in!
Indians seem to have a fixation with—let’s
not be squeamish about words here—shit, leaving
it around for all to see, as if it’s something
lovely. Cow-dung is at least useful and forms an important
item of their home economy, assiduously collected
while still fresh, and put to numerous uses, like
plastering walls and floors; much of it is mixed by
hand with grass or straw and cakes of it are then
stuck onto any available surface to dry, with a handprint
visible in every cake. It is then used as fuel for
heating and cooking and burns without much smoke or
smell while giving off quite a bit of heat. Cow-dung
also forms part of their traditional pharmacopoeia—another
reason why cows are so highly prized in India. If
only they would find use for their own excrement instead
of leaving it lying around; someone could make a fortune
from it. India really is a shitty country!
Most people in the West would not remember—or
would only dimly remember—the days when many
houses had no flush-toilets but only an ‘out-house’
in the back garden, with a bucket that had to be emptied
into a pit now and then. Now we just press a button
or pull a chain and our waste-matter goes gurgling
out of sight so conveniently. We’ve come a long
way.
Now, the whole world—or most of it,
anyway—is under the conviction that the right
is somehow better than the left. Why do I say this?
Well, just look at how we shake hands: except for
the Boy Scouts (though why they should be contrary,
I don’t know), everyone offers their right hand
for others to shake, and some people would be offended
if they were offered the left hand. But I can think
of no good or logical reason why the right should
be regarded as in any way better than the left; it
is just a matter of convention and we are stuck with
it, because to change it now would be almost impossible,
and what would we change it to that would not also
be—or soon become—a thing of convention?
There are so many things we are stuck with that have
no foundations in reality, but to change them would
be very difficult. Another example is our dating-system,
which is really relevant only to Christians, yet the
whole world conforms to it. Such things should be
regarded as what Buddhism terms ‘relative truth’
and as useful for the purposes of communication; but
they have nothing to do with ‘ultimate truth’—that
is, to things that are as they are, or to the principles
of life, that do not change. There is no need to change
them; rather, we should understand them as what they
are: just social conventions, which are useful as
such. We have lived with them for a long time already
and can continue to do so, as long as they don’t
cause inconvenience or trouble.
Buddhists also think of the right as better
than the left, as shown in the way that Buddhist monks
dress, with the right shoulder bared in the case of
Theravada monks (monks of other sects also dress with
something distinctive about the right shoulder); then
there is the way they circumambulate stupas or holy
places: always clockwise, with their right side towards
the object of veneration. Once, when I was in Budh-Gaya—which
is the place where Siddhartha attained Enlightenment
and became the Buddha, and where there are always
people circumambulating the stupa, chanting, reciting
mantras, prostrating, telling their rosaries, or sitting
quietly in meditation—I saw a Western monk going
in the opposite direction. When I asked why, he said
that one doesn’t always have to do what everyone
else is doing, but can do whatever one wants. Well,
in principle I agree with this, of course, but I feel
that to deliberately try to be different, instead
of letting one’s natural differences flow out,
is an expression of ego, and therefore defeats the
whole purpose. He knew the custom, but while he didn’t
see anything intrinsically wrong with it, he just
wanted to be different; or maybe he just wanted to
see what would happen if he went the other way around.
I don’t know what—if anything—happened,
but while I was there, I didn’t see anything
extraordinary take place, and he wasn’t struck
by a thunderbolt for his ‘impiety’.
There is nothing wrong with convention as
long as we understand it and as long as it’s
useful, or at least, not harmful. If we decided to
shake hands with the left hand instead of with the
right merely to go against convention and to demonstrate
our ‘independent thinking’, we would not
be arrested and charged with committing a crime, but
it would create unnecessary confusion and would serve
no useful purpose. We can be—and many of us
are—bound by convention, or we can understand
it and follow it accordingly. To offer one’s
right hand to someone to shake rather than the left
means that we are being mindful, to some extent, and
mindfulness is always good. To make a point of giving
something—anything—with one’s right
hand rather than with one’s left probably means
that one is aware of what one is doing, whereas to
give with either hand, not much caring which, would
indicate unawareness or even sloppiness. Better still
if we would give with both hands as that would indicate
much more awareness of what we are doing, and the
person to whom we are giving might feel honored to
be made the object of such special attention.
Manners are another form of convention,
and though there are certain manners which not everyone
would agree upon or share—for example, the custom,
in some countries, of burping loudly after meals to
indicate satisfaction over the food—many things
are generally accepted without question, and courtesy
and politeness would facilitate one’s passage
in most parts of the world, whereas roughness and
rudeness would cause doors to close in one’s
face.
Back to India, though, where I have been
many times and have traveled widely: it is a place
to really tax one’s patience, and though one
does, at times, meet friendly people, I have found
myself becoming suspicious and thinking, "What
does he want?" as one meets so many people there
who are not friendly. And very often, it turns out
that one’s suspicions are justified. It is not
good to feel like this, I know, but what is the alternative?
If one did not, one would be ripped-off on every side.
And after nine times in India, I know no-one there
who I consider a true friend. Then—it might
be asked—why do I keep on going there? I don’t
know; sometimes I think I must be mad, or masochistic,
or maybe I have to pay some ancient debt to that land
and its people.
It is common to be verbally abused in India;
Indian people are very good at that. But to be apologized
to is something quite rare. Once, I was sitting quietly
alone at Ajanta Caves when a group of Indian tourists
came by and, for no reason that I could think of—as
I had done or said nothing to them—they began
to abuse and make fun of me. I sat there, and did
not respond, but after they had gone, someone who
had been standing nearby listening to their abuse,
consoled me by saying: "Don’t worry, they
do this to Indian monks, too; my brother is a monk,
so I know".
Another time, I was sitting in a crowded
bus in Benares, minding my own business and bothering
no-one, when a little girl sitting besides me threw
up, and some of her vomit went on my clothes; instead
of apologizing to me for the befoulment, however,
the girl’s mother scolded me for not getting
out of the way! Amazing people!
In India, it is so easy to become a Maharaja
or a Mahatma; the beggars will call you such and more
in hope of getting something. Indians—it is
another generalization, of course, but as a generalization,
not inaccurate—can be so obsequious and ingratiating,
bowing and touching your feet and calling down the
blessings of heaven upon you. When they don’t
want anything from you, but you want something from
them, it is another story; any little power or position
they happen to get goes to their heads and they become
arrogant tyrants. Many times, while looking for a
hotel room, I have been turned away with the single,
rudely-uttered word, "Full!"—no such
thing as "Sorry, we have no rooms available right
now".
I experienced ill-manners so often in India
that one day, when someone wheeled his bicycle into
me in a crowd and apologized, it was so unusual that
I almost laughed aloud, and felt like asking him to
bump into me again, just so I could hear another apology!
There is something positive about being
verbally abused—and I always try to perceive
and point out the positive in anything—and it
is that, having been on the receiving end, one knows
how it feels and so has an incentive—if one
is needed—to restrain oneself from doing the
same thing to others. Rude people are good teachers
of manners—just as good, in fact, as polite
people who set a positive example for us—in
that they show us what not to do.
In rebelling against the past, we must be
careful not to discard the good with the bad. Some
traditions and conventions might be obsolete and no
longer valid, but not all; many things, having passed
the repeated tests of time, are still good and shouldn’t
be changed just because they are old. Things should
be investigated carefully and intelligently. |