Above the Tree Line

India is like the human mind — it has so many layers! If you learn how to meditate on your own mind, you might discover its ever-deeper and deeper layers, though you will never know how deep a level you have actually reached. So it is with India. It is an ocean of different peoples, customs, religions, philosophies, rituals, smells, and tastes. There is so much of India that a newcomer could easily end up drifting upon its surface — as if sitting on a raft, pushed by the waters of the Ganga, and witnessing only a fast-forward garland of colors, poverty, temples, and affordable luxury hotels.

India to me was not simply a country I wished to see — it was a quest. I became aware of that quest when I was a teenager, but I came to India for the first time when I was fifty. In all the years in between I was preparing — consciously and unconsciously — as though silently guided by a trusted master who had initiated me into a sacred mantra — India. What I desired was not necessarily to see the beauty of the temples, the grandeur of the palaces and mosques. I wanted to learn about the ancient times, the knowledge hidden in the Vedas, the thinking of the Yogi, the perception of the human mind and body in the philosophy of the Yoga Sutras and the Upanishads, and about the sacredness of the Himalaya.

Why all this? I may never know. Some believed it was my interfaith upbringing that inspired my interest in Hinduism — a religion that at its core is most open and most tolerant, though history has demonstrated the opposite as well. To others it was obvious that, having read about yoga philosophy and about Indian mythology, I wanted to see their origins for myself. Many of my closer friends thought I was attracted to the idea of India because of a particular memorable dream I had as a child, and there were even those who told me that by going to India, I might have wanted to return home, to a place from a previous life. I myself have never really cared much about this question. I was living with this quest of mine as a child lives with the love for its mother. But if I had to ask myself seriously why I wanted to see India, I would probably offer an explanation different from that of the people around me.

I believe that I met India high up in the mountains of the country where I was born — Bulgaria. The highest summit on the Balkan Peninsula, Musala, is in the Rila Mountains. It is just under ten thousand feet or three thousand meters. The mountain chains in that country have very different characters. Pirin is full of deep, cold lakes and rivers and has sharp and rocky peaks similar to those in the Alps. The Balkan Mountains are a range that is a continuation of the Alpine chain. It is somewhat lower, but it extends from the border between Bulgaria and Serbia in the west, all the way east, down to the Danubian delta at the Black Sea; the legendary Rhodope mountains, home of Orpheus, form the border between Bulgaria and Greece and enchant the traveler with their mystical river gorges and caves. And then there is Rila, a mountain where one gets above the tree line quickly but that nevertheless is very green, with soft and gentle shapes. Before I was born, there had been a spiritual teacher in Bulgaria, known in the West as Beinsa Douno or the Master. The Master and his disciples spent summertime in the Rila Mountain. In the beginning, each year they used to set their summer camp in a different place, until eventually they settled in an area called the Seven Lakes. They used to spend a month or two together. At sunrise, to the sound of songs composed and often played on a violin by Beinsa Douno himself, they performed movement exercises called paneurhythmy (in good or perfect rhythm with nature). Every day, after the paneurhythmy, the Master gave a discourse on a particular ethical or philosophical topic. The disciples would listen and ask questions. Then they all cooked and ate together, cleaned the trails, rested near the lakes, and prayed. As a symbol of gratitude to the mountain and to nature, the Master and some of his disciples built a small fountain that captured the water running down from a high peak into two beautiful cupped, stone-carved hands. In 1944, as World War II was coming to an end, the communists came to power in Bulgaria. They prohibited the summer camp. Over the next half a century, until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the regime was trying to suffocate Beinsa Douno's movement in an effort to establish an atheistic nation. The members of the community were persecuted, and the reading of books with the lectures of the Master, written down in shorthand and transcribed by the disciples, was strictly forbidden. Beinsa Douno had died a decade before I was born, and I never saw the summer camp of his days. However, I studied his teachings with one of his very first disciples. I read his lectures, and I trekked in the mountains where he camped. It was in the mountains where I learned most about my master. It was in the mountains where I learned most about myself. It was in the mountains where the concept of the Himalaya was created in my mind and where my wish to go to India and learn about its ancient wisdom was born.

My first trip to India was a trip to the Himalayas. I went to trek there for a month. On the day before the trek began, my second day in India, I went from Delhi to the Taj. I had to take a bus from Connaught Place at five o'clock in the morning. I was staying close to the hotel from which the bus was leaving, and I did not have to take a tuck-tuck or a rickshaw. I walked.

In Delhi, early in the morning, the monkeys used to wake up and start running down the trees in large groups, dozens at a time, trying to escape the inescapable noise of the workday traffic. This was in the days when I first saw Delhi. Since then, things have changed. Legend has it that the monkeys started invading government offices, entering through the open windows, and that they caused terrible damage by playing with or eating the stacks of papers. Since monkeys may not be exterminated in India for religious reasons, an alternative solution was found. Allegedly, the monkeys of Delhi were lured to leave the metropolis and go to more rural areas by another species of Indian monkeys that were not so fond of the big city. Today, there aren't that many monkeys in Delhi.

At the same time of early morning, people who live in the open, outside any homes or buildings, and maybe outside society itself, start moving too. Some of them sleep in parks along rivers — either in groups or as loners. Others spend the nights on top of the small barrows they use to sell fruit and vegetables during the long, hot days. Six, seven, sometimes more naked bodies are pressed next to each other, on a surface no bigger than twenty square feet. It makes one silent.

The bus followed the old Agra road. The express motorway was not yet built. If I hadn't taken that bus so early in the day, I would never have seen those endless human chains, people who seemed to live off nature, together with the street dogs and some bony cows. Other tourists were taking pictures through the windows of the bus, but I could not. It felt as if I would be taking pictures of Christ on the cross.

Some of the people I saw along the Agra Road did seem to get up in the morning and go to work. They washed in the rivers...