Sunrise in England. Hard to catch it, sometimes, but always worth the effort. This week I have been thinking about the Gayatri mantra and how it is chanted at sunrise, noon and sunset. Although the Hare Krishna maha-mantra can be chanted without following any ‘hard and fast rules,’ the Gayatri does have rules attached to it, and they must be…
(This first appeared in the New Statesman magazine January, 2007.) “Could we have a group of Hare Krishnas to appear in The Da Vinci Code?” asks film director Ron Howard in a call to the London Krishna temple one morning. “We want a typical London street scene for the film.” He wanted “a few seconds” of orange-robed Krishna chanters while…
In 1965 an elderly Indian gentleman boarded a steamship in Calcutta. He was a saffron-robed sadhu – a holy man – bound for America, a place he had never visited before, and a place where he had no friends. Almost 70, he had spent the last eight years in the sacred medieval town of Vrindavan, the home of Lord Krishna. In…
A few months ago, I went to India and took my home deity of Nrsimha with me. Wherever I travelled, I would offer lamps and flowers, incense and food each morning. Being India, the offering of flowers part was particularly rewarding. Florists begin their selling in the early hours of the morning, long before sunrise, then right through the day,…
Regular readers will know that, in addition to worshipping God through recitation of His holy names, devotees also worship the form of the Lord manifested in elements such as metal, wood, stone, fire, or a painted image. All religious traditions have such sacred images – of one kind or another – according to the reasoning of their particular theology. Many…
While visiting the megalithic countryside around Stonehenge, myself and a friend first stopped in at Woodhenge. It was built on the same principle as Stonehenge but out of wood, now all decayed, but marked by modern concrete posts. Again there was the feature of the north-east direction being left open for some purpose, either access or ceremonial. Traditionally, the north-east…
The Mystic Spiral The flow of ideas in the Bhagavad gita I was recently travelling through south India on holiday. At every hotel I stayed in there would be, without fail, a copy of the Bhagavad-gita on the bedside table. This intrigued me, because in my travels around England I am accustomed to see copies of the Holy Bible in…
Oxygen. Very important thing, oxygen. You can live without food for a month; You can live without water for a week; But without oxygen you’d be lucky to live for 7 minutes. You extract it from the air around you by breathing in and out using your lungs. Brilliant pieces of equipment, the lungs. Not much to look at really:…
The Devil always likes to help saints ‘organise’ religion, and organised religion can be problematic. But without human structures, the saint’s messages and good public works may not endure over the next three generations. For thousands of years, whenever saintly people have searched for a good spot to live, they’ve chosen places of tranquillity, far removed from the noise and…
The Methodist circuit preacher on horseback, bent double against wind and rain, saddlebags filled with good books, is an icon of American history. Long before the saloons and general stores came to the American West, and certainly long before the railroads came, the Methodist preacher man was there. There’s an old American expression to describe how wild a place was:…
