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,…
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…
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:…
Many pilgrims, one river. Spiritual life asks us to look beyond differences This week found me sharing several interesting hours with Christian and Jewish ministers from my town. The first meeting was in a local hall, and attended by the Mayor; the second, a special explanatory Sabbath service in one of the two high street synagogues. Now, I don’t attend such meetings and…
There’s nothing quite like summer mornings. They seem perfectly designed for tranquility, contemplation, and spiritual thought. Vaishnavas are supposed to rise early, so that their meditation, prayer and study begin one hour and thirty-six minutes before the sun rises. That’s the ancient Vedic prescription. Of course, those ancients who followed the Vedas back then probably never had to scrape the…
This Nrsimhadeva temple lies not in south India, but in the wooded green hills of southern Bavaria, in Germany. Today I had breakfast in Bavaria, lunch in Linz, and an evening meal in Cambridge, England. My culinary journey through Europe began in southern Germany and continued with a short stop at midday in central Austria. I was back in the…
