Peace ascends

Bihar's beauty

The town, dotted across a green bowl, seems cosseted by the encircling wooded hills. It’s an ancient town with history woven through it like shimmering silver threads in a comforting old shawl. We wound our way through the busy lanes of the bazaar, till we came to the scrubby, submontane lands spreading to the foot of the rising hills. Just off the road, a seemingly insignificant circular structure covered by a conical corrugated iron roof rose atop a plinth. We climbed up steps and looked into what appeared to be a well. There was nothing inside it. We spoke to some bystanders carrying hoes and picks. One of them told us that, according to his father, the well had once held a Shiva idol wreathed in serpents.

“Where is it now?” we asked. He shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe the government took it. Maybe it has been hidden. But there is something else.” “Yes?” we prompted.

“Everyone says that this was first a very ancient snake temple: a place where the powerful Naga gods were worshipped even before the Vedas.” The eclectic Indic faith has far deeper, and wider spreading, roots than those ascribed to the Aryans. Those self-styled, ‘noble people’, according to the greatly revered Bal Gangadhar Tilak, immigrated to India from the Arctic. Before their arrival, claim the Jains, their own gentle faith had already been established in our land. They believe that the great Tirthankara Mahavira was the last of their 24 Tirthankaras: not the first as others often contend. Because of his association with this Bihari town, it is still a great centre of pilgrimage for the Jains, and their temples dot every one of the five encircling peaks.

Faiths many

We began to feel that Rajgir’s aura of pervasive serenity arose from the co-existence and intermingling of so many faiths. Such unquestioning acceptance of other people’s beliefs is an essential feature of Indic traditions. We moved on, our initial impressions reinforced by all that we saw.

In Rajgir’s Brahma Kund, bathers disported in hot springs gushing from the deep fires of the earth. There were shrines dedicated to Vishnu and Lakshmi and the beautiful Santoshi Devi. There was also one to the wrathful Kali. Interestingly, this complex of Hindu shrines is separated from an Islamic mosque by a low wall. That was both reassuring and intriguing.

As if in answer to our unasked question, a man with close-cropped grey hair, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a damp sheet wrapped around him, walked up, smiled and asked pleasantly, “You are wondering, perhaps, how it is possible for a mosque and a Brahma Kund to co-exist, peacefully, side by side. Foreigners often wonder like that.” 

“We’re Indians.” 

“Kashmiris, Gujaratis?” 

“We live in the Himalayas.” 

“Ah, Himalayas! My apologies. Maybe you know the history of Rajgir?”

Without waiting for our reply, he went on, “This valley was the capital of the powerful Magadha empire. Later, it was shifted to ancient Pataliputra, the present-day Patna. Rajgir is a shortened form of Rajagriha: the home of the Raja.”

That was an interesting bit of information. We thanked him, got into our car and moved on. Because diversity is our strength, and our people are naturally curious, we’ve always found someone in every destination willing to exchange information.

We were still talking about that when we drove out to an escarpment in the rising hills, stopped and trudged to the Sonbhandar Caves. An unidentified Jain hermit had, apparently, laboured over the years to scoop these shrines out of the friable rock of a cliff. He had carved figures of the Jaina Tirthankaras: the spiritual guides who shepherd mankind. 

Our attention, however, was captured by a Jain ashram with a very unusual gallery.

We walked round, the Virayanta ashram’s display, enthralled. Let into the walls, protected by glass, were the most exquisite dioramas we have ever seen. They portrayed great events in the life of the Tirthankaras like the daughters of the first Tirthankara instructing prehistoric man, Bharat and Bahubali’s great fight, Mahavira coming to Rajgir. They had all been miniaturised in such perfect scale that we seemed to be hovering high above, gazing down at them. We can’t think of a more appealing way to familiarise people with the beliefs of this gentle faith.

In our tour of Rajgir, we were moving forward from the distant past to the present. Historians believe that Mahavira and Gautama Buddha were contemporaries. In fact, the layperson often finds it difficult to distinguish between the images of the Tirthankaras and those of the Buddha, and their non-violent philosophies have much in common. The fact that both these great seers delivered many of their teachings in Rajgir is significant. 

At the base of Ratnagiri Hill, we hopped onto the chairlift and were transported, over scrub-covered slopes, to the peak. Here, Japanese-Buddhists had erected the beautiful Vishwa Shanti Stupa holding four golden Buddhas. During a long stay in Rajgir, the Buddha had meditated on a peak linked to this one.

The towering white stupa breathes peace and gives a horizon-stretching view of the verdant valley of Rajgir.

We stood there for a long while, wondering what brought so many seers here. Some people hold the belief that there are certain places on the earth conducive to spiritual advancement. The Chinese call the quest to respond to these telluric forces ‘Sheng Fui’. In India, we refer to it as vaatsu. Yaqui seers, who eat the psychedelic cactus fruit, peyote, know them as ‘power spots’. Those who believe in such theories contend that certain inexplicable lines of force, possibly magnetic, electrical or even cosmic, cross and interact at these places and react with the bio-electric network of our bodies to bring about a sense of well-being. These beliefs are too deeply ingrained among people all over the world to be dismissed out of hand.

Magnetic pull

We, however, do not know enough about these matters to either confirm or deny the reality of such theories. We can, however, confirm that, in our travels, we have visited places where the sense of peace is almost tactile. Rajgir is, definitely, one such place. And it has nothing to do with the presence of so many shrines of so many diverse faiths. In fact, it would appear that the seers and their shrines did not create the serenity. To the contrary. The inherent character of the place attracted the seers,  whose presence then gave rise to the shrines.

The sun was fairly low on the horizon when we left Ratnagiri and drove to the oddly named Ghora Katora Lake. Legend has it that it was once the site of royal stables. Today, this quiet spread of water, in the midst of rocky hills, is being greened for tourists with swan boats and a recreational park.

This growing facility, dedicated to such a modern trade as tourism, also radiates the abiding serenity that is the very special quality of Rajgir.