CQ2

More on the Basque country:

There’s an old beautiful rustic church,the ermita de San Adrián, located on a hillside outside of the town of Elorrio (near Durango).  “Ermita” literally means “hermitage,” so strictly translated it’s “Hadrian’s hermitage” but I think “the chapel of San Adrián” better captures the feel of this single-roomed church. Perhaps there were hermits associated with these little chapels that are so common in the Basque country, but I sort of doubt it.  A cluster of farmhouses might share an ermita, and today people visit them only on the feast day of the saint associated with the chapel.

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Transliterating Sanskrit, and its derivatives such as Pali, remains an annoying problem.  The problem isn’t with the language itself; Sanskrit’s wonderfully precise and clear about sounds and letters.  Likewise, there’s no issue with scripts or alphabets.  You might think that there is some mystical connection between the script that a language is written in and the language itself but that’s really not the case.  Sanskrit in India is written in Devanagari but there’s no special reason to use Devanagari for Sanskrit instead of the Latin alphabet or another one.  Plus, Sanskrit’s only been written in Devanagari for a comparatively short period of time.

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There isn’t an indigenous American sadhu tradition, ascetic wanderers on the (south Asia) Indian model.  But we do have, thanks to our vast open spaces, celebrated individual instances of semi-ascetic wanderers in the American West and Alaska.  Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild documented the life and death of Chris McCandless, for one, and discussed another, the poet and artist Everett Ruess (1914–1934), whose disappearance at the age of twenty added to his romantic mien the appeal of a good mystery.  Others in this category include, prototypically, John Muir, Edward Abbey, and Henry Thoreau, although Thoreau was a wimp compared to, say, Dick Proenneke or Daniel Suelo — who combines Indian sadhu experience with southern Utah sliprock country, like Ruess — or the Peace Pilgrims (I & II).  But it’s a category that has broad appeal, I think, and the most moving part to me of Krakauer’s book was the self-reflection (I can’t remember now if it was at the beginning or the end, but it involved a story about risky solo climbing in southern Alaska) piece in which Krakauer, like me, admitted to feeling some of what McCandless was after.

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Kathie Brobeck was kind enough to send this photo of a pillar inscribed with Ājīvika ascetics from the south Kōśala site of Mallar/Malhār in what used to be western Orissa and eastern Madhya Pradesh but which is now a part of the new state of Chhattisgarh.  (More on the enigmatic Ājīvikas previously and, much better, in Basham’s History and Doctrine of the Ājīvikas.)

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The Pakistan Taliban war is being fought in areas that 1500 years ago were Buddhist. The districts of Dir, Buner, and especially Swat are rich with Buddhist ruins, a record of a time when they were part of the Gandharan Buddhist heartland centered on the ancient capital of Taxila, now on the outskirts of Islamabad/Rawalapindi. Padmasambhava, for instance, was from Swat, ancient Uddiyana, before he went on to convert Tibet to Buddhism. These were rich, sophisticated centers of learning and art, famous for their monasteries, now sadly the locus of much suffering.

[updated 13 May 2009 with the maps above; for more detail you're wanting John Huntington's gorgeous map.]

[22 June 2009: It turns out that the identification of Uddiyana with Swat is contested; it might instead refer to modern-day Orissa, in eastern India.]