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Ashram Life
Swami Satyananda Saraswati
 I
have travelled far away to fascinating places all over the world. One
of them was Thailand, which impressed me a lot because of the visible
traces of vedic culture in its traditions and heritage. Vedic concepts
are so intricately woven into their religion, social culture and folklore
that it is certain that there was a very strong link.
The legend of Rama is a household one. Just as we do in India, the Thai
people enact the story of Rama through their song, dance, art and sculpture.
Just as he is for us, there too Rama is both the perfect man as well as
divinity incarnated. The streets and roads are named after the heroes
of the Ramayana and so too are the hotels and businesses. This indicates
a mass awareness of the tales of Rama and Sita.
There I visited a gigantic Brahma temple. Apart from India, the land
of the Vedas, this is the only other place in the world where Brahma,
the creator, is worshipped. Part of the vedic trinity, Brahma is worshipped
as the creator, along with Vishnu, the preserver, and Mahesh or Shiva,
the transformer or destroyer. Naturally, once the creation has taken place,
the creator has no role to play after that, hence the scarcity of Brahma
temples as opposed to Vishnu and Shiva.
In the vedic rites and rituals, apart from the trinity, Brahma is also
eulogized as one of the panch mahadevas along with Vishnu, Mahesh, Devi
and Ganesha. In 1968 when I visited that temple over one crore rupees
of incense was burned daily in worship. Apart from that I also visited
grandiose Buddha temples, which were simply spellbinding because of the
sheer enormity of their size as well as their attention to detail. I also
felt that these were not just monuments of a dead and gone tradition but
one that was vibrant and alive even today.
As I moved out of the capital city of Bangkok into the villages and rural
area, I came across its monasteries, which maintained many of the same
traditions as sannyasins in India do for our people. After all, it is
the sannyasa traditions and wandering mendicants or sadhus that are to
be applauded for preserving these traditions for us. If they did not do
it, we would simply have no access to this knowledge.
I lived in their monasteries as a bhikshu, which is the name given to
their renunciates who subsist solely on bhiksha or alms. Each morning
the bhikshus set out for the villages nearby and after collecting alms
from five homes they sit down somewhere to have their only meal of the
day. These monasteries do not have kitchens. Each and every inmate has
to go out for bhiksha.
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