Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Embodiment

"A phenomenon is made into being by performance." Nothing is real until you enact it in your body, until you make it physically real in yourself. It is one thing to hear about something happening, it is quite another to actually do it. The idea of embodiment is probably one of the most important aspects of a pilgrimage class. The reason for the pilgrimage is the what separates it from leisurely travel. Now that we've talked about embodiment and given it a name, I am seeing how it has continually come up and been used during the class as well. When we did our own little Hajj on campus, that was a form of embodiment. Not only was it and effective tool to help us to remember its components, our participating in the actions made it more real and really deepened my understanding of it. By coloring the Hindu gods, our actions gave at least a little more life to something that I had almost no experience with. Visual aides are used in almost all of the classes, even the pictures of the statues and Hagar Qim help to embody, to some extent, the places and things which we are talking about in class. Of course, in a class about pilgrimage, we can't fully embody the pilgrimages of Muslims, Hindus, and all of the other religions that we have covered because that would require actually going on the pilgrimage, which would take more time and money than the course allows but even what embodiment has been done has made the pilgrimages more real than just a verbal explanation of each pilgrimage.

Thursday, November 1, 2007

Mother Ganga

The importance of water to religion has been shown all throughout our class but I think that the relationship between the Ganges River and Hinduism is the greatest example of this that we have seen so far. Mother Ganga fell to earth from the sky and is her own goddess. Her waters are considered holy and pure, so pure in fact that anything that her waters touch becomes "as pure and as beautiful as Shiva."

It is strange and difficult for me to understand the devotion that Hindus have for a river. Their general lack of concern for the cleanliness of the Ganges is also baffling to me. The concept of water being spiritually cleansing even if it isn't physically isn't really a stretch for me, we already talked about it in relation to the Jordan River, but in the "Banaras" article I got the impression that many Hindus don't recognize the problems with the Ganges being as dirty as it is. I would think that if you believed that a specific river was a goddess, especially one as important as Mother Ganga, you would be careful not to pollute it.