| "These are pilgrims taking a midday snooze at the Sri
Ekambaranathar Temple at Kanchipurama, a 16th century complex dedicated to Shiva, the Hindu
destroyer. My purpose was to meet the Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram, a
sort of papal figure of Hinduism, who I ended up tracking down several
thousand miles away, in a suburb of Bombay. The Shankaracharya of
Kanchipuram is deemed the guru of gurus, a descendant of Shiva, and part of
an unbroken line of Hindu leaders, seventy of them, that began in 477 B.C.
While there I remembered a beautiful passage from the Bhagavad Gita that
expressed the nature of the Supreme Being: 'I am the taste in the water. I am the radiance in the sun and the
moon...I am sound in space. I am the sweet fragrance of the earth and the
heat in the fire, the life in all beings, the austerity in ascetics. Know
me as the seed primeval of all beings....I am Love that moves all beings.'" |
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