Baba Rampuri - History of Naga Babas and the Kumbh Mela скачать в хорошем качестве

Baba Rampuri - History of Naga Babas and the Kumbh Mela

http://rampuri.com The Naga Babas and their procession to the ganga for the holy bath is one of the central attractions of the Kumbh Mela. Baba Rampuri narrates the history of Naga Babas and Sannyasis from Guru Dattatreya in the age of the Ramayana through Adi Sankara to the present time. At the age of 18, when I first came to India, I was enchanted by the yogi-shamans, the Naga Babas of India - naked in ashes, long dread locks twisted with Marigolds piled on their heads like crowns, proudly austere, sitting with straight backs in some yoga asana, giving blessings to wide eyed pilgrims, seekers, and the poor, shouting out mantras and spells that charm or curse peoples' lives. That was the public image. I couldn't interpret, then, the hip arrogance I saw, in their sometimes bloodshot eyes. They seemed about as far from the ordinary world one could wander, sort of my story as well, having traveled about as far from the land of my birth as one could go. They were naked, they wore ashes from their sacred fires instead of clothes. They had few possessions other than the few magical instruments like tridents, tongs, and water pots, that adorned their sacred fires. And lest I forget, chillams filled with cannabis sacrament. It wasn't that they were mad - it was theater, there was a narrative, something arcane from another age. If it was theater, it was also ritual, and where those two worlds met, one being the mirror image of the other, the narrative of self-knowledge is performed. According to Indian storytelling, some 2500 years ago appeared a man who became known as Adi Shankaracharya, India's greatest philosopher, prolific commentator of ancient texts, poet, and for our purpose here, the greatest organizer of the ancient tradition of Yogis, the founder of the monastic order known as Sannyasis. About 1500 years later, a number of lineages of Naked Yogis, or Naga Babas from among Shankaracharya's order of Sannyasis, formalized even more ancient bonds into an association called Juna Akhara. In India, today, an akhara is usually a club where traditional wrestling takes place, more often than not, in the back of a Hanuman temple. The Naked Yogis, however in The Akhara of old (and still today), performed a different kind of wrestling - outwardly intellectual, rhetorical, and political, but below the surface of their theater, operated a "human machine" called tradition, that carried knowledge down through time. When Alexander the Great's ambassador to the court of Patliputra (now Patna in the Indian state of Bihar), Megasthenes, observed the Naked Yogis in the fourth century B.C., he described them as gymnosophists, "naked philosophers." There were also the so-called naked philosophers in Greece at the time, who would hang out at a gymnasium, and wrestle, naked. The Akhara's collected lineages look back for their origins to the Age of Treta, countless thousands of years ago, the age of the epic poem, The Ramayana, and to the Three Headed Guru of Yogis, Dattatreya, their ultimate founder. Guru Dattatreya is naked, his dread locks touch the earth. He is the son of one of progenitors of the human race, Atreya, and his wife, the personification of female shakti, Anasuya. His three heads are those of the Indian trinity, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, his four dogs are thought of as the most ancient and sacred texts of the Indians, the Vedas, the Cow of all Desires follows him around, and the Mother Goddess, Herself, sits on his lap. After all, he is the incarnation of her husband, Vishnu. Dattatreya is the original Guru of yogi shamans: He who has crossed over and shows The Path. Even being an avatar (literally, "the descending one"), he is mostly known as the avadhut, a "messenger descending [from the Gods]. He is always pursued, for he is the Knower of the Self. As much the Herald as the Mentor, he makes the narrative known to those who join in his theater. The Guru provides the means of knowing the self, which reflects the entire universe. Even today in The Akhara of Dattatreya (which is now called the "Old Akhara"), each yogi sees Dattatreya as his guru. Our physical gurus, for we start out with five, are called "witness" gurus. They give initiation to the disciple into the "oral tradition," which is called the Tradition of Knowledge. "Hinduism" is a recent word constructed in the West by India's colonizers to represent a set of beliefs thought to be held by most Indians, thus a religion. But traditionally, those thought of as Hindus (originally referring to people who lived on the "other" side of the Indus River), have no concept of "Hinduism," but speak of the sum of knowledge among their diverse traditions as the "Sanatan Dharma." In the oral tradition of the Naga Yogis, we think of the Sanatan Dharma as the Book of the World.