The Nagas and the Elements (Part 2)

When I went swimming at the spring near my house one day last week, I met a beautiful young woman of Indian (Indian/Asian, not Native American) descent as I was bringing some small pieces of trash out of the spring. We fell into conversation about the health of the springs, and practically the first thing she said was, “These places are sacred.”

Even—or perhaps, especially—my neighbors, who are part of a large extended family that has lived in this area for generations, are upset about the pollution and water withdrawals that are harming the health of our springs. I don’t know if my neighbors would agree that the springs are sacred; most Western cultures have moved far away from attributing any kind of sanctity to the natural world, even at places that most everyone recognizes as having intrinsic power. My neighbors might, however, agree that “The springs shouldn’t be messed with.”

So if we humans are concerned, I wonder what the nagas must be feeling, since the big algae blooms and reduced spring flows must be hurting them even more?

Here is how Machik Labdron describes the appearance of nagas, the watery inhabitants of the underworld.

“Black spiders and scorpions, or ants, beetles, otters or fishlike female dogs fall like rain and cover the ground and stick to your body. They are as big as puppies that have just opened their eyes, and extremely cold and wet. Just seeing them is unpleasant and frightening. Also frogs, scorpions, fish, tadpoles, large pir fish, makaras (crocodiles), or lizards the size of young bulls with their mouths open as if ready to eat. Whether on dry or wet land, they all gather together, yelping or quarrelling. They are single or in pairs, their bodies sheathed in fog with slightly formed water droplets. Just looking at them upsets and confuses you and makes your flesh crawl. Or else snakes: black, red, yellow, green, multi-colored, white, variegated red, variegated yellow, or variegated blue, like great trees in full foliage. They are as long as fifty bow lengths…The toxic vapors of some of them boil over onto your body as it lies in bed. They have great manes (hoods) that blaze with fire. Various diseases exude from their mouths and eyes in the form of various colors, like oozing fog spreading out as far as a hundred bow lengths… Just seeing them terrifies you. Your hairs stand on end, your senses become paralyzed, and your body goes out of control from their contamination.

Alternatively, [you experience] small children just eight years old with serpentine bodies below the breast and many blazing snake-hoods on their heads exuding bluish-red disease. Toxic vapors and fog boil up from their tails. Their torsos are generally covered in mist. They are seen in various colors in wetlands larger than the eye can see. Sometimes their torsos are exposed and sometimes their tails show above the water.” (From Machik’s Complete Explanation, pp. 239-240; the italics in the first paragraph of the quote are mine.)

Now, whether you believe in the existence of nagas or not—and I cannot either prove or disprove their existence—the idea of disease-causing nagas is a powerful metaphor for the dangers of pollution.

Just this week, I learned of a 2004 study on “Cyanobacteria: Lyngbya Toxin Monitoring and Evaluation” that was conducted in Florida’s springs under the auspices of the Centers for Disease Control. Lyngbya is just one of the species of algae that is blooming now in our rivers and springs, and is suspected as a cause of allergic reactions that some swimmers have experienced. According to the study, “Elevated groundwater nitrate and other nutrients may be responsible for the proliferation and expansion of toxic Lyngbya species (spp.)…Limited reports of acute dermatitis, blisters, desquamation, and respiratory distress may be related to Lyngbya exposure.”

Our nagas, it seems, are not pleased.

And my Buddhist teachers are sounding warnings.

His Holiness Orgyen Trinley Dorje, the 17^th Gyalwa Karmapa, has some very interesting passages on the web site that describes his design of the Monlam pin:

“…Ever since the human race first appeared on this earth, we have used this earth heavily. It is said that ninety-nine percent of the resources and so on in this world come from the natural environment. We are using the earth until she is used up. The earth has given us immeasurable benefit, but what have we done for the earth in return? We always ask for something from the earth, but never give her anything back. We never have loving or protective thoughts for the earth. Whenever trees or anything else emerge from the ground, we cut them down. If there is a bit of level earth, we fight over it. To this day we perpetuate a continuous cycle of war and conflict over it. In fact, we have not done much of anything for the earth.

Now the time has come when the earth is scowling at us; the time has come when the earth is giving up on us. The earth is about to treat us badly and give up on us. If she gives up on us, where can we live? There is talk of going to other planets that could support life, but only a few rich people could go. What would happen to all of us sentient beings who could not go? What should we do now that the situation has become so critical? The sentient beings living on the earth and the elements of the natural world need to join their hands together—the earth must not give up on sentient beings, and sentient beings must not give up on the earth. Each needs to grasp the other’s hand.”

Thrangu Rinpoche, who is Karmapa’s tutor, has also spoken about our environment and the elements:

“If the external world we live in does not thrive, how can that be good for the ‘internal’ beings who live in that world, its inhabitants? In the external world there are clearly problems…Those of us who are humankind have the responsibility to take care of this world we are in. We might say that it is the responsibility of governments. But whether governments will do anything or not is another question. It is something we all individually need to do something about…When we call this the degenerate age or the age of dregs, we mean this is a time when sentient beings are not easily satiated. They are not modest in their wishes. So they do a lot of business in order to benefit themselves. They make a lot of pollution to do business and gather wealth. They do not gather that wealth for the benefit of the whole of society, but for their own individual benefit. In doing so, they pollute the ground, the water and the air. It creates a problem for the whole world. It is all really due to our greed…We need to know what is happening to our world, what scientists have elucidated. When we know this, we can infer what we need to do, and what we actually can do….

What is happening today is that there is chaos in the elements. There are the four different elements of earth, water, fire and air, and these have now become unbalanced. Due to this imbalance, sometimes there is destruction because of floods and water, sometimes due to wind. Sometimes there is destruction through earthquakes and now there is also destruction happening through global warming. The temperatures are unbalanced—sometimes too hot, sometimes too cold. Because of this, what is happening now is that grand, resplendent snow mountains are melting. Hard, firm, beautiful glaciers are melting. When they melt and disappear, the rivers and lakes will become scarce, parched and dried out. We can actually see this happening. Disturbance in the four elements, snow mountains and glaciers all melting, the water all drying up – what harm do these lead to? Then all the forests of the ancients and trees of beauty will near their deaths. Forests are drying out, trees are dying. Beautiful, wonderful forests that you could explore are drying out, and coming to their deaths. There is now the danger that the whole world’s reaches will become a great wasteland without water supplies. In the entire world, we will not have anything beautiful or good, nor any way of supporting ourselves. There is a frightful, terrifying danger that this will happen. It is a basic truth that if something bad happens to the environment we live in, the inhabitants that live within it will also suffer great harm.” (Again, the italics are mine.)

Karmapa has also said, in a recent message to young people:

“…it is not impossible that in the future, we might face great and unbearable mental burdens and a sense of chaos…”.

Yes, we are being warned—and at the same time, encouraged to take action.

I went back to the spring near my house very early yesterday morning to make an offering to the naga. On the short drive to the spring, I saw a skunk scuttle across the road into an overgrown field. As I waded into the spring, the great heron that had been standing silently in the shallows flapped her large wings and flew off upriver. Something—a raccoon? an otter? a squirrel?—chattered away at me from the bank. As I drove away, I saw a doe move silently away from the road and into the woods.

For those moments, the environment and the elements seemed in balance. And while I’d love to bask in that feeling, I know that to do so—to turn away from what I know is happening around me—would simply be giving in to illusion, making believe all is right with the world when clearly, it is not.

There are many good articles about living in a world in which the elements are out of whack, and encouragement about what we can do, at the Ecobuddhism web site. Karmapa, who is in the United States visiting as I write this, has his own environmental web site as well.

OM AH HUNG BENZA GURU PEMA SIDDHI HUNG!

The Nagas and the Elements (Part 1)

Today was a naga day—a day in which those snakelike “unseen beings associated with water and fluid energy” are said to be especially active and receptive to offerings—so I rose with the sun to make the short drive to my local spring to make an offering to the naga who may live there. The springs are busy all day long in the summer, especially on weekends once the local schools are no longer in session, and I’ve come to value whatever privacy I can get on those rare days—usually only a couple of times a month—when the calendar says the naga might accept my offering. So it’s best for me to go very early in the day, even though I’m not normally an early riser.

It was the Buddhist teacher Khenpo Ugyen Tenzin who first hinted there might be a naga at my neighborhood spring. Khenpo was staying at our house on his first visit to our area, and at dinner one night at a Thai restaurant, one of the folks visiting for Khenpo’s teaching mentioned to me that Khenpo “worked with the nagas.” I was immediately fascinated; the ideas of unseen worlds, magical and mysterious beings, psychic phenomena, and occult goings-on have always strongly magnetized me. So I asked Khenpo about the nagas, but I either asked at a bad time or we were hampered by his beginner’s skills in English and my total lack of skill in Tibetan.

But driving Khenpo into town for Sunday’s teaching on that weekend several years ago, I made a spontaneous decision to show him our local spring. Poor Khenpo! I imagine he must have felt as if he were being kidnapped, but luckily the spring isn’t that far off the main road and I calculated that we had just enough time to visit it without being late to the teaching.

We got out of the car and walked the short length of sidewalk along the river up to the spring, which wasn’t visible until we got right next to it. It was early on a spring morning, and we were lucky. There were a couple of people taking pictures, walking around the horseshoe-shaped limestone shelf that embraced the spring, but there was no one in the water so the spring boil was clearly visible as it bubbled up from the turquoise depths.

Khenpo and I stood in silence and watched the sparkling water until I realized our time was up. “We’d better go,” I said, and we turned back toward the car.

“This is a really unusual place,” Khenpo said after we had turned away from the spring. “Thank you for bringing me to see it.”

“Do you think there might be a naga here?” I asked him.

A tiny proto-smile formed at the corners of his mouth. “Yes, I think maybe so,” was all he said.

Some miles down the road, after we’d left the spring far behind, Khenpo looked at me and again said, “That was a very unusual place. Thank you for taking me to see it.”

I had an interview with Khenpo later that day, in the afternoon. “Khenpo,” I began, “this morning I took you to see the spring near where I live. Our springs are threatened now by so many things—they’re being polluted, and people want to pump water out of our rivers and put it in bottles and take it away to be sold. Would you please pray that our springs and rivers will be protected?”

Khenpo thought for a minute. “Don’t you think,” he asked, “that other people may have need of that water?”

Then it was my turn to think for a minute, and of course I remembered how we all needed bottled water, even here where water was plentiful, when the tropical storms came through and knocked out our power so the pumps on our wells wouldn’t work.

“Yes,” I answered, “I understand that. But I also know that if all our water gets taken away, there will be nothing left to support the people and animals and fish who depend on the water we have now.”

“I will pray, then,” Khenpo said, “for an auspicious balance.” I understood his answer to mean that yes, there would come a time when we would have to surrender some of our water for a greater good—the benefit of other sentient beings. With global warming now melting the glaciers and ice caps in Khenpo’s Himalayan homeland, that time may not be far off. Himalayan ice is the source of many of Asia’s great rivers, and when the ice is gone, there will be millions of people left in a region with practically no fresh water.

Khenpo’s visit inspired me to do some reading about nagas, which are really fascinating creatures. Often depicted in Asian art as part snake, part human, they are sometimes the guardians of the treasure texts hidden by the 8th-century Tibetan sages Guru Rinpoche (Padmasambhava) and his consort and principal disciple, Yeshe Tsogyal, for discovery in later eras when those texts will be especially beneficial. And nagas are strongly associated with bodies of water, especially springs, as well as great and magical trees.

It turns out that Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists all share the idea of nagas. As my friend Khandro relates on her web site, “In the language of Kashmir, the word for ‘a spring’ is naga…A large number of temples were built near springs and were dedicated to the worship of nagas…Most probably, treating springs and rivers with great reverence wittingly or unwittingly resulted in the ecological balance necessary for a healthy and natural interaction between the environment and man."

I love this idea of temples being built near springs, and treating springs and rivers with great reverence. I’d love it if every spring in Florida had its own temple, even a small one, because the temple would reinforce the sacredness of those spots where pure, cleansing water rises, unbidden, from the unseen depths. Our springs are magical, numinous places, and little temples might make people stop and think before they vandalize the areas around the springs, dump things like tires and railroad ties into the water, or forget to pack out their trash when they leave after a day of swimming.

I wonder how much our whole world would change if we treated all of our great natural features with reverence—and if we wouldn’t be better off for doing so.

(to be continued)

The picture above was taken at Ichetucknee Springs. Can you see the face of the naga? J

An Offering to a Naga

In Machik's Complete Explanation, the Tibetan saint Machik Labdron explains to her followers that there are many unseen beings and spirits that co-inhabit our world.

Even though I've never been one to see such beings, I have absolutely no trouble in believing they exist. I can't see ultraviolet or infrared light either, or electricity, or atoms, yet scientists assure me that these things exist—so why not nagas?

Nagas–spirits who live in or near water or powerful trees–are said to be of three types. Some are "bad guys," mischievous and hurtful. Some are "good guys," and even protect the dharma teachings. Some are mutable, and can be good guys at one time and bad guys at another.

One of my teachers, Khenpo Ugyen Tenzin, has said he thinks a naga may live at our neighborhood spring.

One of my other teachers, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, recently gave me instructions on how to make offerings to our neighborhood naga.

So yesterday afternoon found me rushing to the grocery after work to buy milk and sugar—because nagas like dairy products and sweets—and then rushing home to change into shorts and drive the five minutes to the spring, just as the sun was setting.

I was in luck. The last two spring visitors were leaving on bicycles when I drove up. The only other people there were fishing at some distance from the spring. So I had some privacy, which was good.

I waded into the water and made the offering, following Khenpo's instructions as well as I was able, then stood there for a few minutes to take in the scene. It was lovely, as always. I wondered if I would ever be able to see a naga.

Today, I received two pieces of very welcome news. I am not saying this good fortune is connected with the offering, but given that everything is connected, ultimately, I would not be a bit surprised.

The most surprising thing, though, was how happy I felt that by making the offering, I had done something helpful for an unseen being, and for the Earth that sustains us.

Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche recently stressed to me, when I told him how inspired I am by HH Karmapa's commitment to helping the environment, that there are two reasons why it is important to take care of our surroundings.

First, of course, is because our environment sustains us, so by helping it we are actually helping ourselves.

Second is because of the unseen beings, like nagas, who can be sickened by pollution–and since it's human beings who cause pollution, guess who becomes the target for revenge by the bad guy nagas? We do.

So I am wondering if a lot of us started making appropriate offerings to the unseen beings and spirits in our local areas, could we help turn back the tide of pollution and destruction that seems to lurk everywhere we look?

And could we, for our children and grandchildren, preserve even a bit of the best that Florida has to offer?

Note: Naga offerings, and other such offerings, always come with specific instructions that I am not qualified to give. Ask your teacher what you can do, though, and you might be as surprised as I was.