Paul Schroeder

This talk was given July 24, 1998 at Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi. This presentation comments upon and expand's an earlier project, an enlarged edition of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy's Yakshas: Essays in the Water Cosmology, which was published by IGNCA and Oxford University Press in 1993. The talk was introduced and commented on by Shri Krishna Deva, historian and archaeologist, whose remarks surveyed the themes of scholarship and librarianship and contemporary South Asian manifestations of the yaksha theme. Among other works, he is author of several volumes explicating the temples at Khajuraho. Shri Deva's comments await permission and editing before inclusion. The remarks given below were transcribed from a tape made available by IGNCA's archive division.
 

Thank you Dr. Krishna Deva. Thank you Mrs. Ranjan for introducing us, and I would like to also express appreciation to Dr. Vatsyayan for inviting me for the assignments that I am working on while I am here visiting Delhi, and visiting here at the IGNCA. It has been a great privilege to be here, the past week. I have found very cordial, wonderfully warm people who have been taking care of me, and I feel myself, as was said a few minutes ago, becoming a Delhi person. Thank you all for having me here.

I also want to think Shri Krishna Deva for a few words of background on the yaksha theme in the Indian context, because that is a theme that I am not going to speak about, and am really not qualified to speak about, even as editor of this book. I can't address the complexity of the symbolism and the existence of the yakshas, historically and up to the present, on my own authority; and I would suggest that any of you who are interested in reading more, to take a look at Dr. Coomaraswamy's book on this theme.

I took upon myself, and was invited to take the role of editor of this book, and I look back on it and I think that the work that I took upon myself was ideally the work of a faithful scribe. I accepted the responsibility of being the editor of the work, but also the responsibility of attempting to be as faithful to the archival materials that were left behind by Dr. Coomaraswamy as possible. Working on this book for me was in some sense an apprenticeship for me in my training as a librarian. Although I had already received my professional training as a librarian, in taking on this work, in completing the archival work, in completing the bibliographical work, in completing the indexing, and in carrying this book through to publication, also with the very consistent of Dr. Gujral here at the Center, I think that this is a journeyman's introduction to my profession which is really the profession of being a librarian.

I am planning to show some slides today which I took in my immediate surroundings where I come from in central Maine, USA. For those of you who have been there, you know that Maine is one of the most northern states. We are a very cold state. We have winter about half of the year, and winter is real winter there. We have sub-zero C. temperatures for about six months of the year. But we have beautiful forests, and we have beautiful summer during the summer months. We are on the coast, so we have lots of seashore. There is a lot of water, and there are a lot of trees. The themes of river, water and tree, which come up frequently in the Yakshas book are very much part of my environment in the place where I live.

I have taken these slides as an attempt to reflect something of the cultural landscape where I live, to see if there isn't something in there of the spirit that might be reflecting out the same cultural tradition that produced the yakshas here in India. I hope that, as an exercise at looking more carefully at an often hidden cultural landscape, that you will bear with the experimental nature of what I am presenting here today.

My fundamental question, and the one question that I would like to keep in mind, during the showing of the slides and the few things I have to say, is: Can we maintain a habitable cultural landscape? I believe that this is one of the critical questions that we are facing in the United States, and I think that we are facing this globally. The question, how to preserve value in the places where we live and value in our own cultural landscape is critical for our future. And I think that traditional study has a bearing on the kinds of choices we make into our future.

The images that I am going to show were collected with the following themes in mind. As was mentioned, yakshas are tutelary deities, patron saints, guardian angels, guardians of buildings, gates, cities, monasteries, and shrines. I will refer you to Chapter 5, of the book; yakshas as inhabitants and protectors of shrines and temples, as described in Chapter 7; the makara, as described in Chapter 15; discussion of devas and angels, in the new Part 3 Appendix. Also thinking about yakshas as the spirit of the waters, life-generating, life-originating, life-producing force of the cosmos.

In my slides I will show representations of trees and rocks placed as memorials; ornamental wells and lighthouses placed near houses; images from the Native American Indian community in central Maine; a set of images from a constructed forest environment; and finally, imagery related to computers and techno-science, computers and techno-science being a very dominant part of our coming cultural landscape. Please accept these images and remarks that I am going to offer in the spirit of the IGNCA's initiative in the realm of Loka Parampara -- I hope I pronounce this correctly -- which is research into the physical, environmental and cultural surroundings of community. We wish to engage in these investigations in our environment, as you are engaging in them in India. With that brief introduction, I would like to show the slides.

I would like to apologize for the quality of some of these slides. They were digitized from photographs, and then re- formatted onto 35 mm. slides, and I did this in a bit of a hurry. For instance, a few of them will have these borders on them, because the formatting was not done to the right size. The slides are not of the best quality, but I hope what I am trying to illustrate will come through. When I was asked to make this presentation, and I decided to make it in terms of the cultural landscape where I life, I didn't have any preconceptions about what I was going out to find. I did notice, however, around myself, and I had never heard anyone mention, that there were constructions of wells in peoples' yards. I had wondered about these wells, and wondered why they were there. So I will show you some examples of these wells, and wishing wells.

In fact, the first day that I went out on this mission, to examine my surroundings and find these details, I thought of this place down by the river. A very large river flows through our town, the Penobscot River, which flows down the center of our state, and in the background, though it doesn't show in the slide, this is a riverbank, right here. And this is a large river passing by. We are in a woods path, which goes from where I am standing down this way, and what is of interest here is the pile of rocks. I went there because I thought that I would be able to get a photograph of the many glass bottles and flowers that had been decorating this pile of rocks. I had seen that the year before. But this year, when I went just this spring, all the bottles and flowers were gone. I had asked someone the previous year after I had come across this place, "What are these rocks here, and what are these bottles, and why are these flowers here?" And I was told that friends of a young man who had lost his life in the river had come quite frequently, and had moved rocks up from the river, and had created bottle sculptures and flowers. It had probably just not survived the winter.

I think that one theme that I would like to express here, is that in the U.S. we have a relatively modern, secular, non-spiritual tradition overtly in our countryside. And yet, looked at a little more carefully, there is an indigenous popular spirituality that finds its expression through this. Also, I think that the yakshas, as representations of ancestors and the forms of ancestors, will fit into some of these discussions.

A little more traditionally, on my campus is a tree. I had never noticed this tree before. There is a large oak tree, and the plaque was pretty covered with leaves; I uncovered it a little bit. The plaque was very small, only about six inches square. And the plaque says: "In Memory of Walter Ballentine, First Professor of Agriculture, this oak was planted by George H. Hamlin in 1895, and the plaque was placed by the senior alumni, 1945." I think that the idea of planting a tree and maintaining it as a memorial to a person who was important to our lives is practically a universal worldwide phenomenon, and it is something that comes up in our culture, I am sure as well as here, as the tree aspect of the yaksha cults.

I stayed to more or less popular more-or-less non-official symbolism in these slides. I could have take photographs around the yards of churches and other official religious establishments. This is the closest to an official, orthodox religious place that I will show. Again, it is more or less a secular place, it is a cemetery. It shows how individuals in this community go about, in this community, decorating the graves of those people who are important to them. I think the flags are important. They symbolize the French culture as well as the American culture. There is a Franco-American culture that is dominant in this area. I think the French influences much of the yard ornaments that I am going to be showing the next slides.  As I explored, here was another tree, and someone had found some little elves or gnomes and put them under the tree. I didn't ask or even find out why this was there. But this reflects right back onto Kubera and his teeming yakshas. I have had some thoughts about St. Nicholas and Santa Claus and this idea, too; but this was just something I saw along the way.

The major metaphysical or philosophical point that Coomaraswamy seemed to want to make in his book was the connection between the yakshas and the cult of the waters; the origins of life in the waters. I had never really noticed -- I have talked about this since then -- most people around didn't notice how many people put wishing wells into their yards. I think the wishing well is an expression of a sentiment that somehow links from this world down into the world of the source of the waters. This particular set-up, though it might not be visible to you -- up here is a whirligig that has an image of a lighthouse on it. I am going to show you some lighthouses; I think there is some relevance to the lighthouse symbolism, also.

Here and there people have constructed lighthouses. Maine is on the coast, and Maine has a long fishing and maritime tradition. But where we are located here is away from the coast, maybe fifty miles. There is nothing particularly coastal about our location, and yet people have built these lighthouses. This lighthouse is out at the front gate of the house; and it is clearly saying something to the street. I think that the lighthouse is a symbol of security, protection, and it certainly has to do with the waters, people being adrift on the waters and finding their way home.

Here is another one, that has a little bit more elaborate display. It was constructed on the corner of a house. Behind the lighthouse is a deer; in front of it are some small houses, there is a little village here. I think that the use of animals, we will see more of these as we go along, to populate these home- grown creations, is an important way that people can express their wish to connect from the human-constructed material world into the natural world that they would like to inhabit more carefully than they do.

As it turns out, if you turn around from here, if I turn the other direction, I see this. It is a relatively new, large, what we call a "strip mall." I don't know if you have such strip malls here. It is not a very attractive place. It is a place where the commercial development has intruded on a relatively rural, green residential place. I have to wonder whether constructing something like this, on the corner of a house, is not saying something to the passers-by, in terms of how they would like to be treated, in terms of their own space, in terms of the world that is going by at this speed.

Here is another well, in another part of town. This particular place is really interesting to me, and I talked to the lady a little bit about why she does what she does. But the whole yard is filled up with creatures, donkeys, lambs, squirrels, birdhouses, the well, and if you go right across her front yard, they go there too, and she has little statues of deer in the front window of her living room. She told me that she did it "just to make my place prettier," that's all, just to make it prettier. But there has to be an impulse here that goes beyond making our place pretty. We can make our place pretty in a number of ways, but this is actually a population, bringing a whole population of creatures into an environment that she created herself.

Now, this ball and this ball are reflective glass balls, and I don't know exactly where these fit in. And I don't know if people use these as decorative items here. Have these been seen in India, decorative glass reflective balls? It is kind of a mysterious phenomenon, but a lot of people put these into their yards, and they are kind of looked down upon, or looked upon as not being very stylish, I suppose. And it isn't clear why people do this. I was mentioning this to one of my colleagues at the university, who had his brother visiting, one of his brothers, and he said: "Well, when I was at home, my brother had a glass ball in his backyard. And he was the last person that we expected to have this." We had quite a discussion, what this was all about. It seems to be a kind of a metaphysical magnet. The whole world can be reflected from one place, in that ball.

When my colleague was home, at his brother's, the daughter, who was only four years old, specially took him to the back yard, and led him to the ball and had him look into the ball and said, "See, you can see the whole yard, in the ball." And I think the idea that some of these constructions are made with the idea that children have an ability to sense something about the totality of their environment, is something that will show up in a couple of the later images here. I think there is an important element of constructing a world that is habitable by our children, also.

We are going to shift gears here, a little bit. Maine, before the colonization by the British, although the French were in Maine for a while, too, Maine was and still is populated by the Abenaki Indians. There are four major tribes, and the Penobscots are the ones that are here. The man who owns this welding shop, among other animals and creatures around the house, has two large Indian totem poles constructed. This is one, and this is the other, in front of his house. He is Anglo, he is not Indian, but he is married to a Maliseet, who is a member of one of the affiliated tribes. Due to their connection to the tribe is why they are making these expressions of Indian culture. It turns out that the eagle-mounted totem pole is not a symbol that is native to the natives of Maine. The eagle itself is native, and they have a clan of eagles, but they don't use the eagle on a totem pole. This is a cross-cultural borrowing on the part of these people, from Indians in the more western part of the country.

The Indians have a reservation on an island. This is just a garage, an old garage. It is sort of abandoned. It was being guarded by a dog on a chain. When I got close enough to take a picture, I was paying so much attention to where I was taking this picture from that the dog really startled me. He came out of the bushes and made me take quite a jump. So the dog was a guardian; and this is a Thunderbird, which is a traditional Indian symbol, and is just sitting as a decorative item on that garage.

During that week, when I was taking the pictures, our museum at our university was mounting the first-ever exhibit of the war- clubs and spiritual clubs of these same Indians. Here are a couple of examples. These are 19th century clubs, made from the roots of birch trees. Oddly enough, here is an alligator-type creature, which we will see from a different angle -- but there are no such creatures anywhere near here. So why is this alligator-type creature, which is reminiscent of some of the creatures, the makara that Coomaraswamy talks about, why is this alligator one of the traditional images being seen here?

This is the same club seen from the other side. This is the alligator, and here is probably an eagle or a hawk, this is probably a bear, some other, maybe a squirrel. But clearly they are all creatures from the woods environment, except for the alligator.

This is the entrance to the island which is the home of the Penobscot tribe. Their reservation is an odd situation. They have been given all of the islands in the middle of this river. Although they own other forest lands in Maine, their only actual tribal land is the islands in the river. This is a close-up of how they portray themselves to the world. Whether it is a single figure, or it is a mixed figure, it clearly puts the eagle and the Indian warrior in the same environment, surrounded by the clan images from their tribe.

Again, looking the other direction, speaking of the importance of the river to these Indians: this is the town in which this exists, Old Town, Maine, has a very large paper mill. There is a lot of concern among people in the tribe, who depend on the river for their fishing, there is still a lot of fishing, as well as for the other wildlife, that this mill doesn't pollute the river. And there is very close monitoring on the part of the tribe of what kinds of discharges go from this mill into the river.

Similarly in this area, there is a large attempt to restore the bald eagle, and it is being successful. This was an article from the newspaper, recently, of an injured eagle who was brought back to health by this man, and then was sent back into the wild.

I bring these up because I want to show that the eagle is not just an important symbol, as a totem symbol, but that the eagle as a living creature is an important symbol for the continuing health of the environment in which we are living.

The next set of slides are going to be from another place, about twenty-five miles away from there, and it was a place that I had never heard of, even though I have lived in this area for about eleven years. I had never heard of this before I had gone around collecting these images. I talked to a good friend, a reference librarian at my library, and said "I am sort of looking for places that are special, and ways that people make their places special." He said, "Well, from what you are talking about I think that you will really like the Enchanted Forest," which is a special place made by a man, totally on his own, and I will show you the slides.

This is a totem that stands at the entrance to the Enchanted Forest, and again we have this eagle totem image.

Now, this is a little bit closer to what I would call of the spirit of the yakshas. Deep into the woods, at a place where it is really hard to see, is this log that has been turned into a tree creature, a tree man. The size of that is actually a bit larger than two or three meters high, so it is a larger-than-life size image that is sitting deep in the woods.

Likewise, here is a combined creature that was in a tree. It has clearly got a person or a human-type head, and wings; a winged creature. Again, an alligator-type creature, which is completely out of sync with the environment that it has been placed in. A regular bird.

These were at the end of the road, the sign said you can't go any farther. Actually, there was no sign, I was told you can't go any farther than this. But the man who had constructed this created these creatures as the guardians of the end of the road. Right here is something like a beaver on which one of them is sitting, and this one is a man with a gun. So they are telling you, don't go any farther, we are going to protect the rest of the woods.

A lot of this place is organized to be delightful to children, and to be interpretable by children. This was lying on the ground. The person who took me there picked this up from the ground. It is actually a stork that had been constructed to carry a baby, in the famous image of the stork bringing the baby. It had been lying on the ground, but had previously been hanging from that tree.

This is Noah's Ark. To give you a sense of the size, that is my daughter. She is turning a little crank down here that you can turn; on the inside you can make a treadmill go around, and the animals from Noah's Ark will circulate around.

Here is another more-or-less folk image, it is very popular, you probably have them here, the scarecrow that keeps the animals away from the garden; but also that is done in a way that is very lively, life-like image.

Here is another protector of the woods, Smokey the Bear, who has just passed his 50th year in existence as the official fire- prevention image for the forests of the U.S.

Now we are really going to shift gears, just three or four slides, I am just about done. This is a photo of an ad from one of the computer magazines. I think it is from Adobe Photo Shop. The imagery here is something I want to point out, to pay attention to. We have here something that looks like a bird, but it probably looks more like an angel, because it is a human with wings. The angels, and devas, are spoken by Coomaraswamy as being out of the tradition of yaksha symbolism. But this angel is a Caucasian male businessman carrying a briefcase, and he has got his dog who also is a little angel flying up to meet him, and his house, and all of his neighbors' houses, and swimming pool, are all sitting disembodied, floating in the air. I have named this "The Heaven of the Angelic Businessman," I guess.

The other thing here is that the whole setting is an undisturbed wildland, a forest, as if we can somehow, through this imagery, through this ability to fly with our fancy, just create any world we wish, and have it superimposed in whatever environment we think is the most beautiful.

This is another image, from a computer magazine. What is the relationship between the people and the machine in this image? It says, "We've set our sights on something bigger," but it's so big, that it completely dominates the people, who really should be in charge of this scene.

Finally, this is the cover from one of our weekly newspapers. It says, "Lost In Cyberspace" I think it gives the tenor of what some people are thinking is happening to their own space, to their own homes and to their own sense of place in their increasingly electronic and globalized cultural landscape.

My last slide is a slide of Albrecht Dürer's "Melencolia I." I have never read a very adequate, detailed catalogue of the symbols that are in this picture. What we have is a very well- made, geometrically constructed piece of stone, and surrounding it are many of the implements of measurement and production that were state of the art in Duerer's time. We have saws and planes, we have an hourglass and balances, we have a magic square for math, we have a pair of compasses, a forge back here, a hammer. And we have an angel who is not very happy, and another little angel who is not being able to give very much comfort. I think that what is being portrayed here is something of his spirit when looking at the advance of technology, which in his time included printing, and what it might mean for this spirit going into the future.

I have just a few more comments. I brought up the images of computers and techno-science, because computers and techno- science are sort of the other end of the spectrum from the imagery people were trying to create value in their personal space and environment in some of the earlier slides.

I would like to read a passage from an unpublished manuscript of Ananda Coomaraswamy's, that is on the theme but you won't be able to see it in the book Yakshas. It is from an essay he wrote titled Daimon, Yaksha, Spiritus. In this essay, he tried to bring something common from the tradition of the West to bear on the exposition that he had already made in terms of the yaksha theme in the Indian context. The reason that this is not included in the book is that the archival material did not indicate that it was intended to be part of the book, although I hope that it does get published at some time in another context. At one point in here he says:

"There is a beautiful illustration of the Socratic rebirth of the good man or woman as a daimon to be found in Euripides' Alcestis:

'Unto her let the wayfarer pray
at her shrine he shall say
she for her lord gave up herself
and is now a blessed daimon;
hail oh thou queen, grant us weal.'"

He goes on to say: "This in turn leads to a consideration of the Greek and Indian and one might say worldwide cult of ancestors, as the tutelary spirits of cities and guardians of those to whom they had been related in this life. It has often been observed by anthropologists that when this ultimately megalithic worship of ancestors is broken down and the ancient rites abandoned, the morale of the whole community is broken down at the same time; and it was certainly not for nothing that the Buddha advised the Vajjians to maintain their ancestral cults, and to continue to make their customary offering at the yakkha shrines would be one of the indispensable conditions of their continued safety and prosperity."

With that I would like to say that what I tried to illustrate are some attempts that I have seen of people who are trying to honor their ancestors, trying to honor the unknown, attempting to attend to their indwelling spirits as described in his work, and for myself and ourselves some pointer toward preserving in the future our habitable cultural landscape.

Thank you very much.

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