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We live in world suffused with offended religious sentiments: depictions of Muhammad in newspaper cartoons and hackneyed films spark violent global protests; courthouse officials in the US South refuse to issue same-sex marriage licenses in defiance of the Supreme Court; and in India, authors threatened by thugs on the Hindu Right “die” publicly in order to avoid a less metaphorical demise.
Virtually everybody has heard of the filmmaker, writer, graphic artist, and composer Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) but except for Bengalis, few know much about the exploits of his formidable ancestors and their kinsfolk. And yet, over years of versatile creative engagements, Upendrakishore Ray (1863-1915), his father-in-law Dwarakanath Ganguli (1844-1898), his brother-in-law Hemendramohan Bose (1864-1916), his son Sukumar (1887-1923), and daughter-in-law Suprabha (the parents of Satyajit) charted new paths in literature, art, religious reform, nationalism, business, advertising, and printing technology.
With the devastating earthquake in Nepal on 25 April 2015, not only humans but also gods became shelterless. The famous Car Narayan or Fourfold Vishnu Temple in Patan is one of the many temples that completely collapsed. It was constructed in the classical Newar “pagoda” style with two pyramidal roofs and an inner ambulatory by a local ruler, Purandara Simha, in 1565.
Nepal has had an extraordinarily eventful 2015. It has been rocked by catastrophic earthquakes and burdened by a blockade from India, but it has also (finally) passed a new constitution and elected its first female head of state, Bidya Devi Bhandari, who took office in October.
‘My first impression is of daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder.’ With this beautiful sentence, so characteristic in its fusion of poetry and physical, bodily detail, Rudyard Kipling evokes the fruit-market in Bombay, the city (now Mumbai) where he was born in 1865.
Today, 18 January 2015 marks World Religion Day across the globe. The day was created by the Baha’i faith in 1950 to foster dialogue and to and improve understanding of religions worldwide and it is now in its 64th year.
The aim of World Religion Day is to unite everyone, whatever their faith, by showing us all that there are common foundations to all religions and that together we can help humanity and live in harmony. The day often includes activities and events calling the attention of the followers of world faiths. In honour of this special day and to increase awareness of religions from around the world, we asked a few of our authors to dispel some of the popular myths from their chosen religions.
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Myth: Quakers are mostly silent worshippers
“If you are from Britain, or certain parts of the United States, you may think of Quakers as a quiet group that meets in silence on Sunday mornings, with only occasional, brief vocal messages to break the silence. Actually, between eighty and ninety per cent of Quakers are “pastoral” or “programmed” Friends, with the majority of these living in Africa (more in Kenya than any other country) and other parts of the global South. The services are conducted by pastors, and include prayers, sermons, much music, and even occasionally (in Burundi, for instance) dancing! Pastoral Quaker services sometimes include a brief period of “unprogrammed” worship, and sometimes not. Quaker worship can be very lively!”
Myanmar, monks and novices, by Dietmar Temps, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr
Myth: Zen as the Buddhist meditation school
“Zen is known as the Buddhist school emphasizing intensive practice of meditation, the name’s literal meaning that represents the Japanese pronunciation of an Indian term (dhyana). But hours of daily meditative practice are limited to a small group of monks, who participate in monastic austerities at a handful of training temples. The vast majority of members of Zen only rarely or perhaps never take part in this exercise. Instead, their religious affiliation with temple life primarily involves burials and memorials for deceased ancestors, or devotional rites to Buddhist icons and local spirits. Recent campaigns, however, have initiated weekly one-hour sessions introducing meditation for lay followers.”
“This was a common cry in the nineteenth century – the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli made it – and it continues in the twenty-first century. Atheists respond in two ways. First, if you need a god for morality, then what is to stop that god from being entirely arbitrary? It could make the highest moral demand to kill everyone not fluent in English – or Hebrew or whatever. But if this god does not do things in an arbitrary fashion, you have the atheist’s second response. There must be an independent set of values to which even the god is subject, and so why should the non-believer not be subject to and obey them, just like everyone else?”
— Michael Ruse is Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science, at Florida State University and an editor of The Oxford Handbook of Atheism
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Floating through the temple, by Trey Ratcliff. CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 via Flickr
Myth: Islam is a coercive communitarian religion
“Claims of an Islamic state to enforce Sharia as the law of the state are alien to historical Islamic traditions and rejected by the actual current political choices of the vast majority of Muslims globally. Belief in Islam must always be a free choice and compliance with Sharia cannot have any religious value unless done voluntarily with the required personal intent of each individual Muslim to comply (nya). Theologically Islam is radically democratic because individual personal responsibility can never be abdicated or delegated to any other human being (see e.g. chapters and verses 6:164; 17:15; 35:18; 39:7; 52:21; 74:38 of the Quran).”
Religion in Asia, by Michaël Garrigues, CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0 via Flickr
Myth: Hinduism is tied to Southern Asia
“One myth about Hinduism is that it is an ethnic religion. The assumption is that Hinduism is tied to a particular South Asian ethnicity. This is misleading for at least three reasons. First, South Asia is ethnically diverse. Therefore, it is not logical to speak of a single, unified ethnicity. Second, Hinduism has long been established in Southeast Asia, where practitioners consider themselves Hindu but not South Asian. Third, although the appearance of ‘White Hindus’ is a phenomenon rather recent and somewhat controversial, the global outreach of Hindu missionary groups has prompted scores of modern converts to Hinduism throughout Europe and the Americas. In other words, not all Hindus are South Asian.”
— Kiyokazu Okita is Assistant Professor at The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research and Department of Indological Studies, Kyoto University, and author of Hindu Theology in Early Modern South Asia
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Headline image credit: Candles, photo by Loren Kerns, CC-by-2.0 via Flickr
Given that we see yoga practically everywhere we turn, from strip-mall yoga studios to advertisements for the Gap, one might assume a blanket acceptance of yoga as an acceptable consumer choice.
Yet, a growing movement courts fear of the popularization of yoga, warning that yoga is essentially Hindu. Some Christians, including Albert Mohler (President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary), Pat Robertson (television evangelist and founder of the Christian Coalition of America), and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Roman Catholic Church, warn about the dangers of yoga given the perceived incompatibility between what they believe is its Hindu essence and Christianity. Some well-known Americans, such as Mohler, add that yoga’s popularization threatens the Christian essence of American culture. Hindu protesters, most notably represented by the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), criticize yoga insiders for failing to recognize yoga’s so-called Hindu origins and illegitimately co-opting yoga for the sake of profit.
Protesters rely on revisionist histories that essentialize yoga as Hindu, ignoring its historical and lived heterogeneity. By the end of the first millennium C.E., however, a variety of yoga systems were widespread in South Asia as Hindu, Buddhist, Jains, and others prescribed them. Following the twelfth-century Muslim incursions into South Asia and the establishment of Islam as a South Asian religion, even Muslim Sufis appropriated elements of yoga. Therefore, throughout its premodern history, yoga was culturally South Asian but did not belong to any single religious tradition. Rather than essentializing premodern yoga by reifying its content and aims, it is more accurate to identify it as heterogeneous in practice and characteristic of the doctrinally diverse culture of South Asia.
Antoinettes Yoga Garden. Photo by Robert Begil. CC by 2.0 via Flickr.
The history of modern postural yoga, a fitness regimen made up of sequences of often-onerous bodily postures, the movement through which is synchronized with the breath, also problematizes the identification of yoga as Hindu. That history is a paragon of cultural encounters in the process of constructing something new in response to transnational ideas and movements, including military calisthenics, modern medicine, and the Western European and North American physical culture of gymnasts, bodybuilders, martial experts, and contortionists. Yoga proponents constructed new postural yoga systems in the twentieth century, and nothing like them appeared in the historical record up to that time. In other words, the methods of postural yoga were specific to the twentieth century and would not have been considered yoga prior.
In short, recent scholarship has shown that the type of yoga that dominates the yoga industry today—modern postural yoga—does not have its so-called “origins” in some static, “classical,” Hindu yoga system; rather, it is a twentieth-century transnational product, the aims of which include modern conceptions of physical fitness, stress reduction, beauty, and overall well-being. Hence recent scholarship on yoga, both historical and lived, attends to the particularities of different yoga traditions, which vary based largely on social context.
Nevertheless, protesters against the popularization of yoga, in strikingly similar ways, are polemical, prescriptive, and share misguiding orientalist and reformist strategies that essentialize yoga as Hindu. Interestingly though, the two protesting positions emerge as much from the cultural context—that is, consumer culture—that they share with popularized yoga as from a desire to erect boundaries between themselves and yoga insiders. For example, protesters participate in the same consumer dialect, assuming the importance of “choosing” a fitness regimen that fits one’s personal lifestyle and serves the goal of self-perfection. The protesters positions, in other words, are as much the products of the social context they share with postural yoga advocates as popularized yoga itself.
Image Credit: Yoga. Photo by Matt Madd. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr.
December 14th is Monkey Day. The origin behind Monkey Day varies depending on who you ask, but regardless, it is internationally celebrated today, especially to raise awareness for primates and everything primate-related. So in honor of Monkey Day, here are some facts you may or may not know about these creatures.
Headline image credit: Berber monkeys. Public domain via Pixabay.
Acclaimed author Susanne Gervay’s new children’s picture book,Elephants Have Wings (Ford Street Publishing, H/B $26.95,) is inspired by the ancient story of the blind men and the elephant and promotes the importance of peace and inclusion to younger readers.
Inspired by Susanne’s journey to India and South East Asia, she returned imbued with the cultures of India and Asia and the parable of the blind men and the elephant with its spiritual traditions in Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Sufism and modern philosophy. As the child of refugees, Susanne wanted to open a discussion about pathways to peace by creating an illustrative text that gave young people positive ways to navigate a world torn by conflict.
Beautifully illustrated by Anna Pignataro, Elephants Have Wings follows the story of two children, riding on the wings of a mystical white elephant, embark on an extraordinary journey to discover the meaning of the parable of the blind men and the elephant, and the humanity in all of us. Endorsed by the esteemed Blake Society and created by the award-winning picture book team of Susanne Gervay AO and Anna Pignataro, Elephants Have Wings is a remarkable book that promotes peace and understanding to young readers.
Interview with Susanne
I’ve spoken to hundreds of thousands of young people, sharing my books across the world, in remote indigenous communities, Australian capital cities, throughout regional Australia, across the USA, Asia, India, Kiribati, Europe, from the richest to poorest communities, to young people in prison, hospitals, special schools, remote Outback stations, international schools. The young people I speak to come from many faiths, ethnicities, cultures. However there is a commonality. They seek acceptance, safety, love and are overwhelmed and disempowered by a world in conflict. Story can create a place to unravel their fears and disempowerment and provide pathways to compassion, understanding of other peoples and faiths and become a participant in creating a safer world.
On my tours, a little American boy told me that when he grows up he wants to be an architect. But he will only design short buildings. The Twin Towers of 9-11 are part of who he is now. I included his words which felt so poignant, in my ‘I Am Jack’ series.
I was flown to New York to speak about the power of my young adult novel ‘Butterflies’ to travel with young burns survivors and families. I had the extraordinary privilege to be on the faculty with Kim Phuc, the 9 year old Vietnamese girl running naked from napalm bombs in Nick Ut’s 1972 iconic Pulitzer Prize winning photo. With 80% of her body burned, she decided to turn pain into compassion. She is a UNESCO Ambassador for Peace and established the Kim Phuc Foundation for child survivors of war.
Kim Phuc became incorporated into ‘Always Jack’:-
My hero Jack, of the ‘I Am Jack’ books and his friend Christopher whose parents are Vietnamese refugees present their project to the school.
“Jack and Christopher say together. ‘Kim Phuc, the girl running from the bomb, said, ‘Don’t see a little girl crying out in fear and pain. See her as crying out for peace.’” (Chapter 10)
As part of a delegation, an initiative of the Edmund Rice Centre, I travelled to Kiribati with Patrick Dobson, father of Indigenous reconciliation. Kiribati looks like paradise, an island nation of 32 atolls in the Pacific with approximately 100,000 people. However, without sanitation, rising sea levels, inadequate fresh water supplies, one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world, it is a multi-faith country struggling for survival. I had the privilege of sharing my books with wonderful teachers, students and communities. I addressed an assembly of hundreds of students under an open canopy. When I announced that I would donate my books to the school, in a spontaneous thanksgiving of song, their voices rose in a powerful celebration of thanks. It was deeply moving.
There have been many special moments of connection through story. I was invited to represent Australia in the international peace anthology by IBBY Korea under the auspices of the United Nations. My story ‘Remember East Timor’ was one of 22 stories, by 22 authors, 22 illustrators from 22 countries with different faiths and cultures. My author visit to the Deaf and Blind School where I read my picture books to children with multiple disabilities and diverse faiths, was significant in sharing the commonality of all children while recognising their difference.
As the child of refugees, ‘Elephants Have Wings’ encompasses the ethos that drives all my writing, engaging with young people as they face the challenges of life and empowering them with compassion, understanding of different faiths, humanism. The extraordinary tree of life that connects all humanity spreads its ways through the pages of ‘Elephants Have Wings’, as the mystical white elephant takes the children across the beauty of the world, its conflict and then safety of home.
‘Elephants Have Wings’ was written for young people and adults to open discussion about what sort of world they want and how they can contribute to it because ‘The elephant is in all of us’.
As Christmas approaches children everywhere are writing Santa with their lists—but few I imagine, will be expecting an elephant with wings?
Award-winning children’s author Susanne Gervay, captures the beautiful complexity and culture surrounding elephants, in her new book ‘Elephants Have Wings’—a perfect Christmas gift for curious young minds.
Brimming with detail, fascinating facts and colourful illustrations, ‘Elephants Have Wings’ invites children to explore the history, culture, and complexities of elephants. A deep respect and expanded view of these impressive creatures encourages readers to cast fresh eyes on elephants. Imparting the value of an ancient species with long-held ties to society, Susanne conveys a charming tale that endears children to elephants and their enduring legends. Such is the context to instil in our youth, the virtues of curiosity—both for culture and conservation.
I asked Susanne to share her thoughts on the importance of art and story in conveying natures fragile state and engaging young minds and hearts in the efforts of wildlife preservation. In her words…
Elephants are the gentle giants of the world. They are like humans with small families of up to four babies, but they do take 22 months to have a baby elephant. They live nearly the same life span as humans and can continue for more than 70 years like in the Old Testament. ‘The days of our years are threescore years and ten’ (Psalm 90.10). They are intelligent with memory that spans many years, communicate, care for their families. When a baby elephant cries, their family protects and caresses them. They hug, wrapping their trunks around each other. Elephants have enormous capacity for love, intelligence, and show grief, joy, anger and play. Loyal to their families and tribes, they form deep family bonds in their herds led by the oldest female elephants. What moves me the most is the respect elephants pay to those who has passed away. They pay homage to the bones of their dead, gently touching the skulls and tusks with their trunks and feet. As elephants pass a place that a loved one has died, they will pause silently in memory.
Elephants are part of the lives of so many young people growing up. They offer warmth, strength, safety. As a child I slept with my soft grey elephant. Dr Seuss’ Horton the elephant was my companion. Horton protected the world and me from danger. Pressing my face against the fence at Taronga Zoo, I adored watching the elephants in their pseudo Indian compound. I rode with a gaggle of children on rickety seats strapped to the elephant’s back. What greater excitement than Ashton’s Circus coming to town. Everyone piled into the Big Top circus tent marvelling at elephants doing amazing tricks. As a child I thought the elephants loved giving rides and performing tricks. It hurts to think that they may have been treated unkindly.
When I was ready to explore the world as a young adult, I embarked on the obligatory trek through Asia and India. Elephants permeated the land, cultures and lives of the peoples. Throughout India there were temple elephants where elephants participated in Hindu festivals. Buddhist and Hindu temples abounded with images, bas-reliefs and sculptures of elephants. The exquisite kalaga tapestries of Burma (Myanmar) created with gold threads, beads, sequins, glass stones depicted the Ramayana and the Jataka stories with complex images of the white elephant of enlightenment. In Chiang Mai, I feed baby elephants with bananas. Elephants worked hard in the logging industry. They lived a double life of labour with often brutal treatment and also veneration.
The elephant is sacred throughout India and Asia, integral to Buddhism and Hinduism in their many forms, culture, folklore and traditions. Buddha was re-incarnated into a white elephant and at his birth, a white elephant appeared in the sky. The Garuda, a large mythical bird-like creature, in both Hindu and Buddhist mythology, was created from the cosmic egg that hatched the eight elephants supporting the universe. Ganesh, venerated and loved Hindu Elephant God, is Lord of Obstacles and Beginnings. In Hindu mythology the flying white elephants bring monsoon rains to refresh the land. According to legend, while Buddha’s mother was pregnant, she dreamt a white elephant entered her womb.
In Islam too, the elephant is venerated as Muhammad was born in the Year of the Elephant (Arabic: عام الفيل, ʿĀmu l-Fīl). The story of the blind men and the elephant told in Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufi Islam, Jainism and other Asian-Indian sects challenges humanity to seek truth and peace.
On my travels, I journeyed to Africa where elephants are integral to the land, culture, folklore and beliefs in spirits. Portrayed as powerful, strong, kind and noble, the elephant is seen in the ritual objects of ancestor veneration and African rites of passage. The Ashanti of Ghana honour elephants, giving dead elephants the burial rites of human chiefs.
Elephants today are being threatened with survival with loss of their habitats, hunting them for game, illegal killing for their ivory tusks. Elephant numbers have dropped by 62% over the last decade. The Asian elephant is an endangered species with less than 32,000 in the wild. Taronga Zoo in Sydney is working with other international zoos to help conserve and save elephants.
Elephants have worked for humanity and are fundamental to our cultural and spiritual life. Today international zoos, governments and organisations are working to save the elephant. However the threat to them continues.
I created ‘Elephants Have Wings’ with artist Anna Pignataro, to invite young people to discuss the traditions, complexity and beauty of the elephant over the millennium. The extraordinary painting of the Divine Elephant protecting two children in a landscape of elephants symbolically melds all living creatures into the tree of life.
As elephants have brought wisdom to the world, we must be wise. As elephants take us on a spiritual and philosophical journey of truth, we must seek truth. As elephants have protected us for generations, we must protect them now.
Elephants Have Wings by Susanne Gervay illustrated by Anna Pignataro.
Ford Street Publishing, ISBN: 9781925000399 (hardback), 9781925000405 (paperback).
Susanne Gervay is an award winning children’s author recognised for her work on social justice. Her books are endorsed by Variety, Room to Read, Life Education, the Cancer Council, The Alannah and Madeline Foundation, The Children’s Hospital Westmead among others. Director of the Sydney Arts heritage hotel, The Hughenden, she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for children’s literature and professional organisations. www.sgervay.com; www.taronga.org.au
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Wildlife Warriors is an original initiative of Bare Essentials Magazine created to raise funds and awareness for wildlife. We help coordinate events and campaigns for affiliate wildlife foundations and provide educational materialsand incentive rewards for fund-raising efforts on their behalf.
