Edge of the Wild
On our way to the Malabar coast, we stopped for a couple of nights to visit Nagarhole National Park. The park is situated in southern Karnataka state, on a plain adjacent to the Western Ghats mountain range that separates Kerala from the rest of Southern India.
The Nagarhole, or “river that flows like a serpent,” wends its way through the park before joining the Kabini at the southern edge of the park. We stayed at a resort on the banks of the Kabini reservoir, a lake-like section of the river formed by a dam downstream.
Safaris in the park are government-run and depart morning or afternoon, by land or by water. We opted for the afternoon land safari, which runs in twenty-seat buses with large, open windows. Although it was slightly more nimble and considerably more open, traversing the steep, winding dirt trails in the bus felt much like living out my childhood fantasy of off-roading in a school bus.
There was an incredible density of animals in the park, particularly of spotted deer. Everywhere we looked we saw these small and sprightly deer with sides elaborately dappled with white spots. In addition, we saw sambar deer, gray langur monkeys, a mongoose, a wild boar, a black bear, and an adult male elephant.
We had a perfect view of the elephant, which was only about thirty feet from the bus, directly in front of our window. It appeared utterly unperturbed by our presence, and spent the entire time we were watching it methodically tearing up clumps of grass, holding them in the curled end of its trunk, gently swinging the trunk forward and back to pick up momentum, and then, with one final swing, bringing the clump of grass to his mouth. It seemed like a slow way for an eight thousand pound animal to feed itself, and we wondered how many hours of its day were spent doing just this.
We didn’t manage to see a tiger, despite the determined efforts of our guide. Apparently, the trick to finding them is to listen for the alarm calls animals make to alert other animals of the presence of something large and dangerous. When we go for a walk in the woods and hear the lovely sounds of nature all around us, a lot of those sounds are alarm calls warning other animals of our presence.
Our guide was young and wiry, with long, curly hair tied back in a bushy pony tail. Every so often he’d signal for the driver to cut the engine and for us to stay perfectly still and quiet while he leaned out of the bus, cocked his head, and listened for alarm calls. He’d then have the driver head off in some new direction, and after a while the process would repeat.
He was friendly and articulate, and brimming with fascinating bits of knowledge. He explained to us why sambar deer are the favored prey of tigers: they are larger and slower than spotted deer, so they are easier to catch and make for a better meal, but they are not as dangerous to hunt as much-larger Indian bison.
He also explained what happens when humans have run-ins with black bear. The bear are nocturnal, have poor eyesight, and spend their time with their noses to the ground hunting for termites and the like. Humans walking along in the dark don’t notice them, or think they’re a rock, so by the time the human notices the bear and the bear notices the human, they are right on top of each other. The bear sees the human on two legs, which it perceives as an aggressive position, so it attacks. The attack doesn’t last long, our guide informed us. Just “two swipes and a bite.” And “they don’t kill you; they just take off your face.”
He also had a story about elephants. Elephants are social animals and live together in groups, but males, when they reach adulthood at about twenty years of age, have to leave the group they grew up in and forge their own way in the world. This can be a difficult time for them, and some males in their twenties become troubled, even violent. These troubled young male elephants sometimes even form gangs that ravage the countryside.
He described one such group that he studied while he was in school. Over the course of one year, this group of about ten male elephants destroyed more than thirty vehicles, and killed nineteen people. The violence stopped only when the local villagers struck back, killing the two leaders of the group.
We tend to have a pastoral image of nature as a benevolent caretaker, or as a state of grace to which we wish to return from the ugliness and brutality of the human world. Perhaps this is because our encounters with nature so often take place in tamed spaces: in gardens and parks, or along well-trodden hiking trails.
Nature, however, is not tamed; it is violent and capricious, and it has devised an awesome and terrifying array of ways to harm and kill us. The same waters that bring life to our crops bring devastating floods. The same fire that brings us light and heat can go wild and destroy vast swaths of land, as we have seen in Brazil, California, and Australia. I recently read that an estimated one billion animals have been killed by the Australian brushfires.
In Indian mythology, nature, personified by the Divine Feminine, is often violent. She can be a gentle and nurturing mother who brings fortune and prosperity, knowledge and wisdom, music and the arts; but she can also be a fierce protector who rains down fury and violence. In her oft-worshiped Durga form, she is a warrior who rides a lion and carries a different weapon in each of her many arms. When the gods encounter a demon they cannot defeat, they often turn to Durga, their mother-protector, to slay the demon for them.
As we drove out of the park, we passed by a small village, where people lived and farmed and fished, directly adjacent to the park. Here were people living at the edge of the wild, working in their fields just outside of the forest where tigers stalk their pray, walking paths along which black bears look for termites at night. How fragile their life seemed. And yet it is the population of tigers, elephants, and other wild creatures that keep dwindling, victim to habitat loss and fragmentation, and run-ins with humans.
In thinking of nature as something that is not always idyllic or nurturing, that can be violent and capricious, a few other uncomfortable thoughts come to mind. The first and most obvious being that the same violence that is inherent in nature is also inherent in our nature. The second being that nature may not be benevolent towards us at all, that she may in fact be hostile. After all, aren’t the Australian brushfires due, at least in part, to violence we have done against the environment, against nature? And could the destruction they are raining down be a warning that our kind does not hold a special place in her divine providence?
Another act of violence we have committed is treating nature and ourselves as separate. The Upanishads, ancient Indian philosophical sacred texts, teach us that the natural world, our physical selves, and our individual souls are all part of one, universal, infinite, divine essence, referred to by the name Brahman (in the quote, “all of this” refers to the entirety of the perceivable, material world, including the self):
All this is Brahman, From It the universe comes forth, in It the universe merges, and in It the universe breathes. Therefore a person should meditate on Brahman with a calm mind. (Chandogya Upanishad, III.14.1, translated by Swami Nikhilananda, modified by me to be more gender-neutral)
We recently watched two films about two modern-day Indian gurus. The first film was about my teachers’ teacher, the great yogacharya B.K.S. Iyengar. The second (and better) film was about Ayurvedic doctor and teacher Vasant Lad, who we had the great privilege of meeting in person at his clinic in Pune.
In the films, both men describe the same philosophy, describe taking the same approach to the people that come to them to learn and to heal. They both describe how they see each and every one of their students or patients as God, and treat them as such. Jesus teaches the same thing in the parable of the sheep and the goats: whatever we do unto one of our fellow human beings, even the least fortunate among them, we do unto Him.
This is what it means to live out the philosophy of sarvam khalvidam brahma — all of this is Brahman. And “all of this” includes not only our fellow human beings, but also every wild creature and every wild place. Can we see the tiger, the elephant, the forest, and even the brushfire as God?
The verse of the Upanishad continues:
Now, verily, a person consists of will. As they will in the world, so do they become when they have departed hence. Let them (with this knowledge in mind) form their will.
We have violence inherent in our nature; our history on this planet makes that abundantly clear. But we also have a will; we have the ability, and the responsibility, to transcend our base nature. Every day we see the impact of the violence we are doing to the natural world. We are in a state of shock, of grief and remorse. We feel a sense of personal responsibility, and we seek atonement.
We want something to be done. We want everyone to see the error of our ways, for us all to somehow change our way of living. But what are the limits of our will? What are we willing to sacrifice? What do we do now? These are open questions, and answering them is going to require us to go beyond grief and remorse, beyond ratcheting up our political polarization. I am left with one more open question, inspired by the philosophy of the Upanishads, the teachings of the Gospels, and the examples of B.K.S. Iyengar and Vasant Lad: how do we learn to treat every fellow creature and every part of the natural world as God?
This is one of a series of posts written during our travels. You can find the first post here, and you can find the next post here. You can sign up for email alerts about future posts here.
