On September 30, a group of Harvard alumni landed in Puri to have a glimpse of the Jagannath Temple. Two among them were practising Buddhists from China. As usual, they were unceremoniously turned down at the entrance because they are not Indian.
They did not feel offended. They only took pity on the priests and the authorities for their gross ignorance of the true Jagannath culture. The Lord is known for embracing all humans irrespective of faith, creed or colour. He is a formless god meaning ‘universally equal' to all. The truly practising Buddhists do know too well that the Brahmin hegemony had nearly ruined Hinduism during the times when Buddha preached the universal religion to establish lasting human existence with absolute peaceful coexistence that included perfect trans-species democracy which means equal respect for all living things, plant and animal.
The two saddened Chinese Jagannath believers roamed the streets aimlessly as a natural human right was bizarrely denied to them unlike anywhere else in the world. All other temples and places of worship in the world are kept open to all visitors.
No religion in the world forbids any human creature from entering its shrines. On the contrary, there is big craving to welcome all into the sanctum sanctorum.
Not surprisingly, the Chinese Buddhists went back home with diminished respect for Hindu priests and authorities who never came forward to defend the true Jagannath spirit and usher them into the temple despite the fact that Lord Buddha and Lord Jagannath are one and the same as per Hinduism best exemplified at the Jagannath Temple.
What the Puri priests do not know, for sure, is the historical fact that when the living Gautam Buddha was looked upon as a demigod, two Brahmin pundits, Vasettha and Bharadvaja, debated one day as to what made a true Brahmin. Bharadvaja maintained that it was pure descent from seven generations of ancestors with neither break nor blemish in the lineage whereas Vasettha contended that virtue and moral behaviour made a true Brahmin.
As neither could convince the other, they agreed to refer the matter to sage Buddha, who said ‘it was not birth but deeds which made a true Brahmin'.
The Puri priests are terribly dumb in head unlike their counterparts at the abodes of Lords Ballaji Tirupati, Padmanavaswami and countless others. To enter all these shrines, anyone can walk up to a register book and simply declare in writing that 'he believes in the Lord at the temple'. Strangely, it is not yet clear as to how the Jagannath Temple turned so illogically sectarian and restrictive over the
years.
The Brahmin hegemony is gone since long, but the ‘Hinduism’ or particularly the ‘Indic study' researchers have never delved deep enough to dig out some of the missing links in history to make clear why or how the beauty of the most human-friendly faith propounded and founded by great sages and saints thousands of years ago got lost.
Peculiarly, the very Hindu tenet of believing only one Creator of all things that attracted everyone to the temple has been put to the garbage yard today.
They keep saying the Jagannath culture is the best-known human-friendly faith, but the so-called high priests seem to know nothing. It is evident that some fundamentalist Brahmin in authority dumped the anti-Hindu rule of disallowing any other human being than orthodox Hindus into the great temple symbolising every major religion.
The ‘Madala Panji', which chronicles critically important events and developments, is being interpreted erroneously by a few vested interests to suit their greedy, stupid designs, particularly the illiterate priestly clans. Interestingly, except one servitor class that offers sacred food and any other objects to the deities, called ‘Puja Pandas', no other servitor category has to take and pass any kind of tests to be declared high-grade servitors.
The rest are all casual, happy-go-lucky categories that run myriad businesses outside the temple domain and appear only when important festivals occur and pilgrims are likely to be big in number so as to facilitate moneymaking. Not one of them can tell the history of the Lord, or recite any critical hymn used in rituals protocol.
That the Brahmin hegemony has caused utmost damage to the Hindu race is an undeniable fact. Criticism against Brahmanism continued up to late medieval period, particularly by some Shaivism and Vaishnavism sects notably with rise of the Bhakti movement and Lingayatism.
The Bhakti movement is known to have encouraged followers to attain spiritual union with God not through sacrifices, rituals, pilgrimages or prayers but through the ‘force of pure love and fervent yearning for God.
During the mediaeval period, the merchant and agricultural classes were wealthy. They were so disgusted with the Brahmin domination in every field of social structure that they funded the growth of ‘Nastika' sects and reformists only to create an alternative to the expensive Brahminical way of life.
The Harvard guys, mature that they are in thought and mind, ignored the sad episode merrily but left a clear message behind: Abode of God is a place for all to visit.
More importantly, the so-called Know-all servitors never came forward with a prevailing truth that Rasagola, the most famous sweet of India, has its origin in the abode of Lord Jagannath. Not a single servitor from any clan could scream “Rasagola is only a Bengali name for the original Khiramohana” offered to pacify an enraged Goddess Lakshmi just at the time of re-entry of the deities after the Car Festival sojourn. Khiramohana is what the Bengali communities learnt to eat because of their frequent visit to Puri.
The aristocrats of Bengal then hired Odia cooks at home who popularised this delicacy among the Bengalis. Shockingly, this little yet most potent, indisputable fact is not known to the ‘know-all’ servitors of the Jagannath Temple. They keep screeching the term Rasagola at all times now because they have forgotten the original Khiramohana.
The Bengalis had only rechristened the famous sweet. If only the Odisha researchers had fought on the Khiramohana lines, they would have won the battle against the Bengalis hands down. Rasagola is the Bengali term which foolish Odia contenders accepted as theirs.
The Lord never used Rasagola. He is offered Khiramohana only. More amusingly, Khiramohana is not a regular item in the temple kitchen. It’s only outside the temple campus that Khiramohana is prepared and used only once a year. Inside the temple environment, Khiramohana is a forgotten term for the deities.
So, the GI tag was first won by the Bengali claimants merely because they had first coined and used the word Rasagola.
The Odia warriors had to slug like mad to prove by historical evidence that much before the Bengalis came to know the sweet, it was being offered to the Purideities.
The authorities granted a second GI tag, which is only a smaller reward. If only the servitors had stood by the truth assertively, Odisha would have been known as the exclusive birthplace of Rasagola, the more popular term for the original Khiramohana. There is still scope to get the records right by a fresh appeal.
Lately, some honest Bengali historians have shown up courageously to admit the divinely indisputable truth.