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The mass religious restraint (sacrificing bad habits or harmful indulgences) practiced during Lent begins today. Lent is a period of 40 days leading up to the year's big Fertility festival, which has more to do with estrus and renewal than anything else.
It was co-opted away from sex-positive Pagans honoring "Esther" and converted into a bunny-and-egg-themed Christian Spring festival. It was one of the few remaining spiritual practices in Christendom, a Catholic post-party epitomized by Carnival in Rio, Brazil and a calm, quiet celebration in Louisiana's French Quarter called Mardi Gras ("Fat Tuesday").
The cultural anthropology of it? Women symbolically attempt to prove their fertility by exposure of breasts, men by their conspicuous display of wealth tossing highly valued dime store beads.
It is nice to go from fleshy (the carne in Carnival). This feast and famine, or hedonism before asceticism, is echoed in many places. When a boy in Asia wishes to become a novice monk, for example in Sri Lanka, the celebration at times involves a parade, fine linens and silks, gold rings and ornaments, all of which are symbolically abandoned to mirror Siddhartha's renunciation of the extravagances of Iron Age Indian nobility.
Just as the future Buddha cut off his long, beautiful hair, so too a novitiate is shaved. And as Shakyamuni dropped his royal finery for a dun colored robe, the mark of voluntary simplicity and spiritual abandonment, so a boy becomes an austere and disciplined follower of the path to happiness that is the well grasped Dharma. (If it is not well grasped or not undertaken with the appropriate attitude, it can be miserable and a hardship that leads to hypocrisy).
Hooray that some still do it for the noblest reasons. The reward for them and us are immeasurable, for rare is the liberating Dharma. And it should be preserved as long as possible.
Why ashes on the forehead on Ash Wednesday? Ask and few Catholics will be able to say.
But our resident Wisdom Quarterly scholar answers: The reason is that Christianity in general, and Roman Catholicism in particular, appropriated most of its spiritual practices and symbols. Almost all of its monasticism comes from ancient India and other sources influenced by India, like the Essenes. The forehead ashes -- like many common features of a Catholic mass -- are characteristic of the habits of Hindu holy men. The ashes signify a disinterested attitude with regard to the body or even death. Originally the ashes were not taken from altar incense but from cremation pyres.
- There is a kind of "Buddhist Lent" that goes further back than the Catholic version. It is called the "Rains Retreat" (Vas) observed by monastics, which people enjoy as a time to practice the Eight Precepts and hear the Dharma taught by monastics engaged in intensive meditation.
- Mardi Gras Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Official Mardi Gras site 2011. Come to the party in New Orleans and have a great time on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter (mardigrasday.com).
