Symbols of Hetauda

I only have a few hours left in Nepal, but I still have lots of thoughts about all that I have seen here over the past six weeks. So much to process.

One thing that I've been thinking about a lot is symbols. I just did a quick google search. A couple interesting sites popped up that seem to merit further investigation, symbols.com and symbols.net. Also, here is the obligatory Wikipedia article.

Walking around Hetauda, where my good friend, Tiffany, is a VSO volunteer working with COSAN, a local Nepali NGO, I felt constantly bombarded by symbols. Really, this was the case all over the Nepal, but it seemed especially so in Hetauda.

I'll start simple--relatively. I saw this cross on the gate to Tiffany's neighbor's home.

They are Christian. They sing religious songs (in Nepali) in the evening, while other neighbors play guitar and sing secular songs or light candles and incense as a form of puja. By the way, according to this Wikipedia article, less than one percent of Nepalis are Christian.

A symbol that is perhaps a bit more common than the cross in Hetauda--and certainly much more common in Nepal as a whole--is the communist hammer and sickle. For example, I saw this flag hanging over Main Road in Hetauda a couple days ago.

I think it's kind of nice that there is a tractor driving down the street in the photo, as well. Kind of completes it for me. I'll write a bit more about Nepali politics later, but for now I'll just say that there are two different--and opposing--communist parties in Nepal, the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist) and the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). Here are their official web sites, CPN-UML and UCPN (Maoist). Interestingly, UCPN (Maoist) has a facebook page, as well.

A couple weeks ago I went up to the mountain with an Israeli guy named Moses or Moshe in Hebrew. Much more about this later. For now I just want to say that both he and I noticed hexagrams all over the place up there--think Star of David. It would seem that--perhaps among other meanings--it is associated with education in this part of the world. Here is an example of one on the gate to a school--on School Road coincidentally enough--not too far from Tiffany's home in Hetauda.

By the way, I just asked the nice Nepali guy sitting next to me in the internet cafe what is written--in Devanagari script--in and around this particular hexagram. He said the bit in the middle is a year, the year 2016, in particular. Recall that Nepal uses Bikram Samwat calendar, and the current year here is 2067. His guess was that that was when the school would have been build, i.e., 51 years ago. The word in the top right is "golden" so it would make sense that this nice gate would have been made for the school's golden anniversary. The yellow word towards the bottom is Hetauda, the town where the school is located. The rest of the symbols seem to indicate the name of the school, but without more context it was hard for this fellow to decipher with certainty. Just an interesting little aside...

In the Hindu world, Om is a very important symbol. In fact, it's about the only symbol in Devanagari that I can recognize. You see it all over the place, for example on the sign above a little shop near Tiffany's work.

The god in the painting is Shiva, one of the most important gods in Hinduism. His weapon is the trident or trisul. Here is one of many, many trisuls to be seen in and around Hetauda.

By the way, up in the Buddhist part of the country Padmasambhava, a.k.a. Guru Rinpoche, is often seen holding a trisul. My trekking partner, Moses, thought of Lucifer every time he saw this particular symbol.

Finally, the swastika, perhaps the most challenging--for Westerners--symbol of the region. Here is one of many examples in and around Hetauda, from a small temple on Main Road.

Note the Om in there, as well. It was particularly hard walking around up in the mountains with Moses seeing so many swastikas, tatooed on peoples' hands, on carpets, etc.

What's the point? I guess it's twofold. One, symbols are very common in Nepal. And really, I bet they are pretty common at home, too. It is probably just that I notice them more being in a foreign land. Two, and much more importantly, I think, the meaning of a symbol depends on context. Take the hexagram or the swastika, for example. For my whole life those two symbols have held very strong and very specific meanings. In this part of the world, though, they have utterly, completely different connotations. It really just takes some time to integrate that. It's one thing for someone to say that or to think it abstractly, and another all together to walk down the street and see a holy temple covered in swastikas. Makes you think. Makes me think, anyway.