Teaching as Meditation
by Mohan J. Dutta
A story told in the village circle is the school, the law, and the memory of the ancestors.
— after the Santali oral tradition
In the Santal villages of Jharkhand, Bengal and Odisha, knowledge has travelled for centuries by voice and by drum, and by the slow return of the seasons. Long before Pandit Raghunath Murmu gave Santali its own script, Ol Chiki, in 1925, the people carried their history in the binti. This is the creation story that a guru recites at important ceremonies, telling how Pilcu Haram and Pilcu Budhi, the first man and the first woman, came into the world. The story was heard in a circle, with listeners sitting close enough to feel one another's warmth. A child learned the law of the village the way she learned the path to the well, by walking it again and again beside someone older.
At the edge of each village stands the jaherthan, a grove of sal trees kept for the spirits who watch over the people. It is never cleared. When the sal comes into flower, the Baha festival begins. Women dance in long lines with their arms linked, and their feet meet the ground together while the men beat the tamak' and the tumdak'. In this world knowledge lives in the body. It is in the step that answers another step, and in the breath drawn in time with the drum. It is in the grove, which still stands because the ancestors asked for it to be left. To learn here is to belong to a circle, and the trees are part of that circle.
Santiniketan grew from the same red earth. In the early 1860s Debendranath Tagore was travelling through Birbhum when he stopped beneath a pair of chhatim trees on a bare stretch of laterite and sat there in meditation. The ashram he founded on that spot became, in 1901, the school where his son Rabindranath taught children in the open air. Classes met under the trees, with students sitting on the ground around their teacher while the day moved with the light. The seasons had their own festivals, and songs were learned alongside grammar. In "My School," Tagore wrote that we may become powerful by knowledge, but we attain fullness by sympathy.
The Santal villages lay all around the ashram. Santal families farmed along the Kopai river, and Santal dance and music became part of the ashram's festivals, as they still are at Poush Mela. Tagore founded Sriniketan in 1922 to work on rural reconstruction, and its work took place in the neighbouring villages, many of them Santal. The sculptor Ramkinkar Baij lived and worked in Santiniketan, and in 1938 he cast Santhal Family in cement and laterite. It shows a man, a woman and a child walking with everything they own, their bodies leaning into the journey. It still stands on the campus.
I read Tagore's school under the trees as kin to the circle under the sal. Both place learning in the open, among living things, in the company of bodies that sit and sing and move together, and both let the season teach. Where they part is in who was recognised as the knower. Santiniketan painted and sculpted the Santals, studied them and served them, and much more rarely sat at their feet to learn. The culture-centred question starts there, with whose ways of knowing are called knowledge and whose are called custom. A pedagogy of presence has to carry that question into every room it enters.
Far across the world, on the plains of Turtle Island, Lakota prayers close with the words Mitákuye Oyás'iŋ, which mean all my relatives. The phrase reaches beyond family to the buffalo and the grass, to the stones in the sweat lodge and the four directions. Luther Standing Bear, an Oglala Lakota writer, described in Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933) how children were raised inside that web of kinship. "Children were taught to sit still and enjoy it," he wrote. "They were taught to use their organs of smell, to look when there was apparently nothing to see, and to listen intently when all seemingly was quiet." He also remembered elders who sat or lay on the bare ground to be near a mothering power, and who found the soil soothing, strengthening and healing.
Reading those lines, I hear instructions for meditation, remembered from a childhood. In Standing Bear's account, stillness opens the body to the land, and the land does the teaching. He knew the other kind of school as well. In 1879 he was among the first children sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Its founder, Richard Henry Pratt, stated its purpose in 1892: "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man." At Carlisle the children's hair was cut, their names were changed and their languages were forbidden, and their bodies were drilled in rows. The school worked by cutting knowledge off from land and kin, and by teaching the body to forget where it belonged.
Aotearoa carries its own version of that history. The Native Schools Act of 1867 set up schools that taught in English, and for generations children were punished for speaking te reo Māori. Ranginui Walker, of Whakatōhea, told the long story of Māori resistance in Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End. He took the title from the words Rewi Maniapoto spoke at Ōrākau in 1864. Part of that struggle has always been about how people learn. The first kōhanga reo opened in 1982. There, kuia and koroua spoke te reo to infants, held them and sang to them, so that the language would enter the children through the body before it ever reached them through a page.
Te reo Māori has one word, ako, for both teaching and learning. The teacher learns and the learner teaches, and knowledge passes between them the way breath passes between two people in a hongi. Whakapapa ties a person to their mountain and river, their waka and their ancestors, so that saying who you are means naming the land that holds you. On the Whanganui River people say Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au: I am the river, and the river is me. Since 2017 the law of this country has recognised the river as Te Awa Tupua, a living whole from the mountains to the sea.
The wharenui, the meeting house on the marae, is built as the body of an ancestor. The ridgepole is the backbone and the rafters are the ribs. The carved figure at the gable is the face, and the bargeboards reach out like arms held open in welcome. People gather there to listen to whaikōrero, to sing, grieve, argue and learn, and they do all of it sitting inside the ancestor's chest. In this world knowledge is held kanohi ki te kanohi, face to face, in a room that is itself a relative.
These three traditions hold knowledge in the body and in its relations: to sal groves and rivers, to the ground beneath the one who sits, to the people in the circle and the ancestors behind them. That knowledge is learned slowly, through presence and through attention given with the whole self. Colonial schooling tried to lift it out of the body and the land and set it down in rows of desks and printed pages. In place after place, what it took away was the stillness in which the land could be heard.
This is what I mean by teaching as meditation. Meditation begins with the body, with sitting and breathing, with the weight of the self resting on the earth. It asks for attention that does not grasp, and for a willingness to wait. A teacher who brings that stillness into a classroom brings the body back into learning. Every student arrives carrying a whakapapa: a village, a river, a history of what schooling has done to their people or for them. To be present is to receive all of it. It means listening the way Standing Bear's elders taught children to listen, intently, when all seems quiet, and staying with the quiet until it begins to speak.
bell hooks wrote in Teaching to Transgress about how the academy teaches us to erase the body in the classroom, and how much life drains from the room when we do. The traditions gathered here never made that mistake. They knew that people learn with their feet on the ground and their arms linked, face to face, in the shade of trees that are also elders.
In the film that goes with this post, leaves fall through an autumn wood. Each leaf lets go when the season turns and returns to the soil that fed the tree, so that it can feed the tree again. Knowledge passed on in presence moves the same way, from the grove to the circle and from elder to child, from teacher to student and back again, in a cycle that holds all of us.
To be fully present with another being is the oldest form of prayer I know.
Mitákuye Oyás'iŋ. All my relatives.