In the Hindu household with whom I stay during my visits to India, there is a three-and-a-half-year-old who, to the great alarm of his grandfather looking to the family business, and to my own immense satisfaction, already has the makings of a fine panditji. This young boy has been collecting murtis, in the form of small statues and images, of every bhagwan and bhagwati he could lay his hands on: Ganesha, Hanuman, Lakshmi, and many more. He has them arrayed on his own puja table, and spends a large part of every day doing homage to them.
Even before my arrival, he had decided to have the Buddha represented amongst them. This is not surprising in itself: some Hindu scriptures teach, after all, that the Buddha is the ninth and up to now most recent of the avatars, or incarnations, of the god Vishnu. In the absence of an actual image of the Buddha, he had temporarily assigned one other of his deities to provide that duty; and interestingly, the one he had alighted on was not Vishnu or any of his other widely worshipped forms such as Krishna or Rama, but that of a meditating Shiva; I say interestingly because to Shiva, almost alone in the whole Hindu pantheon, I happen to be particularly devoted.
(Since then I have bought him a proper Buddhji, and upon this new statue taking its place on the puja table, the Shivji image was promptly reassigned to its correct representation.)
Every morning he called me to do puja with him, and every evening too, if he could get away with it. He had a surprisingly good memory for a three-and-a-half-year-old, for I could recognise his reproducing many snatches and many gestures from the regular prayers conducted by his mother and his grandmother in the family shrine room upstairs, during which he would sit in whenever the occasion allowed. That is not to say there was not a good deal in his ceremonies that was simply invented; and the overall result, I must confess, to a casual non-Hindu participant like myself, resembled nothing so much as a lot of mumbling in Hindi and Sanskrit.
His devotion was, nevertheless, strikingly sincere; and therefore I decided to incorporate my own little daily observances alongside his. Whenever I would come to his puja table, I would arrange to open proceedings with the four lines of the traditional Tibetan Buddhist taking of refuge, which starts: “Sanjay chö tang tsok jee cho naam la ...” (“I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha ...”)
But this three-and-a-half-year-old proved to be even more observant than I had given him credit for. After a few days of this, an occasion came when I failed to perform my usual recitation, arguably distracted by having been snatched by him in the middle of rather engrossing writing work to perform my puja duties. He waited patiently for a few seconds, then nudged me and solemnly instructed, “ ‘Sanjay’ bolo.” (“Say your ‘Sanjay’ stuff.”). I immediately complied, and as a reward could observe him, from that moment on, accompanying me on this short prayer with as many of the words as he had managed to catch by himself, and certainly every time as far as “Sanjay chö tang.”
So I thought I might as well add a little bit of instruction on what we were doing, and tried to explain to him in my broken Hindi that this was a prayer to the Buddha, using his Tibetan title: “ ‘Sanjay’ dusra naam Buddhji ka hai.” (“ ‘Sanjay’ is another name for the Buddha.”) That tiny nugget of information absolutely delighted him, and if anyone else came upon us thus occupied, he would gladly repeat the explanation of his own accord. As for me, I have become a tad more knowledgeable about Hindu divinities, even if it is only to be able to tell the goddesses Durga and Saraswati apart, and still get hopelessly confused between Lakshmana and Balarama.