Hyphenated New York - NYU Fall 2009

India via Redbank: Jersey-born Monk Lives by Ancient Rituals | December 15, 2009

by Sandy Gordon

NEW YORK-  No meat eating. No intoxication.  No gambling.  No premarital sex.   Those are the vows he keeps in order to control personal desire and reach enlightenment.  He shaves his dark hair, leaving just a tuft in back to symbolize his renunciation of material selfishness.  Those are the orange robes he cloaks around himself- their color symbolizes celibacy.  He wears a necklace of beads carved from Tulasi wood to remind him of his devotion to his god, Krishna.  Ghanashyam.  That’s the Sanskrit name 30-year-old Joseph Caruso took when he became a Hare Krishna monk eight years ago.  Before his initiation, he was young man from Redbank, NJ, searching for answers and a deeper purpose to life.

The questions started with the music.  Caruso began studying piano in high school and said he became fascinated with music’s mysterious emotional power.  When he sat at the piano to play Chopin, he sensed the expanse of something infinite between the black and white keys.  When he listened in his room to Scriabin, he felt an inexplicable pull of some spiritual dimension embedded in the notes.  He heard it in John Coltrane’s pivotal recording, “A Love Supreme,” where the saxophonist came to realize that his purpose for playing music was to glorify God.  “What is the source of the feeling that comes through music?” Caruso asked.  The great composers seemed to know the answer.  “They were awakening in me a desire to go deeper.

Caruso’s Italian family was never very religious.  But when he began studying classical piano performance at New Jersey City University, Caruso started making frequent trips to New York City, to explore churches and mosques and the ideas housed inside their walls.  He read the Bible and Buddhist texts.  And he continued to search for the answer to his question.

He found the answer inside himself.  “What do I want more than anything else?” he asked himself one night.  “I realized it’s a spiritual desire.  I want eternal love, lasting love.”

On one of his trips to the city, when he was twenty-two, he encountered a man selling copies of the sacred Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita.  Caruso was skeptical.  Instead of reading the scripture, he researched the religion.  Online, he found the teachings of Swami Prabhupada, the guru who sailed to New York on a freight ship in 1965 at age 65 to spread the Hare Krishna tradition to the West.  He sensed Prabhupada had experienced a higher satisfaction and true happiness.  Prabhupada drew him in, like Scriabin, like Coltrane.

Caruso stewed with the new ideas for three weeks before venturing to the room where Prabhupada founded America’s first Hare Krishna temple.  On a Monday night, he stepped through door at 26 Second Avenue and sat down for a class on the Bhagavad Gita.  One month later, he was Ghanashyam.  He never left.

Today, Ghanashyam sits in that same room, hosting a vegetarian buffet for hungry college students three days a week.  Indian music floats through the air, along with the smell of warm food.  People gather in chairs, or on cushions on the floor, eating and talking softly.  Photographs of

Swami Prabhupada hang on the wall.  Ghanashyam sits near the door, greeting guests.  Sometimes his hand rests on a table, next to a copy of the Bhagavad Gita.  Sometimes he memorizes his favorite Sanskrit passages he has written in a notebook.  “I was a little suspicious coming here,” he said.  “I didn’t know what this was really all about…  Then I saw there’s a wealth of 5000 years of tradition behind this.”

Ghanashyam lives with thirteen monks in an ashram in an apartment building on First Avenue.  By 5 am they are all singing and dancing together.  They meditate and study scripture.  There is a piano in the temple, but Ghanashyam said he doesn’t play- that music started his search for the spiritual fulfillment he has found.

Even with strict relinquishments and serious devotion, he retains an innate sense of humor.  “He’s a wild prankster,” said Doyal Guaranga, 25, another monk and Ghanashyam’s friend of five years.  “He’s the most mischievous person in our group.”  He laughingly told stories of Ghanashyam leaving a statue in his closet and improvising goofy stories.  “Humor is a very important part of any life; the soul naturally needs happiness and I think he brings that in a very balanced way,” Doyal Guaranga said.

Ghanashyam confessed to adding extra chili peppers to the monks’ soup until it was just shy of too spicy.  “Krishna himself was very mischievous and funny,” he pointed out.

The Bhagavad Gita teaches that the monks’ vows of abstention can clear away obstacles of selfishness, greed, and envy in order to reach a higher satisfaction: eternal love.  “Real love means always giving, unconditionally,” Ghanashyam said.  “If one can love Krishna, then that love can become more and more pure.  And once that love is pure, then it can be applied to other human beings… it becomes compassion.”

Perhaps it is Ghanashyam’s compassion that helps him to remain so devoted.  When he distributes spiritual literature in Union Square, people sometimes ask, “’What are you doing wasting your time?’”  But he knows most congregants join for the same reason he did- from meeting a monk on the street.  He said shrugging off the naysayers is easy knowing he can affect just one person.

It was harder to shrug it off when the naysayers were his closest childhood friends.  The group of five boys did everything together, laughing and goofing around.  They pulled pranks and tried to shock each other with stunts- like the time they pressured a teenage Caruso to drop his chalk in the middle of math class and take a running jump from the blackboard to dive over the classroom partition.  Caruso cleared the barrier and landed in the middle of another class.

Ghanashyam said the reckless crew who drank and smoked didn’t understand when he gave up intoxication.  When he moved to live in the temple, “they were kind of really disturbed,” he said.  “At some point they just couldn’t relate to what I was doing.”  He paused.  “When you make a decision like this it reveals who your real friends are.”  He still sees them sometimes, when he visits his mother in New Jersey, but their relationship is different.

Since moving into the ashram, Ghanashyam has formed deep friendships with the other monks.  He discovered they came from all over the world- Russia, Germany, India, South America- to strive for a life of compassion.

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