I’d been for long asking myself the question: If Christianity has priests, Buddhism has monks, so what does Hindu have?

The answer is far from satisfying. In fact, it makes me even more clueless, and crave for more. The “holy men” of Hindu are called Sadhu. They eat human flesh and have sex with corpses (To be verified). According to Wikipedia, “There are 4 or 5 million sadhus in India today and they are still widely respected: revered for their holiness, sometimes feared for their curses”.

My first acknowledgement of Sadhu came from the book “Holy Cow” of Sarah McDonald (It’s basically a street book I picked for the author’s twisted sense of humor and the outrageous name. It has no literature value, yet provides bunches of useful information about Indian culture.) In this book, the author described her first encounter with a Aghori sadhu. She was cursed and fell fatally sick. The sadhu comes out of her vivid writing as a kind of disgusting, savage Indian wizard who lives in a cemetery, drinks water from skulls, stays naked and has freezing eyes (no wonder why she was cursed). Since I generally consider her writing as biased, I didn’t put much thoughts on it, until yesterday.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure to have 3-hour-dinner with Robinson Johnson from Travelguru.com. Sadhu was once again brought up on the table to neutralize awesome fried chicken.

“I once met a sadhu. He looked into my eyes and said: ‘Most people who come to me either are scared of me or want to make use of me. But you come to me with pure heart. You can ask me anything you want.’ So I asked him to show me the ghost. You know, sadhus carry ghosts around with them.”

“Did you see the ghost?”

“Well, he asked me what I think about ghost. Ghost is actually energy, it’s like an overcharged cloud. He can show me, but this energy is so powerful that it will disturb my vitality and make me sick.”

“He is smart.”

“Yeah, he graduated from Cambridge and speaks 7 languages.”

“What? Then why did he become a sadhu?” (Mental thoughts: He must have studied too much, or job market in India is simply too competitive nowadays.)

“He said that sadhus were born, not made. When he was 2 years old, he knew that he was a sadhu. You or I can’t become a sadhu.”

“There must be some ritual to make him a sadhu?”

“Yeah, he had to walk all the way from Kolkata to Gingotri, some places in Himalaya, around 2000km away.” – Robin continued with a long story about how this Cambridge sadhu met a girl who was raped then murdered by her husband and his friends on her wedding, and how he helped the girl find her lost bracelet. It’s a very typical story in Liaozhai Zhiyi. You can find stories like that everywhere in China or Vietnam.

“Is it true that they eat corpses?”

“They even have sex with corpses.”

“How?”

“It’s their ritual. Once a year, they have to eat a small piece of human flesh. They also have to steal a corpse of an unknown woman, in a mortuary or anywhere, to have sex with. They don’t do it out of morbid desire, but as an offer to God and to create connection with the Dead.”

“Do they eat it raw?”

“Oh no. Do you know in some places, like Varanasi, they burn a lot of corpses everyday. They eat from there.”

“Do they do it on a special date?”

“That I don’t know.”

“I want to meet a sadhu. Do you keep in touch with this guy?”

“No, sadhus don’t keep in touch with anyone. But if you really want to meet a sadhu, the sadhu will show up.”

I kinda feel goosebump. I don’t know if I really want to meet a sadhu or not, I don’t want to be cursed.

But I think I do.

***Sadhus have a huge gathering every 3 years called Kumbh Mela – “the largest gathering of human beings for a single religious purpose on the planet”. It just happened few months ago which means I’ll have to wait for 3 more years. It seems like sadhus don’t want to meet me

Tags: Cannibal, Hindu, Holy Cow, Holyman, Monk, Sadhu