The Wag-Gummandi Cat

In Greek monasteries, if you look hard enough, you’ll find a grinning cat at the base of a pillar at the North-eastern corner of their common prayer hall. There is the mention of a common practice of tying up a cat to the north-eastern corner pillar in old monasteries in Alexandria in Egypt. Academicians have long debated about the origin of this cat.

Now the cat is out of the bag, literally so.

Near Indo-Pak border Wagha, in village Gummandi, a cowherd found some old scripts in birch barks wrapped in a bag, which have helped scholars to establish that many religious traditions and practices have gone from India to Greece through Alexandria. Students from Egypt had come to learn at the feet of Saints in India and Indian scholars too had gone to Egypt to teach there. One of the factors that helped to arrive at this fact was the cat story mentioned there in the scripts.

Once some disciples were meditating beneath a tree under the guidance of a Guru. A mischievous cat troubled them. The Guru told them to tie up the cat. There was a bush at the North-eastern side. The cat was tied up there. The disciples soon became masters in meditation. When they became Gurus themselves, they regarded their Guru’s every  instruction  as sacrosanct and duly arranged a keep a cat tied at the Northeastern corner of their meditation places. Most of the scholars accept that this practice traveled from India to Greece. But there is a minority which believes that Greek cat precedes the Indian cat.

Perhaps the original cat is grinning away in its grave.

Swami Sampurnananda, 30 October 2003, Genre 273, No. 23.