Our Daily Bird 48: The Jain Bird Hospital in Dehli

Founded in 1956, the Jain Bird Hospital is capable of taking in up to 10,000 fine feathered friends.  Located in Dehli, India, it is run as an offshoot of the Digambar Jain temple, treating nearly 30,000 birds every year and admitting up to 60 new patients a day. Brought in by area merchants and townspeople, birds are treated for free with the hospital being supported through private donations.  

The Jain Bird Hospital in Delhi

by William Meredith

Outside the hotel window, unenlightened pigeons

weave and dive like Stukas on their prey,

apparently some tiny insect brother.

(In India, the attainment of nonviolence

is considered a proper goal for human beings.)

If one of the pigeons should fly into the illusion

of my window and survive (the body is no illusion

when it’s hurt) he could be taken across town to the bird

hospital where Jains, skilled medical men,

repair the feathery sick and broken victims.

There, in reproof of violence

and of nothing else, live Mahavira’s brothers and sisters.

To this small, gentle order of monks and nuns

it is bright Vishnu and dark Shiva who are illusion.

They trust in faith, cognition, and nonviolence

to release them from rebirth. They think that birds

and animals—like us, some predators, some prey—

should be ministered to no less than men and women.

The Jains who deal with creatures (and with laymen)

wear white, while their more enterprising hermit brothers

walk naked and are called the sky-clad. Jains pray

to no deity, human kindness being their sole illusion.

Mahavira and those twenty-three other airy creatures

who turned to saints with him, preached the doctrine of ahimsa,

which in our belligerent tongue becomes nonviolence.

It’s not a doctrine congenial to snarers and poultrymen,

who every day bring to market maimed pheasants.

Numbers of these are brought in by the Jain brothers

and brought, to grow back wing-tips and illusions,

to one of the hospitals succoring such small quarry.

When strong and feathered again, the lucky victims

get reborn on Sunday mornings to the world’s violence,

released from the roofs of these temples to illusion.

It is hard for a westerner to speak about men and women

like these, who call the birds of the air brothers.

We recall the embarrassed fanfare for Francis and his flock.

We’re poor forked sky-clad things ourselves

and God knows prey to illusion—e.g., I claim these brothers

and sisters in India, stemming a little violence, among birds.

 

From Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems.

Copyright © 1997 by William Meredith

Found at The Poetry Foundation

Comments

[René]

Ah, you beat me - had this one in my folder. :) I really love this poem. Good to know the Jains treat carnivorous birds too. Heh.

Thanks, David.

[Elaine]

Thanks, David. I didn't know about the Jains. Lovely story & poem. Human kindness -- I don't know if it's an illusion but I still believe in it.