Zendo for the heartmind

kokorozendo

The Song of Silence That Remains…

The Song of Silence That Remains…

by | Dec 19, 2025 | Harmony, Joy, Life, Meaning, Meditation, Peace, Zen

The Music Around Me (Inheritance)

Music was always present in the background of my life, though I never claimed it as my own. My late father, Sankara, was a devoted fan of Rafi and Mukesh. In our home stood an old radio, and before that, I remember an even older one—so old it required a license from the post office. Listening to Vividh Bharati and Ceylon Radio was a daily ritual. My father often spoke with fondness about how Rafi would visit Thalassery for annual concerts, and those stories carried a kind of magic, even if I did not yet understand the music itself. 

Around me, others carried the thread forward. A cousin of my father in Mannarkkad was a flutist, his son a skilled mridangam player. Our family friend, Dr. Anju, now balances her life as a doctor and a singer. I still remember attending her very first concert when she was a child—watching her step onto the stage with a voice that has since grown to embrace Carnatic, semi-classical, and even pop.

Even in my own home, music appeared in unexpected ways. My elder son, Many, learned tabla for a while, and though he dropped it midway—as children often do—his teacher at TVS insisted he had talent. My younger son, Rishi, sings, strums the guitar, and listens widely. Yet both of them, true to the Krishnamurti school spirit, resisted any attempt at dictation. For them, music was never about performance or achievement. It was simply part of life, woven into their days without showmanship.

Looking back, I see that they were living out something I only discovered later: music is not about being “talented” or “rhythm deaf.” It is about how it inhabits the spaces of our lives.

The Music I Found (Awakening)

For much of my early life, I was not even a listener of classical music. Perhaps I was rhythm deaf, or perhaps I simply stood outside its circle. But one day, on Church Street in Bangalore, I picked up a CD—Colours by Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan and Ustad Zakir Hussain. That album opened a door. I began to build a small collection of instrumental music, and slowly, listening became a quiet practice.

When I moved to the Zendo, music took on a new role. Each evening, we chose music for meditation. Sometimes, visiting musicians played live. At other times, I curated recordings—Kitaro, Hikari Ōe, Naomi Sogbe, and others. Fr. AMA was particular about the choices, and I learned to listen with care, to sense how sound could prepare the ground for silence.

Through Rishi, I discovered Agam, the Carnatic progressive rock band. He insisted that all music is good music, and I began to hear through his ears. Their fusion of Carnatic depth with rock’s energy felt like a bridge between traditions, a reminder that music is always evolving, always finding new forms.

The Music That Remains (Revelation)

A long time back, in 2015 i guess, i was attending annual KFI conferences in the verdant settings of KFI, Rajghat. And they organised a concert on Kabir, by the side of Vasantha college , under that giant and old peepal tree by the side of ganges. There were diyas around and stars and moon in the sky to give us some light. There were no sound boxes or other artificial enhances. And that atmosphere, kabir dohas, melodious siinging, it was just mesmerising and just seeped into my heartmind.

But then not all music connects. I once heard T. M. Krishna at The Valley School, but something in his manner left me distant. By contrast, Harish Sivaramakrishnan of Agam felt closer—perhaps because of his spiritual intensity, perhaps because his birthplace was near Mannarkkad, perhaps because his music carried both rootedness and rebellion.

I once tried to attend an Agam concert in Bangalore, but the tickets sold out before I could get them. Still, their recordings reached me. Their third studio album, Arrival of the Ethereal (2025), was their most ambitious yet, with a hundred-piece orchestra recorded in Czechoslovakia. One track, The Silence That Remains – Mokshamu Galada, lingers with me.

Its words echo a truth I have come to know in Zen practice:

What is longing but the soul remembering something once held— and lost?

When the body fades, when the curtain falls, what remains?

For those who never sought—emptiness. For those who clung—regret.

For those who fought the tide—fear.

But for those who saw, who surrendered, who walked open handed and unafraid— silence. light. freedom.

 And still, the song remains, whispering:

Did you find your way home,

or are you still searching in the dark?

When the music fades, what remains is not the sound but the silence it reveals. That silence is not empty—it is luminous, alive, free.

The Teacher’s Voice And Hakuin’s healing ( Integration)

Once, to a question of mine, Fr. AMA said:

“I too had a long struggle with religions, orthodoxy, sexuality and SJ. What I can tell you is it is possible to go beyond them and continue your spiritual journey. It is tough and not easy. But possible. Zen did help me. What I can’t do is to explain to you how to do it. You got to find a way and do it by yourself. But being aware, is a right start. Also remember, Humour makes humans. Animals are not known to have it. Some humans too. That is what makes us not only cope up, but successfully face the absurdity of our life. Please remember Humour and Music elevates the human mind. They are very much part of Zen.”

His words stay with me. They remind me that music and humour are not diversions from the path, but companions on it. They are ways of lifting the mind, of facing the absurdity of life without despair.

During another question and answer, Fr. AMA told us why music . meditation is as important as Zazen, or Samu.

It so seems Zen Master Hakuin, who wrote the Song of Zazen

Zen Master Hakuin suffered from what he called “meditation sickness”—a burning sensation in his chest and mental agitation from overzealous practice. He was healed by a Taoist hermit who taught him the “Butter Method of Meditation”, a visualization practice that soothed his nervous system. Later, Hakuin himself recommended healing practices that included sound and chanting, showing how music and vibration can restore balance when meditation becomes excessive fierce and uncompromising in his youth, once drove himself into collapse. His practice was fire—unceasing meditation, relentless striving, a refusal to rest. The body rebelled. He described it as “Zen sickness”: burning in the chest, agitation in the mind, sleepless nights.

Seeking relief, Hakuin found a Taoist hermit, Hakuyū, who offered not more effort but gentleness. The teaching was simple, almost childlike: imagine soft butter melting from the crown of the head, flowing slowly down through the body, soothing every nerve and bone. This “Butter Meditation” restored him. The fire cooled. Breath returned. Practice became whole again.

The Music of Healing

Though Hakuin’s cure was imagery, the principle is the same as music: vibration, rhythm, and softness that re-tune the body-mind.

Chanting sutras is not performance but medicine—breath and sound aligning with heart.

Temple bells and gongs are not decoration but resonance—waves that settle agitation.

Silence itself is music, the pause between notes, the butter melting into stillness.

When meditation becomes too sharp, music reminds us of roundness. When practice burns, sound cools.

In our own Zendo, music is not entertainment. It is presence. The bell before Zazen, claps before kinhin and meal gatha, the chant that rises and falls, the quiet hum of voices sharing tea—all are therapies for the subtle sickness of striving.

Hakuin’s story is not about weakness but about balance. Even the fiercest Zen master needed butter, needed sound, needed softness. His sickness became his teaching: practice must heal, not harm. And so, perhaps the silence that remains is not solemn, but smiling. A silence alive with laughter and song. A silence that is, in itself, the song of Zen.

Usually at the zendo, we play recorded music.. Sometimes, when a musician visits us, it is live music. Yesterday for evening music meditation, a very accomplished French violinist and composer Chloe Netter performed. And in between , there was a silence.

It kind of transported me back in time to that Kabir concert by the banks of Ganges.

Sound is a path to silence, and that silence, when attended to, is itself a song.

A Celebration for Nothing: Pizza, Zen and the Inner Shrine

A Celebration for Nothing: Pizza, Zen and the Inner Shrine

by | Dec 14, 2025 | Joy, Life, Meaning, Peace, Zen

Perhaps that’s what this is—a long journey brought to stillness in a shared meal, a remembered verse, a slice of pizza in the hills. No reason. Every reason. A celebration for nothing. For everything.

It was a Celebration for nothing… mean no particular reason… per se…

Today morning, I was watching again the documentary An Original Cloud in the Mountain. And after that we, Fr. AMA, Prakash, Sreenath, Robert, Inaki and I, headed for a Sunday pizza at George’s Gourmet Kitchen. George is a Canadian settled in Kodai Kanal… and many have vouched that he makes really good pizza. (That many includes my second son Rishi and many of our guests who have travelled around the globe.)

On the way, Jill Mistry, who is the Director of the movie, stopped our vehicle for a lift… She was on her way to Kodai town for a haircut. She was asking me to visit her and Cyrus. While Cyrus Mistry is a well-known award winning author and playwright, she is into films. And Rohinton Mistry (who wrote those best sellers A Fine Balance and Such a Long Journey; who got nominated for the Booker Prize thrice and even made an appearance in Oprah Winfrey’s talk show) is Cyrus’s younger brother. And to add to all that, Jill’s and Cyrus’s son is into Psychology and Counselling. So whenever we meet, endless talk on movies, books and psychology. She was also telling me that she was into shooting a documentary on the lives of tribals. There is a tribal hamlet a bit far off from Kodaikanal, where they still live their ancient ways, closer and in alignment with nature. Jill was telling me that they are more spiritual than many others in the modern world.

And during the pizza lunch, I was telling Fr. AMA that just today morning I was watching the documentary, here she is…

Sometimes life is like that. It is wonderful as it is. Hence the Celebration for nothing…

Please do watch that documentary at Kanzeon Zendo you tube channel. ( if you can spare some 50 minutes.) It is on Zen. Some of the scripts I remember from that movie are from Fr. AMA on his Zen vision… and that wonderful and most spiritual poem of Tagore from Gitanjali.

From Fr. AMA:
“I am often asked to what religion I owe my allegiance. I say I stand in the in between of Advaita Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity. My vision of Zen is dynamic and liberative though I am rooted in the Buddhist tradition I have gone beyond its approach and yet differs in varying degrees from that are many Buddhist teachers…..

The mind is emptied so that the world can be received as it is. It reflects the world as it presents itself. It is consciousness becoming conscious of itself like a mirror that reflects whatever comes before it, itself being empty of colour or form. Now it’s a universe becoming conscious of itself, stepping forth and manifesting itself…..

You are the universe and the universe is yourself. When you sit in meditation it’s Earth sitting, it is a mountain sitting. When you breathe it’s a universe breathing and when you walk it is a universe that is walking….

The heart is a mystery here where the Divine and the human meet. The way is perfect like vast space where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess. Indeed it is due to our choosing to accept or reject that we do not see the true nature of things….

In Zen there is no why. Zen does not try to explain suffering or evil or any of the ultimate realities of life. Why is there suffering? So that you may respond to it. Why do I suffer? So that I may bear it. You are called and you respond to the call. You become yourself only in this call and response.
You are Buddha, become Buddha. To use Christian terms in the light of Zen you are Christ and you are called to become Christ who bears and suffers all. There is no God outside of you. The only answer is to respond in your compassionate action to the suffering and the broken. When you pervade the world with the consciousness of compassion and love, you are the awakened Bodhisattva.”

Tagore’s Gitanjali
“The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long.
I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light,
and pursued my voyage through the wildernesses of worlds
leaving my track on many a star and planet.
It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself,
and that training is the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune.
The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own,
and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.
My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said “Here art thou!”
The question and the cry “Oh, where?” melt into tears of a thousand streams and
deluge the world with the flood of the assurance “I am!””

Some 40 years back, I had read an old Malayalam novel written with the background of Kodaikanal Astronomical Observatory—Pullippulikalum Vellinakshathrangalum (Spotted Leopards and Silver Stars). It was serialized in Mathrubhumi Weekly and I might have read it when I was in high school. Written by C. Radhakrishnan, a famous Malayalam novelist known for his wonderful fiction work with a lot of metaphysical background.

Last time, after the sesshin got over, we went to a pizza at George’s Gourmet Kitchen and on the way back, I saw that Kodaikanal observatory. I did share with Fr. AMA about the novel I had read some 40 years ago, written by a scientist who worked there and with a lot of metaphysical underpinnings. And laughingly but very affectionately, Fr. AMA told me: no wonder you have reached the same place.
And today before our sesshin starts, we went again for a pizza at George’s.

And as Tagore wrote so wonderfully:
The time that my journey takes is long, and the way of it long… The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own… and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.

Perhaps that’s what this is—a long journey brought to stillness in a shared meal, a remembered verse, a slice of pizza in the hills. No reason. Every reason. A celebration for nothing. For everything.

The Pied Piper’s Tune: On Spiritual Gurus, Corporate Leaders, and the Surrender of Our Critical Mind

The Pied Piper’s Tune: On Spiritual Gurus, Corporate Leaders, and the Surrender of Our Critical Mind

by | Dec 12, 2025 | Friendship, Integrity, RElationship, Transformation, Trust

My concerns about the modern “guru”—a title that now stretches from ashrams to boardrooms—are simple and twofold.

First, does the person on the stage actually know what they’re talking about? Have they genuinely walked the path they’re selling, or is it just polished rhetoric? Second, and more dangerously, what do they do with the authority they gather? Too often, the answer points toward the oldest temptations: power, privilege, and personal gratification.

The mechanism for gathering this authority is often the same: the demand for total surrender. It’s a call to “have complete faith in me, my way, and what I say.” It’s the subtle (or not-so-subtle) instruction to park your critical thinking at the door, to keep your questions in abeyance, and to simply follow. This isn’t a relic of medieval spirituality; it’s the bedrock of modern influence.

I saw this play out in real-time recently. A venerated corporate leader was interviewed live by a famous media personality. Before a large, attentive audience, he staked a controversial claim. He leaned in and declared, with absolute conviction, that he was stating a “FACT.” Not an opinion, not a perspective—a fact. The crowd, a sea of people nearly all holding smartphones—literal fact-checking libraries in their pockets—nodded and absorbed it as sacrosanct truth.

A simple check proved his “fact” was wrong. I even shared the details beneath the video later in Linkedin. Yet, the reluctance to accept the correction was palpable. The spell of the moment, the aura of the speaker, was more powerful than a verifiable truth.

And this game doesn’t only play out on spiritual or corporate stages. Think about it: a person in deep distress, seeking a therapist’s help; a coaching client investing in their potential; a young child looking up to their teacher; a fan pouring admiration into a celebrity. In each of these relationships, a natural power differential exists, built on a legitimate need—for healing, growth, knowledge, or belonging. This is precisely where the Piper’s tune finds its most vulnerable listeners. The dynamic can morph, subtly or overtly, from guidance into control, where the healer, coach, teacher, or star becomes the sole, unquestionable source of what the seeker desperately needs.

This is the essence of the Pied Piper’s power. It doesn’t work through logic, but through a magnetism that asks for our trust in exchange for our discernment. As sociologist Paul Heelas observed in studies of modern spirituality, people often reject traditional authority only to surrender to new, charismatic forms of it. We exchange one piper for another.

Mariana Caplan, in her book Halfway Up the Mountain: The Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment, diagnosed this same malaise in contemporary spirituality. She warned that seekers and teachers alike often mistake charisma, altered states, or partial insights for full realization—and then prematurely claim enlightenment. The danger, she argued, is not only in the teacher’s illusion but in the seeker’s surrender of discernment. When we hand over our authority too quickly, we become vulnerable to fraud, confusion, and exploitation. Caplan’s critique echoes the Pied Piper metaphor: the tune is seductive, but it leads us away from freedom into dependency.

And this is not new. History is littered with such tunes—whether in medieval cults, fascist rallies, or corporate “visionary” speeches. The melody changes, but the mechanism remains: charisma eclipses scrutiny, and authority bias blinds us to fact. Even today, with confirmation at our fingertips, the enchantment of certainty often outweighs the quiet labor of verification. Psychologists call this authority bias: the tendency to accept statements from perceived experts without question. Add confirmation bias—the desire to hear what fits our worldview—and the Piper’s tune becomes nearly irresistible.

The true guide, then, is not the one who demands we stop thinking for our journey. It is the Kalyan Mitra—the “good friend” or fellow traveler—who walks beside us. This is the therapist who empowers your inner authority, the coach who mirrors your own wisdom back to you, the teacher who ignites your curiosity beyond their own knowledge. This guide doesn’t ask for surrender; they empower our scrutiny. They don’t offer a tune to follow blindly, but a mirror to see our own path clearly. Where the Piper plays louder, the friend invites silence. Where the Piper demands obedience, the friend cultivates discernment.

John O’Donohue, in his Celtic meditation Anam Cara, speaks of the soul friend in precisely this way: as one who dissolves masks, who sees you as you truly are, and who walks with you in intimacy and authenticity. The anam cara is not a master but a companion, not a Piper but a mirror. In such friendship, the soul finds recognition and freedom.

The Buddha, too, told Ānanda that spiritual friendship is not half the holy life but the whole of it. In the Samyutta Nikāya (SN 45.2), he declared that with admirable friendship, companionship, and camaraderie, the Noble Eightfold Path unfolds. The radical claim here is that awakening is not built on surrender to authority but on the wonder of camaraderie—walking together, questioning together, supporting each other.

In a world full of Pied Pipers claiming to have the only map, the most radical act is to hold on to your own compass. To listen, but also to verify. To respect, but also to question. Because the tune that leads you to surrender your critical mind never leads to freedom; it only leads to the next cliff edge, with someone else in control of the music.

Freedom is not found in the tune that enchants us, but in the pause that lets us listen. The true guide is not the one who plays louder, but the one who helps us hear our own music. To walk with such a friend—whether as anam cara or kalyāṇamitra—is to keep our compass alive, even in a world of pipers. Better than following a tune is learning to hear the rhythm of your own footsteps. It is my lived experience that, transformative growth happens in the soil of egalitarian, trusting relationship, not in the shadow of unquestioned authority.

The Courtesan and the Cosmos

The Courtesan and the Cosmos

by | Dec 6, 2025 | Meaning, Transformation, Uncategorized, Zen

The Sun is a minor star in a small galaxy, in a universe of billions. And yet, it can make a flower smile. Carl Sagan often reminded us that even in the immensity of the cosmos, the warmth of a single star sustains life and beauty here on Earth. Vastness does not diminish intimacy.

Romain Rolland, in his biography of Swami Vivekananda, recounts a story from the Jaipur palace. After Ramakrishna’s passing, Vivekananda travelled across India and was often hosted by kings and nobles. In Jaipur, the king arranged a dance performance by the most renowned courtesan of his palace. Vivekananda, offended, withdrew to his quarters. The king worried about displeasing him, but it was the courtesan who sent a note that carried the true teaching:

“The Sun does not discriminate. It shines on all — the saint and the sinner, the lotus and the mud. Why then should an enlightened one like you?”

This reminder became a mirror for Vivekananda. Just as the Sun warms every flower without judgment, true wisdom does not exclude. The courtesan’s note revealed that enlightenment is not about separation, but about seeing the divine equally in all beings.

We see the same truth in other traditions. In the Gospels, Jesus did not shun Mary Magdalene despite her social stigma. Instead, he welcomed her as a disciple and allowed her to be the first witness to the resurrection. His openness showed that divine recognition is not bound by categories of “pure” and “impure.” Compassion, like sunlight, embraces all.

Zen offers another wave. Two monks came to a stream where a young woman stood unable to cross. One monk lifted her and carried her across. Hours later, his companion, troubled, asked: “Why did you break your vow by touching a woman?” The elder replied: “I put her down hours ago. Are you still carrying her?” The teaching is clear: true practice is not about clinging to rules or appearances, but about responding with compassion in the moment.

Across Hindu, Christian, and Zen lenses, the lesson converges: enlightenment does not exclude. Social categories — courtesan, sinner, woman, untouchable — are human constructs. The divine light, whether expressed as Sun, Christ, or Dharma, shines impartially. The “unexpected guru” may appear in any form: a courtesan, a stigmatized disciple, or a woman at a stream.

The story turns the telescope around. Sagan used the cosmic view to make us cherish the intimate. The courtesan used the intimate — a beam of sunlight on mud and lotus alike — to reveal a cosmic spiritual truth: consciousness, like sunlight, is fundamentally impartial. Vastness does not diminish intimacy; true vastness of spirit includes all intimacy, all particularity, without judgment.

The cosmos is not cold because it is vast. It is the source of the very warmth that allows for the flower, the saint, the sinner, and the moment of understanding between a weary monk, a wise courtesan, a compassionate Christ, and a Zen elder at a stream. The final teaching is that to be truly “enlightened” is not to flee from the mud, but to recognize that the same light that makes the lotus glow also sleeps within it.

The Dance of Change: Lessons in Transformation, Resonance, and Compassion

The Dance of Change: Lessons in Transformation, Resonance, and Compassion

by | Nov 29, 2025 | Change, Management, Transformation, Zen

The first time I heard the phrase “Change Management,” I wasn’t in a lecture hall or reading a textbook. I was on the 23rd floor of the Renaissance Centre in Detroit, in 2004, looking out at the river below, surrounded by seventeen senior leaders from the tech world’s elite. I was there for the GM Round Table, representing Wipro as the most junior person in the room.

That moment was the beginning of a journey—one that would weave through corporate high-rises, soul-testing commutes, and the quiet of a Zen meditation hall. It was a journey that taught me change is not a process to be managed, but a dance to be learned—a subtle, living art built on resonance, trust, and compassion.

Beginnings: The Mask and the Scaffolding

I felt the weight of that room deeply. My boss, Geoff Phillips, saw my trepidation. He flew in and spent weekends drilling me in the art of consulting, teaching me to put on what I later called the “Monroe Mask”—that layer of outer confidence worn to cover the inner tremors.

Soon, I realized I wasn’t the only one learning to wear a mask. Our client manager enrolled the entire team in a three-day crash course on Change and Transformation Management, led by Booz Allen & Hamilton. That was the first time I heard the term. Those three days were precious.

But in my usual, tenacious way, I couldn’t stop there. I began gathering books—an enormous collection on Change Management. From the British Council’s digital library, I painstakingly downloaded chapter by chapter from nearly fifty books. Over time, those lessons became the scaffolding of my professional life.

That scaffolding was tested to its limit during my KAUST assignment. For months, I endured a daily commute of 260 kilometers—130 km each way from Jeddah to Thuwal and back. The endless desert highway became a grinding ritual that left no space for life itself. It was this physical and mental exhaustion that finally forced my hand; I decided I had to step out of Wipro to reclaim my time and my well-being.

But then, grace intervened. My client, Carsten Svensson, upon hearing my decision, spoke directly to my bosses. He valued the work more than the policy, and carved out a direct contract. He ensured I had a Red Sea-facing apartment on campus, a monthly Emirates ticket home, and a generous raise.

Those two years gave me the freedom to fly away from the 9-to-5 rhythm. The tax-free money helped Thara and me settle all our loans, buy an apartment, and decide to live debt-free.

But this story was never about financial freedom. It was about the lessons I learned in Change Management—through books, through work, through the very grain of lived experience.

The Four Directions of Change

From Detroit to KAUST to Bangalore, the compass of change has revealed itself in four enduring lessons:

  1. Reactance – The Pushback Reflex
    Reactance is the invisible wall that rises when people feel their freedom is being curtailed. It calls to mind the wisdom of Lao Tzu:

“Water is the softest thing, yet it can penetrate mountains and earth. This shows clearly the principle of softness overcoming hardness.”

A consultant who barges in with “best practices” is the hard hammer; the wall only hardens in response. The art is to be like water—to invite rather than impose. Frame change as choice, not command. Create space for ownership, so resistance transforms into curiosity.

  1. Persuasion Radar – The Hidden Antennae
    Every individual and organization has a subtle radar scanning for manipulation. This truth is perfectly captured by an old Arabian proverb:

“He who has a hundred guests cannot seat them all at the same table, but he can offend them all with a single dish of hypocrisy.”

One insincere gesture is all it takes. Authenticity, therefore, is not a soft skill but a strategic imperative. Speak plainly, act transparently. Influence flows not from persuasion, but from resonance.

  1. Overton Window – The Horizon of Acceptability
    The Overton Window is the spectrum of ideas a community currently considers “thinkable.” It is a slow, patient process of expanding the light, much like the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

You cannot force an unthinkable idea from outside the window; you can only illuminate it from within. Frame new ideas in familiar language. Stretch the window incrementally, so what was once unthinkable becomes inevitable.

  1. Context Matters – The Ecology of Change
    I never get tired of quoting Steve Donahue’s opening from Shifting Sands:
    “How big is the top of Mount Everest?”
    “About the size of a small kitchen table,” he responded.
    “That is amazing,” I said, “You know, when you cross the Sahara Desert, there is no way of knowing where the desert ends. There is no peak, no border, no sign that says, ‘You are Now leaving the Sahara Desert – Have a nice Day!’”

This is the essence of context. There is no universal map. Context is the soil. A banyan tree may scatter thousands of seeds, but it becomes another banyan only when a seed finds the right soil. A goose thrives in a pond; a camel in the desert. Listen to the land. Change is ecological, not mechanical.

The Unlearning: Compassion as the Ground

After I left Wipro, I stepped fully into managing the affairs of our Zen meditation center, Bodhi Sangha.

In my very first week, my teacher, Fr. AMA Samy, gave me a single lesson: “Be compassionate, regardless of the situation. Don’t bring your corporate hat here.”

And then he quoted a Sanskrit sloka:
Bryat satyam, priyam bryat, na bryat apriya satyam.
(Speak the truth, speak it sweetly, but do not speak unpleasant truth.)

Here, I had no title, no salary leverage. My only tools were compassion, trust, and presence. This was the most profound validation of the principles I had studied. The compass was true, even here—especially here.

The Nuance: Honesty is Not Transparency

This journey taught me another vital lesson: Honesty and integrity are the essential blocks of transformation, but honesty is not the same as transparency.

You must be honest in all you convey. Your word must be true. But to believe you must reveal every card in your hand, in a compulsive rush for total transparency, is to invite disaster. It can overwhelm, create unnecessary panic, or be weaponized against the very change you seek.

Nature understands this deeply. Human beings and animals have skin. Trees have bark. These are not walls of deception; they are vital boundaries that protect the delicate life within, allowing for selective exchange with the outside world. They are membranes of wisdom.

You can speak your truth with integrity without revealing the raw, unfinished, and vulnerable core all at once. Timing, dosage, and discernment are everything. This is the lesson from nature: be honest in your being, but wise in your revelation.

The Final Truth: Time is the Essence

And yet, all these principles rest upon one universal, non-negotiable truth: Time is the essence of all change.

We cannot alter this principle, regardless of the compulsions of Wall Street or Dalal Street. One cannot create a baby in two months by enlisting four mothers.

Nature achieves everything—without hurrying, without hastening. This brings to mind the timeless wisdom of Lao Tzu:

“He who stands on tiptoe doesn’t stand firm.
He who rushes ahead doesn’t go far…

If you want to accord with the Tao,
just do your job, then let go.”

The Dance Is the Path

So, this is my synthesis. My learning.

Change is not a formula to be memorized. It is a dance. A flight path constantly being reshaped by winds, horizons, and landscapes.

This philosophy redefines our role as that of a pilgrim—a seeker who walks alert to resistance, attuned to sincerity, patient with horizons, and humble before context.

In a world obsessed with speed and scale, this compass reminds me that true transformation is never about control.

It is always, and only, about resonance. And resonance requires the courage to be honest, the wisdom to be discerning, and the patience to listen to the ancient rhythms of nature itself.

 

The Paradox of Ego, Desire, and the Shifting Self

The Paradox of Ego, Desire, and the Shifting Self

by | Nov 28, 2025 | Life, Transformation, Zen

A few days, happened to write in response to a WordPress prompt: What historical moment fascinates you the most? I said the most historical moment for me was my own birth.

A kind response to that reflection wondered aloud if such a statement was egoistic. That question itself opened another gate for me—into the paradox of ego and desire. Perhaps that concern comes from a certain religious conditioning—that moksha or mukti must mean the annihilation of ego, the killing of all desire. I do not know if that hypothesis is true. What I do know is this: for human beings to live a good, functional, phenomenal life, a healthy ego is a must.

Our existence is paradoxical. We are where infinitude meets finitude, the eternal with the temporal. We can only realize the Self through our own consciousness—through the very ego we are told to erase.

Try this simple experiment: hold your breath for a few moments. The desire to breathe in, to live on, is our most natural desire. Without it, there is no life, no practice, no realization. So one cannot be egoless and desireless.

The real question, then, is not whether ego and desire should be annihilated, but:

  • What is a healthy ego?
  • What is a wholesome desire?

Let us begin with ego…

What we call Self / I / Other / World are not fixed identities. The borderlines between self and other, I and world, keep changing like a shifting sand. In a sense, self-realisation is the dissolving, the sublimation of that line altogether. But as the Zen koans remind us, one cannot function in that place for long. One must return—to this world, to the marketplace, to the ordinary rhythms of living. Modern psychology offers its own language here. Winnicott spoke of the “true self”—a healthy ego that allows spontaneity, play, and authentic living. Jung described individuation—the process of integrating fragments of psyche into wholeness. Both point to the same truth: ego is not to be annihilated but clarified. In Dharma terms, ego is not the enemy but the raft. Without it, we cannot cross the river; with it, we must remember not to cling once the crossing is complete. And this borderline is not a single line at all, but a continuum—stretching from finitude to infinitude. Take a simple example: when I sit on a chair and say my chair, the border is drawn where my body rests on the wood. The chair is the “other.” But when I say my hand or my leg, suddenly that which is outside me is also claimed as mine. The borderline has shifted inward, now lying between me and mine. Follow this chain of logic and you find it is endless in both directions.

Where does the “I” end and the “world” begin? Is the breath I draw in mine or the worlds? Is the food that becomes my body still “other”? Even the thought that says I—is that me, or is it something arising within me?

Advaitins keep referring to Advaita Vedanta’s never-ending refrain of neti-neti— “not this, not that.” Each identity we cling to, each border we draw between self and world, is gently negated. The chair, the hand, the breath, even the thought “I”—all are peeled away until what remains is the unnameable Self, beyond attributes.

 Yet Zen diverges.  Zen insists we return. After the silence of dissolution, we must still sweep the floor, cook the rice, and bow to the neighbour. The paradox is clear—Vedanta dissolves, Zen re-enters. Together they remind us that realization is both transcendence and ordinariness, silence and sound, vastness and marketplace.

Zhuangzi, the Taoist sage, once dreamed he was a butterfly. Upon waking, he wondered: was he a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man? This wasn’t just whimsy—it was a radical questioning of the solidity of the self and the world. Zhuangzi constantly shifted perspectives to show that what is “true” depends entirely on one’s standpoint. He didn’t resolve the paradox—he danced with it.

The borders keep moving, like waves on the shore. Sometimes they dissolve altogether, and we glimpse the vastness where self and world are not two. But then, inevitably, the tide returns, and we find ourselves once again in the marketplace—buying vegetables, greeting a neighbour, saying this is mine, that is yours. It is here—in the weighing of tomatoes, in the bargaining for onions, in the smile exchanged with a neighbour—that realization is tested. Not in exalted states, but in ordinariness. The marketplace is the true koan: do we cling to “mine” and “yours,” or do we walk lightly, allowing the world to fill us in?

When one becomes egotist, then for them only they exist, and the other does not. But when we are empty of self, then the world fills us in.

Turning now to desire, and what makes it wholesome…

Buddhism itself makes a subtle distinction here. It speaks of two kinds of desire:

  • Tanhā – craving, thirst, the clinging that binds us to suffering.
  • Chanda – wholesome aspiration, the clear and steady wish that leads toward growth, practice, and liberation.

So, the problem is not desire itself, but the way it is held. When desire hardens into tanhā, it narrows and enslaves. When it opens into Chanda, it becomes a path, a current that carries us toward freedom. In many mainstream interpretations, moksha, mukti, nirvana, swarga, and heaven are precisely conceived as an escape—a final release from the painful, relentless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth (samsara) on this Earth. And many traditions teach the way out of this to kill the ego and discipline the desire. Sometime back, I read a caption on the T-shirt of a young tourist in Kodaikanal. It read: “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.” I was struck by the absurdity of that quote. Many don’t realise that living here, right now, is heaven.

Religions often seem to have trained us to believe in a heaven “out there”—a distant reward to distract us from our pain here. We’re told to sacrifice our joy, suppress our desires, and endure suffering for a paradise that never arrives. It’s like a carrot hung in front of cattle—always just out of reach. Infact In Mahābhārata, Bhishma Parva urges the warriors that virgins wait in heaven for their valour and death in the battlefield.

In verse 6.11.13, Sanjaya declares to Dhritarashtra:

“Those who die in battle, having fought bravely, attain the regions of the righteous, where celestial nymphs wait upon them.”

The battlefield becomes a portal to heaven, and death becomes passport and visa. But what gets lost is the heaven of this life—the heaven of ordinariness, of compassion, of presence.

By the way this motif isn’t unique to the Mahābhārata. In Norse mythology, warriors who die in battle are promised entry into Valhalla, where they feast and fight eternally under Odin’s gaze. The valour of death becomes the ticket to glory. In Islamic martyrdom traditions, especially in certain militant interpretations, paradise is promised to those who die defending the faith—often described with vivid imagery of gardens, rivers, and companions.

Even in Indian traditions, moksha or mukti is often described as a state of eternal bliss—freedom from rebirth, from the cycle of earthly pain and suffering. In other words, another metaphor for heaven. Swarga, Vaikuntha, Kailasa—each tradition paints its own celestial landscape. But the paradox remains: we long for liberation from this world, even as the teachings whisper that liberation is found in this world.

My reflection, however, leans into a different, though equally ancient, interpretation found within those very same traditions. It’s the voice that questions:

What if the goal is not to escape the world, but to see it correctly?

This is the radical non-dual perspective within Vedanta, the “nirvana is samsara” of Mahayana Buddhism, and the “ordinary mind is the Tao” of Zen.

From this vantage point:

  • Heaven (Swarga) vs. Moksha: In the traditional ladder, swarga is a temporary, pleasant abode—a reward for good deeds, after which one must return to Earth. Moksha is the final release from that very cycle. But we often treat moksha itself as a super-sized, permanent swarga—a “better place” elsewhere. This longing for “elsewhere” blinds us to the sacredness of “here.”
  • The Problem isn’t Earth, it’s Ignorance: The suffering isn’t inherent in the world, but in our avidya—our distorted perception. We suffer because we cling to what is impermanent as if it were permanent and believe the fragile ego to be the whole truth of who we are.
  • Liberation is a Shift in Perception, not Location: When ignorance falls away, the world isn’t negated—it is transfigured. The same marketplace, the same breath, the same neighbour, is seen in its true nature—as luminous, empty, and inseparable from the divine ground of being.

So perhaps the eternal bliss of moksha isn’t the antithesis of earthly life, but its fulfilment. We don’t leave the world to find heaven—we discover heaven by fully, awake-ly, living in the world. The raft (ego) isn’t burned because it’s evil, but because the crossing is complete. One stands on the further shore, only to realize the shore was always right here, and the river was an illusion of perception all along.

So we return, as always, to the paradox of ego and desire. At the beginning, they seemed like obstacles—something to be killed, disciplined, erased. But now they appear as gates. Ego is the raft, desire the wind. Without them, there is no crossing. With them, there is danger of clinging, of craving.

The task is not annihilation, but clarification.

  • Ego clarified becomes openness, a self that is porous, playful, and free.
  • Desire clarified becomes aspiration, a current that carries us toward compassion and ordinariness.

When ego hardens, the world shrinks. When desire distorts, the heart thirsts endlessly. But when ego softens, the world enters us. When desire steadies, the path unfolds beneath our feet. Perhaps this is the paradox: we do not transcend ego and desire by destroying them, but by letting them dissolve into their true nature. Ego as transparency. Desire as aspiration. Both as companions on the way.

And then, as always, we return to the marketplace—smiling, bowing, buying onions. Heaven is not elsewhere. It is here, in the ordinariness of breath, in the neighbour’s greeting, in the stray dog’s eyes. And the other shore is not the shore of Nirvana, but of our present life—this breath, this neighbour, this stray dog, this marketplace. Ego and desire do not vanish; they are clarified, softened, made transparent. They return with us to the ordinariness of living, no longer chains but companions.

The realisation / enlightenment or whatever we name is the understanding that  there is no non-dualism without dualism, no day without night, no life without death and no yin without yang. Realisation is not the erasure of opposites, but the seeing that opposites are inseparable.

 

On the Way of Fireflies and False Lights and Borrowed Brilliance

On the Way of Fireflies and False Lights and Borrowed Brilliance

by | Nov 24, 2025 | Life, Management, Meaning, Zen

Btw Nature as we call it is not all about serene views and instagram photo shoot opportunities… As every Rose comes its thorn, nature too comes with its own paradoxes….. After rainfall, especially regions like Tamil Nadu, it’s common to witness swarms of winged insects. They are winged termites or ants… (they are not Fireflies) Attracted to artificial light, and die within hours.. gathering around artificial lights.. interesting thing is they are alwys swarm near to blue or white elctric lamps.. anot the yellowish ones. aFter swarming, they shed their wings and die quickly.. Naturalists say especially if they fail to. mate of find shelter.. And often in the mornigns yo see piles of dead insects near the map. By the fireflies are biolumiescent insects that emit light from their abdomen. And they are not attracted to artificial light in the same way. They are not known to swarm and die en masse around eletric lamps.

This natural paradox is a powerful metaphor for our own lives and careers. How often are we, like the insects, drawn to the “borrowed brilliance” of trendy ideologies, external validation, or the glamour of someone else’s success? This mindless swarming is not true community, and such attraction rarely leads to meaningful union or purpose.

This challenge of navigating external noise is not new. Steve Jobs articulated it perfectly when he explained the core of Apple’s marketing philosophy, saying:

“This is a very complicated world; it’s a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.”

This is the corporate equivalent of the firefly’s path. Jobs understood that the only way to cut through the “noisy world” was not to swarm towards the artificial lights of competitors or trends, but to be radically clear about your own core identity—to generate your own light from within.

May be that is why Buddhs said to us “appo deepo bhava” and. Krishamurti wrote ““It is only when you are a light to yourself that there is freedom.” The insects teach us: Not all light is guidance. Not all swarming is Sangha. Not all attraction leads to union.

Let us not be drawn to borrowed brilliance. Let us glow from within, like the firefly— not to dazzle, but to illuminate the path.

The Art of Living Well: Rehearsing Failure and Symbolic Death for a Successful Life

The Art of Living Well: Rehearsing Failure and Symbolic Death for a Successful Life

by | Nov 21, 2025 | Harmony, Life, Meaning, Meditation, Transformation, Zen

One of the best ways to set ourselves to success in any endeavour in life, is prepare ourselves the best for a potential failure. While it is true, with respect to skills, strengths and ability, it is better to strengthen our strengths than bridge the endless gap of lack of it. That does not work in the area of mindset and attitude.

How much ever we reframe ourselves with positive thinking and paper over those fears with hope, fear of failure, performance anxiety lies in some distant corner of our mind, like that potassium permanganate capsule. And the moment it gets burst in a beaker of water, it colours the water in no time. The same with that capsule of fear of failure / performance anxiety in the darkest recesses of our mind.

And only way we can purge it out of our system is, putting the 1000 lumens headlight of awareness right into it. All human transformations begin with awareness. In management parlance, there is a cycle of unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence. Unless we bring out what is there in our unconscious mind to the effervescent light of awareness, we will never be able to transform it.

This is where the ancient practices come alive. The way to do it is those Stoic exercises on death or Jesuit memento mori. While I learnt the Stoic exercise from the annual Stoic Week organised by University of Exeter, Fr. AMA taught me about the Jesuit practice of memento mori. Once we visualise what is the worst that can happen in our endeavour and then survive those torrid feelings in our body, it dissolves itself. The nervous system learns it has already “died” and returned. The capsule loses its potency. This is not just a mental reframing but a physiological release — the body itself learns freedom.

Athletes too have discovered this gate. Sports psychologists train competitors to rehearse failure — missed shots, falls, defeats — so that when the real contest arrives, the body does not recoil. The fear has already been faced. And Phil Jackson, the “Zen Master” of the Chicago Bulls, brought this wisdom to Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and their teammates. He taught them meditation, breath awareness, and detachment from outcomes. In his method, the game was not just about winning but about presence. By rehearsing loss, by facing impermanence, the Bulls dissolved their fear and played with freedom.

I have been a student of spirituality and meditation for some 30+ years. And I did read quite a bit (in fact late Dr. Satish Inamdar, KFI Trustee and Director of The Valley School had said to me once, I will find my “way” when I stopped reading!) and did my quota of channel surfing and spiritual shopping in my life. And the search kind of ended while watching an NBA basketball match on TV in West Haven. Seeds of Zen were planted in my mind in the most unlikely of places. West Haven.

During June 1998. That was my first visit to the land of Baseball and Basketball. Both Greek and Latin games for me as a spectator. In the NBA final, Chicago Bulls were playing against Utah Jazz. What got my eye and attention was Chicago Bulls Coach Phil Jackson. There was an article in NYTimes that he used to make players like Dennis Rodman, who was an out and out rebellious, rule-breaking toughie, and Scottie Pippen and the larger-than-life Michael Jordan, all managed by the Zen Coach, Phil Jackson. I would have read and reread his book Sacred Hoops more than once. He was deeply spiritual with Native Indian and Zen philosophy. In fact, Jackson spent a large part of his life studying Buddhism and its principles, from his mentor Shunryu Suzuki. Jackson wrote, “What appealed to me about Zen practice was its inherent simplicity. It didn’t involve chanting mantras or visualizing complex images, as had other practices I’d tried. Zen is pragmatic, down-to-earth, and open to exploration. It doesn’t require you to subscribe to a certain set of principles or take anything on faith.”

Fourteen years later, in 2012, after my own experiments with truth and lies of spirituality, I did a hard landing into Bodhi Zendo and Zen, and real spiritual seeking started.

AMA Samy and Bodhi Zendo were different. I would compare Bodhi Zendo a bit with Esalen of Big Sur, CA. One of the most beautiful places of learning I had visited. It was not as regimented as a Vipassana session. It did allow a good amount of personal space to oneself. Sometimes a good conversation, a good joke and laughter at the dining table along with some yummy food, is as good as anything else in this world towards one’s spiritual seeking.

Secondly, AMA Samy had one of the best collections of books on spirituality, philosophy, theology and psychology I have seen in my life. (AMA seems to have read most of them.) When I was a full-time student of MA Education at APU Bangalore, I had to write a term paper on Phenomenology of Krishnamurti’s teachings as an assignment for Dr. Kaustav Roy. I was searching for a book of Heidegger at the Zendo library one December afternoon. AMA walked in to keep some book and he asked me what I was reading. When I explained to him my struggle with that phenomenology paper, he spent 15–20 minutes to sum it up for me like a précis. I ran back to my room, and jotted down in my notebook whatever I could remember. That assignment is one of the few for which I got an O grade. And getting it from Dr. Kaustav Roy was almost like a Fields Medal. 🙂

Thirdly and most importantly, no one demanded that the camel got to pass through the eye of needle test of Faith first and salvation later. The Kalama Sutta poster on the wall said it so succinctly: “Don’t blindly believe what I say. Don’t believe me because others convince you of my words. Don’t believe anything you see, read, or hear from others, whether of authority, religious teachers or texts.” And AMA Samy did practice it to every dot in the i and j and crosses in the t. Though he had a tough and rough demeanour as a Zen master, there was an endearing quality of integrity and compassion about the man. He took his spirituality and teaching seriously, not himself. That was absolutely refreshing to my tired seeking mind.

Even then, it took me 3 years to seek to be accepted as AMA’s Zen student. As the saying goes, once bitten twice shy and the cat which falls into a hot water tub will stay even from a cold water one. Heidi, a co-student of AMA in Japan with Yamada Roshi and later AMA’s student, spoke to me and asked me to join Bodhi Sangha.

And I did decide to seek to be accepted as a student of AMA Samy, after reading this passage in one of the books written by him:

“The master cannot give you satori; she/he is there to guide, to challenge, to test, to confirm. In truth, all the world is your teacher, the whole life of birth and death is the training field… Zen, therefore, is a teaching by negation, negating everything that the student supposes Zen to be, hoping that the student will realize that by not being any particular thing, s/he is everything; and that by not being any particular self, s/he is selflessly all selves.”

Coming back to our theme of this note: what emerges here is not just resilience, but antifragility — the capacity to grow stronger through stress and shocks. By rehearsing failure, we do not merely withstand adversity; we integrate it, and in doing so, we gain from it. The process unfolds as a living cycle:

Awareness → Acceptance → Integration → Freedom.

We move fear from the unconscious (where it controls us) to the conscious (where we can work with it). By mentally and emotionally surviving the worst-case scenario, we integrate the experience, and the capsule loses its potency. What remains is not naive hope, but a confident, grounded presence.

As the saying goes, hope for the best and prepare for the worst is the best strategy. Not pessimism, but resilience. In Zen terms, it is living with the certainty of impermanence while still planting seeds of joy and trust.

 

Reclaiming the Temple of Sleep: The Lotus Pond and Night stars.

Reclaiming the Temple of Sleep: The Lotus Pond and Night stars.

by | Nov 18, 2025 | Harmony, Life, Meditation, Peace, Trust, Zen

Sometime back, I asked Fr. AMA what the mark of a spiritually evolved person is. He replied, “They may have reconciled their relationship with money, power, sex, and hunger.” Later, when I read Buddha’s five Nīvaraṇa (hindrances), when I saw sloth and sleepiness (Thīna-middha) as one of the Nīvaraṇa, I added one more of my own: a sound, deep sleep.  Not as a hindrance but, essential for spiritual evolvement.  If one can’t sleep well, may be how can one be awake well and live well.

Though I don’t know where I stand on that list of hindrances, one thing I can say is I am not much bothered about it anymore. But one box I can tick is sound, deep sleep. May be that is why I added it to that list.  Those holy books and enlightenment literature always talk about enlightenment as awakening from sleep. But they hardly realise that one awakens well only when one sleeps well and deep. Our own life is nothing but a spark of light between two eternal sleeps. And without that eternal sleep, before the beginning and after the end, there is no spark of light and life. Similarly, ever good day lived in wakefulness, is between two deep good sleeps.

Animals remind us that sleep is never uniform but always adapted to survival. Bears and bats hibernate, entering long torpor where metabolism slows and hunger waits at the edge of waking. Dolphins and whales sleep with one half of the brain at a time, keeping one eye open to guard against predators. Birds too drift in unihemispheric rest, balancing vigilance with renewal. Even creatures like giraffes or certain fish seem to sleep with eyes open, conserving energy while remaining alert. Evolution teaches that sleep is not a luxury but a covenant, reshaped by environment and necessity.

Humans, by nature, are diurnal beings. Our bodies are tuned to the rhythm of sun and shadow, waking with light and surrendering to darkness. Yet the Industrial Revolution, with its artificial light and endless productivity, compelled many into nocturnal patterns. Factories and electric lamps broke the covenant, forcing us to live against our biology. In this dissonance, sleep disorders multiplied, and the ritual of trust was forgotten. To reclaim sleep is to reclaim our natural rhythm, to remember that we are not nocturnal hunters but beings of day and night, of surrender and renewal.

Mythology too circles around sleep, magnifying its power and paradox. In the Ramayana, Kumbhakarna is cursed to sleep for six months and wake for only one day, a cycle that mirrors the hibernation of bears. His story is both comic and tragic — sleep as abundance, sleep as curse. In Greek myth, Endymion is granted eternal sleep by Zeus, a timeless rest that suspends vitality. Hypnos, the god of sleep, is brother to Thanatos, death itself, reminding us that sleep and mortality are kin. In Hindu and Buddhist lore, sages and enlightened beings are said to transcend ordinary sleep, resting in awareness beyond waking and dreaming. Myth remembers sleep as both vulnerability and power, both surrender and transcendence.

Even gods and animals remind us: sleep is not absence, but renewal. Whether in the hibernation of bears, the one-eyed vigilance of dolphins, or the enchanted slumber of Kumbhakarna, sleep remains the covenant between body, mind, and cosmos. To sleep deeply is to trust — to let problems sink into the lotus pond, to let blessings rise and dance in the night breeze, and to awaken renewed at dawn.

During modern times, especially after the advent of scientific management, sleep was looked down upon with contempt. Productivity and efficiency became the new gods, and those who needed more sleep — even the average quota required by the body — were branded lazy, not up to the corporate mark. Higher education institutions, preparing students as future cogs in the corporate machine, began loading them with assignments and work, training them to wear sleeplessness as a badge of honour. To survive on a few hours of rest became a symbol of toughness, a distorted virtue. In the era of social media, even political leaders project this image — sleepless nights as proof of dedication.

Of course, there were exceptions. Winston Churchill was said to take long afternoon naps and then return to work with renewed vigour. And I remember my own corporate days at Wipro in 1995, working on the fourth floor of S.B. Towers, MG Road. The top floor housed the management. Once, passing the narrow corridor that divided the open office from the cabins, I saw Ashok Soota, then our CEO, sleeping on a mat on the floor. A colleague later told me he did this regularly, and everyone knew not to disturb him. Much later, when I tried the same in our EC office, my annual 360-degree feedback carried two criticisms about it. When I shared this with my then boss during appraisal, he laughed and said, “In corporate, the top fellas can do anything. Those who are bonded labourers are not supposed to. And remember, it is not the results, but the perception that matters.”

In essence having a good relationship with one of important needs for our life is as difficult as any other instincts.  Most of the tradition and rituals are developed by societies to take care of those nivarans or to ensure a smooth societal living. Tradition are rituals based on wisdom, and wisdom is always derivative of the knowledge in one particular time. Rituals are not timeless—they carry the imprint of the knowledge available in that moment. When knowledge evolves, rituals must evolve too, or else they become hollow forms. Two points about the wild animals in nature remind us of this evolutionary wisdom. First, they are not programmed for a deep sleep. That is evolutionary. If someone is lost in deep sleep, one may end up as a lunch or breakfast for another. Second, most of the hunting animals, which require speed and faster response, have a higher breathing rate. And they also have a lesser living age. Speed and responsiveness come at the cost of longevity. Evolution balances survival strategies differently depending on ecological niche. Most of the human being problems stem from the fact that though our environment has changed, we have not bothered to reprogram our rituals. Most important of all the rituals is the ritual of sleeping. We all need a long deep sleep to rejuvenate and rebuild our body. Yet we cling to outdated patterns—late-night meals, overstimulation, artificial light—while ignoring the wisdom of renewal. In effect, we have broken the covenant between body and environment.

After we started living in better protected shelters than in open spaces and caves, human beings started evolving their sleep habits and used to follow nature’s rhythm. Last meals of the day were before the sun set. And though people used fire as light, since those resources were scarce, it was put out well before our ancestors hit the bed. Darkness itself became the cue for sleep. The body’s rhythm was perfectly attuned to the cycle of sun and shadow.

Today, artificial light tricks our bodies into believing it is still day. Screens and productivity rituals have replaced the ancient ritual of surrender. We have forgotten that sleep is not just biological—it is a ritual of trust. Trust in the shelter to protect. Trust in the rhythm of nature to guide. Trust in darkness to renew.

Our body starts sleeping only when our mind starts sleeping and is still. In modern times, with all those electric lights (white) and blue lights of the screen, music, food eaten closer to the sleep time even after birds have rested and sun had set—all cause our mind unrest. The body cannot rebuild if the mind refuses to yield. To sleep deeply is to allow the mind to bow, to let silence and darkness become the true temple.

In Zen practice, breathing is the most important ritual. One Zen quote says: “You can’t wipe away blood with more blood.” Similarly, you cannot wipe out thoughts with more thoughts. Breath is what unites body and mind. Zen emphasizes focusing the breath into the hara (tanden, lower abdomen), rather than at the nostrils as in Vipassana or at the third eye in other traditions. This shift of attention is a way of stilling the mind. At the end of the day, we often take the brain as the seat of all thoughts. But in Zen, the hara becomes the true seat of awareness—breath anchoring us away from the turbulence of thought into the stillness of being. And moving that focus even from hara to heel is even more effective. Sooner, one will know that the mind is still, all our problems, pains, suffering and challenges of the day have been written, cast away, and sunk deep into the lotus pond. And those blessings of the day will start floating on the surface, dancing in the night breeze. And soon, we would have slept.

First, I became  aware of the sleep rituals when I was deprived of it. I was in deep depression due to tinnitus peaking, and at first another doctor, when my Doctor, Dr. Raja Hiremani was away, prescribed a medicine named Olanzapine in a higher dose and another medicine for sleeping. Before that, for days together, sleep left me. It was a very difficult time. I hardly ate. But there was no hunger. No sleep too. Though I used to feel the effects of sleep deprivation. But after those medicines, though I used to fall asleep, suddenly my legs or hands used to jerk so violently during sleep as if they belonged to another soul beyond my mind’s control. And I used to be so startled and scared of that.

So I wrote a lengthy email to Fr. AMA. At that point of time, he had moved out of Bodhi Zendo and was living in a small room in Little Flower School. One of those days I called my family friend, Dr. Radhakrishnan. He was undergoing some procedure in a hospital in Coimbatore and his spouse Usha Aunty took the call. Maybe by listening to my sad tone of voice, she handed over the phone to Dr. He did listen for a few minutes and told me that no one really knows how those neurological medicines act on the human body unlike other normal medicines. Since I am into meditation etc., why don’t I try that out.

And on the same day I got a reply from Fr. AMA saying, though it will take some time to build the new Zendo, there is going to be a two-week Koan Seminar in the school. Till then just do Zazen and focus on my tinnitus at home. Maybe I was on the edge between life and death. And one morning, I just threw away those sleeping tablets into the dust bin though Dr. Raja Hiremani advised me to taper it down rather than stopping it at once. I started sleeping well. Maybe my body was getting back all those deprived sleep. There were days when I woke up during the lunch time. But I never had to go back to those medicines or even supplements for sleep. And that is when my own learning and experimentation with sleep rituals started.

Now I can sleep even on a noisy railway platform in a moment. Some time back, when I shared that in my WhatsApp group, a good friend and ex-Wipro colleague Mukesh wrote back that he could sleep even standing in a moving bus. But then Mukesh was one of the coolest persons I had met in my life.

Last meal of the day at the Zendo is at 6:00 pm. Fr. AMA has his light supper a bit earlier than that. Music meditation ends at 8:00 pm and then it lights out. I do check my emails for 10 minutes and write down the day review. Then laptop and phone are out.

My most important learning was: as times change, we need to gain new knowledge about the environment, revise our wisdom and rituals. This reprogramming became my nightly practice, a three-part ritual to close the day.

First comes the Emotional Catharsis—the Problem Sink. I write a day review, beginning with the most problematic event of the day. The first version is an emotional outburst, pure feeling onto the page. This is the act of “casting away.” Then, after a few deep chiposoku breaths, I write it again, this time as a clean, objective problem statement. This is the “sinking.” I am telling my mind, “It is noted. It is stored. We will address it in the light of tomorrow.” This, I realize, is the modern equivalent of our ancestors putting out the fire for the night—a ritual act of closure, trusting that the shelter will hold until dawn.

Next is the Gratitude Journal—the Blessings Dance. Here, I look for the silver linings, even on days of the darkest clouds. A good message from my better half, a show of affection from Zendog Bhim. This conscious cultivation of trust is the active reprogramming of the mind from turbulence to peace. These are not just words; they are the most potent nutrients for the soul. Truly, this practice has become the best sleeping pill, melatonin, and magnesium supplement, all combined into one.

Finally, I engage the Physical Anchors—the path from Hara to Heel. The last read is the Four Great Vows. Then, on the bed, I begin chiposoku breathing. But now, the journey of attention deepens. I let my tongue touch the upper palate, a subtle Tai Chi cue to connect the body’s energy and promote stillness. Then, I move my focus from the breath in the hara, down, all the way to the heels. This is the ultimate act of grounding. By rooting my awareness there, I am no longer in the thinking brain. I am planting myself into the earth, into the primal trust of simply being. I become as solid and unmoving as a mountain, ready for the final surrender.

This embodied practice is the synthesis; it is the theory made truth.

That my Garmin notes a sleep score of 80-90, even on short nights, proves a vital point: sleep is not an absence, but a quality of renewal. The ritual itself is what matters. And the ability to sleep on a noisy platform? That is the ultimate proof that the covenant of trust has been rebuilt. The shelter is no longer just four walls; I carry it within me. The chiposoku breath is no longer just a technique; it is the living bridge that unites my body and mind, moment by moment, breath by breath. When the hara steadies, the heel roots. Problems sink into the lotus pond, blessings rise and dance in the night breeze. Ritual is wisdom reprogrammed, and dawn is the seal of trust.

Vedanta speaks of four states of consciousness: waking (jagrat), dreaming (Svapna), deep sleep (sushupti), and the fourth, turiya—pure awareness beyond them all. Though this suggests metaphorical sleep  (ignorance, delusion)  and separate it from the biological, restorative sleep (renewal, trust). In my lived experience biological restorative sleep is not an obstacle to the former but is , in fact it’s essential prerequisite.  To me, my nightly ritual feels like a conscious reprogramming of these very states. The Emotional Catharsis clears the residues of the waking world. The Problem Sink dissolves the forming fragments of dream. The Gratitude Dance prepares the mind for the pristine stillness of deep sleep. And in the Hara-to-Heel grounding, there is a hint of turiya—that steady, unwavering awareness which remains, whether awake, dreaming, or asleep. In this way, the ritual is not merely about sleep, but about touching the very substratum of consciousness itself, where renewal and awakening are one and the same. Moving on to other  spiritual traditions, including the Buddhist nīvaraṇas and certain strands of Christian asceticism, sleep/sloth is framed as a hindrance. The goal is to overcome it, to reduce attachment to the body’s need for rest to pursue higher states. The metaphor of “awakening from the sleep of ignorance” is ubiquitous.

Conventional wisdom often places “spiritual practice” (meditation, prayer, study) above “biological maintenance” (sleep, diet).  Zen reframes and  flips this hierarchy. Hakuin Ekaku, one of the most radical and influential Zen Master ever lived, in his song of Zazen says “At this moment , what are you seeking ? Nirvana is right here before youer eyes: This very place is the louts land ! and This very body, the Buddha!”

I reckon  that deep, ritualized sleep is itself a high form of spiritual practice—a “ritual of trust” and “surrender.” It is not the lowly ground crew that enables the spiritual rocket to launch; it is part of the rocket’s fundamental engineering. By making sleep a conscious ritual, we can elevate it from a passive state to an active one, from a biological necessity to a spiritual discipline.

 

Komorebi: Perfect Days in Shadow and Light

Komorebi: Perfect Days in Shadow and Light

by | Nov 13, 2025 | Harmony, Integrity, Joy, Life, Peace, Zen

At our Zendo, Sunday evening movies were once a quiet tradition.

After the reopening, that rhythm slipped away, as if waiting for the right conditions to return. When the new kitchen and dining hall were built, the old dining space by the Zendo hall transformed into a reading room and library—a place of books, silence, and study. We named it as Yamada Koun Library, after Fr. AMA ‘s  Zen Master. 

It was only last year, when Dr. Meath Conlan, a Sangha member, visited and wished to share his film on the Benedictine monk and guru Bede Griffiths, it got reignited. Btw we can’t move on without mentioning about Dr. Meath Conlan. He is one of the persons enriched my life on the way of spiritual seeking immensely. By any yardstick, Meath is an extra ordinary person and lead so far, an extraordinary life.  His great grandfather T Conlan was once a VC of University of Allahabad. Once means a long time back. 1894-98 … And Meath as a spiritual seeker would have read about various traditions and travelled around the world in general and India in particular than most of the people whom I have met. He is a retired diocesan priest who once was the Vatican’s representative in China. He is a polymath, knowledgeable in so many areas, a writer and teacher himself.  His elegant film “The Human touch” on Bede Griffith was broadcast on ABC. And another connection I have with Meath, in addition to being fellow disciples of Fr. AMA and Bodhi sangha members are he knew Tony De Mello in person. And I was / still am a big fan of Tony De Mello’s writing.

Then Sr. Chitra offered a gift to Yamada Koun Library —a large Panasonic screen—and suddenly the Zendo had a new way of gathering. Zen Master Olaf Muyoju suggested Perfect Days for the following Sunday.  And so, the tradition was reborn. To ensure that we don’t regress, Wolf a Sangha member from America, gave me a hard disk with some 200 of the best movies from his collection.

May be the move Prefect days was a perfect restart.  Perfect Days is a more of a film of shadows and silences.

 Hirayama, its hero, if  the current and lofty success standards of our “clean and mean” society permits us to  call a toilet cleaner/janitor as a hero,   speaks very little. Indeed, so very little that one can count the number of his dialogues. But Hirayama’s life unfolds not in dialogues, but in the stillness of  his daily rituals: folding his bed sheet, watering plants, cleaning toilets, listening to cassette tapes,  a lonely lunch under the same tree in the same park day after day, photographing the play of light through trees. At first, I thought whether I could sit through this. But then what seemed monotonous and boring instead came out as  so lively and luminous. Each act is performed with care, with presence. The film does not hurry, does not hurry at all and  does not bother to explain. It simply shows us that even in the smallest gestures, there is a wholeness, a completeness.

In a way this is the rhythm of Fr. AMA and Zendo life too. Early morning Zazen, breakfast, Samu, Sweeping the floor, bowing, walking the Dog. Each act, when done with attention, becomes sacred. And for some mysterious reason this life doesn’t feel boring at all. It feels peaceful. Sacred even. Like there’s something holy in how he takes care of the smallest things.

There’s no big drama in Hirayama’s life. No loud pain. No chase for wealth or attention. But you can feel it. The loneliness he doesn’t complain about. The joy he doesn’t announce. The kindness he gives without asking anything in return. A recurring motif in the film is the canopy of trees. Hirayama photographs them daily, capturing the subtle shifts of light filtering through the leaves. In Japanese, there is a word for this: komorebi—the quality of sunlight as it passes through foliage. Komorebi is never pure brightness. It is light and shadow together, inseparable. Hirayama’s life is like this. (to an extent my life too!)  He carries his past, his pain, like the rings of a tree—silent cassette tapes of storms and seasons. Yet he continues to move quietly, toward the light. When he finds a struggling seedling, he gently scoops it into a folded paper pouch, carries it home, and nurtures it among his saplings. The trees are his companions, his mirrors. They remind us that life is both rooted and reaching, both scarred and vital.

Yet the Director of the movie does not give us an oversentimental portrait. Beneath Hirayama’s serenity, shadows flicker. A niece tells him a disturbing story about a boy who stabs his parents after they cook and eat his pet turtle. His estranged sister appears, brusquely reminding him of their father. In these brief encounters, we glimpse a past marked by rupture, perhaps even trauma. And these scenes come and go in a flash. I missed it the first time. And the second time, I had to rewind and watch again.  The director of the movie does not care to explain. Neither does the hero, Hirayama. He simply nods, accepts, and returns to his life. His quiet routines are not naïve simplicity—they seem to be deliberate practice of turning toward presence, a way of living with shadows without being consumed by them. His “perfect days” are not perfect because they are free of suffering, but because they hold both shadow and light—komorebi itself.

One of the most striking aspects of the film is Hirayama’s devotion to cleaning toilets. His young assistant mocks him: “Why spend so much time and energy? They’ll just get dirty again.” But Hirayama’s effort is not about permanence. It is about presence. Each act of scrubbing, polishing, and restoring is a gesture of respect and compassion—for the space, for the people who will use it, for life itself. In Zen, this is Samu: work as practice, labour as meditation. The point is not to achieve a final state of cleanliness, but to embody care in each moment. After seeing the movie, one of the things I did was to create a few posters on the art of dishwashing.   I took a lot from an article of Thay. ( I will share those )

It has been a recent practice in LinkedIn to list down the cultural practices of Japanese. Most of them repeat the most famous ones. Like kaizen or kintsugi etc. It was quite fascinating for me to learn about komorebi which is the central metaphor of the movie. Life is not about achieving pure, unadulterated light (joy, peace, bliss or perfection). It is about learning to appreciate, even cherish, the dappled and understated pattern where light and shadow are inseparable. Hirayama’s past, his loneliness, his trauma—these are the shadows that give depth and contrast to the simple joys of his music, his plants, and his work. His “perfect days” are perfect because they hold the whole of it, without denial or despair.

By the way this spirit is not confined to cinema. A recent news report from Tokyo said, Koichi Matsubara, a 56‑year‑old man, earns over 30 million yen (nearly ₹2 crore) annually from rental properties and investments. Financially, he has no need to work. Yet he chooses to spend his days as a janitor, cleaning common areas and doing basic maintenance in a residential building.

He works only part‑time, earning a modest 100,000 yen a month—far below Tokyo’s average salary. Why? Because, like Hirayama, he finds meaning in simplicity. The work keeps him active, grounded, and healthy. It gives rhythm to his days. It is not about money, but about living fully in the ordinary.

Matsubara’s story, like Hirayama’s, is a reminder that dignity is not measured by status or wealth, but by the spirit we bring to our actions.

When Wolf, another ultimate polymath and spiritual seeker, I have seen in my life, handed over his collection of movies , I was thinking the way  the Zendo movie tradition slipped away and was reborn is a good lesson. Things in life and practice fall away, and we don’t force them. We wait for the “right conditions,” for the gift of a film, a screen, and a suggestion from a teacher to allow it to return, renewed. This is not regression, but a natural cycle.

 In a way that movie taught that one could live a quiet life and still have a beautiful one.

That’s what I felt while watching Perfect Days. This movie made me realize something. That maybe we’ve been running too fast. Wanting too much. Comparing too often. Reflecting too much on the past.. “It could have been” stuff.  But life doesn’t always have to be loud to be meaningful. Sometimes, it can be found in small routines and stillness.  Decibel levels, the number of likes one gather, the model of the iPhone, the place we went for the last vacation, or the fancy food in that Michelin star restaurant in our Instagram post, or even that AI written intellectual sounding article…. We hardly realise all these chips away parts of our soul one chip at a time.

Some might say Hirayama’s life is simple. But to my uninitiated eyes it looks wholesome. This is the great secret that so many miss in their frantic search for more. A life can be quiet, simple, and utterly, profoundly beautiful. It is a life where every action, no matter how small, is performed with care and presence. It is a life where we can live with the shadows and traumas of our past without being overwhelmed and consumed by them. As the saying goes every saint has a past and every sinner a future.  A sinner gets is present moment and future when one accepts one’s past.

And most importantly we don’t need to be seen by the world to feel alive, and that a folded bed sheet, a clean toilet, or the light through the trees can be more than enough. It can be everything.

And it recalled a question from long ago, from Prof. Indrani Bhattacharjee’s Epistemology class in Azim Premji University on Dharmakīrti: If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it happen? I think I understand it now. Though, she may not upgrade my low grades in that Epistemology course.  And that answer is not found in a textbook, but in a life like Hirayama’s. The reality of the fallen tree—like the reality of our own pain, our joy, our past—does not depend on an external audience. It becomes fully, wholly real when we ourselves can turn towards it with unwavering attention and acceptance. Hirayama’s practice is to be the ultimate witness to his own life. He hears every falling tree in his soul, the shadows and the light, and in doing so, he makes his days perfect.

The final lesson is that “perfection” is not a flawless state or ever bliss, but as the courageous, equanimous and attentive embrace and acceptance of the whole of one’s experience. It brings to mind why I named my own book Fallen Flower, Fragrant Grass—that even a flower which has fallen unseen upon the grass, far from the costly vase of an ikebana arrangement, can still offer its fragrance to the world. Its beauty and purpose are not diminished because they go un-witnessed by the crowd.

Those Flowers Bloom, Even When No One Counts the Petals

Those Flowers Bloom, Even When No One Counts the Petals

by | Nov 12, 2025 | Joy, Life, Meaning, Uncategorized, Zen

Last year, as I was frantically sending out blank requests with attached sample blogs to publishers, one from Chennai very derisively told me: if my blog reached 5000 in the counter, he would publish my book, Fallen Flower, Fragrant Grass.

I did all the tricks I knew and learnt from one of the best SM strategists in Blr (of course low bono work… TRC breakfast :)). And it fell very much short of that 5000 mark. Then I had to go the Kindle self‑publishing way.

That publisher from Chennai gave me an arbitrary, derisive goalpost. It was a “no” disguised as a conditional “maybe.” .I fell short of his meaningless number, but in the process, I built a real, organic audience.

This morning, as I remembered that put‑down, I checked the blog counter again. It had crossed the quirky Nelson number—8888—into 8889. A great miss, perhaps, of what some call “luck.” But in truth, the luck was already here: self‑publishing was the Dharma gate, the breath that didn’t wait for permission.

Btw I was always intrigued by Nelson Numbers… there is a great story behind that. The great Admiral Nelson, who defeated Napoelan had one eye, one hand and one leg. It is said that was a unique luch which played in his victory against Napolean.   Then numbers such as 1111 is called an Angel Number.   3 weeks ago, my good friend , who is the Chief Product Officer of a very promising ( and valued ) AI startup had put out a note in his linkedin wall. Which said their booth number is 1112 in an international exhibition at Barcelona… And I pinged him that he missed the angel number by one for your booth.. Though he is one of those accomplished IIT-IIMer, he comes with a superb sense of humour. He is the one who forwarded that  Paris Museum theft blog. And he replied, “May be a cherub  can visit  and bless us with a few contracts “.    4 years back, I was attending the kick of meeting of Tata & Sons  Breakthru Coaching initiative. And the Zoom attendance list said 111.  And I put that out as a message to the group  .. There were quite a lot of a Smilies around it. But the  person who had taken me in as a Coach was aghast at that !

Mathematicians say a numbers are mental constructs, symbols we use to organize experience. In this view, “8888” or “1111” has no inherent power—it’s our imagination that gives it meaning, whether as Nelson numbers or angel numbers.  But then others see mathematics as a universal language, woven into the fabric of the cosmos. The ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, π, exists whether or not humans imagine it. The same goes with the ratios of  our human body. It seems to be designed by someone who has one a Fields medal in the heaven.

And then, the most important part: I didn’t let his “no” be the end of the story. Though it was pale imitation of Pirsig. ( It is reported that more than 121 publishers said no to his “Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle maintenance ).  I went the self‑publishing route. I put my work out into the world. I had a list of 20 who might be courageous and kind towards me to spend a few hundred rupees. And  that number crossed the 99 mark , silently . May be the next one “When Air turns into breath : Zendo chronicles”, will cross those landmarks with some noise.

And a few months back, I was sharing my blogs for getting published in good journals and mags. Cyrus Mistry told me , they pay well.  $1 per word.  A few ignored it. A few were kind enough to write back and one of them wrote, though the idea and writing is good, I got to work on my grammar.  So when I went back to Blr, I did look for my old Wren and Martin. I had my primary schooling in a local Govt school and then a vernacular aided high school . When I joined my +2 ( then PDC in Kerala), with a vengeance I worked on transforming my Manglish into English. Still I guess, I think in Malayalam and then speak and write in English.  .  If I could not cross the English channel between  Manglish and English in those 40 years, then I may never be on the other side, at least on the language side. But then one never knows.

Btw yesterday’s koan for the dokusan was  Tosu and “Every voice is the Buddha’s voice”.

It goes like this. “ A monk said to Tosu, It is said “every voice is the Buddha’s voice. IS that true?”  Tosu said, “Yes, it is true.”. The monk said , “Master, don’t let me hear you breaking wind.”. Tosu gave him a blow with his stick.

Guess , each one of get our chance to cross those meaningless milestones by let others listening to us breaking wind !

And yes, we all get our chance to “break wind”—to be unapologetically, messily, authentically ourselves. And sometimes, that sound, to the right listener, is the sound of enlightenment.

Yudhishthira’s Dog at the Gate: Dogs, Dharma, and the Paradox of Compassion

Yudhishthira’s Dog at the Gate: Dogs, Dharma, and the Paradox of Compassion

by | Nov 8, 2025 | Compassion, Friendship, Gratitude, Grief, Joy, Life, Zen

 

On the Kodai Ghat road, as you turn from the plains of the marketplace toward the winding hills, one notice stands out. The Forest Department urges travellers: Do not feed the wild animals. It is a reminder written in bureaucratic script, but it carries a deeper teaching. Feeding them changes their nature. They lose the instinct to forage, they grow dependent, they become aggressive. What begins as kindness can end as harm.

This question of compassion follows me into Kanzeon Zendo. Here too, there are three kinds of visitors:

  • Dog lovers, who see every wagging tail as a chance to practice kindness.
  • Those who are scared of dogs, whose compassion is mixed with fear and hesitation.
  • Those who don’t mind either way, who pass by without much thought.

Visitors who come for short stays often feed the stray dogs. Perumalmalai has no shortage of them—thin, hungry, territorial creatures, starved of food, care, and warmth. For a moment, the dogs are happy. They have found a good Samaritan. But when the visitors leave, the dogs remain. They linger at the Zendo gates, waiting for the next act of kindness. Compassion, offered in passing, leaves behind ripples that are not always gentle.

This paradox is not new. The Mahabharata begins with the curse of a dog and ends with the loyalty of another. As a child, I read Mali Bharatham, the Malayalam retelling of the epic sweetened for children. What struck me then, and now, is how dogs frame the epic.

The first story is about the curse of a dog on a king. Janamejaya, son of Parikshit, was conducting a yaga. A dog named Sarameya entered the arena and was beaten by the king’s brothers. Sarama, the mother, confronted the king. Not satisfied with his response, she cursed him.

The epic ends with Yudhishthira, who refuses to climb the celestial chariot to Heaven without the dog that had accompanied him on his final journey. He had lost his brothers and Panchali along the way, but he would not abandon the dog.

Between these two stories lie pages of valour and cowardice, justice and injustice, joy and sorrow, sacrifice and self‑centeredness. And yet, the dog remains—at the beginning and at the end—as a mirror of compassion and responsibility.

Much later, rereading these epics through the hermeneutical eye my Zen Master encouraged, I saw how curse is the last weapon of the helpless. When powerless, the curse becomes the cry of frustration. Wuji, too, came into our Zendo life as a living koan of compassion—sometimes blessing, sometimes burden, sometimes curse.

And then there was Jackie Mu.

The first dog in my imagination was Buck, Jack London’s hero in The Call of the Wild. Later, in childhood, Jackie the mongrel stood guard at our Thenkara gate. But Jackie Mu was different. She arrived at Kanzeon Zendo, half‑tamed, majestic, part Indie, part hound. Adopted by Tithi, cared for like Elsa in Born Free, she became part of our practice. She had her blanket, her medicine kit, her morning walks. She even had her koan: Mu.

Mu is the first case in The Gateless Gate. A monk asked Jōshū, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” Jōshū replied, “Mu.” Nothingness. Yet Jackie Mu, without doubt, had Buddha nature. She knew which doors to knock at, which people to trust, which paths to guide me along. She led me from Kanzeon Zendo to Bodhi Zendo, waiting at every turn, stopping at Surya tea stall for biscuits while I had chai.

But Jackie Mu was not only a guide. She was also a hunter. She never liked monkeys or cats, and chased them away whenever she could. She killed more than a few. One morning, during our walk toward St. Joseph farm, she spotted a kitten in the hands of a child waiting for her school bus. The kitten leapt from the child’s arms, tried to run, and Jackie Mu caught it in an instant. My screams did nothing. The child wailed, the mother tried to console her, and I sat on the kerb in anger and sorrow. And then, beside me, Jackie Mu appeared—obedient, present, as if nothing had happened. For a moment I did not know how to respond.

That weekend, when I was in Bangalore, came the news of her death. It seemed someone had poisoned her. The paradox closed: the dog who carried Mu, who embodied both loyalty and violence, was gone.

Whatsapp  message drenched in grief said: Jackie Mu had passed away. She lay down outside the meditation hall, her favourite place, and breathed her last. A pang struck deep, as if some part within me had died. Mahayana does not speak of soul, but I am sure Jackie Mu left her Buddha nature behind at the Zendo.

That night, I wrote to Fr. AMA:

Dear Fr. Ama, Tithy messaged me at 9:37 pm saying, “Laddo / Jackie Mu passed away.” Suddenly I felt a pang in my heart. As something within me had died down. I never had a pet before in my life, leave alone a dog. And I just happened to remember the koan Mu. As you used to teach us, all beings are connected in a way. Regardfully, Vishy Sankara

His reply was simple, tender, and true:

I too was saddened by the death of Laadu. It was fond of you, followed you often. I am in tears. Peace to Laadu and to you and to me. — AMA Samy

But compassion is not the same in everyone. In our Sangha, there are members like Robert, who genuinely care for dogs. He takes them along on his hikes, brings them to the vet, ensures vaccinations, medicine, and good food. His care is steady, embodied, and responsible.

And then there are those who are more superficial. They pet the dogs, feed them Zendo biscuits, and enjoy their company for a while. But when their time at the Zendo is over, they move on. They forget the true nature and requirement of being compassionate when a fine being reveals its great Mu nature to them.

This difference is itself a teaching. Compassion is not measured by the warmth of a single gesture, but by the continuity of care. To see the Buddha nature in a dog is to recognize both its joy and its vulnerability, and to respond with responsibility as well as affection.

So the Forest Department’s sign, the stray dogs of Perumalmalai, the curse of Sarama, the loyalty of Yudhishthira, the koan of Wuji, the life and death of Jackie Mu, the Sangha’s varied responses, and the tears of my teacher all converge. Compassion is not sentiment. It is awareness. It is foresight. It is the willingness to see the whole field, even when it complicates our desire to help. Sometimes compassion is feeding. Sometimes compassion is not feeding. Sometimes compassion is simply sitting on the kerb, seeing the dog, seeing our own heart, and bowing to the paradox.

The Mahābhārata ends with Yudhishthira, who refuses to climb the celestial chariot to Heaven without the dog that had accompanied him on his final journey. He had lost his brothers and Panchali along the way, but he would not abandon the dog. Perhaps our visitors too will take the cue, and be truly compassionate—not only in passing gestures, but in the continuity of care, in the willingness to walk alongside, even when the path is steep, even when Heaven itself beckons.

Bhim, the Zendog ...

The Fulcrum in the see-saw of your life : when your first life truly begins…

The Fulcrum in the see-saw of your life : when your first life truly begins…

by | Nov 6, 2025 | Harmony, Joy, Life, Peace, Zen

We are told: “We have two lives. The second begins when we realize we have only one.”

The sooner we realise, our first and only life is going to be lived as it could be lived… For many that realisation comes very close to their end. Though, some philosophers say we are all born equal. I beg to differ. We are born unequal… Some with silver spoon in their mouth, some golden ones and some no spoons at all… Many of us have to struggle and suffer a lot more than others… But in Death more or less we are equal. At the end of it all, it is 6 ft of earth or a handful of ashes.

A long time back, I worked as an Org change and transformation consultant at KAUST Thuwal, Jeddah… Btw full name of KAUST is King Abdulla University of Science and Technology… It is apt to say, it is more of a modern showcase monument than a university. Started by the King of Saudi Arabia in his name and well-funded by Aramco, it is said to be the second richest university in the world after Harvard, in endowment holding. That riches and opulence was there everywhere. I don’t know which other university in the world has its own harbour, lighthouse and a long beach that too facing the verdant Red Sea… And inside, all of us had the big screen Macs in addition to the latest and top most versions of MacBook Pros…

One of the humorous anecdotes I heard there was about its inauguration… It was shared by many. So I reckon it as true. It so seems, during the inauguration, many a times, King Abdulla happened to hear the word KAUST… and he summoned the Aramco sr. exec, who was also the de facto “RULER” of the university to clarify. And that exec replied it stands for King Abdulla University of Science and Technology. It is said, the king got into rage, how dare you shorten my name like that… Better you change it or you had it… And the very next day, they put up the name board in full…

And King Abdulla did pass away, when I was still working there. To my surprise, he was buried in an unmarked grave. This is in accordance with the austere Islamic tradition of Wahhabism, which opposes public displays of wealth and mourning to emphasize equality before God. His grave is located in the Al Oud cemetery in Riyadh and is marked with a simple, plain stone.

So I thought, at the end of the day, death makes us equal in one way or other. Though there was a Shah Jahan who built at a great cost and cruelly a mausoleum and modern day Shah Jahans do that, most of us don’t get there. Though there can smell a bit of inequality there, there is another aspect of death, where we are absolutely equal. No one. Absolutely no one can predict the time of leaving. You can be a prince or pauper. If Alexander had to leave behind all the kingdoms he conquered at an early age, that points to just that.

And here, the philosophers join in like a chorus. Seneca reminds us that the problem is not that life is short, but that we waste much of it. His words sting, because they are true—we squander hours, days, years, as if they were endless. Marcus Aurelius, the emperor who wrote to himself in the quiet of his tent, whispers: “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” His is not a lofty abstraction but a practical tool, a way to live with integrity now, not later. And then Tagore, with the gentleness of a poet, offers another measure altogether: “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” A life is not weighed in years but in the intensity of its moments, in the beauty of its flight.

Albert Camus, who wrote of the absurdity of existence, died suddenly in a car crash, with an unused train ticket in his pocket. That unused ticket is the perfect symbol of all our plans, our “later,” being rendered null by the absurd randomness of fate. His death is the brutal proof of what the philosophers intuited: that the second life cannot be postponed.

And so we return to the fulcrum. We often assume our first life begins with a cry in a delivery room. But is that truly the start? For decades, we may only be inheriting a life—a script written by others, a path laid down by circumstance, a collection of expectations and conditioned responses. We accumulate a name, a history, a personality, a set of possessions. But is the person living this existence truly awake, or are they a custodian of a pre‑fabricated self?

Life is a see‑saw, the fulcrum never quite in the middle. Sometimes the shorter side sinks, not because of weight, but because of where awareness rests.

This inherited existence—the one of silver spoons or none, of struggle and societal metrics—is the prelude. It is the raw material, the long, often‑unbalanced side of the see‑saw weighted with the past. It is a reaction, not a creation.

Your first life begins at the fulcrum.

It begins not when you are born to the world, but when the world is born to you. It starts in the silent, seismic shock of realization—the same one that marks the beginning of the so‑called “second life.” This is the paradox: your first life and your second life are the same life, born in the same instant.

The moment you realize you have only one life is the moment you become truly alive within it. It is the moment you shift from being a passenger to the driver, from a custodian to the author. The fulcrum point is where unconscious inheritance ends and conscious living begins.

Before the fulcrum, you had a biography. After the fulcrum, you have a story you are actively writing.

So, when does your first life begin?

It begins when you trade Seneca’s “waste” for Aurelius’s “purpose.” It begins when you stop counting months like a mortal and start counting moments like Tagore’s butterfly. It begins when the nightmare of the unmarked grave no longer frightens you, but focuses you on the vibrant, fragile ordinariness of the now.

Your first life begins when you choose to place the fulcrum of your awareness in the present and finally, deliberately, begin to balance the weight of all you have been with the possibility of all you might yet be.

Author’s Note These reflections came up during a memorial service for All Souls’ Day 2 November, observed at Kanzeon Zendo. The names of the departed, the scent of incense, and the silence between thoughts were the first drafts of this chronicle. This is the day the veil between the living and the dead is considered thinnest. And so, behind this thin veil, Camus and Alexander, King Abdullah and Karen, Ann Marie and Sheela, and my late father, Sankara—all find their place on the same altar of remembrance, embodying the very equality I sought to describe.

And perhaps the altar itself is a see‑saw of memory and presence: the weight of absence pressing one side down, the lightness of gratitude lifting the other.

 

Time chasers!

Time chasers!

by | Nov 5, 2025 | Zen

Do you need time?

Do You Need Time?
For what?

The one on their deathbed, who looks back and sees only a life spent chasing time, may feel they need more. The one who suddenly realizes—this is the only life I have—may feel they need more.

As Confucius said: “We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”

But the one who lives moment to moment never needs more or less time. For them, it is enough. They never rush.

As Lao Tzu reminds us: “Nature never hurries, yet everything is accomplished.”

Those who need time are the ones forever chasing ego’s goals, always in the future, missing the life here and now. And for them, no number of eons will ever be enough.

Live this moment – Not even three moments ahead , three moments are too many.

by | Nov 4, 2025 | Uncategorized

What will your life be like in three years?

A few weeks back i wrote a whole blog on this … https://kokorozendo.life/2025/10/24/stepping-off-the-prison-wheel-living-without-gradations/. To quote from that. “And when I look back from where I am at this point in time — with the great misty mountains rising on the left side of my room, which is both my living quarters and my working office, with a water wall flowing on the right, and the Zendo hall above — I wonder: would I ever have imagined this ten years ago, while dutifully filling in that wheel exercise to design my future? “… after 10 days, there is nothing to change that view… As Steve Jobs said, we can only connect the dots looking back.

The unmarked holiday…

by | Nov 3, 2025 | Uncategorized

Invent a holiday! Explain how and why everyone should celebrate.

How strange, this modern habit of carving life into segments. A day for mothers, for fathers, for yoga. And a day to celebrate! As if the other three hundred and sixty-four hold no space for such things.

Our calendar has become a factory ledger, the years measured in output, not presence. We are allotted: work from this hour to that, with a weekly holiday to catch our breath.

But what if our holiday wasn’t a date circled in red? What if it was a daily ritual?

An hour, each afternoon. Screens go dark. The world grows quiet. We nap, we walk, we simply sit. We remember how to be.

This is not idleness. It is fertile ground. The soil from which compassion, clarity, and creativity grow.

The 9-5 is a relic of industry, a blueprint for machines. We are not machines.

The most essential holiday was never invented. It has always been here, waiting in the space between one breath and the next.

Three Birthdays and a Remembrance: The Ensō Circles of November

Three Birthdays and a Remembrance: The Ensō Circles of November

by | Nov 2, 2025 | Gratitude, Grief, Joy, Life, Peace, RElationship, Zen

2 November. Today is Nithya Chaithanya Yati’s birthday. A long time back, when I started reading Malayalam newspapers, one of the must-reads was his articles—mostly about day-to-day life and challenges. Later in high school, my grand uncle, a National Award–winning teacher, used to talk about him as well as Krishnamurti. Gopala thatha was considered an atheist by many of my relatives. But he was quite spiritual, just not religious. Much before I started seeing Nithya as a spiritual guru, I read him as someone who wrote Malayalam prose really well. Like another spiritual master, Eknath Easwaran’s English.

In my collection, after Krishnamurti’s books, the most number of books I have are by Nithya and Eknath Easwaran. While Easwaran’s spiritual life was almost like that of JK and UG, Nithya belonged to the illustrious lineage of Śrī Narayana Guru—the great Advaita teacher and social reformer from Kerala. Nithya’s guru, Nataraja Guru, was Narayana Guru’s disciple. Nataraja Guru, after a PhD from Sorbonne and teaching in Switzerland, returned and accepted sanyasa. Nithya, after being a monk, went on to do a PhD from TISS and taught in many universities such as Stanford. He also headed ICMR’s yoga division.

Though I was not fortunate to meet them in person, they were all great influences on me—connected through their writing. And another connection: I share my birthday with Nithya Chaithanya Yati, 2 November.

I missed that with my late father Sankara, whose birthday was on 3 November. He passed away on 20 November. So November is a bittersweet month. Like that movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, for me it is “three birthdays and a remembrance (śraddhāñjali) day.”

Like that classic movie Four Weddings and a Funeral. It was such a wonderful comedy and a must watch… especially for that eulogy Matthew delivers during the funeral service of Gareth. That W.H. Auden poem— “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone…” And the best in my view: “He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest.” Maybe someone would rephrase it for me at my memorial in the Zendo: “My resting week and my Sunday work.”

When my father left, I did not cry for a very long time. The tears came much later, one evening as I sat alone on the KAUST beach. With that, my grief cycle turned in full, like the arc described by Kübler‑Ross. Perhaps it turned so full that, later that year, when my mother called to ask if I had done puja on 20 November, I realized I had forgotten the śraddhāñjali day. And after so many years, I see that this forgetting is itself the best śraddhāñjali one can offer to the dear and near—that we forget they are no more, because in truth they are still here, in another form, formless.

I even hope to breathe my last on a 1 November, so that after I am dusted and gone, joyful memories would come up for my dear and near ones after the sad ones—if at all someone cares to remember.

And it is always good to get reincarnated, even in our imagination, like Jesus—though I was not crucified by life in general. After all, don’t we wake up to life after a deep death every single night.

Many religions and concepts of God arose from humanity’s fear of death and the anxiety of being mortal. Some religions and spiritual paths teach that real life begins only after this life, after our death—the very word moksha points to that. But Zen looks at it differently. For Zen, this life is the only life that matters. Samsara is Nirvana.

Fr. AMA often reminds us that life is precious, and any other thought is without true understanding. One begins to live only when one accepts death fully. Only when we accept our mortality and fragility do we become truly immortal. There is no day without night. And if there were an endless day without night in between, would we really value that day at all?

Many years ago, when I joined a Stoic Week program organized by the University of Exeter, there were two important meditations: one to recognize our insignificance in the vast universe as individuals, and the other to face death directly. A few months ago, Fr. AMA too spoke of the Jesuit meditation practice of meeting one’s own death. All these are preparations to face death. And in a way, there can be no better preparation for death than this: to live one’s day-to-day and moment-to-moment life with full presence.

I don’t remember celebrating my birthdays during my growing-up years. One reason was obviously economic—my parents just struggled to take care of the essentials in my and my siblings’ life. And the second reason is that, usually in Kerala, birthdays are celebrated as per the Malayalam calendar. So it kind of complicates things.

The first such celebration was in engineering college hostel, when my friends—the Dagar gang—came up with an impromptu birthday celebration and gifted me a book: Lee Iacocca’s autobiography.

And this time, it is the first birthday in the Zendo. So kind of being reborn.Feel like the first birthday. And like that, life comes in circles… not straight lines. What I missed in childhood, comes back now in another form. Not with cake or candles, but with silence, chanting, and friends on the path. Feels like the day itself is saying—be born again, again and again.

Zen teaches that life and death are not two separate realities, but one continuous unfolding. Yet at the Zendo we still celebrate birthdays, and we also gather in prayer for departed Sangha members. To lean only on the side of the infinite, ignoring the world of form, would be foolishness. We live in this phenomenal world, where grief must be endured and cannot be bypassed. However much one reframes, body pain, loss, hurt—all are truly sorrowful. And just the same, moments we cherish and enjoy bring real joy, laughter, and happiness. To deny either sorrow or joy would make life sterile and empty. To embrace both is to live fully.

Like Kübler‑Ross’s grief cycle, everything else in this universe too has its own life cycle. It is circular in nature. A recognition that the path is not straight, but it is whole. That every loss is woven into the fabric of a larger gain, and every ending is, in some form, a very quiet and gentle beginning.

And perhaps the best wordless way this truth is represented is in the Zen ensō—the circle drawn in a single breath, open or closed, complete yet unfinished.

Yesterday evening, Fr. AMA reminded us of this truth in the most ordinary way: he said today morning we will go   to the cemetery for Alosanai’s remembrance — she, the first staff of Bodhi Zendo, who lived Zen without ever needing to sit in meditation. Today evening 630 pm we will gather again for a memorial service to all departed Sangha members. And i plan to include Nithya and my late father Sankara too to that. And in between, he is taking me  for a birthday lunch. Life and death, grief and joy, silence and laughter — all folded into one circle

The most historical moment : my own arrival ..

by | Oct 31, 2025 | Uncategorized

What historical event fascinates you the most?

What Historical Moment Fascinates Me the Most?
When faced with such a question, our minds instinctively scroll through history books, searching for the great events and the great lives of others. We discount ourselves, as if our own existence does not count.

For me, even at the risk of sounding a little narcissistic, the most historical moment is the moment I was born into this world.

It was a long time ago, on a November evening, in a place called Mannarkkad—a name that literally means Earth + River + Forest. That name itself feels like a blessing, as if the elements conspired to welcome me.

There is, after all, a single unbroken thread that connects “me” to the most ancient human couple in Ethiopia. Across millennia, countless fortunate events had to align for me to emerge as this particular presence in the world.

And what a world it is—so lovely, so improbable, so alive. This life too, with all its paradoxes, is a gift. And yes, to some extent, me too.

So what other historical event, for me personally, could ever take precedence over this?

And yet, this is not just about me. Each of us carries such a thread—woven through ancestors, landscapes, languages, and forgotten struggles. Each birth is a convergence of histories, a quiet miracle that rarely makes it into the textbooks.

Perhaps the fascination, then, is not only with the moment of my own arrival, but with the recognition that every arrival is historical. Every cry of a newborn is the sound of history continuing, reshaping itself in flesh and breath.

So I leave this not as a conclusion, but as an invitation—may you pause, too, and remember the wonder of your own first evening on this earth.

Seeds of Potential and Hindrances to Blooming: The Gardener’s First Task

Seeds of Potential and Hindrances to Blooming: The Gardener’s First Task

by | Oct 30, 2025 | Career, Leadershipwithintegrity, Zen

Currently, I have only one coaching client—a new CEO of a mid‑tier company. Perhaps that is shaped by my environment. After all the chores and the attending at the Zendo, that is the limit of my time and energy. Of course, I could do with some more income for the Zendo, but this universe comes with a stable quantity of time and energy at any point in our life.

We talk every Wednesday. And most often, I end up writing a coaching note on Thursday early morning—maybe word‑smithed by the unconscious. This one, I thought, is generic enough to share with all. And my coaching client too said, “Okay.” So here we go…

Every being comes into this world with some potential. For many, that potential is already aligned with a purpose chosen by Nature. A bird does not wonder whether to sing. A jasmine does not debate whether to bloom. A banyan scatters a million seeds, knowing only a few will take root. That is not failure—it is design. This effortless alignment with design becomes the backdrop against which the human struggle stands out.

For humans, it is different. We are not handed a fixed script. We must discover our purpose, match it with our potential, and then find or create the right environment. Freedom is our gift, but also our burden. Many end their lives without blooming, not because the seed was absent, but because the conditions never came together.

This is not a personal failing. It is the very condition of being human—that unlike the jasmine, we must discover, match, and create. Leaders, too, are not broken when they struggle; they are simply facing the core task of their role.

The Buddha spoke of five hindrances—craving, ill will, sloth, restlessness, and doubt. These are not just inner obstacles; they echo in the organizations we create. Restlessness may look like constant chasing of fads. Doubt may paralyze decision‑making. Sloth may appear as resistance to change. Ill will can poison culture and trust. Craving can drive short‑termism at the cost of deeper purpose. Naming the weed is the first and most critical step.

A new leader is like a gardener. The work is not about being the hero or the smartest person in the room, but about cultivating conditions for growth. The gardener’s first task is to see the seed—the potential hidden in people, in the organization itself. Then to name the weeds—the hindrances that choke growth. Then to clear the ground—removing what suffocates. And finally, to enrich the soil—bringing in new skills, new learnings, new technologies, while protecting the space from storms of distraction.

The banyan does not lament the seeds that do not sprout. Its abundance is its wisdom. For us, the real tragedy is not that every potential is not fulfilled, but that awareness is not cultivated. The leader’s task is not to force every seed to bloom—that is a recipe for exhaustion—but to cultivate the awareness and conditions that allow blooming to happen naturally.

When awareness meets potential, blooming is inevitable.

We may not control every outcome, but we absolutely can cultivate the awareness to see what is true. In that clear‑seeing, the path to blooming naturally reveals itself, for ourselves and for the organizations we lead.

Zendo Chronicle: The Moth, the Clay, and the Website

Zendo Chronicle: The Moth, the Clay, and the Website

by | Oct 28, 2025 | Communication, Integrity, Peace, Zen

It all started with an advert — an amateurish poster in the notice board of the cafeteria.  23 February 2009. I was attending a year-long General Management program at IIMB, a gift from the company I was working for. The campus was just a two‑minute drive from where I lived, and the schedule meant a three‑day weekend — a boon from the divine. One afternoon in the cafeteria, I noticed a small, innocuous poster announcing an evening program on Kabir. “Kabira khada bazar mein,” it read. My classmate from Varanasi nudged me: “Let’s go.” And that was the start.

It was a documentary film show followed by a panel discussion and Q&A with Shabnam Virmani, who was the director of the documentary as well as Kabir project Koi Sunta Hai?. Till then, I did hear a few of Kabir’s Dohas… Swami Sukhabodhananda, whose program YLP (Yogic Linguistic Programming) I attended. And then my friend from Varanasi had a penchant of coming with a good Doha time to time. That is how I ended up in the Koi Sunta Hai — a 3-day Kabir Festival at Sophia School, Palace Road.

It was superb… Prahlad Tipaniya, Farid Ayaz and all the most notable Kabir and Sufi singers. It was just magical… Two nuggets stayed with me since then:

  • A small story shared by Farid Ayaz about flies and moths. Flies got into a competition with moths in search of light it seems. And both of them went in search of light. The flies returned to tell the King to announce about their discovery, while the moths never came back — for they had merged with the light itself. In the same way, people who show off their bhakti only return with pride and eager to display. But the one who truly finds the light, becomes light and never comes back to prove anything or teach anyone.
  • And the Doha:
    ‘Maati kahe kumhaar ko, tu kya roonde mohi,
    ik din aisa hoyiga, main roondoongi tohi.’
    The earth says to the potter, oh, how you knead me! One day, I will return the favour…

What strikes me is how both images point to the same thing: the futility of pride. Whether it’s the fly boasting of its discovery or the potter pressing down on clay, time and truth have a way of turning the tables. The moth and the clay don’t stand apart with their pride and ego — they merge with light and earth, and in that they reveal the real teaching.

The flies return to announce their discovery (nowadays in LinkedIn or SM), while the moths never return because they’ve become the light itself. It’s the difference between speaking about truth and dissolving into truth. Between Spirituality as performance and Spirituality as disappearance.

A few years back, when I was the lone one at the Zendo and had to take care of all the roles, I said to Fr. AMA, why not have a website etc. Why be the best kept secret in the world? And he said, even Buddha had only 10 core disciples and Jesus had 12 and one of them was Judas… So don’t worry about it. Those who want to come will come.

“Those who want to come will come.” In a way it was rejecting the anxiety of marketing spirituality. It trusts that the light itself will attract those who are ready to become it, not just those who want to hear about it. We don’t run towards the wheel of time… It rolls towards us. Like the Sun.

And later, I did take time off from my work at Wipro, learnt to create a website and did end creating a simple, rudimentary website. And I did share with him before announcing. He just spent a minute looking at it and just shook his head. And then just maybe to ensure not to leave me despondent, said to me, it does look a bit Zen-like. Simple. 🙂

And his minute of looking and head-shake wasn’t a rejection of my effort. It was a silent sermon. It was the potter looking at the clay that has momentarily forgotten it is clay. It was a gentle, wordless reminder: “This — the website, the announcement, the identity of being the one who ‘spreads the word’ — is also something to be kneaded. Don’t get attached to it.”

The moths never return, the clay never boasts. The light and the earth do their work without announcement. What does it mean, in our own lives, to dissolve rather than display? To trust that those who are meant to come, will come — drawn not by our effort to advertise, but by the quiet radiance of the light itself?

As Piyush Pandey would have said, “some advertisements are made not to sell.” What is it, then, that shines without selling, calls without calling? Maybe the moths and the clay knew this long before Ogilvy did.

Perhaps that is why Kabir stands in the bazaar, and the Zen master returns to the marketplace. The light does not need to announce itself — it simply shines.

Living tributes to remarkable lives : Lighting the incense now

Living tributes to remarkable lives : Lighting the incense now

by | Oct 26, 2025 | Compassion, Gratitude, Life, RElationship, Zen

In 1986, when Doordarshan first arrived in Mannarkkad, the television was not a possession but a commons. A single set in a neighbour’s house became the village square. We gathered for the Mexico World Cup, for Sunday morning serials, for Chitrahaar. The glow of the screen was less about technology than about togetherness.

Some songs and images from those days remain etched like stone inscriptions. Mile Sur Mera Tumhara—a melody of national integration, sung in many tongues—was not just a broadcast, but a vision of belonging. Later, Piyush Pandey’s creations—the Hutch pug, the Fevicol bus—entered our folklore in the same way. They were not merely advertisements; they were shared jokes, shared tenderness, shared recognition.

When Pandey passed away, the tributes poured in. Ogilvy’s full-page homage in The Times of India was unlike anything we had seen before. And yet, a question lingers: why do we wait until death to say what we truly feel? Would not the living heart have been gladdened by those words while it still beat?

I remember in 1998, when Wipro became the first company in the world to achieve SEI CMM Level 5, they printed the names of all employees in the Economic Times. For me, it was the first time my name appeared in print. Recognition in life, not as epitaph, but as celebration. How much it mattered.

Of course, there are a few who are fortunate in this regard. Some lives are bathed in recognition while still unfolding. Sports stars like Pele, Maradona, and Sócrates were not only admired but serenaded in their lifetimes—Pele hailed as “The King”, Maradona as “El Pibe de Oro”, Sócrates as the footballer-philosopher who stood for democracy as much as for the game. Writers like O.V. Vijayan and Kamala Das received living recognition through reviews and cultural debates. Scientists like Einstein and Richard Feynman became beloved public figures, their wit and humanity as cherished as their discoveries—Feynman even laughed at reading his own obituary while alive. And sages too: George Bernard Shaw once called Krishnamurti “the most beautiful human being he had ever seen”; Kahlil Gibran, upon meeting him, whispered, “Surely the Lord of Love has come”; Aldous Huxley introduced him to the world with reverence in The First and Last Freedom. These were tributes spoken in life, not carved in stone after.

But alongside these celebrated ones are the countless unheralded—the teachers who shaped generations without ever being quoted, the neighbors who quietly held communities together, the elders whose wisdom never reached print, the Sangha members who sit in silence and sustain the field of practice. Their names may never appear in newspapers, their faces never on television, yet their impact is no less real. They are the hidden roots of the tree, nourishing unseen.

On 12 July 2009, when a dear one passed away untimely, I wrote in my blog Sunday Sambar under the title Lasting Impressions of Some Remarkable Lives:  https://sundaysambar.blogspot.com/2009/07/lasting-impressions-of-some-remarkable.html

“Having crossed so many tragic moments lately, it just seemed odd that this one would make any difference. But still I couldn’t quite put my finger on why it felt different. Maybe only, when someone known to you goes back to Mother Earth as basic elements, we steal some precious moments to step back and think what life means to us and more importantly what matters to us. Then it struck me that it was the people, who live still in my mind long after they are gone from here. It had nothing to do with the environment. They weren’t many. I could count within my hands… They weren’t famous people in that sense of the word. When some of them died, only near and dear knew, wept and prayed for their souls… Nevertheless they were really remarkable people, who led remarkable lives. At least for you.”

But when I look back, I wish I had sent those notes while they were still in flesh and bones, alive and kicking.

It is a socially accepted practice never to badmouth the departed. We are careful not to speak ill of the dead, yet we hesitate to speak well of the living. But there is no written or unwritten practice that says we should not share with the remarkable people in our lives our living tribute — while they are still here to hear it.

So I wonder:

What would it mean if we practiced “living tributes”?
What if we wrote letters of gratitude not after funerals, but on ordinary Tuesdays?

No one really knows where we go after our lives here. People write of heavens where the departed crack jokes, or of philosophers teaching God himself. But what happens after we die is still hypothesis, no matter how finely written in holy books. What is real is this: this very land is lotus land, this very body is Buddha.

Perhaps this is the Dharma of enoughness: to speak the word of thanks now, to bow while the other can still meet our eyes, to let affection and recognition breathe in the present. Impermanence is not only loss; it is also the urgency to love without delay.

The unspoken word is like incense unlit. Let us light it while we can.

Whom do you want to write a living tribute today? Maybe they are not as famous as the names above, but remarkable all the same — at the very least, for you.

Those paths will find you…

by | Oct 24, 2025 | Uncategorized

What alternative career paths have you considered or are interested in?

When the paths you chose turn into a burden, the ones you never sought will come looking for you—and claim you. Keep your heartmind (kokoro) open, so you can recognize them when they knock at the door of your heart.

Stepping Off  the Prison Wheel: Living Without Gradations

Stepping Off  the Prison Wheel: Living Without Gradations

by | Oct 24, 2025 | Career, Joy, Life, Peace, Zen

“How big is the top of Mount Everest?”
“About the size of a small kitchen table,” he responded.
“That is amazing,” I said, “You know, when you cross the Sahara Desert, there is no way of knowing where the desert ends. There is no peak, no border, no sign that says, ‘You are Now leaving the Sahara Desert – Have a nice Day!’”
— From Steve Donahue’s Shifting Sands

Not only do metaphors run our life, but we also reveal our minds through the metaphors we use in day‑to‑day communication. Metaphors can liberate us and imprison us at the same time. As a child pilgrim to Sabarimala, and later through books like Eknath Easwaran’s Climbing the Blue Mountain and Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, mountains became etched in my imagination as metaphors of summit — spiritual or human endeavor.

All of it changed in a moment.

Almost twelve years ago, I landed at Lekhwair airport on the edge of the Empty Quarter — Rub’ al Khali, a sand desert of 650,000 square kilometers. One evening, under a full moon, we drove out near the borders of Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Oman. The jeep stopped, and we stepped into the vastness. The reddish‑orange dunes glistened in moonlight, the horizon shimmered with mixed colors, the sky was alive with shy stars and a brazen full moon. In that silence, the universe stood still. We dissolved into it. That moment rewrote my metaphors: from mountains and summits to deserts and horizons.

The desert taught me what the wheel could not. What works on Everest is useless in the Sahara. In the desert, you follow a compass, not a map. You lower your gaze, because the horizon never gets closer. You stop pushing, and instead deflate your ego. You learn when to duck. These lessons from Shifting Sands became my compass for transformation—whether with my children, my coachees, my colleagues, or my Sangha.

And yet, the wheel still beckons. The self‑help world offers diagrams: concentric wheels with spokes radiating from the center. Each spoke is given a name—career, wealth, health, family, spirituality, leisure—each one a promise of fulfillment if only we can keep it strong. And then come the circles, one after another, like ripples spreading outward in time. The first circle might be +5 years, the next +10, then +20, until the wheel stretches all the way to the imagined horizon of our life. At every point where a spoke meets a circle, we are asked to write down a goal: what we will achieve in our career by 40, what wealth we will accumulate by 50, what family milestones we will reach by 60. The wheel becomes a calendar of ambition, a map of decades yet to come. It looks neat on paper, almost scientific in its symmetry, as if happiness could be engineered by filling in the blanks.

But here is the deeper question: while some of these goals—being healthy, nurturing relationships, continuing to learn—are valid, do they really merit gradations? Why postpone them into the future instead of bringing them into the present moment? Health is not a target at 50, it is a practice today. Relationships are not milestones to be ticked off, they are lived in each conversation, each act of care. Even learning, when turned into a fixed goal, becomes like chasing a product rather than inhabiting a process. What remains in the wheel, then, are mostly the immaterial material goals: the kind of house, the size of the bank balance, the type of car. And these, as we know, are the most fragile spokes of all.

Arthur Brooks, the famous author of From Strength to Strength, discovered the flaw in this promise. On his fiftieth birthday, he found the bucket list he had written at forty. Every ambition was checked off. Every spoke of his wheel was polished. Every circle of time had been dutifully crossed. And yet he was less happy than before. The wheel was balanced, but it still spun. The destination he had imagined was not waiting for him at the end of the road. Out of this realization came his practice of the “reverse bucket list.” Instead of asking, What do I still want? he asked, What can I let go of? He wrote down his desires, and then crossed them out. Each line struck through was a small liberation, a loosening of the wheel’s grip.

In my own life, as part of a program in 2014, I too was told to do this wheel. I dutifully filled in the spokes, charted the map, imagined the future. And after some years—ten years later—many of those plans did not work out for me. But still I found that one’s happiness does not depend on it. So it was the reverse of Arthur Brooks. He achieved everything and found it empty; I watched many of my ambitions fall away, and still found life whole.

What I discovered is that while we do need essentials to live on—a roof, food, clothes, and some books, music, and so on—those needs can be met without charting out distant goals that kill our present living for the sake of a never‑arriving tomorrow.

And when I moved to the Zendo in 2024, I was still apprehensive. The old habit of worrying about the future lingered. But my Zen master, Fr. AMA Samy, told me gently not to worry so much about what lies ahead. This world has enough for our genuine needs, he said, and even the vast universe cannot satiate our wants. That teaching landed like a stone dropped into a still pond. The ripples continue.

Two stories, two directions, one truth: happiness is not at the rim of the wheel, nor at the summit of the mountain, but at the still center, or in the shifting sands beneath our feet. Whether the spokes fall away by circumstance, or whether we cross them out by choice, the discovery is the same. The essentials are already here. The music is already playing. The book is already open. The breath is already flowing.

Zen calls this letting be. The Tao says, He who knows he has enough is rich. Shakespeare reminds us that all the world’s a stage, but he also hints that the play is already unfolding, whether or not we rehearse our lines. And the Buddha shows us the wheel of samsara, and the still point beyond its turning.

To step off the wheel, to leave the summit, to walk into the desert, is not to abandon life, but to enter it more fully. To live not for the endless “somedays,” but for the enoughness of now.

And when I look back from where I am at this point in time — with the great misty mountains rising on the left side of my room, which is both my living quarters and my working office, with a water wall flowing on the right, and the Zendo hall above — I wonder: would I ever have imagined this ten years ago, while dutifully filling in that wheel exercise to design my future?

The answer is clear. No wheel, no summit, no plan could have charted this. And yet here it is: the life that unfolded, unplanned, ungraded, enough.

Yesterday, as I stepped out of the Zendo after giving my very first introduction to Zen and meditation for a sesshin — entrusted to me by Fr. AMA — I found myself thinking neither about the past (yesterday) nor about the future (tomorrow). There was only the cool air of the hills, the silence of the hall behind me, and the steady rhythm of my own breath. No wheel to fill, no summit to reach, no desert horizon to chase. Just this step, this moment, this enoughness.

The Sky Was Never Disturbed: A Journey Through Doing, Being, and Non-Doing

The Sky Was Never Disturbed: A Journey Through Doing, Being, and Non-Doing

by | Oct 18, 2025 | Life, Meditation, Peace, Zen

When I was a child in Mannarkkad, I remember seeing Krishnamurti books and audio tapes with Gopala thatha, a cousin of my grandfather. He had studied in Chennai and was deeply interested in Krishnamurti. During my teenage years, I considered myself an atheist and devoured the writings of rationalists like Dr. Kovoor. Meditation came much later—almost thirty years ago—after attending a talk by Swami Chinmayananda while I was searching for a job in Bangalore after graduation (or “non-graduation,” as I sometimes call it). What followed was a period of “window shopping”: at Wipro, then outside with TM, AOL, and Swami Sukhabodhananda. It was a kind of double life—on one hand, I was devouring Krishnamurti (both JK and UG) like a hungry wolf, and on the other, I was searching for meditation. Fortunately, the other streams dried up quickly—either I was kicked out, or I kicked them out. Much later, I found myself at a Vipassanā retreat in Igatpuri, thanks to Dr. Richard McHugh, who had introduced me (and Thara) to NLP. After several Vipassanā courses, including two Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta retreats, I quite serendipitously landed in Perumalmalai, in Zen, with Fr. AMA Samy.

This note is what I learnt mostly from Fr. AMA. Any errors could be my own limited understanding or misunderstanding. Credit wholeheartedly goes to Fr. AMA, my Zen Master, who took me into the Zendo as uchi deshi (live-in disciple).

Meditation, in its refined form, is one of the great gifts of the East to humanity. Across India, China, Japan, and Tibet, it was shaped into a precise discipline—a science of mind and consciousness. From the Buddha’s discovery of Vipassanā, to the Taoist harmonies of breath and spontaneity, to Zen’s radical simplicity of “just sitting,” and the luminous visions of Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā, the traditions converge on a single truth: awakening is not elsewhere, it is here.

When the Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi tree, he had already mastered the meditative techniques of his time. What he discovered was not merely stillness, but insight—the capacity to see impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self in every arising. This became the heart of vipassana, the disciplined work of cleansing perception. vipassana is like polishing a lens until it becomes clear. Each moment of mindful attention removes the dust of distraction, revealing the insubstantiality of all phenomena.

As the Dharma travelled east, it absorbed the Taoist sense of naturalness and spontaneity. In Zen, this blossomed into Zazen: a practice that does not rely on mantra or image, but on the radical simplicity of just sitting. Here, the mind is not forced into one-pointedness; it is invited to reveal itself. If vipassana is cleansing the lens, Zen is realizing that the lens and the light are not two. And in Shikantaza, one rests as the light itself.

Modern neuroscience helps us glimpse why these practices feel so different. Vipassana’s reframing strengthens the prefrontal cortex and calms the amygdala. Zazen’s concentration builds attentional networks and clarity. Shikantaza’s  acceptance reduces self-referential activity and loosens identification with thought. Reframing changes the story, concentration holds the lens steady, acceptance lets the sky be.

Zen thrives on paradox. Its manuals can run into hundreds of pages, yet the ultimate teaching is to transcend all manuals. Taoism says the Tao cannot be spoken, yet it offers the Tao Te Ching. Zen says enlightenment cannot be grasped, yet it offers koans and rituals. Both traditions use form to go beyond form, words to undo words, method to dissolve method. The way to non-dualism is through dualism. The way to the wordless is through words. Koans and chants are not ends in themselves but devices to exhaust the conceptual mind until it falls silent.

The culmination of Zen meditation is Shikantaza, “just sitting.” Here, even the intentionality of focusing on the breath is released. Awareness is open, unbound, choiceless. This resonates with Krishnamurti’s teaching of choiceless awareness: a seeing without interference of will or method. Tibetan traditions echo this spirit. Dzogchen rests in the natural luminous awareness. Mahāmudrā looks directly at the nature of mind. All point to the same ground: the uncontrived awareness that is always here.

Zen’s most radical affirmation is that samsara is nirvana. Awakening is not elsewhere—it is here, in this very body, in this very land. “This very body is Buddha, this very land is the Lotus Land.” Zen does not suppress desire but sees through it. It does not reject the world but awakens within it.

This is why, when we enter the Zendo, we bow—not to an external idol, but to ourselves, to the Buddha within. Sitting on the zabuton, walking in kinhin, working in samu, Zen reveals that daily life itself is meditation. Sweeping the floor, cooking rice, tending the garden—each is an expression of awakening.

Robert Pirsig captured this spirit in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He suggested that Buddhahood resides in the gears of a motorcycle as much as in mountain peaks or lotus petals. To care for a machine with attention and reverence is no less an act of awakening than to sit in meditation. The sacred is not confined to temples or scriptures—it is found in the hum of an engine, the sweep of a broom, the breath in the belly.

The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures carry this teaching to its fruition. After searching for the ox, taming it, riding it, and finally forgetting it, the practitioner returns to the marketplace with open hands. The mountaintop represents emptiness and clarity; the marketplace represents form and daily life. The teaching is that emptiness and form are not two. True awakening is not escape but integration. The awakened one returns to the world of fish and toddy, mingling with people, laughing, working, living freely.

The path of meditation moves from doing to being, and finally to non-separation. Vipassanā represents the path of doing: the intentional, disciplined work of cleansing perception. Zazen represents the transition: using the form of posture and breath to settle into being. Shikantaza/Dzogchen/Mahāmudrā represent the culmination in non-doing: resting in the primordial awareness that was always present. Zen’s Radical Affirmation and the Ox-Herder’s Return represent the fruition: the realization of non-separation, where the absolute (nirvana, the mountaintop) and the relative (samsara, the marketplace) are seen as one inseparable reality.

The sky was never disturbed. In realizing this, we discover that meditation is not apart from life, but life itself—doing, being, and non-doing flowing into the freedom of non-separation. This is what I learnt, and continue to learn, from my teacher Fr. AMA Samy. To him I bow, to all teachers past, present, and yet to come, and to the ordinary life that, when seen with clear eyes, reveals itself as extraordinary.

The naive Qn ?

by | Oct 18, 2025 | Uncategorized

What’s something most people don’t know about you?

The question—“What is something most people don’t know about you?”—has struck me as a little naïve. If “most people” refers to our inner circles, then whatever they don’t already know is probably something we prefer not to broadcast. And if it refers to strangers, then the question isn’t about intimacy at all—it’s about curation. What we choose to share publicly is never our hidden core. It’s a facet we’re willing to place in the open, a glimpse rather than a revelation.

On Purpose: The Absurdity of Purpose: From Naranath Branthan to Zen — and the Freedom to Create Our Own

On Purpose: The Absurdity of Purpose: From Naranath Branthan to Zen — and the Freedom to Create Our Own

by | Oct 18, 2025 | Meaning, Zen

I usually write about ordinary events and experiences from my life. Philosophy is not my forte. Even when Fr. AMA asks me to read a Will and Spirit by Gerald May or The End of Desire by Guy Thomson or Isamatsu, I always keep them pending in my book Q and move on to lighter stuff. But this essay got triggered by two random events. One a sharing by a well-read Sangha member during our weekly Q & A in the Zendo. A quote attributed to Albert Camus which said “Whatever keeps us alive from suicide is our life’s purpose”. And another a question by a distant relative of mine to a family friend, “Why did Vishy join a Zendo, What is his purpose in life?”.

Those who know me from childhood know that I was a rolling stone who failed to gather any moss. Almost like a leaf in the storm. No one was sure where I was going to end up. And that includes me.

That quote of Camus comes from his famous book “The Myth of Sisyphus”. That is one of the myth I am familir with . As I have read the folklore story about Naranath Branthan from the wonderful book of Aithihya Mala when I was a small child. That book was a big tome of wonderful collection of legends from the land of Kerala. Naranath Branthan (Madman of Naranath) was considered a divine person, a Mukhta who pretended to be mad. His chief activity consisted of rolling a big stone up a hill and then letting it fall back down. His birthplace is believed to be in Pattambi, very close to where I was born and brought up. There is a large statue of Naranath in Pattambi, Palakkad district of Kerala where he is believed to have lived.

Btw he did have some great pedigree. Naranathu was born as the son of Vararuchi, the famous scholar who adorned the court of Vikramaditya. Naranathu was one among the twelve offsprings of Vararuchi and was brought up in the Naranathu Mangalathu Mana, situated at Chethallur in Palakkad district. Vararuchi’s children were also known as Parayi Petta Panthirukulam (twelve children born from the Pariah woman). That is what legends says.

I tried to put together whatever little bit I knew about purposeless living. And it ended up as a long essay. That is an indicator of how little I know about it. Those who know it well always come up with pithy one-liner maxims… and those who don’t know write an essay. Happy reading and forge your own purposeless purpose.

The Cliché of Purpose

We are raised on a cliché: live with a purpose, make your life meaningful. This refrain echoes in coaching sessions, sermons, classrooms, and boardrooms, often reinforced by the modern self-help canon, from Stephen Covey’s principles to Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl’s logotherapy, born from the horrors of the camps, convinced generations that if we can find a “why,” we can endure any “how.” For many, that “why” has been misinterpreted as a divine destiny, a purpose written before birth.

And yet—nothing could be more absurd.

The Myths of Endless Tasks: A Global Chorus

Long before modern philosophy, cultures intuited the futility of searching for a ready-made purpose outside ourselves. Humanity have a shared origin, challenges, issues and myths.  One will find parallels in every place. Myths of endless, repetitive tasks appear across the world, each exposing the emptiness of borrowed purposes.

While Sisyphus was the most famous one across the globe. (Western civilisation had a way of glorifying anything from there at the cost of everything.)

  • Sisyphus (Greek Mythology): Condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only for it to tumble back down, forever.
  • Naranathu Branthan (Kerala Folklore): The “madman” who daily rolled a stone up a hill and let it tumble down, laughing. Villagers mocked him, but in folklore he is remembered as a mukhta (liberated one), showing the futility of worldly pursuits.
  • The Danaids (Greek Mythology): Fifty daughters condemned to carry water in leaky jars that never fill. Their punishment is endless labor without completion.
  • Loki’s Binding (Norse Mythology): Bound beneath a serpent dripping venom, Loki writhes endlessly as his wife catches the drops in a bowl. The cycle never ends.
  • Samsara (Buddhist Teaching): The wheel of rebirth itself is the ultimate endless task—beings repeat craving and suffering until awakening.

These stories whisper the same truth: life does not hand us a ready-made purpose. The gods may impose endless tasks, society may hand us borrowed ideals, but the meaning of those tasks is not given. It is we who must create meaning in the act of living.

Camus and the Absurd

Albert Camus saw this with startling clarity. In The Myth of Sisyphus he begins: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” If life has no inherent meaning, the first question is whether it is worth living at all.

His answer is not despair but revolt: to live fully, passionately, and creatively, even while knowing life has no ultimate justification. His symbol is Sisyphus, condemned to roll his boulder forever. Camus ends: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

This is the absurd: our hunger for meaning colliding with a silent universe. To demand a cosmic purpose is to fall into illusion. To accept one blindly is what Camus called “philosophical suicide.” Life has no script. Meaning is not found—it is forged in the act of living.

Viktor Frankl and the Search for Meaning

If Camus startled the world by declaring that life is absurd, Viktor Frankl offered a different but equally radical insight: life always has meaning, but it is not given in advance.

Frankl was a psychiatrist, a Jew imprisoned in Auschwitz and Dachau, who lost his parents, brother, and pregnant wife in the camps. Out of that crucible came Man’s Search for Meaning (1946). Unlike Camus, who framed the question in terms of suicide and revolt, Frankl framed it in terms of survival and dignity.

The Core of Logotherapy

Frankl called his approach Logotherapy—from the Greek logos, meaning “meaning.” Where Freud emphasized pleasure and Adler emphasized power, Frankl insisted that the primary drive of human beings is the will to meaning.

He was clear: this meaning is not ordained by God, fate, or some cosmic script. It is not a universal “purpose of life” that applies to everyone. Instead, it is always personal, concrete, and situational. Life, he said, is like a series of questions posed to us. We do not get to ask “what is the meaning of life?” in the abstract. Rather, life asks us, and we answer by how we live.

Three Pathways to Meaning

  1. Through creative work – what we give to the world.
  2. Through experiencing love, beauty, or goodness – what we receive from the world.
  3. Through the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering – how we bear what cannot be changed.

This third pathway is perhaps his most profound. He did not glorify suffering, but he insisted that when suffering is unavoidable, we still retain the freedom to choose our stance. In that freedom lies dignity.

Freedom and Responsibility

For Frankl, the essence of being human is freedom and responsibility. We are free to choose our response to any situation, and we are responsible for what we make of that freedom. Even in Auschwitz, stripped of everything, he wrote: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

This is why Logotherapy is not about prescribing meaning, but about helping people discover it for themselves.

Frankl and Camus: Divergence and Convergence

Placed alongside Camus, the contrast is striking:

  • Camus: Life has no inherent meaning. The universe is indifferent. Our task is to revolt, to live fully without appeal.
  • Frankl: Life always has meaning, but it is not abstract or preordained. It must be discovered in the concrete moment, through work, love, or suffering.

And yet, there is a strange convergence. Both reject the idea of a cosmic script. Both insist that meaning, if it exists, must be lived here and now. Both affirm human freedom in the face of a silent universe.

Camus imagines Sisyphus happy as he pushes his stone. Frankl imagines the prisoner dignified as he endures the camp. Both are affirmations of life without guarantees.

Born Empty, Creating Ourselves

When we are born, we are born with almost empty minds. Nature fills us just enough to survive—breath, instinct, the capacity to grow. But beyond that, it leaves us open. And the more empty the mind space we are given at the start, the more possibility there is for becoming.

For animals, that emptiness seems limited. Their minds are tuned to survival, their instincts already inscribed. But for human beings, the mindspace is vast—as vast as the sky. David Hume once described the mind as tabula rasa, an empty slate. Into that openness, experience begins to write.

From the very beginning, we start creating ourselves. First comes identity: the fragile sense of “I” that forms in infancy, the ego that allows us to navigate the world. Later, we begin to create our own purposes.

The phrase “find your purpose” misleads us. It suggests that our purpose has been created by someone else, hidden somewhere out there, waiting to be discovered like a buried treasure. That is simply not true. Purpose is not preordained. It is not second-hand.

Just as we once created our identity, we must also create our own purpose. To recreate our purpose is to recreate ourselves, to peg our own space within this vast world. And because each of us is unique, so too will be our purpose.

The purposes of others—whether Buddha, Krishnamurti, or Mother Teresa—are not ours to inherit. They may inspire us, but they cannot substitute for our own. To live by another’s purpose is to live a second-hand life.

We must create our own purpose out of nothing. Out of the emptiness we were born into. Out of the freedom that nature gave us.

Nature’s Silence and Our Fallacy of Purpose

If we look to nature for an answer, we find only a deeper silence. From an evolutionary perspective, survival and flourishing are what life “does.” Traits like the capacity for storytelling, the feeling of awe and wonder, the urge to laugh and play, the creation of ritual and dance, and the making of music and humour evolved because they helped us endure and bond.

Nature does not ask “why.” The tree does not grow to give shade. The river does not flow to quench thirst. The lion does not hunt “for” the zebra. The ecological food chain itself “just happened”—a web of interactions shaped by chance, adaptation, and extinction.

Our fallacy is to imagine that because something works, it must have been designed for that purpose. Camus would call this the absurd. Zen would call it emptiness.

Fr. AMA’s Teaching: Companions on the Path

In a conversation, Fr. AMA once told me:
“Humour makes humans. Animals are not known to have it. Some humans too. That is what makes us not only cope up, but successfully face the absurdity of our life. Please remember Humour and Music elevate the human mind. They are very much part of Zen.”

He also said that many of history’s richest traditions of humour—from the Jewish diaspora to Irish folklore—have emerged from communities that endured immense suffering.

These words remind me that humour and music are not diversions from the path, but essential companions on it. They are ways of lifting the mind, of facing the absurdity of life without despair.

Where Camus and Zen Meet

At first glance, Camus and Zen seem worlds apart—one born of French existentialism, the other of Oriental contemplative practice. Yet they meet in surprising ways:

  • Facing reality without illusions: Camus rejects consoling stories; Zen rejects clinging to concepts. Both demand a stark, unvarnished encounter with “what is.”
  • Living fully in the present: Camus’ revolt is a passionate engagement with the immediate; Zen’s awakening is a profound presence in the here and now. Both are radical affirmations of this moment, free from the ghosts of the past or the mirages of the future.
  • Joy in the midst of futility: Camus’ Sisyphus finds happiness in his endless, pointless task. This is the final, crucial convergence. For Camus, the joy is born of defiance, of owning one’s fate entirely. For Zen, the joy is born of non-attachment, of realizing that the futility itself was the illusion. When you stop struggling against the rock and simply push, the pushing becomes the point. The weight of the rock is no longer a punishment but the very substance of his existence. This is the “mind of daily life” in Zen—the profound peace found in chopping wood and carrying water, even when the wood will be burned and the thirst will return.

The Forged Purpose

So, where does this leave the cliché of purpose? It shatters it. The idea of a pre-written, cosmic purpose is exposed as a comforting fiction, an attempt to escape the terrifying and magnificent freedom of our condition.

Frankl does not contradict this; he reframes it. He agrees that no universal “why” is handed to us. Instead, life is a continuous questioning. Our purpose is not a noun to be found, but a verb to be enacted. It is the answer we give to life through our work, our love, and our stance toward suffering. We do not discover our purpose; we decide it, moment by moment.

We are born empty, and that emptiness is our canvas. We are not born with a purpose; we are born with the capacity to create one. And just as we created our identity from the raw material of experience, we forge our purpose from the raw material of our freedom.

The Companionable Path

This is where Fr. AMA’s teaching rings true. In a universe devoid of intrinsic meaning, humour and music are not trivial. They are evolutionary gifts that we have repurposed for our existential survival. Humour is the ultimate weapon against the absurd—it does not deny the futility but laughs in its face, disarming its terror. Music is the rhythm of our forged meaning, a way to harmonize our inner chaos and connect with others on the same path.

They are the companions Fr. AMA spoke of, helping us to walk the path without despair. They are the tools that elevate the mind from the “how” of survival to the “why” of a life worth living.

Ultimately, the synthesis of Camus, Frankl, and Zen points not to a single answer, but to a way of being: to live with our eyes wide open to the absurd silence of the universe, yet with a heart fully engaged in the vivid, tangible, and fleeting world before us.

We must imagine Sisyphus and Naranathu Branthan happy not in spite of their tasks, but because they have made the act of pushing the rock their own. This is their magnificent, defiant, and deeply personal purpose.

The purpose was never in the summit; it was in the push.

Now since we started with the absurdity of life, we may end with it. Albert Camus is supposed to be one of the most influential voices of the 20th century, shaping philosophy, literature, and political thought through his articulation of the absurd, despite dying tragically young at 46.

Camus’ impact is remarkable given the brevity of his life. His novels (The Stranger, The Plague), essays (The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel), and journalism made him a central figure in existentialism and absurdism, even though he resisted being labelled. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, one of the youngest ever recipients, for illuminating “the problems of the human conscience in our time.” His insistence on confronting the absurd without illusions—neither surrendering to despair nor escaping into dogma—continues to influence philosophy, literature, and even political ethics.

There is also a haunting irony in the story of his death. Camus was known to have an almost absurd fear of cars, often preferring to travel by train. In January 1960, however, he accepted a ride with his publisher Michel Gallimard in a sports car. Near Villeblevin, the car crashed, killing Camus instantly and fatally injuring Gallimard. In Camus’ coat pocket was found a train ticket—he had originally planned to return to Paris by rail. Alongside it was the unfinished manuscript of his last work, The First Man.

That ending, so sudden and ironic, seemed to echo the very philosophy he had articulated: life is fragile, unpredictable, and absurd. Yet Camus’ legacy endures precisely because he showed that even in the face of absurdity, one can live with dignity, creativity, humour, and revolt.

Though I don’t roll rocks up the mountain of Perumalmalai, I spend time in lighting the lamps at the Zendo and dokusan room, feeding or walking Bhim the Zendog,  bowing to our guests at the zendo door, sweeping the zendo floor and some time writing meaningless essays.

Skip to content