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Effortless effort…

by Vishy Sankara | May 11, 2026 | Wisdom, Zen

I am writing this on a bus, descending from Kodaikanal to Bangalore. A few exchanges in a WhatsApp group started this train of thought somewhere on the ghat road. It was not much of an effort. It just arrived. Which, as it turns out, is exactly what the essay is about.

Whatever your soteriology, it takes energy to delay entropy. It took Universe a lot of energy to put together a group of elements into a form of human. But even universe cannot escape the principle of entropy. We start our dissolution back into disorder and basic elements immediately after we are put together. And it takes energy and intentional effort to delay entropy. Day to day, moment to moment, there is physical effort involved. That effort in itself is neutral. Positive even. It becomes negative only when the mind sees it as effort.

Buddha called it the suffering of suffering. Dukkha-dukkha. Not the pain itself but the resistance to the pain. Non acceptance of pain. What we resist, not only persists. It works towards our perishing . The mind adding its judgemental commentary — this shouldn't be happening — on top of what is simply happening. That addition is self-generated. And it is worse than the original.

An infant breathes naturally. There is no self standing apart from the breath, watching it, controlling it and managing it. Then selfhood forms. And suddenly there is a witness. The witness interferes.

I knew this early. Not as philosophy. As a child with asthma, I was aware of every single gasp long before I had the word Zen or Zazen. The body's most automatic act became a conscious task. Most people discover this split through meditation. I was thrown into it by my own lungs.

Then much later, was thrown into the vortex of deep depression. In deep depression the simplest things became immense. The most challenging task of the day was to get out of bed. Then eat a little. Just enough to sustain life. My psychiatrist prescribed and mandated a morning walk. Often it felt like an Everest expedition. Many a day i might have ruminated a longer time than i went for a walk.

The cruelty of depression is that the second layer is the worst. The body is already heavy, energy absent, neurochemistry working against you. Then the mind adds — why can't I do this simple thing. Others do this without thinking. What is wrong with me. Now you are not just depressed. You are ashamed of being depressed.

The same me could wake at 4am for 365 days to meditate. Even when I had slept at 3am after watching World Cup football. I even did not miss that routine, even when i was travelling between Bangalore and Kodaikanal.. And once i reached that 365 days in my insight timer, very eagerly i shared that with Fr. AMA during evening tea time. He laughed and said. So much effort is not Zen. Zen is practiced effortlessly and when you really let go eve Zen, that is Zen.

The body was identical both mornings. The difference was never the body. It was what the mind was oriented toward. When something genuinely calls, the mind pulls the body rather than the body dragging the mind. In depression the internal negotiator goes tyrannical — weighing every action, finding nothing worth the effort. Meditation and passion both bypass that negotiator entirely. Two very different doors to the same freedom.

Eugen Herrigel's Zen master ( in that wonderful book

"The Zen in the art of archery) demonstrated this once, in near darkness. He shot two arrows. The second split the first.

Herrigel asked how he could see the target. The master said — I did not shoot. It shot.

The darkness removed the self that aims. The conscious, calculating, correcting self that Herrigel had been trying to use for years. Something older took over. Something more accurate.

The arrow knows the way. The breath breathes itself. The legs walk to the cushion at 4am. When the self steps aside.

When I moved to the zendo, Fr AMA — knowing I write a little — introduced me to Cyrus Mistry. Cyrus is a noted author and dramatist and has won Sahitya Akademy award. His spouse Jill Mistry, who is a Cine director , a long time back made a documentary on Fr. AMA and his zen vision. ( An original cloud in the mountains. https://youtu.be/ynCdRAilAvY?si=8tPnAUFJKy_ynlhQ ) Cyrus has chronic arthritis. Moving around even a bit is difficult. Still he writes four to five hours every day. His writing room is on the top floor of their house in Kodaikanal. A beautiful house overlooking a deep valley. Almost 240 degrees of picture perfect scenery. Just getting to his writing room. there takes great effort.

Once he mentioned his brother Rohinton, who strayed into writing, as he was fed-up with Banking job in Canada. And then with writing found great success. Three Booker nominations. Even a guest appearance in a Oprah Winfrey show about books. Earned fame and fortune in no time. Then he retired from writing, having made his money.

Neither path is wrong. But placed side by side they illuminate something.

Cyrus climbing those stairs with arthritic joints is not so different from walking the prescribed morning walk in depression. Or sitting at 4am on three hours of sleep. The body protests. Every reasonable excuse exists to stop. And yet the thing continues.

Because it is not being done for outcome.

Rohinton had a destination. He reached it and stopped, honourably. Cyrus seems to have no destination except the writing itself. The stairs are part of the writing. The pain is part of the writing.

The Tao calls it Wu Wei and Gita calls it nishkama karma ( though both differ on their metaphysical foundations). Action without attachment to fruit.

Cyrus may never get the Booker. He likely knows this.

He climbs the stairs anyway.

The stairs are the practice. That is effortless effort.

Where Else…

by Vishy Sankara | Apr 19, 2026 | Joy, Life, Literature, Meaning, Relationships

The van, the auto, the waste cart, the seaside library, the guest room, the kitchen – all are libraries. All are literature.

On the way to Kochi, someone had named his tourist carrier Rumi Ride. A Force Urbania. Dark grey. Kollam registration. And right in the middle of Cherai beach — not a bookshop, not a university — a two-storeyed library. Named Janakeya Vayanasala. A People’s Reading Room, in Malayalam. As if the beach needed one. As if, of course it does.

Francis Bacon, Father of Science, wrote in his essay Of Studies — Reading maketh a full man, Writing an exact man. Most people stop there. But the full sentence adds: conference a ready man. Conversation. Dialogue. The third leg. The one we always drop, as if reading and writing alone were enough. Bacon knew better. Readiness is not solitary. It happens in the presence of another mind.

In Kerala, that third leg has always been the street. Not the seminar hall. The street corner where an auto driver names his vehicle after a novel.

A few years ago, a photo went around of an auto in Kerala. The driver, Pradeep, had named his three-wheeler The Alchemist — after reading the Malayalam translation of Paulo Coelho’s novel. That was ten years before the photo was taken. He had changed the vehicle a couple of times. He never changed the name. Someone photographed it, tagged Coelho on Twitter, and the Brazilian writer — fifteen million followers — reposted it with just this: Kerala, India (thank you very much for the photo). Pradeep became an internet sensation without quite intending to. Coelho probably smiled and moved on. But the auto kept running. Same name. Same roads.

And then there is Dhanuja Kumari. She is a sanitation worker in Thiruvananthapuram, with the Haritha Karma Sena — the door-to-door waste collection service. She dropped out of school in the ninth grade. She began writing on scrap paper. Not to publish. Just to cope. What came out was a memoir — Chengalchoolayile Ente Jeevitham. My Life in Chengalchoola. Published in 2014. By 2024, it was part of the BA curriculum at Kannur University and the MA curriculum at Calicut University. She still collects waste in the mornings. She is writing her second book. Her colony has a library. She started it. It is called Wings of Women.

Two libraries. One on a beach, one in a colony. Both named after people.

Pradeep changed the vehicle. Never the name. Dhanuja wrote on scrap paper. It ended up in syllabi.

I remember reading, a long time ago, how Mahasweta Devi — the Bengali literary giant — encouraged an ordinary rickshaw puller (Manoranjan Byapari) to write. It stayed with me. I didn’t know then why. I think I do now.

After my own days of trauma — the nights, the twilights, the dawns — I sat in an online writing workshop and learned one thing. Perspectives matter. But more than that: those who have suffered, who have tasted the salt in their own tears — they are the ones who write literature. Mostly.

Rumi on a tourist van. Coelho on an autorickshaw. A library facing the sea.

Where else.

On our last day at Kochi, I told Nishad, who was taking care of us at Kochi, that we got to pay a visit to Kaladi Sankara’s birthplace. I had been there a couple of times. Thara has not. In the dedication page of my first published book “Fallen Flower and Fragrant Grass”, I had penned, “There were three Sankaras in my life.. EMS, Sankara and Adi Sankara. Of the three, it was Sankara, my late father, who taught me without teaching me to walk on the Middle Way between left and right. I dedicate this book to his wonderful memories.” And on our way, there was a board Pazhayidam Naivedyam. That triggered a photo of a Sadya on leaf shared by my sister Sandhya when she was visiting Guruvayoor, just a week back. My sister Sandhya, my nephew Anand, and my brother-in-law Manjunath — when they visited Guruvayoor last month — had their lunch at Pazhayidam Ruchi, a restaurant run by him.

Pazhayidam Mohanan Namboothiri.

And then, in the kitchen, another stage: Pazhayidam (literally “Old Place” in Malayalam, often contrasted with Puthiyaidam — “New Place”) is always fresh in taste. A six-flavoured culinary art that never tires the eater. Even those weary of life, ready to die, find themselves returning to the rasa — the essence of life — through it… He would say that life thirty years ago was not beautiful. After completing a degree in chemistry, there was a search for jobs. Nothing was working out. He started supplying equipment to school and college laboratories. That too failed midway. Then he began to lose hope. He was 28 years old. Sitting at home without any work or employment, he even thought of death. Even when he was completely depressed, he did not forget the path to the Kuttichathan Public Library. Behind that journey was his love for M.T.’s stories. When it felt like darkness was ahead, standing at a junction, he happened to flip through a weekly magazine hanging in a shop. In it was the beginning of M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s Randamoozham. It started like this: “That day, the sea had a dark colour…” He read the chapter titled Yatra two or three times. His mind told him that if he left the world without finishing this novel, it would be a loss. He journeyed with the novel until the 51st issue. Later, as brand ambassador for a food product, Mohanan Namboothiri earned his name and fame cooking for thousands at Kerala School Festival (one of the most reported events in Kerala), holding rare records and earning accolades.

Not sure Sandhya was aware of the story.

On our way to Kochi, Thara and I stayed at Usha Aunty and Dr. Radhakrishnan’s home in Coimbatore. Family friends for forty years. In the guest room, on the table there was a book. The Academy of Magic. Written by their granddaughter, Sanvi. A schoolgirl. Just that — a child’s first published story. No syllabus. No struggle. Only the ordinary miracle of a child who wrote. Who knows. I was about to take it and read it, then Nyra, the author’s cousin sister walked in to talk to Thara and I, and the rest of the evening went for it. So I added that book to my reading queue. The title of the book sounds like one of those J.K. Rowling series. “The Academy of Magic”. Who knows she may be the next J.K. Rowling.

The van, the auto, the waste cart, the seaside library, the guest room, the kitchen — all are libraries. All are literature.

Where else? Everywhere there is hunger. Not for food. For the thing that makes food worth making. Last month, my family sat at his table. They didn’t need to know. That’s how it works.

I Feel, Therefore I Am…

by Vishy Sankara | Apr 16, 2026 | Experience, Knowledge, Phenomenology, Wisdom

There is a WhatsApp group I am part of — Being Masterful Coaches — and recently someone dropped a question into it about Knowledge, Experience, and Wisdom. The kind of question that looks simple until you actually try to answer it.

Almost 10 years ago, I spent two years at APU trying to learn Phenomenology and Epistemology. Fr. AMA added Hermeneutics to that mix. I let go of Ontology and Logic ( as such I am not that logical  )— Prof. Kaustav Roy had said something that stuck: regardless of the reality out there, what lands in us is what matters. So I let that be my anchor. This is an attempt to put together the little I know — and the little I have felt — about all of it.

So here we go. Take knowledge first.

“Fire is a process of combustion.” “All beings are mortal and die.” Knowledge comes dressed in words. Maps. Recipes. Symbols. It is the finger pointing, not the moon. Useful, yes. But distant.

Experience is something else entirely. It is the body’s trace — warmth on skin, the smell of smoke, a chest tightening at the thought of a last breath. It is givenness, not concept. Even imagination can do this. The Jesuit practice of memento mori — sitting quietly and rehearsing your own dying — trembles in the body as if the thing is actually happening. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Wisdom is harder to locate. It is the horizon where both — knowledge and experience — meet and dissolve. Not the map alone, not the terrain alone, but the art of walking. Aristotle called it phronesis. Zen calls it the Middle Way. Knowing when to light a fire. Knowing when to sit in the dark. Living with death at one’s shoulder and still acting with care.

Epistemology debates the conditions of knowing. Phenomenology describes how knowing appears. Ontology asks what is there— apart from me. In practice, they blur into each other. The finger, the moon, the sky. Not two. And surely not three.

Memory holds all three — but differently for each.

Knowledge lives as semantic memory: facts, concepts, meanings, spread across the neocortex. Abstract, transferable, recallable without context. “Fire is the combustion of fuel with oxygen.” You can say that in a library. You do not need to have ever sat by a fire. There are many who have really mugged up the spiritual text to the last syllable. But with very little spirituality.

Experience lives differently — as episodic memory (personal events, feelings) and procedural memory (skills). The hippocampus carries it. The basal ganglia. The cerebellum. Sitting by a fire, feeling its warmth, learning to light it with wet wood and three matches. That kind of knowing is embodied, contextual, tied to emotion and sensation. You cannot transfer it with a sentence.

I have my own small proof of this. Almost twenty years ago, I learnt Yang style Tai Chi — 100+ forms — from Sifu George. Last year, I tried to relearn it with Francois at the Zendo. The moment I started, the flow and rhythm came up from somewhere in the depths of my muscles and bones. Not from my brain. My brain had no idea. Francois corrected many of my steps — and that was the hard part. Unlearning what the body already knew took enormous effort. You cannot just overwrite a twenty-year-old trace with an instruction. The body holds on. And here is the other thing — the moment I stopped, even for a millisecond, to reflect or think about the next move, I lost the step. Lost the flow entirely. When the mind was empty and still, it moved. The moment the mind arrived, it stumbled.

And lastly wisdom is not stored so much as emergent. It arises when semantic and episodic memory integrate with emotional regulation and judgment — in the prefrontal cortex, if you prefer the neuroscience. In phenomenology, wisdom is the horizon of meaning: memory not as recall, but as discernment. I keep listening to Fr. AMA sharing the serenity prayer. There are many versions to it from Epictetus to Buddhist scholar Shantideva. I prefer the AA one.  “T God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.”

Now coming back to the way we experience, here is where it gets interesting.

The brain cannot reliably distinguish between real and imagined. Both leave felt traces — the same neural pathways fire, the same body responds. A pilot in a simulator feels flying — not a version of it, but flying itself, as far as the nervous system is concerned. The sage who mistakes a rope for a snake gets the same tremor as if it were actually a snake. The Jesuit imagining his own death shakes as if it is real.

This faculty can make or mar us. It can traumatize us in perfectly ordinary life situations. And it can also help us bootstrap out of real trauma.

This faculty of simulation is powerful, but it does not automatically make one a teacher. Just because one has experience — or even experience plus knowledge — does not mean one can help a client. This is where the gulf of translation comes in. Maradona, one of the greatest players, struggled as a coach. His episodic memory, the felt sense of genius, was not easily translatable into words or teaching. Only two people have ever won the World Cup both as players and coaches. Many eminent coaches never had top-level playing careers, yet they succeed because they can translate, structure, and communicate. The dumb mirror reflects, but sometimes the mirror must also point, or strike, or embody presence. Experience alone is not enough. Translation matters.

In coaching and counselling, I have seen this play out. The mind wants to narrate. To manage. To control the body with language. But unless the client feels it — the tremor, the tightness, the warmth — nothing quite lands. The moment sensations are lifted too quickly into words, the wound is bypassed rather than met. Reflection without embodiment is a detour. Healing begins when the body is allowed to speak.

Evidence-based therapy (EBT) often works by protocols: a symptom is judged, classified, treated. But process-based therapy (PBT) insists on something subtler: one symptom can be the manifestation of many processes, and one process can manifest in myriad ways. Silence, for instance, is not always reflection. It can be grief. It can be shame. It can be avoidance. I have seen coaches exult at silence, writing that the client must be reflecting. But silence is not evidence. The mirror must be clean enough to show, but humble enough not to judge.

Some spiritual traditions exalt jnana marga — the path of knowledge. But Zen insists on something more uncomfortable: this very body is Buddha. Not the abstraction of thought, but the immediacy of breath, posture, sensation. The gate is not in the head. It is in the body.

And then — the paradox of machines.

The “higher” gifts we thought were uniquely ours — reason, language, intelligence — turn out to be the easiest for silicon to mimic. Chess. Logic puzzles. Intelligence tests. Circuits handle them with ease. But the elemental capacities we share with animals — balance, touch, feeling — remain stubbornly resistant. Hans Moravec saw this decades ago: abstract thought is cheap to compute, but sensorimotor skill, perception, emotion demand enormous resources. A one-year-old outstrips the cleverest machine in crawling, grasping, sensing.

The higher order is easier. The lower order is deeper.

Descartes said, cogito ergo sum — I think, therefore I am. It helped. It gave us a scaffold for reason, for science, for machines. But it also narrowed us — into heads without bodies, concepts without felt sense.

Maybe he had it backwards.

I feel, therefore I am.

It is the warmth of fire, the tremor of imagined death, the tears that arrive before you know why — these are what make existence real. Thinking alone can be mimicked. Feeling remains stubbornly human. Animal. Ordinary.

The map is simple. The territory is vast. Coaching, Zen, phenomenology — all point to the same gate. Not bypass. And surely not abstraction. Ordinariness. The body as Buddha. The felt sense as the way in.

Three questions that remain, even after all this:

First. Can wisdom ever be taught, or only revealed? If a coach has no wisdom to offer, and cannot teach it, what is their role when the client is stuck — not in feeling, but in meaning? A client who feels everything, raw and present, but cannot decide what to do. Does the mirror simply hold longer? Or is there a moment when the coach points — not as an expert, but as someone who has walked the terrain?

Second. What of collective or inherited trauma? The child of a refugee who has never crossed a border but trembles at the sound of a uniform. The body speaks, but the experience is not “mine” in the episodic sense. Can the dumb mirror reflect what was never directly lived? Or does something else need to happen first — a naming, a story, a lineage?

Third. Is the dumb mirror a sustainable identity for a coach? In principle, emptiness is the ideal. But in practice, a coach with no presence of their own — no character, no conviction, no edges — may become a void, not a mirror. The client needs to feel that the person holding space is there, not just a technique. Zen masters are empty, but they also hit you with a stick. The stick is wisdom-as-action, not just reflection. How to hold that tension?

Closing reflection:

If the body is Buddha, and the felt sense is the gate, then coaching is not problem-solving. It is not even healing, if healing means returning to a prior state. It is initiation — the kind Joan Halifax speaks of. The client crosses a threshold, not because the coach knew the way, but because the coach was willing to stand at the edge and not know. And in that not-knowing, gave the client permission to feel their own way through.

So perhaps the three questions are not problems to solve. They are koans to sit with. The answer is not a sentence. It is the next breath, the next session, the next tremor felt and named or not named. The mirror does not need to be perfect. It only needs to be clean enough to show what is already there.

The body as Buddha. The felt sense as the way in. The rest is just walking.

Being Irrelevant, and Other Things I Learned at University…

by Vishy Sankara | Apr 6, 2026 | Career, Change, Friendship, Life, Meaning

[Photo: Rupali, Flavia, and me — outside Pixel Park, APU Campus, Bangalore, during one of our APU days. Original photo reimagined as a time-travel — returning us to the child’s seat, a gentle leap backward into the schoolyard of learning and ordinariness. 🙂 ]]

There is a particular kind of madness in going back to university in your forties. Not an online course. Not a weekend workshop. A full-time, show-up-every-day, write-your-assignments, sit-in-a-classroom PG course— surrounded by students who were born around the time you were writing your first appraisal at work. In 2016, that is exactly what I did, walking away from a perfectly good career in IT to join Azim Premji University, Bangalore, for an MA in Education. I had watched that old comedy Back to School as a teenager and found it funny. I had no idea I was taking notes.

During those two years, I was the oldest student in the university. Many of the professors were younger than me — including my erstwhile colleague Vikas Maniar. I think I did attempt to follow his footsteps. After an MBA from IIMA, he had built a great career at Wipro, then moved on to work in the social sector, and eventually did a Ph.D. from TISS on Education. His was one of the courses I attended — in fact, I did two courses with him.

There were other real stalwart professors too: Dr. Rohit Dhankar (Philosophy of Education), Dr. Kaustav Roy (Marx to Laing to Phenomenology to Hermeneutics!), Dr. Rajasshree, Dr. Indira Vijayasimha, and Dr. Indrani Bhattacharji — who taught me, or tried to teach me, Epistemology. She had two Ph.Ds, the second one from the University of Massachusetts on Epistemology. And she had Gettier as one of her professors there. Gettier deserves a full blog of his own — the philosopher who dismantled Plato's theory of Justified True Belief in roughly 800 words, producing one of the most cited papers in the history of Philosophy.

But my best memories from those two years are a handful of moments.

One. Along with me, two of my friends from Sobha Hillview had joined the course. We used to carpool. Rupali and Flavia. And here is the thing — when we were classmates at APU, Flavia's son Ryan, Rupali's son Raghav, and my son Rishi were simultaneously classmates at The Valley School, KFI, Bangalore. Three parents studying the philosophy of education, while their sons shared a classroom at a Krishnamurti school. I am not sure life gets more poetic than that. All three of us did quite well too in the course— firmly on the right-hand side of the bell curve. 🙂

Two. I got elected to the Student Council during the first year — after surviving an open debate in front of all voters, where two of my opponents were genuinely brilliant orators. One had graduated from Visva-Bharati, the other from St. Stephen's. A long time ago, I had lost a college union election at Government Victoria College quite badly. That had sat as something incomplete on a checklist inside my heart. This felt like closing that loop. Though my bosses boss at Wipro was then Vice Chancelor of University, I could organize protest against parking fee hike or food quality at canteen etc- a delicious iron not lost on me. 🙂

Three. Once, I received an O+ for one of my papers, and I was trying to use it to motivate my son Manu — showing off, really. He immediately replied: "Papa, when I was 12, my football coach made me play in the age group of 10, and we won a football match. So at this age, getting an O+ while studying with younger people is no big deal. It is like me going back to Primary Class 2."

He deflated my ego balloon with a sharp and incisive argument. After that, I never shared my grades with him. And luckily, universities do not have CTMs — Child-Teacher Meetings for reviewing parents-as-students.

A few years after I left APU, Manu did get an admission there. I wrote to my professor: "My son Manas is going to join your university — and BEWARE, he is a tougher nut with a sharper mind." Pat came the reply: "We took care of you. We will take care of your son too. Send him here."

But then he chose Jindal Global University. So they never had to.

And lastly — during the Covid years, I tried to get into a Ph.D. at ISEC, a prestigious institute in Bangalore. I managed to rank 2nd in their entrance exam. The interview was online. The Director scanned through my one-page research proposal — "A Phenomenological Analysis of Krishnamurti's Teaching in Education" — and asked, very derisively, "Can't you do something useful?"

I feigned as if I had not heard that comment.

Then he said, "Who is going to guide you in these things? If you choose another, more relevant proposal, come and meet us."

I never went back. Maybe I never had another relevant research proposal for him. Or maybe I was simply irrelevant.

That research proposal, by the way, was my thesis course for three full credits with Dr. Kaustav Roy in the final semester, and I had wanted to continue working on it. Krishnamurti's ideas on education — on freedom, attention, and the nature of the self — are not a footnote. They are a living question.

But perhaps that is a story for another blog.

The photo above was shared by all three of us on our Facebook pages back in the day — Flavia, Rupali, and me, outside Pixel Park, bags on our backs, heading into class. Older than most of our professors. Younger than we had ever felt.

Perhaps that is what Back to School really meant — not returning to classrooms, but returning to the child's seat, where learning is renewed by ordinariness, irrelevance, and play.

The Inner Smile: Loving Yourself as the Gateway to Loving Others…

by Vishy Sankara | Apr 2, 2026 | Uncategorized

Compassion is the anthem of the helping community, sung across cultures and traditions. Athithi Devo Bhava — the guest is God — reminds us to extend warmth to all who enter our lives. Yet the deepest wisdom quietly points back to the same source: you cannot give what you do not have.

Jesus put it with quiet precision: "Love your neighbour as you love yourself." Nothing less. Nothing more. It is not a hierarchy — self first, then others — but a recognition that the two are inseparable. The well must have water before it can quench anyone’s thirst. In the rush to serve, to help, to love others, it is the easiest thing in the world to forget that compassion is not an infinite resource drawn from a void — but a renewable one that requires its own source. If one cannot love oneself, how can one truly love another?

The Inner Smile

The Taoist practice of the Inner Smile arrives at the same truth through the body. It involves cultivating a gentle, loving smile aimed inwardly — at the organs, the glands, and the nervous system — to cultivate health, happiness, and longevity. In a world that so often asks us to discipline, ignore, or reshape the body to fit an external ideal, the Inner Smile asks something altogether different: simply to turn toward it with kindness. It treats the body not as a machine to be managed, but as a living community to be befriended. This is quietly radical.

The practice begins behind the eyes — deliberately so. The eyes are the windows to the soul, but they are also its most vigilant sentinels. Softening the gaze is the first step in telling the entire nervous system: you are safe. Like a stream flowing downhill, the smile softens everything in its path — through the jaw, the throat, the chest — until it pools in the belly. It is anatomically intuitive.

Modern science lends this ancient practice unexpected support. A genuine smile — even one generated internally — activates the parasympathetic nervous system, reducing cortisol and triggering the release of neuropeptides associated with well-being. The Taoists arrived at this through centuries of observation, long before neuroscience had the vocabulary for it.

Breath: The Thread That Weaves the Fragmented Self

Before any smile can be directed inward, there is breath. It is breath that integrates — gathering the fragmented kokoro (the Japanese word that holds heart, mind, and spirit as one inseparable whole) back into coherence. Not by forcing the pieces back together, but by creating a quiet enough space for them to settle back into their natural, integrated state on their own. When the mind scatters and the emotions storm, breath alone can silently collect them. We reach for complex solutions — therapies, medications, affirmations — when the most ancient and portable technology is always quietly running in the background. Breath is not a technique we pick up and put down. It is the most reliable technology the human body possesses.

The lineage of breathing practices is long and rich. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali gave the world Pranayama — the conscious regulation of life-force through breath — and this remains the foundational grammar that most traditions still reference. Yet what happened next is extraordinary. The Tibetans, Taoists, and Zen practitioners did not simply inherit this grammar. They took the initial insight and carried it into an altogether different dimension — refining, deepening, and embodying it in ways that transformed it from technique into a complete way of being.

Here Japan offers a revealing parallel. Zen tempers wisdom as Japan tempers steel — importing ore, returning purity. Japan has very limited iron ore and coal deposits. It imports those raw materials in large quantities and produces the finest steel in the world. So too with the Japanese — and more broadly the Zen — relationship to received wisdom. They import the raw ore of an idea, subject it to extraordinary refinement and pressure, and return it to the world transformed. This reframes the transmission of ideas not as mere copying, but as a form of spiritual alchemy. The pressure of a different culture, a different psychology, forges something new and exceptionally pure from the same base material. What arrived as Pranayama — a technique — was returned as Zazen, a way of being. Stripped of everything superfluous, forged into precision.

The Hara: Energy Rooted in the Earth

Central to Taoist and Zen understanding is the concept of Hara (Zen) or Tanden (Taoism) — the energy centre located approximately two inches below the navel. This stands in meaningful contrast to the heart-as-centre model prevalent in Western and many other Eastern traditions. The West tends to locate the self either in the head — the mind — or in the chest — the emotions. Taoism and Zen offer a third possibility: root it in the belly. In Japanese culture, hara carries deep moral weight — “hara ga aru” means a person of substance and integrity. To have belly is to have groundedness. It suggests that true stability lies not in what we think or feel, but in where we root ourselves.

In martial arts, all power originates from the Hara. In Zen sitting, breath is directed there. Directing the inner smile downward — into the gut, into the Hara — is therefore the completion of the circuit: warmth meeting ground, heart meeting stability.

Whether one calls this life force chi (Taoism) or ki (Zen), the underlying recognition is the same — that life is not merely biochemical but energetic. Negative emotional energy need not be suppressed or discharged; it can be alchemized into something useful. This is not mysticism alone — it is psychologically sophisticated. The heart may flutter, the mind may scatter — but the belly does not lie.

Hakuin’s Soft Butter & The Music That Carries It Home

There is a remarkable companion to the Inner Smile that has been practiced at Kanzeon Zendo as the closing ritual of every daily session — and it comes from an unlikely source: an 18th century Japanese Zen master named Hakuin Ekaku.

Hakuin developed what he called the Naikan or Soft Butter meditation as a remedy for Zen sickness — the very real burnout that arises when practice becomes effortful, driven, and self-punishing rather than nourishing. His prescription was radical in its simplicity: imagine a lump of soft, fragrant butter resting on the crown of the head. Feel its warmth. And then simply allow it to melt.

Like the Inner Smile, the butter flows downward — slowly, without force, softening everything in its path. Through the skull and behind the eyes. Down through the throat and shoulders. Through the chest, the organs, the belly. Until it gathers, warm and luminous, in the Hara. It is Hakuin’s stream. It is the same stream.

That this vision arose from a Japanese Zen master — itself a refined transmission of received wisdom — is precisely the continuity this piece has been tracing. The body as a living community. Warmth as the medium. Descent as the direction.

At Kanzeon Zendo, we do not end here in silence. We carry this warmth home on music. The Soft Butter meditation is held within music — sound becoming the final carrier of the inner smile, resonating in the spaces that words and breath have softened. Music does not add to the practice; it completes it. The body, already quieted, receives it differently. Wholly.

In the interest of keeping this post to a manageable length, the details of Hakuin’s practice deserve a note of their own — and we would be happy to share it with you directly. For a note on Hakuin’s Soft Butter meditation as we practice it at Kanzeon Zendo, write to us at vishy.sankara@kanzeonzendo.life.

The Inner Smile, at its heart, asks a simple and profound question: what if your baseline inner state was one of gentle affection rather than criticism or indifference? It reframes the entire spiritual path. Not about achieving grand states of bliss, but about subtly shifting the background hum of our own consciousness. From that shift — quiet, almost imperceptible at first — every thought, every word, every action naturally follows.

And it begins, as almost everything does, with a single breath.

The Hand That Knows Too Much: What Dan Brown Teaches Us About the Untaught Writers…

by Vishy Sankara | Mar 30, 2026 | FAction, Literature, Right(ing)

(A Reader's — and an Aspiring Writer's — Critique of The Secret of Secrets By Dan Brown )

After I moved to the Zendo, the natural progression was becoming part of the Bodhi Sangha book club. Each month they curate a list of seven or eight books, and all of us vote and select a book for the month and the last Saturday of the month spend some 2 hours sharing views on it. Some members — like Dr. Rao, a retired Indian-American physician, and Ritesh, an academic settled in Germany who is completing his doctorate, Carl who lives in Kyoto next to a Zen monastery etc — read every single chosen book and come prepared with views and critiques. Many others do too. That one-and-a-half to two hours is worth its weight in gold.

Dan Brown needs no introduction to any reader in the world. Not after The Da Vinci Code.

The book for March was Dan Brown's The Secret of Secrets — a breezy read, a fast page-turner. I was completely engrossed for a day and two. Then, after a gap of two or three days, I found myself reflecting on it.

There are books I have read in one sitting. Gone with the Wind, for instance. We got hold of a copy during our final-year engineering exams, and my roommate Goofy and I read it straight through, the exam entirely irrelevant. And then there are other books — O.V. Vijayan, Kamala Das — which demand something slower, something more interior.

What follows is my critique of The Secret of Secrets. When I was reading, I was simply reading. That reflective hat came later — a gift from a generous online writing course I was able to attend at no cost. Sincere gratitude for their generosity.

The Machinery of Pace

Brown builds his narrative through relentless scene-shifting — short chapters that end mid-tension, dropping the reader into a different strand before resolution arrives. In cinema this is called cross-cutting. In literature the precise term is interlacement — the medieval technique of braiding multiple storylines so that the reader is perpetually suspended between threads. Brown deploys this with considerable skill. The pages turn almost involuntarily.

The Crichton Effect

What gives the novel its unusual grip is Brown's faction — the scaffolding of verifiable fact beneath the fictional story. He elaborates, sometimes at length, on noetic science, the Hermann Grid, precognition, sudden savant syndrome, EMet and Met, the Barnum Effect and others. A reader who fact-checks these discovers they hold up. And that changes everything. The fictional frame partially dissolves. What was a thriller quietly becomes a possibility. This is the Crichton inheritance — dense, accurate research deployed not to educate but to destabilise the reader's certainty about what is real. Brown uses it masterfully.

The Knowing Hand

And yet. Brown teaches creative writing. And it shows.

A writer who teaches technique becomes hyper-conscious of the toolbox. Every chapter end arrives on schedule. Every cliffhanger deploys with the punctuality of a train. Every scientific digression appears at precisely the moment the pace needs breathing room. The interlacement is too clean, the faction too carefully placed, the dramatic revelation too well-timed.

The seams are visible. The hand is always there.

Brown's interlacement is like a magician's trick — you know the hand is moving, but you still lean forward. Yet there is a difference between suspension and surrender. In Dostoevsky or Vijayan, you surrender because the world itself has swallowed you. In Brown, you are suspended because the scaffolding keeps you dangling. It is a thrill, yes. But not the free fall.

This is the central limitation of the classroom writer — tremendous structural competence, imaginative caution. He writes like an excellent student who has understood every rule and replicates them faithfully. There is skill here, undeniable. But rarely surprise at the level of form.

Technique is safe. It guarantees a certain level of readability. But risk is what makes literature unforgettable. Kamala Das risked shame. Vijayan risked incomprehension. Melville risked ridicule. Brown risks nothing. He entertains, but he does not endanger himself. And so the reader is never endangered either.

And yet — here is the other side. Some books demand one-sitting immersion, like Gone with the Wind during engineering exams, when the world outside is irrelevant. Others demand gaps, pauses, reflection. Brown's scaffolding may be deliberate, but the reader's rhythm decides whether it becomes mere entertainment or a seed of reflection. The critique is not only of the writer. It is also of the reader's own machinery of attention.

The Dharma of Reading

Every book is a gate. Some gates open into gardens, some into deserts, some into wounds. Brown's gate opens into a museum of ideas — consciousness, precognition, noetic science. You walk through, you admire, you nod. But you rarely bleed. The Dharma of reading is not only to be informed, but to be transformed. Brown informs. Transformation is rarer.

And what the Untaught Writers Had…

Dostoevsky had a Siberian prison and a firing squad. O.V. Vijayan had Khasak and a devotional relationship with Malayalam itself. Kamala Das had her body and her uncontainable honesty. Emily Brontë had the Yorkshire moors and one novel in her and died at thirty. Melville had harpooned actual whales and lived among cannibals.

None of them managed technique. They managed truth. The craft followed necessity, not the other way around.

What the Indian aesthetic tradition calls pratibha — spontaneous creative illumination — cannot be taught or replicated. It arises. And when it does, you cannot see the writer's hand at all. Only the wound, or the landscape, or the obsession. Mahabharata, does not give any clue about Veda Vyasa, neither Ramayana about Valmiki.

Brown chose to write a thriller. That choice is already the distance between him and that company.

The Honest Verdict and the reader's — and aspiring writer's — Gratitude

Brown is not without genuine quality. His enthusiasm for ideas — consciousness, the limits of knowledge, mind preceding matter — is real, not manufactured. That curiosity rescues him from being merely mechanical. When the research opens an unexpected room, the wonder is authentic.

But the architecture around it is always a little too deliberate. The technique is the scaffolding. The ideas are the building. In his best moments, you forget the scaffolding. In his weakest, it is all you see.

He writes like a man who knows exactly what he is doing. The greatest writers never quite knew. And that unknowing was everything. Still, gratitude remains. A book that engrosses for two days is already a gift. A book that makes you reflect after gaps is another gift. And a book that provokes critique is the greatest gift of all. Brown gave me all three. For that, I bow.

The Koan of the Mindzendo: Writing in the Tunnel Without Light…

by Vishy Sankara | Mar 28, 2026 | Change, Life, Transformation, Zen

There was a time — not that long ago — when the tunnel had no light. Not at the end, not even at the beginning. Just darkness, thick and unyielding. I had lost my job, lost my footing, and with it, the fragile scaffolding of confidence. Depression is not just sadness; it is the absence of horizon. You cannot even imagine the possibility of dawn.

In those days, the only thing I had was a domain name: Mindzendo.coach. A small corner of the digital world, a name I had registered almost absentmindedly, like planting a seed without knowing if the soil would ever hold.

Then something curious happened. On GoDaddy, an unknown bidder kept raising the price for that domain. Ten dollars, a hundred, a thousand. When it touched six thousand, I was tempted to sell. After all, I was penniless. Six thousand dollars could have been oxygen for someone who was drowning in the whirlpool of life.

But then a thought struck me: if someone else sees so much value in this, and I cannot, then the issue is not with the domain — it is with my eyes. To sell it then would have been to sell not just a name, but the possibility of my own seeing. So I declined.

That refusal was not an act of wealth, but of faith. Faith that value is not always measured in currency, and that sometimes the world tests us by showing us our worth through another's eyes.

It was around then that my friend Komal Jain said, "Why don't you monetise your writing?" At that time, even stepping out of the house felt like climbing Everest. To imagine that my words could carry value, that they could be exchanged in the marketplace of human attention, was almost absurd. And yet, it was precisely then that I applied for an online writing programme.

The irony is not lost on me. I had no money, no certificate, no job, no confidence. But I had a domain name, a friend's suggestion, and a stubborn refusal to sell what I did not yet understand. Out of that refusal, a new path opened.

That online writing programme is one of the most reputed in the world, and would have cost me a fortune. But when I wrote to them — explaining that, in the aftermath of Covid, the NGO I worked with had let me go and I was absolutely penniless — they let me join on two conditions: no certificate, and I was not to broadcast their generosity too widely. I have kept both, as best I can.

The writing programme taught me what no certificate could: that the heart of writing is perspective. It is not about technique. And perspective is born not in comfort, but in crucible. It is born when you sit in the tunnel without light and still choose to see. It is born when you decline six thousand dollars because you sense that the real treasure is not in the offer, but in the challenge.

Looking back, I see that Mindzendo was never just a domain. It was a koan. A question posed by life itself: Do you know your own value?

And writing became the answer. Not a final answer, but a living one. Each word, each act of seeing, became a way of reclaiming that value — not in the marketplace, but in the heart.

The tunnel did not end. It transformed. The darkness became ink. The absence of light became the page. And the act of writing became the lamp.

After the lamp came the books. Three of them, in particular, became companions on the writing path. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott — honest, irreverent, a writer telling the truth about the mess of writing without flinching. Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg — spare, surgical, a love letter to the sentence itself. And Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg — which came to me through Fr. AMA Samy, who recommended it when I asked him to write a preface for my first book, Fallen Flower, Fragrant Grass. ( https://amzn.in/d/02lCskfG ) Goldberg writes about writing the way a Zen teacher writes about sitting — as practice, as presence, as a return to what is already there. I should not have been surprised. The bones, after all, are just another name for the ground.

After living in the Zendo for almost three and a half years, one thing I have learnt: writing is like Zazen. One writes for the sake of writing. One reads for the sake of reading. One sits for the sake of sitting. All of them are complete in themselves. Anything that comes out of them is just a bonus — grace, arriving uninvited.

Purrfect Presence: The Trikaya on a Balcony

by Vishy Sankara | Mar 20, 2026 | Life, RElationship, Trust, Zen

Eckhart Tolle said: “I know many Zen Masters… all of them Cats.”

And here, three ZenCats listening to a teisho have arranged themselves with such impeccable dharmic precision that one suspects the whole scene was choreographed by something beyond mere kittenhood. 🙂

But first — what the photograph doesn’t show. These three had known loss. A sibling, gone. And with it, a wariness that only grief can plant in those small bodies. They had reason to stay back, stay wary. It took a long time — quiet sitting, no agenda, no forcing — before they would come close at all. That patience, that slow and gentle rebuilding of trust, is not the backstory to this photograph. It is the teaching.

In Mahayana Buddhism, the doctrine of Trikaya (Sanskrit for “three bodies”) describes the three manifestations of Buddhahood:

Dharmakaya (Truth Body): the formless, unmanifested absolute — ultimate reality, emptiness, Buddha-nature itself.

Sambhogakaya (Enjoyment Body): the luminous “reward” body, radiant presence experienced in deep meditative states.

Nirmanakaya (Transformation Body): the physical manifestation that appears in the world to teach and guide beings.

The balcony photograph is nothing less than Trikaya in fur.

One eager beaver kitten leaning forward with attention. Shoshin in fur form. Beginner’s mind, ardent faith, great doubt — personified in a tiny body. Not striving, just interested. Pure attention meeting the moment. This is the Nirmanakaya: the Buddha who enters the world, who takes form, makes eye contact, leans in. Shakyamuni under the Bodhi tree had this same quality — fully landed in form, fully present.

The one bang on the Middle Way. Not meditating — just being the meditation. The very picture of shikantaza (just sitting). Half-lidded eyes, no goal, no attainment, nothing to reject. Sitting is sitting. Cat is cat. This is the Sambhogakaya: luminous enjoyment body, radiating without broadcasting, bliss without agenda. Amitabha’s infinite light simply shining.

One lounging in the back row. Stretched out, utterly unbothered. Upekkha so complete it naps through the teisho — which is itself the teisho. “The sound of the talk is the sound of the breeze. The breeze is nice. I shall nap.” This is the Dharmakaya: the unborn, unmanifest ground of all three. Not sleeping, not waking — prior to both. The Dharmakaya doesn’t meditate. It is what meditation is.

Eagerness, detachment, equanimity — all expressed in fur and whiskers. One cat-nature. Three expressions. The form that engages. The presence that radiates. The ground that holds it all.

The balcony is the zendo. The morning light is the dharma. The railing is the boundary between samsara’s hillside busyness and this small square of equipoise. No separation between practice and life. No special posture required. Just this — fur, light, hillside humming in the distance — already complete.

They lost a sibling. They had every reason to remain closed, remain wary. And yet here they are — one leaning in with trust, one sitting in luminous presence, one resting into the ground of being. That journey — from grief and wariness to this open, sunlit arrangement — is perhaps the deepest teaching of all.

Cats don’t try to be enlightened. They simply are what they are, completely. Which, as this photograph shows, turns out to be the three bodies of Buddhahood — arranged casually on a balcony, waiting for breakfast.

Who still doubts that a cat cannot be a Zen Master?

The answer, as always, comes in purrfect silence. 🐾

Dilbar Coffee

by Vishy Sankara | Mar 17, 2026 | Harmony, Joy, Life, Meaning, Zen

Some of the most remarkable insights in life have not come from self-made billionaires on Forbes covers. Or spiritual gurus on mountain tops. The most unexpected people, in the most ordinary moments taught me those wonderful life lessons.

This is one of those.

During those days, post covid Corporates were trying to get out of work from home rule. My boss was in faraway Zurich gave me the freedom to decide. But one jealous senior colleague, with whom I had an argument, did not like that. He made sure that I had to visit my work office in the United States of Sarjapur at least on once in a week. Corporate office was in the United States of Sarjapur, northeast of normal Bangalore. Every second Thursday I would drive cross-country very early in the morning. The reason was simple. To avoid an hour of meditation at the infamous visa and passport check at Silk Board junction. 😄

An early morning breakfast at TRC was a routine affair. That's where I first met Dilbar. The quiet, friendly barista at TRC, brewing that perfect South Indian filter coffee like it was the most important thing in the world.

And in a way, it was.

Now let me tell you a little about Dilbar. He is from Assam — a young boy who failed his 10th standard, with no degree, no diploma, no connections. Just a quiet desperation to support his family. So he did what many young boys from smaller towns do: he packed whatever little he had and came down to Bangalore in search of a job. Any job.

And somewhere along the way, he found coffee. Or perhaps coffee found him.

I was seeing him after some time when I asked whether he had been on leave. He, self-effacingly, replied that he had been in Mumbai. When I persisted, he said he had been at Mota Bhai's house. He was one of those who went with the TRC team for Mota Bhai's son's wedding. And it so seems Mota Bhai and another family member had taken a liking to his South Indian filter coffee .

Now here is where the story gets interesting. In India, no one says no to Mota Bhai. So when his managers spoke to Dilbar's employer, there was no notice period. Dilbar was now working at one of the most prestigious addresses in India — may be beyond India too.

His entire job there was to make one or two cups of coffee. Every single day. For Mota Bhai. And the ritual was something else. When Mota Bhai arrived for breakfast, his personal butler would radio the kitchen manager. Only then would Dilbar begin his work. He would brew that perfect cup, hand it to the kitchen manager, who would walk it to the butler, who would then serve it.

A relay of respect, for one cup of coffee.

But here is the twist in the tale.

After a few days, Dilbar got bored. Not even the other kitchen staff drank coffee — they were either tea drinkers or badam milk people. 😄 A coffee maker with no one to make coffee for.

Think about it: a musician without an audience. Sanju Samson batting in front of an empty stadium. A writer without a reader (like me?). Or a barista without that beautiful chaos of steam, clinking cups, and a queue of sleepy people waiting for their first hit of caffeine.

Making two cups in a palace, how much soever prestigious in LinkedIn — safe and secure, but not alive. So after a few days, he walked up to the kitchen manager and said he wanted to leave. Word reached Mota Bhai. He did not meeting him in person. Through the kitchen manager he enquired and offered to double his salary.

Some one who as a master communicator thru Coffee, Dilbar had to struggle to explain: it is not about the money. This is a society of spectacle where increments on a payslip, or designations in LinkedIn profile are success barometers. In this world, Dilbar's quiet "no" was nothing short of a revolution. Corporate workshops spend millions trying to teach Corpoarzens this: "purpose over package".

Because how do you explain to the richest man in the country that a craftsman needs his crowd? That a barista needs his rush? That making two cups a day, how much soever prestigious, is not living — it is mere existence?

Think about what happened here. A boy who failed his 10th standard, from a small town in Assam, was being offered a doubled salary by the richest man in India — and he said no. Not out of arrogance, not out of foolishness, but out of a deep, unshakeable understanding of what truly fulfils him.

How many of us — with our degrees, our MBAs, our LinkedIn profiles — can say that with such clarity? Sooner than later, he was back. To TRC. To his station. To his thousands of coffees a day (including the one for yours truly 🙂). Back to the chaos, the steam, the noise, the orders. Back to where he belonged.

No fanfare, no Instagram post, no "as seen at Mota Bhai's house" badge on his apron.

A man, his coffee, and his calling.

And this story dismantles a myth we all grew up believing — that success is a linear ladder, always pointing upward. For Dilbar, success was a circle that led him right back to his station at TRC. He didn't see working for India's richest man as a promotion. He saw it as a detour.

Think about it. In one of the most discussed wedding where everything was curated to perfection. In that world of million dollar wrist watches and Michelin-star menus, what lingered was a humble cup of South Indian filter coffee. Brewed by a boy who failed his 10th, who travelled from Assam to Bangalore with nothing but hope.

That's not luck. That's mastery.

And mastery, I have come to believe, has nothing to do with where you studied, or where you come from, or what certificate is framed on your wall. Mastery lives in your hands and heart—not in your head. And in the way you show up for your craft every single day in an honest manner.

In a city like Bangalore, which runs on ambition and caffeine, Dilbar is as essential as the morning news. Some people don't chase the spotlight. The spotlight finds them. And some people — after standing in the spotlight — quietly walk back to where their soul sings ☕.

Now here is the part that gave me goosebumps. I looked up the meaning of his name. Dilbar, in Urdu, translates to one who fills the heart. A boy named Dilbar, who fills hearts for a living, with a cup of coffee. You can't make this up. He doesn't only serve coffee. He administers a small dose of warmth, and a quiet sense of normalcy, to hundreds of strangers every single morning. He brewed a life lesson. And yes, some coffee does fill the heart. Especially when someone whose heart is already full makes it. The boy from Assam taught me more about purpose, mastery, and self-awareness than most books I have ever read.

Some people inspire me. Some people remind me that purpose is brewed, not bought. And yes—there are things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s Mastercard.

P.S. When I first shared this story with my near and dear over WhatsApp, I did include his photograph — taken with his permission. After his narration, over a second cup of coffee, I told him I was going to share this in my group, and he said okay. But as I write this for reach, I realise the story's soul is that this man walked away from the spotlight. As a coach, the most empathetic thing I can do is not drag him back into one without his full, informed blessing. So Dilbar's face remains, in a befitting manner, between the steam and the silence

Dilbar taught me that purpose is brewed, not bought. But if you'd like to help me keep brewing these stories, you're welcome to buy me a coffee — every cup fuels the next.

☕ buymeacoffee.com/vishysankara.

Or simply click the coffee cup on the right side of this page — it's always warm and waiting. 😄

When the North Star Disappears — Lost Is Where It Begins…

by Vishy Sankara | Mar 10, 2026 | Life, Meaning, Transformation, Zen

Since olden times, people looked outward for direction. Sailors on sea, wanderers in desert, travellers on land—all leaned on North Star and compass. They became symbols of constancy, external lighthouses available at any point of time. They remind us of the human need for validation, for something outside ourselves to say: this is the way.

But as with all symbols, context undoes them.

At the North Pole, Polaris is no longer a guide—it hangs directly overhead, dissolving its function as "north." In Norway's summer months, as a Norwegian friend at the Zendo described, the sun refuses to set—and locals speak of "time-free zones," where the ordinary rhythm of day and night disappears. Near magnetic poles or iron-rich lands, the compass needle falters, pointing in strange directions. In those places, navigators abandon it altogether.

Thomas Kuhn wrote that paradigms change only when experience breaks the programmed frame. These examples show the same truth: guides are not absolute, they are contextual. The North Star and compass are reliable until they are not.

What is harder to name is the in-between. The moment the star disappears but the inner light has not yet steadied. That gap—disorienting, even frightening—is perhaps the most honest place on the journey. Many turn back here, reaching for a familiar guide even when they sense it has begun to mislead them. The known wrong direction feels safer than the unknown right one.

The poet David Whyte, reflecting on Dante's opening lines from the Commedia—"in the middle of the road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost"—offers a striking reframe: "How do you know you're on your path? Because it disappears. That's how you know." The loss of the way is not a failure. It is a signal. A threshold.

The Zen tradition calls it don't-know mind. Not ignorance—something subtler. The willingness to stand in open uncertainty without rushing to fill it. To let the question breathe before the answer comes.

Rumi points to the same field: out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. When the compass loses its north, that field opens.

The Tao Te Ching whispers the same: the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. What guides us most deeply resists being fixed, pointed to, written down. The ancient Chinese navigators of the interior did not seek a star to follow—they sought a quality of listening, a receptivity to what the moment itself was asking. Wu wei—not forcing, not grasping. Moving with what is, not against it.

The Salish people of the Pacific Northwest speak to this directly. In a teaching recounted in David Wagoner's poem Lost, young ones ask the elder: what do I do when I am lost in the forest? The answer was not to search harder or move faster. It was to stand still. To stop imposing direction. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you. Whyte, reflecting on this teaching, draws the Zen parallel himself: the elders of the Northwest and the masters of Zen were pointing at the same truth—that the deepest orientation does not come from our seeking, but from our allowing.

There is a difference between surrender and giving up. Giving up turns away from the journey. Surrender turns toward it—with empty hands. To release a guide is not to abandon the path; it is to trust that the path continues even when the markers disappear. That trust is itself a form of navigation.

In our human journey, external guides—teachers, traditions, communities—can illuminate the way. But there are moments when they fail, when the compass lies or the star disappears. Then the invitation is to turn inward, to cultivate an inner compass, to discern direction from lived experience, silence, and presence.

The North Star and compass are not wrong; they are incomplete. They remind us of our longing for orientation, but also of the wisdom to know when to trust them—and when to let go.

And this is why the Buddha said: Appo deepo bhava—be a light unto yourself.

When the outer lights go dark, we do not become lost. We become ready.

The Mindcar: A Driver’s Manual for Comfortable Journey

by Vishy Sankara | Mar 7, 2026 | RElationship, STRESS, Transformation, Zen

You may remember this iconic movie scene.

Bus number 2525. A normal day. People going to work, going home, going nowhere special. Then the bomb. Then the call. The villain on the phone telling Keanu Reeves: There is a bomb on that bus. When the bus hits fifty miles per hour, the bomb is armed. If it drops below fifty, it explodes.

Now you may remember the name of the Movie. SPEED. It was a big hit in 1994.

Now back to that bus 2525.

And the bus keeps speeding. The driver cannot stop. The passengers do not know. Keanu runs after it but the bus is faster. So he jumps into a car. A normal car. Not a police car. Not a hero car. But a Jaguar. And he chases.

He pulls alongside the bus. He has a poster. A handmade thing. Written in a hurry. Probably with a marker that was lying around. He holds it up to the window. It says something simple. Something that could save everyone.

It says: BOMB on the BUS

But the damn wind.

The wind from the speeding bus, from the speeding car, from the highway rushing past at eighty miles an hour—it catches the poster. Rips it from his hands. The paper flies and twists and tumbles through the air like a thing with no purpose. And then, by some strange grace, it sticks. Right there. On the front mirror of the bus. The driver's mirror. The one place where the driver might see it if she looks.

That poster is stuck. Stuck to the glass. Stuck to the minds of those bewildered passengers, who were on their way to work on a very normal day and Sam, their driver.

And on that poster, written in marker, is the warning that changes everything:

BOMB on the BUS

And then, after that message, our hero manages to get into the bus quite heroically as in any other normal Bollywood/Tolllywood movies.

Somehow. The way heroes do. A leap. A grab. A door that opens at just the right moment. He is inside now. The bus is still speeding. The bomb is still under the floor. The rule is still the same: below fifty, everyone dies.

There is a man driving. A regular driver. Sam. Who seems to know all the regular passengers of that bus 2525. A man who was just doing his job until a stranger jumped in and a poster appeared on his mirror and now his world is upside down. Keanu starts explaining. Starts trying to calm everyone down. Starts telling them about the bomb, about the speed, about what they have to do.

And then it happens.

There is an unruly passenger. Someone who cannot handle the fear. Someone who turns fear into fury. Someone who does not want to listen, does not want to calm down, does not want to cooperate. He pulls out a gun. (Which of course are available in plenty in the land of opportunities!) And before anyone can stop him, he shoots the driver.

The driver falls. The bus keeps moving. But the wheel is empty.

And then Sandra Bullock takes over.

A passenger. A woman who was just riding the bus. Who had no plan to drive, no desire to drive, no training for this. But the wheel is empty and someone has to hold it. So she holds it. She drives. She learns in seconds what most people take years to learn. She keeps the bus moving. She keeps the speed above fifty. She navigates through traffic and turns and obstacles while behind her, chaos continues.

And Keanu? He is still there. Still managing. Still trying to calm the passengers, deal with the shooter, figure out what comes next. But Sandra is driving now. And that changes everything.

If you are driving a car through a busy Indian road (Let us say Hyderabad) and there are lot of people in the car. Many good, noble and friendly ones. And some loud, pesky, irritable ones. The one who wish that you have never come across in life. Now if you are really determined and focus on shutting up those bad ones or not have them in that car itself, you cant even focus on driving. Now the other fear is those bad pesky ones are allowed to in the car, you wont be able to drive at all. So U may stop on the kerb and fight them to throw them out. But they neve leave. They are all glued to their car seat with Fevicol. There is a middle path.. (The one Buddha and Aristotle taught ). These passengers are your memories. Your pain. Your thoughts. Some about your guilt. Some about your anger. Some about your not so good times.. Etc. That is your own. That is why they are stuck to the car seat glued with Fevicol. Consider you have enough room in those backseats of that CAR above your neck. And Just accept that fact and continue to drive. There may be other passengers who may whine to you about those loud irritable co passengers.. But even they are nothing but a passenger in your Mindcar. The tag phrase is Be comfortable with them all. While you navigate your car of life through those narrow , sometime wide alleys of this world.

This is not just a story. This is a map of the human mind, drawn with the dust of Hyderabad roads and the glue of Fevicol.

the paradox we all live inside:

The Trap of Suppression: We try to shut them up. We try to focus only on the good, noble, friendly ones. But the moment we put all your energy into silencing the backseat, our eyes leave the road. The car swerves. We cannot drive while fighting a war behind your own head.
The Trap of Engagement: So then we think, "I will stop this car altogether. I will pull over to the kerb, I will turn around, and I will throw them out. I will argue with them until they leave." But they never leave. They are ours. They are stuck with Fevicol to our mind, like that advt. Every memory, every guilt, every angry thought—it is bonded to the seat of our experience. The more we fight, the more we are just sitting on the kerb, going nowhere, while the world waits.
The Middle Path is the Driver's Path: This is where Buddha's wheel meets Aristotle's highway. The middle path is not a compromise between the good passengers and the bad ones. It is a shift in identity. You are not a passenger. We are the driver. The driver's job is not to control the conversation in the back. The driver's job is to keep the vehicle moving. To watch the road. To navigate the narrow alleys and the wide boulevards.

And then we add the most subtle truth: The ones who whine about the pesky passengers—the thoughts that say "Why is this thought still here?" or "I should be over this by now"—they are also just passengers. More noise. More meta-noise. All of them, just faces in the rearview mirror.

After lot of struggles and stumbles, while trying to drive the Mindcar on a Zazen cushion, we find the key to the whole journey:

Be comfortable with them all.

But what does comfortable really mean? Have given the answer inside the word itself. That was a built fort with letters.

COMFORTABLE = COME + FORT + ABLE

Let us sit with this. Let us feel the weight of it.

COME: This is the first step, and the bravest one. It is the opposite of running. It is the opposite of covering your ears. It is turning toward the backseat and saying, "I see you. I know you are there. You are loud. You are irritating. You remind me of things I wish I had never done, things I wish had never happened to me. But I see you. I acknowledge you." You stop fighting the fact that they exist. You invite the reality of your own mind to be present. You COME to terms with what is.

FORT: This is the realization of your own strength. You are not a fragile hut that will collapse if a loud thought shouts. You are a FORT. A fort does not exist to keep the weather away. A fort exists to stand firm in the weather. The rain comes. The wind howls. The fort remains. The noise from the backseat—the guilt, the anger, the pesky ones—it can bounce off the walls. It can scream. But the walls do not shake. Because the FORT is built with something deeper than temporary peace. It is built with the knowledge that you are the driver, not the noise. The fort is your own unshakable center.

ABLE: And because we have COME to the noise, and because we sit in our FORT, we are now ABLE. Able to drive. Able to navigate. Able to turn the steering wheel when a cow walks onto the road or a child runs after a ball. The ability does not come from a silent car. It comes from a driver who is at peace with a noisy one. You are ABLE to live your life with your memories, not despite them. The guilt is still in the back. The anger is still muttering. The pain is still there, glued with Fevicol. But you are ABLE. Your hands are on the wheel. Your eyes are on the road. You are moving.

So the final image is this: Close your eyes. And see your mindcar with insight.

You are driving through the busy, chaotic, beautiful, terrifying streets of Hyderabad—which is just another name for life. The car is full. It is loud. Some voices are kind. Some voices make you wish you had never been born. Some voices complain about the other voices.

And you? You are in the driver's seat. You have looked back once, said "I see you all," and turned forward again. You have built your FORT not in some silent mountain far from the noise, but right here in the driver's seat, with the chaos swirling around you. You are COMFORTABLE—not because the noise has stopped, but because you have COME to your FORT and you are now ABLE.

The Fevicol is strong. But so is the fort.

Drive on.

And now let us make things a little more complex.

Often You are not driving on a smooth highway with that Mindcar. This is not a movie set where the road is empty and the only problem is the bomb. This is not a Zendo. But a market place This is real life. Let us say that that road is in Old Hyderabad. Or This is anywhere.

On the road too you meet some good people. Some bad. And some really ugly.

Sometimes someone cuts in. No signal. No warning. Just swerves right into your lane because they are late, because they are careless, because they simply do not care about you.

Sometimes someone blares the horn for no reason. Not because you did anything wrong. Not because there is an emergency. Just because they are angry. Just because they have their own bomb inside their own car and they are taking it out on you.

Sometimes there is a truck behind you riding too close. So close you can see the driver's face in your mirror. So close that one tap of your brake would end everything.

Sometimes there is a pedestrian who steps off the kerb without looking. Lost in their own world. Their own thoughts. Their own passengers.

Sometimes there is a cow standing in the middle of the road. Just standing. Because this is India and cows can stand wherever they want.

Sometimes there is a child chasing a ball. Sometimes there is an old man crossing slowly. Sometimes there is a political procession with flags and shouting and drums. Sometimes there is a wedding. Sometimes there is a funeral. Sometimes the road is flooded. Sometimes it is full of potholes. Sometimes it is not even a road, just a dirt path that someone decided to call a road.

And through all of this, you are driving.

Your car is still full. The loud ones are still loud. The pesky ones are still pesky. The irritable ones are still making you wish you had never been born. The Fevicol is still holding them to their seats. The bomb is still under the floor. The rule is still the same: keep moving or explode.

And now there is all of this outside too.

The ones who cut you off. The ones who honk. The ones who drive like maniacs. The ones who walk like they own the road. The ones who do not see you. The ones who see you and do not care.

What do you do?

Do you stop the car to fight the man who cut you off? Do you get out and shout at the one who blared the horn? Do you chase down the pedestrian who stepped in front of you? Do you try to move the cow?

You cannot. The bomb is still there. The speedometer is still ticking. Below fifty and it is over.

So you do what an expert driver of a mindcar does. You acknowledge them. You see the man who cut you off. You hear the horn that means nothing. You notice the cow and the child and the old man. You register them. And then you keep driving.

You adjust. You slow down a little for the cow. You wait for the child to get the ball. You let the maniac pass because letting them pass costs you nothing and fighting them costs everything. You do not return the horn because returning the horn does not move you forward. You do not make eye contact with the angry ones because eye contact is just another kind of stop.

The road is full of people with their own bombs. Their own Fevicol. Their own loud passengers. Their own pain. Their own guilt. Their own anger. Their own not so good times.

They are not your passengers. They are not in your car. They are on the road. And the road is where they belong. The road is where everyone belongs. The good, the bad, the ugly, the maniacs, the lost ones, the ones who cut you off and the ones who let you in.

Your job is not to fix them. Your job is not to fight them. Your job is not to understand why they are the way they are. Your job is to share the road with them. To navigate around them. To keep moving despite them.

Because the bomb is still there. The passengers are still there. The road is still there. And you are still the driver.

Come. Fort. Able.

Come to the chaos outside as you came to the chaos inside. Build your fort so that their horns do not shatter you. Be able to drive through the worst traffic, the worst drivers, the worst roads, without losing your speed.

The world outside is not your passenger. It is just the road. And the road, like the passengers, like the bomb, like the Fevicol—the road just is.

Drive on.

Kanzeon Zendo Chronicles: Eyes of Wuji … Light Seeking Eyes

by Vishy Sankara | Feb 27, 2026 | Harmony, Integrity, Joy, Transformation, Zen

Wuji, the Zen kitten is the youngest inmate at our Zendo. It is Wuji’s practice to sit at my Window and listen through the Coaching conversations. No idea, what the kitten has found it so amusing to listen to coaching calls !

Eyes are the mirrors into one's heart mind. Almost 25 years ago, after a visit to Aurobindo Ashram, the only "curio" I bought was a small picture of eyes… just the eyes of Mother @ Pondichery. There was something quite mystical about it. I think that small photo is still there… maybe a bit faded. Still those eyes sparkle with light.

The "curio" was never a souvenir. It was transmission. A point of contact with unknowable in this unknown world. As the Zen koan teaches the way is not in knowing or in not knowing. Those eyes in a photograph are not merely biological—at that point of time, I felt they are darśana, windows into being. And those eyes have more glitter than that gold domed meditation chamber they were building at Auroville. We still have that laminated photograph of eyes in Manthari. Thara’s home. The fading of laminated paper only deepens the power. The sparkle of light is still untouched. I can feel it.

Carl Sagan in one of his documentaries, said that sometimes the stars we see in the sky have disappeared long ago… only the light they emitted still travels, looking for eyes to land in. The star is the saint. The Mother's earthly form is memory, history. Yet her gaze still travels. It landed in me 25 years ago, and lands again each time I look.

The eyes are the real telescope. Not just lenses, but mirrors of heartmind, kokoro. Light doesn't stop at the retina—it enters awareness. That photograph is a telescope, not aimed at galaxies, but at a state of grace.

Wuji is the medium. Limitless, primordial, void of infinite potential. The space through which all light travels. Wuji's eyes— Zendo kitten, c, ordinary, fragile and feline, yet the medium of limitless presence. The Mother's eyes, the starlight, Wuji the small Zen kitten’s eyes—all vessels of the same formless ground.

And then the eyes of Manu and Rishi… My right eye and left eye. They were small when they pushed me off the meditation mat, claiming it for themselves. Rishi was looking at with some disbelief; how can one waste one’s time without doing anything and Manu had expressions with his eyes closed. Their expression of that living moment was playful, innocent, yet luminous in their own way. Not faded, not distant, but immediate. Transmission through laughter, through ordinariness. Their then gaze in that photograph, now reminds me that Dharma is not confined to mats or postures—it arrives in the push, the smile, the sparkle of childhood.

The same goes with Krishnamurti's eyes, too, were spoken of as intense, luminous, compassionate. One could not not notice it in those countless videos of his dialogue. And those who were present in person for his talks vouched for that. A gaze that pierced through thought, dissolving the walls of convention. Observers felt his eyes were darśana, a living transmission, selfless and direct.

And then there is Fr. AMA's eyes. My Zen master. His eyes are a bit of a paradox. Kind and stern. Compassionate and matter of fact. Forgiving and correcting at the same time. He taught me that human beings are paradoxical self. Where finitude meets infinitude, eternal with temporal. And his eyes reflect that. They don't choose one side or the other. They hold both. In one gaze, you feel completely accepted as you are. In the same gaze, you know you are being asked to go further. There is no gap between the kindness and the sternness. They are the same thing, looking at you from different angles. His eyes are the teaching. Not just windows into his being, but mirrors showing you your own paradox. That you too are finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, perfectly imperfect and called to awaken all at once.

So the mandala widens:

The Mother's eyes—promise that light never ceases.

The stars' eyes—light traveling across time, seeking witness.

Wuji's eyes—ordinary, yet the medium of limitless presence.

Manu and Rishi's eyes—innocence, ordinariness, playful Dharma.

Krishnamurti's eyes—penetrating, luminous, compassionate, telescopes of awareness.

Fr. AMA's eyes—paradox embodied. Kind and stern. Forgiving and correcting. The gaze that holds both sides of being human.

And then there was my maternal grandfather. He had moved on the rainbow world more than 35 years ago. While he was alive (and still i think ), he was respected deeply by all those who met him. One who lived and walked on this earth with a lot of wisdom, compassion, kindness and generosity. And what I still recall in my innermind is the way he used to talk to us , his grandchildren. Especially he was in one of those wise sage mood. Whenever he had to say something very profound to us, his grandchildren, he would close his eyes.

As I said, he was respected deeply by all who met him. Of course. Because respect is not earned by what we project outward, but by what we contain. His closed eyes told us grandchildren: I am not looking at you right now. I am going somewhere else first. I am consulting the darkness. I am listening to the space behind my own eyes. And what I bring back from there—that is what I will give you.

All the other eyes in this mandala are outward facing. Beacons. Light seeking landing places. Transmission through gaze. But my grandfather—he closed his eyes. This is the other half of the teaching. The inward turn. The wisdom that knows: before light can be received, there must be stillness. Before transmission, there must be silence. Before the profound can be spoken, the eyes must stop seeking and simply be.

While my children's eyes pushed me off the meditation mat. My grandfather’s eyes pulled me inward.

Pondichéry Mother's eyes travelled across time to land in my heart. Wuji is the formless ground from which all light emerges. But Wuji is also the darkness behind closed eyelids. The primordial. The unmanifest. The silence before the word. Krishnamurti's gaze pierced through walls. Fr. AMA's gaze holds the paradox of walls and openness, self and no-self. My grandfather's closed eyes dissolved the walls entirely—not by looking through, but by looking away, into the source.

The first six are variations on light seeking eyes. The last is eyes seeking light—not outward, but inward. Into the darkness where all light is born.

When he closed his eyes, he wasn't shutting us out. He was taking us with him. Into the place where words come from. Into the Wuji behind the eyes.

And then he opened them and spoke.

That pause, that closing, that inward descent—that was the transmission. The words were just its echo.

Light seeks eyes. Eyes seek light. What my eyes saw was a promise: that light, whether from a star, a saint, a cat, a child, a sage, a Zen master whose gaze holds all our paradox, or a grandfather closing his eyes to speak truth to his grandchildren, does not cease. It travels. It waits. And it finds us—if we have the eyes to receive it.

My grandfather's gaze, too, still travels. Still lands. Every time I close my own eyes, I complete his journey.

Together, that journey form a complete mandala of seeing light seeking eyes, eyes seeking light, and finally eyes closing to return to the source.

The Tax of Goodness…

by Vishy Sankara | Feb 14, 2026 | Compassion, Life, Zen

It is not really easy to be a good human being. It is in fact quite difficult. I mean to be a good human being in practice. Not as an idea or ideal in our mind.

That is because to be a good human being we got to fight with our nature. Our DNA. DNA is for hierarchy and followership. DNA—our basic nature—is not for equity, equality or thinking mind with awareness.

The paradox of the "natural"

Awareness and equity are not natural to our hardware. We are running on millions of years of code optimized for tribal survival, not universal compassion. But the fact that we can even recognize this limitation is evidence that we have already transcended it.

A fish does not know it is wet. A human, however, can observe the water and decide to build a boat.

Our DNA gives us the instinct to push others aside to reach the fruit; awareness gives us the ability to plant an orchard for the next generation. That act of planting is "unnatural," but it is precisely what makes us human.

Religious vs spiritual

Religions were initiated in an effort to make us all into good human beings. If you carefully and hermeneutically decode those scriptures across any tradition, they are all gentle teachings, advice and nudges to align our selfish gene to being good. They span from strict commandments of Judaism, Christianity or Islam, to the precepts of Buddhism, to the teaching through parables and Gitas of Hinduism.

Those who scripted those scriptures might have believed that those who follow would end up as good human beings.

But following is being religious. Religiosity calls for just faith and following to a hierarchy. It is, in a way, deciding not to use our rational brain—not to work the small space between stimulus and response. We surrender our personal agency to something beyond us. Our existence out here is preordained; very little we can do about it. It is very easy to be religious. That explains the milling crowds.

Religion fills our cup with the Shepherd's process, procedure, worksteps. Soon there is space for nothing else.

Being spiritual means empty that cup quite a bit, so that there is mindspace for the world in general and others in particular. The Zen Master, filling the professor's overflowing tea cup until it spills, was pointing to this.

Being spiritual is an entirely different ball game. Spirituality accepts and aligns our instincts and nature to the well being of ourselves and others, using our ability to think and decide for ourselves. One got to be really aware of our thoughts, sensations, basic nature and not to identify with it. To choose a way that is good for us and good for others too. But being aware and being an observer is not basic nature of a human being. That is an evolved quality. It takes effort. Often it is taxing.

A small parable:
Religion is like following a shepherd into the valley. You trust the path is laid out. You surrender your agency to the flock.
Spirituality is like planting seeds in wild soil. You decide where to place them. You water them, protect them, wait.
The shepherd gives you belonging. The seed gives you responsibility. Both are paths. But only one asks you to awaken in that small space between stimulus and response.

True spirituality is not about floating above the muck of human nature. It is about wading through it without losing sight of the shore. It is easy to feel enlightened in a quiet room. It is hard to feel enlightened when your nervous system is screaming at you because a toddler is screaming at you.

The battle is real.

The child as mirror

That is why as adults, we can't really communicate with small children. Have you ever observed how adults communicate with small children who often babble and talk quite incoherently? We do try to listen for some time and then give it up and try to distract the focus of the child to something else.

This is not because we lack love or affection for that child. Basically to be with that child does take energy.

Two areas in human life that receive the most research and advice are leadership and communication. There are terabytes of knowhow on the internet. Especially in community groups of helping professionals such as coaches. On empathy and communication. We pay hefty sums to listen and learn from the fancy sage on the stage.

And yet we often forget: the best teacher of empathetic communication could be the infant child in our own homes. If we could communicate with that infant child, then communicating with anyone else—leave alone humans, even animals, flowers and trees—could be a cakewalk.

The taxing nature of awareness is not a flaw but the very gate of practice. The child's incoherence is not a barrier but a reminder of the raw ground from which awareness must arise.

Adults often assume communication fails because the child lacks vocabulary. In reality, it fails because the adult lacks presence. To be with a babbling child is to abandon the linear, goal-oriented mind—Where is this conversation going? What is the point?—and enter a state of pure process.

This is energetically expensive because we have been conditioned to value outcomes over encounters.

The child is not incoherent. The child is speaking the language of pure sensation. We find it taxing not because it is difficult, but because we refuse to learn the language.

The dance floor

And when we transform that battle into a dance, that is when we really transcend it—without rejecting our basic nature. Using the energy of instinct as fuel for awareness.

The dance happens the moment we stop saying "I must suppress my irritation" and start saying "Ah, there is irritation. Hello, old friend. I see you want me to shut this child down. I am going to feel you, but I am not going to obey you."

The energy of the instinct does not vanish; it is transmuted. The heat of frustration becomes the warmth of patience. The sharpness of hierarchy becomes the clarity of boundaries.

Yes, it is taxing. But a muscle only grows when it is torn first.

Is our nature the shadow?

Our nature is shadow when we remain unconscious of it. Our nature is fuel when we bring awareness to it. Our nature is Buddha when we dance with it.

The shadow is not evil—it is unintegrated. When we fight it, it becomes battle. When we dance with it, it becomes energy for awareness.

In Zen, nature is both instinct and Buddha-nature. The paradox is that both are true: our raw DNA is shadow, but our capacity to see it is Buddha-nature. To transcend is not to reject, but to integrate.

The quiet heroism

We often look for goodness in grand gestures. But the space between the impulse and the action—that gap—is where the real work happens.

It is the pause before snapping at a waiter.
It is the breath taken before correcting a child.
It is the choice, despite exhaustion, to listen to one more round of babbling.

This is invisible labour. No one claps for it. The DNA certainly doesn't reward it.

But this is the architecture of a good human being.

To conclude

It is indeed difficult to be good.

Now one may ask: how do all these connect together? Being spiritual—is it just some navel gazing, mindless, solitary walk on this earth?

No. Being spiritual is to be a completely humane human and live a compassionate and caring life.

If we can't communicate empathetically to that infant child within us, then we cannot connect with ourselves, leave alone others. That child inside—the one who still babbles, still feels, still reacts from raw sensation—if we cannot listen to that voice with presence, then all our fancy communication techniques are just performance.

And that is the most basic aspect of being a humane human. That is the ground floor of being spiritual.

The fact that you find it difficult—that you feel the weight of the effort—is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that you are actually doing it.

The person who finds goodness easy has likely never questioned whether they are truly good. The person who finds it heavy is the one carrying the water uphill, building the consciousness of the next generation drop by drop.

The child will grow. The babbling will become coherence. And one day, that child will encounter their own toddler, feel the familiar surge of impatience, and remember:

Someone once listened to me long enough for me to learn how to speak.

That child is you. Waiting.

That is the dance. That is the transcendence.

That is the tax well paid.

Sound Matters: A Sonic Pilgrimage

by Vishy Sankara | Feb 5, 2026 | Harmony, Joy, Life, Meaning, Meditation, Peace, Zen

Sound matters. Not concept. All ancient traditions knew this. Veda, mantra, sutra, dharani, koan — they are not intellectual puzzles but sonic transmissions. Zen too is deep-rooted in this. My master keeps urging: move beyond concepts. When we get stuck in concepts, we lose our way.

There is a story of a Zen master speaking to Alan Watts. He said there is no need to translate Zen, because the sound of rain in all languages is the same. This struck me deeply. It is the purest teaching. Before the word “rain,” there is the sound. Before the concept of “wet,” there is the feeling. The translation happens in the mind; the experience is direct, universal. This is where we must reside.

Zen practitioners chants sutras, but Zen also says: Do not cling to words and letters. This is not contradiction. It is rhythm. Sound is presence. Chanting is practice. It is the direct transmission, felt in the bones, not processed in the mind. The koan isn’t solved; it is absorbed until it shatters the intellect.

Frequencies and Harmony

Modern seekers rediscover what ancients knew: sound is not just heard, it is embodied. The Solfeggio frequencies — 396 Hz, 417 Hz, 528 Hz, 639 Hz, 741 Hz, 852 Hz — are said to resonate with human nature, unlocking healing, transformation, harmony.

Verdi’s 432 Hz tuning is another example. Unlike the modern 440 Hz standard, 432 Hz is said to align more harmoniously with natural resonance, with the rhythms of the earth and the human body. Musicians, mystics, and meditators alike speak of its calming, centering effect.

Zen would say: do not get stuck in the numbers. Do not cling to the theory. Listen. Chant. Embody. The frequency is not concept but vibration. The practice is the return to resonance. We are tuning the instrument of our being.

The Uninvited Mantra: Sound of the Inner Anechoic Chamber

But what of the sounds we do not choose? The ones that come unbidden, like a ghost in the machine of our own mind?

A few years back, I landed in deep depression due to Tinnitus. A constant, incurable ring. I suffered because I refused to accept it. I fought it. Friends, talks, psychiatrists helped. But what really helped was when I started meditating on it.

My psychiatrist, at our first meeting, did not rush to prescribe. He told me: no one can withstand perfect silence. The max time one could stay in an anechoic chamber—the quietest place in the world—are just a few minutes. I read about it. In that room, silence is so absolute, so below the threshold of hearing, that you start to hear the sound of your own blood moving. The click of your eyelids shutting. Your body becomes a symphony of noise you never knew was playing.

For those who have done Vipassana, you know this. By the 7th or 8th day, as you go deeper, you start to hear the voice of your own cells. We are oriented to vibration. We are vibration. But not for an anechoic chamber. And not, at first, for Tinnitus.

When you meditate on Tinnitus, you stop fighting. You listen. You realize it is not one flat ghost noise. There are finer nuances to it. It changes tunes and rhythms. It almost becomes musical. You realize: Tinnitus is not different from you. You are Tinnitus.

Once you reach there, it recedes. It becomes a tone in one far corner of the vast galaxy of your brain. The aha moment comes: The silence of the mind is different from the silence of sound. On top of the Himalayas, one can be troubled by the silence. Right in the midst of a Silk Board flyover traffic jam, horns blaring, one can be at peace.

This is the first lesson. Accepting reality as it is. Life is what happens to you when you have other plans. What you resist, persists. Acceptance is not helplessness. It is choiceless awareness. Seeing the borderlines we draw between our experience and ourselves—seeing that these lines are also possible battlelines. And in that seeing, letting the battle extinguish.

Expanding the Practice: Listening Across Traditions

So I started listening. To the Heart Sutra, the Four Great Vows, the Wishing Prayer — not only in Japanese, but also in Classical Tibetan, Sanskrit, Pali and Chinese Mandarin. Each language carried its own cadence, its own resonance, its own transmission. This is not translation of meaning, but embodiment of vibration. Each language is a different sonic key for the same lock.

Heart Sutra Across Languages

Classical Tibetan:
བཅོམ་ལྡན་འདས་མ་ཤེས་རབ་ཀྱི་ཕ་རོལ་ཏུ་ཕྱིན་པའི་སྙིང་པོ།
chom den de ma sherab kyi parol tu chinpai nyingpo
“The Blessed Mother, the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom.”
Sanskrit:
गते गते पारगते पारसंगते बोधि स्वाहा ॥
gate gate pāragate pārasamgate bodhi svāhā
“Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, awakening, svaha.”
Chinese (Mandarin):
揭諦揭諦波羅揭諦波羅僧揭諦菩提薩婆訶
jiē dì jiē dì bō luó jiē dì bō luó sēng jiē dì pú tí sà pó hē
Japanese:
羯諦羯諦波羅羯諦波羅僧羯諦菩提薩婆訶
gyatei gyatei haragyatei harasōgyatei bodhi sowaka

Each language shifts the vibration. Tibetan is earthy, resonant. Sanskrit is sharp, crystalline. Chinese is flowing, tonal. Japanese is clipped, rhythmic. Each is sound beyond concept. The Gate Gate Pāragate mantra isn’t a sentence to be parsed; it is a vehicle to be ridden. The sound is the teaching.

The Four Great Vows (Japanese Zen)

衆生無辺誓願度
煩悩無尽誓願断
法門無量誓願学
仏道無上誓願成

Shujō muhen seigan do
Bonno mujin seigan dan
Hōmon muryō seigan gaku
Butsudō mujō seigan jō

Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.
Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them.
Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them.
The Buddha Way is unsurpassable, I vow to become it.

The vow is cadence. The vow is sound. Its rhythm shapes the aspirational mind.

Wishing Prayer (Samantabhadra)

སེམས་ཅན་ཐམས་ཅད་ཀྱིས་སེམས་དང་བསམ་པ་དག་པར་གྱུར་ཅིག
semchen tamche kyi sem dang sampa dakpar gyur chik
“May all beings’ minds and thoughts become perfectly pure.”

The repetition is sonic dedication. Aspiration becomes resonance.

Om Mani Padme Hum

ཨོཾ་མ་ཎི་པདྨེ་ཧཱུྃ།
Om Mani Padme Hum
“Om, the jewel in the lotus, hum.”

Avalokiteśvara’s vow embodied in syllables. Compassion as frequency.

21 Taras

ཨོཾ་ཏཱ་རེ་ཏུ་ཏྲེ་ཏུ་རེ་སྭཱ་ཧཱ།
Om Tare Tuttare Ture Soha
“Homage to Tara, swift liberator.”

The syllables themselves are Tara’s activity. The chant is protection, not the idea of protection. The vibratory pattern is the swift, motherly response.

Gregorian Chant: Sanctus

Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus
Dominus Deus Sabaoth
Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua
Hosanna in excelsis

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of ghosts.
Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest.

The resonance of Gregorian chant is cathedral stone vibrating with human voice. It is not doctrine but sound. It is an architectural resonance of awe.

Śaṅkara’s Nirvāṇa Ṣaṭkam

मनोबुद्ध्यहंकार चित्तानि नाहं
न च श्रोत्रजिह्वे न च घ्राणनेत्रे ।
न च व्योम भूमिर्न तेो न वायु
चिदानन्दरूपः शिवोऽहम् शिवोऽहम् ॥

manobuddhyahaṅkāra cittāni nāham
na ca śrotra jihve na ca ghrāṇa netre
na ca vyoma bhūmir na tejo na vāyuḥ
cidānandarūpaḥ śivo’ham śivo’ham

“I am not the mind, intellect, ego, or memory.
Not the senses of hearing, taste, smell, or sight.
Not space, earth, fire, or air.
I am the form of consciousness and bliss — I am Śiva, I am Śiva.”

The cadence of Sanskrit dissolves identity. Each syllable is a negation, each refrain is affirmation. Not concept, but vibration. To chant Shivo’ham is to let the repeated sound dissolve the very "I" that would claim it. The sound does the work.

Kanzeon Zendo, Perumalmalai

Here at Kanzeon Zendo, Perumalmalai, the name itself is practice of compassion . Kanzeon — Avalokitesvara, Kannon, Guanyin — the Bodhisattva of Compassion who hears the cries of the world. Tara — his emanation, swift motherly response. One listens, one acts. One is presence, one is movement.

Our practice extends into the night. Every single evening, we close with music meditation. We sit in Hakuin Zenji’s Nanso no ho—the Soft Butter Meditation—allowing the body and mind to melt like soft butter, while listening to carefully selected music. The music is not entertainment. It is the container, the environment of resonance in which the "soft butter" of awareness can dissolve and flow. On some blessed nights, when a musician visits, the meditation deepens. The live vibration of guitar, flute, or voice merges with the practice of Nanso no ho. There is no separation. The musician breathes, the listener breathes. The note vibrates, the body vibrates. It is all the sound of rain.

Our broader chanting — Heart Sutra, Four Great Vows, Wishing Prayer, Om Mani Padme Hum, Tara praises, Gregorian Sanctus, Nirvāṇa Ṣaṭkam — is not about concept. It is about sound. Sound as Dharma. Sound as transmission. Sound as ordinariness.

The Zendo becomes a mandala of sound. Tibetan syllables, Sanskrit cadence, Pali rhythm, Chinese tone, Japanese vow, Latin resonance, the note of a flute, the falling rain—all dissolve into one practice. Not separate traditions, but one vibration. In this sonic mandala, the canter is listening-compassion, and every chant, every note, is an arranged element of the integrated whole. We are not blending doctrines. We are experiencing sonic unification. The Dharma has no native language. It is the sound of rain.

When we chant, when we sit with music, we do not explain. We embody. We dissolve. We return.

At Kanzeon Zendo, Perumalmalai, this is our root.
Compassion as sound.
Wisdom as sound.
Aspiration as sound.
Protection as sound.
Presence as sound.

These are not abstract virtues described by sounds. They are activated and transmitted as sound.

Sound matters. Not concept. The pilgrimage is the return to this resonance. To listen, to chant, to melt like soft butter into the note, into the silence after the rain. To dissolve. To return.

The Thief of Joy: Walking the Ox-Herding Path Back to the Marketplace, to the Tune of a Different Drummer

by Vishy Sankara | Jan 29, 2026 | Compassion, Harmony, Integrity, Life, Transformation, Zen

Expectation is the thief of joy. We imagine the world, people around us, and life events should conform to our hopes—and when they don’t, peace and happiness slip away. This is all the more piercing in spiritual communities, where many assume fellow practitioners are somehow more evolved than the rest of society. But that assumption is false. Often, people come to the sangha not to deepen realization but to escape the marketplace, and so the same patterns of hypocrisy, ambition, and self-deception repeat themselves—sometimes unconsciously, sometimes with full awareness.

The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures are not simply allegories; they are one of Zen’s most enduring teaching devices. Originating in China during the 12th century, attributed to the Chan master Kuoan Shiyuan, they depict the seeker’s journey through ten stages of practice. The ox itself is a symbol of the mind—wild, elusive, sometimes hidden, sometimes tamed. The pictures begin with the restless search, the ox unseen, the seeker wandering. By the third step, the ox is glimpsed—the true self recognized. The middle stages show taming, riding, and eventually forgetting the ox, pointing to the dissolution of duality. And the final step is the most radical: returning to the marketplace with “bliss-bestowing hands.” Here, realization is not escape but ordinariness, not withdrawal but presence in the midst of daily life.

Yet many begin in the marketplace and end there again, without ever walking through the intermediary steps. They wear the robes of spirituality but never touch the ox. They mistake the outer form for the inner journey. And so, spiritual communes mirror the wider world. The marketplace is always present—even in the zendo. The question is not whether hypocrisy exists, but whether we meet it with awareness. To see the act, the mask, the double face, is itself a koan: how do we walk without expectation, without projecting our longing for purity onto others?

This longing extends far beyond the zendo. It touches the very core of how we move through society. We are all, in some way, following an internal rhythm. Henry David Thoreau captured it perfectly: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

David Keirsey placed this quote at the opening of Please Understand Me for a reason. It is a testament to temperament—to the innate, different guides within us. The spiritual path, at its best, is about hearing that unique drummer with perfect clarity and having the courage to step to it. Yet so often, in our rush to belong to a community—be it a corporate team, a family, or a sangha—we mute our own music. We project onto others the expectation that their drumbeat should match the one we’ve chosen to hear, or worse, the one we think we should hear.

The full passage from Walden reveals more. Thoreau speaks of advancing confidently in the direction of one’s dreams, of new laws establishing themselves “around and within him.”

Here is more of the surrounding text for context from the final paragraph of the chapter titled "Conclusion." :

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings...

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer?"

This is the journey of taming the ox: the inner laws becoming clear, the authentic rhythm undeniable. But here is the paradox: to return to the marketplace with “bliss-bestowing hands” is not to demand that the chaotic noise of the market become your melody. It is to move through it, undistracted by its discord, steadfast in your own measure—and in doing so, to allow others the space to hear their own.

If we can meet even hypocrisy as another face of suffering, then it too becomes part of practice. We see it not merely as a moral failure, but as a profound disconnection—a person who has stopped listening to their own drummer and is instead clattering along to a cacophony of borrowed beats, of shoulds and oughts, of spiritual ambition and unmet longing.

The path is not linear. Some circle back, some stall, some leap ahead, some act out roles without ever glimpsing the ox. But the invitation remains: to strip away masks, to deepen realization, and to return to ordinariness. To live in the marketplace—not as escape, but as presence. And to do so, finally, stepping to the music you hear, however measured or far away, while letting the din of expectation fade into the background where it belongs.

The Marketplace of Masks: Value, Silence, and the Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Vishy Sankara | Jan 24, 2026 | Integrity, Life, value, Zen

In 2002, one of the things learnt from Dr. Richard McHugh is that much of our behaviour and actions stem from the subconscious or unconscious mind. For a while, while leading the Talent Transformation Academy at Wipro, it became clear why facilitators use games and simulations in corporate classrooms. It is in those moments that the mask falls off, and we begin to notice what is usually hidden.

Later, during a PG in Education at APU, frameworks such as Social Exchange Theory, Carl Menger’s subjective value and marginal utility, and most importantly the minmax principle, offered lenses to decode these observations. Returning to NGO work and then corporate corridors, observing people’s behaviour and learning from it became a kind of pastime. It is fascinating, almost like marking tally marks, when a senior leader rudely interrupts others in a meeting, or when an SVP nods approvingly whenever the Chairman speaks. People are constantly trading in currencies of respect, attention, status, and approval. The interruption is a claim to status currency. The nod is an exchange of approval for favour with the Chairman. It is a market of social transactions.

Once, an experiment made this visible. In a brainstorming session, notes were exchanged between myself and my boss. I presented his inputs, and he mine. The team’s responses were striking—most of my ideas, when voiced by my boss, were voted in. Again, at the Zendo and outside, it is equally interesting to observe how people respond—or do not respond—on social media and various community groups.

Carl Menger’s principle of subjective value and marginal utility applies directly to meetings: an idea’s worth is not intrinsic, but assigned subjectively by the receiver. The same idea, voiced by me, had low marginal utility, but when packaged and presented by my boss, it carried high value—the source added a premium. People are value-appraisers in every interaction.

The minmax principle (minimizing maximum possible loss) is the engine of much corporate politeness and risk-aversion. Supporting the Chairman’s point or deferring to the highest-paid person’s opinion (HiPPO) is often less about genuine agreement and more about minimizing personal risk.

And one of the toughest koans in Zen is “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” created by Hakuin Ekaku, one of the famous Rinzai masters. Once a practitioner gains insight into that koan, one begins to live with the sound of one hand clapping. There is freedom from approvals, emojis, and appreciation—even from close family or friends. One speaks because speech must arise. One writes for the sake of writing. Nothing more.

The Zendo and other platforms make this explicit. The response or non-response is pure social exchange and subjective value. A like or comment is a micro-currency. Silence can be a deliberate withholding of currency—disagreement, indifference—or a calculation that engagement has no utility or carries risk (the minmax principle in a public forum). The online disinhibition effect—both positive and toxic—is another way the mask falls off.

Here, the koan of one hand clapping integrates seamlessly as liberation. All the tally marks, nods, interruptions, likes, and emojis are currencies in the social marketplace. But the koan points to freedom from that marketplace. To live with the sound of one hand clapping is to speak without seeking approval, to write without chasing appreciation, to act without calculating marginal utility. It is radical liberation from the minmax principle itself.

And most often, our learning and education come from a mindset of instrumentality—we learn in order to get something. Yet there is another way. My children, who had their schooling at a Krishnamurti school, taught me that learning is not transactional but transformational. Learning is meant for making or unmaking ourselves. The mindset of Instrumental vs. Integral Learning is a crucial one. Conventional learning often becomes another transaction—acquiring skills to trade in the marketplace. In contrast, learning for “making or unmaking ourselves” is inherently non-transactional. It aligns with the one hand clapping. It is learning for sovereignty, not for currency.

The Marketplace of Self

These observations highlight the core challenge of collaboration: human beings are not rational agents evaluating pure data, but social beings navigating a complex web of subconscious drives, perceived value, and status economies.

The corporate and social world is a subconscious economy where our masks are both currency and commodity. Every interruption, nod, like, or silence is a transaction in the currencies of status, approval, and security. The theories of Menger and Minmax aren’t just academic; they are the living, breathing algorithms of daily life.

That note-swap with my boss is the quintessential proof. It reveals that in this marketplace, the “who” often completely overwrites the “what.” The subjective value conferred by status can render identical content either priceless or worthless. This is the silent, powerful bias that undermines meritocracy.

And the Zen practitioner who lives with the sound of one hand clapping has already stepped beyond the need for transformation—because the freedom is already here.

Hakuin’s koan is not a riddle, but an antidote to the social marketplace. To live with the sound of one hand clapping is to opt out of the exchange. It is to act from an internal locus of value, where creation and expression are ends in themselves. It is freedom from the tally sheet.

The ultimate goal, perhaps, is not to make everyone a Zen monk, but to create pockets of space—in relationships, in corporate meetings, in classrooms, in online forums—where the sound of one hand clapping can be heard: where ideas are evaluated more independently of their source, where silence is not fearful, and where contribution is driven less by the calculation of personal utility and more by the intrinsic value of the act itself.

You Are Here (Even in the Over-Lit Corporate Corridor)…

by Vishy Sankara | Jan 21, 2026 | Joy, Life, Peace, Zen

The voice from the google map app in iPhone tells us to turn left, then right, then merge. We follow the blue dot, but the feeling grows: this is not just a wrong turn. This is being lost in general. The highways multiply, the paths diverge, and we whisper:

Where am I, really?

We are lost on the over-lit corporate corridors, moving from one identical meeting to another.

We are lost in the labyrinths of relationships—with the dear and near, with friends, or in the outer circles of Dunbar’s number, wondering which connection is true.

We are lost in the marketplace of choices and voices.

We are lost on our own spiritual path, where the signposts are confusing or gone.

We have endless guidance for roads, and none for this.

It is here, in this specific modern wilderness, that David Wagoner’s poem Lost isn't just pretty verse. It is a radical, necessary command.

Lost by David Wagoner

“Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you. “

This applies to anywhere. Especially here. Especially now.

That over-lit corporate corridor? It is your forest. Stand still. Listen to its hum. Let this Here be known. That labyrinth of a relationship? Stand still. Not in silence, but in deep attention. Let the space between you breathe. Ask permission to know it anew. The noise of the marketplace? Stand still. Let the frantic churn become a powerful stranger you observe, before you buy. The confused spiritual path? Stand still. The path is not ahead; it is under your waiting feet.

In Zen practice, there is a bow. You bow to the doorman at the zendo entrance. You bow to the Buddha on the altar. You bow to the person across from you. It is not a bow of blind reverence to others. It is a bow to the Buddha within yourself, and within them. When you bow, you empty yourself—your pride, your rushing, your frantic need to be somewhere else—and in that emptying, the world comes in.

It is the same as swimming. While you struggle in frantic motion, you drown. Only when you relax, when you release the fight, do you start to float. The water was always holding you; your panic was what sank you.

It is the same as Tai Chi. I remember when François taught us at the zendo. He did not rush into teaching forms. He spent a good three weeks teaching us to stand still—Wuji, the primordial stillness. And he said, all Tai Chi movements start by themselves from that stillness. The form does not begin with a step, but with a surrender. The first movement is not made; it is allowed, born from the quiet fullness of standing.

Standing still is that bow. Standing still is that floating. Standing still is that Wuji. It is the surrender that precedes being upheld, the emptiness from which true movement spontaneously arises. Emptying yourself of the frantic navigation so that the forest—the corridor, the labyrinth, the path, the water, the qi—can find you. Can move you.

The poem’s genius is its transferable truth: "If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost."

If what your colleague's silence does, or the labyrinth's turn, or the marketplace's buzz does is lost on you—you are surely lost. So you must stand still. You must bow. You must stop thrashing. You must find your Wuji. Not to figure it out, but to let it find you. To let it carry you. To let the first real movement begin from you, not through you.

Only when we empty ourselves—when we bow to the Here, when we relax into the float, when we root into the unmoving stillness—does the world come in. The corridor, the labyrinth, the path, the water, the life force... it knows where you are. It has always known. You must let it find you.

You are not a blinking GPS dot, not a line on a map, not a corridor endlessly lit. You are a breath in a breathing world, a silence that listens, a stillness that bows.

Stand still— and the corridor becomes a forest. Stand still— and the labyrinth becomes a path.

Stand still— and the marketplace becomes a stranger you can greet.

The world has always known where you are. It waits for you to stop thrashing, to empty, to float, to bow.

Here is not a mistake. Here is the beginning. Here is the place that finds you.

You are a breath in a breathing world. And it knows exactly where you are, even here. Especially here.

Preparing with Care, Trusting in Execution… Reading the First Half, Living the Second

by Vishy Sankara | Jan 19, 2026 | Change, Communication, Compassion, Harmony, Life, Meaning, RElationship, Trust, Zen

My better half’s family was into Krishnamurti and she got out of a well-paying IT job to be a teacher in a. Krishnamurti school and Manu and Rishi too had their entire school education there. Though, it is an alternative education, it did give me some anxious moments, especially when i got to read about the competitive landscape of higher education and career building and livelihood earning outside that protected cocoon. They did end up in really good universities for their UG. But , the elder one, did face the challenged due to changed environment. Someone who was never part of dumb bell curve or exams for most of his life, but who pursued knowledge and wisdom for its own sake, was thrown into the high seas of surprise tests, CGPA and dumbbell curve etc without any life jacket. And it did reflect on his performance for the first two sems… There were O+ with 0 ( Not present). As someone who skipped my final year Engineering exam , for watching World cup football, in spite of my late Father's concerned advice of a lengthy 5 page letter, i knew i did not have the moral capital to advise him. Though indirectly , i tried to share some pointers and nothing much. There was some subaltern tension and concern nevertheless.

But one thing good about him was his zeal of reading and ability to observe. As a very young child, he was into ornithology and could recognize almost all kinds of birds in the Valley school campus. Their daily routing in school, even for 1st std starts with early morning Nature walking. And the first gift i had given was a book by Salim Ali and a Bushnell binocular bought in Johannesburg. And he is one of those who read much more than i do. So in the breaks between semesters, while at home, he started reading the books in my bookshelf and also started buying a lot of books chosen by him. Me and Thara had also kind of stopped asking him about his results. We just used to say in a good way that he got to prepare himself to make a living as there is no inheritance as such.

So i was quite surprised, when he walked in and showed me his Semester marks card last month. It was all O+ and A+. I asked him how did he turn himself around and he talked about Frankl's paradoxical intention and Huxely's law of reversed effort. As someone who was trained in NLP ,Counselling, and did MA in Psychology and got trained in Coaching and read a bit, i was familiar with most of such stuff. But not this. And when i asked about it, he showed it in the book ( my old book of Man's Search for Meaning). I had read the first part and just skimmed thru the second half. 🙁 .. Below is his full note on that. When your own son self-coaches himself, out of trouble into some success and teaches you about it, may be one can’t be more happier than that ... Here is his note in full:

"The law of Reversed Effect

The law of reversed effect can be viewed as a psychological boomerang. When you attempt to wilfully dictate an experience, the harder you try, the more that experience will slip away from you. It’s like trying to hold a feather steady in a gust by grasping it tightly in your hand. Examples of this principle are found in all areas of human experience. The more you attempt to force sleep to occur, the more alert and reactive your brain will become; likewise, if you tell yourself to “stay calm,” all of a sudden, you’ll feel more anxious. The conscious mind, when in a state of contraction, creates a resistance to the natural rhythms required by the unconscious mind to perform its job effectively.

This law points out that the mind is likely going to produce better results through relaxation than through strain. All aspects of performance, confidence, creativity, and memory are likely to grow, develop, and improve when there is less pressure and strain associated with them. Athletes enter into flow states by not trying hard enough, but rather by getting out of their own way. As soon as an athlete stops worrying about the results of a competition and focuses only on the performance, their body takes over and performs at its best.

The law of reversed effect does not imply to “never try.” It means to use intention rather than effort and precision over strain. For instance, aim like an archer: identify the target, align your shot, and release without forcing the bow. In many cases, the most successful result comes from creating a time period of rest and relaxation in between two actions, during which you lead, rather than restrain, your movement toward your desired outcome. Sometimes the best way to make progress toward a goal is to stop chasing after it and allow it to come to you.

Rather than mandating performance, the conditions can be established which will allow the output to develop itself, which means So, you relax the inner grip. You don’t quit, you just change the aim of your effort. Just move your effort from trying to control the end result and start focusing it on the process. When the anxiety pulls you into "I must do this right," you pull back and say, "I'll make the space for good execution."

In a way, this is line with. Viktor Frankl’s Paradoxical intention. Paradoxical intention is a psychotherapeutic technique developed by Viktor Frankl, the founder of logotherapy. It is designed to break the "vicious cycle" of anticipatory anxiety—the fear of a symptom (like insomnia or stuttering) which, through the very effort to avoid it, makes the symptom worse. This directly mirrors the "Law of Reversed Effort". Many who read Frankl’s “Man Search for Meaning”, though it is a small book, reads the first part where he narrated his experiences and let go the second part in which describes the second part of Logotherapy. ( Like my Papa!) . And they don’t realise that , Man’s search for meaning is meaningful, only if you stay with it rather than let go in the middle. 🙂

Coming back to exams, it involves studying for them and going to them trusting what one has prepared for rather than going for what one has not perfected. With anxiety, it involves recognizing the sensations one feels without trying to struggle against them. With skills, it involves practicing them in a structured manner and executing them by breathing into them instead of straining them.

The core is:
Let’s put the effort into preparation rather than execution. Let the trust go into execution. You're not letting go of control; you're choosing the right kind of control: conditions, not grip. The effect appears like a cat; pounce too hard and it runs off; just be still, and it curls up in your lap."

What he has written is not just a psychological principle, but a Dharma gate. The law of reversed effect is nothing but the Zen koan of “trying not to try.” The feather in the gust, the archer’s release, the cat curling up in the lap—these are not metaphors alone, they are lived gestures of life teaching us that control is often the enemy of presence.

I see in his words the same paradox that Krishnamurti pointed to when he said, “The more you pursue pleasure, the more pain you invite.” Or in Zen, when Master Dōgen reminds us that practice is enlightenment itself, not a means to it. The reversal is the teaching: when you grip, it slips; when you soften, it arrives.

And perhaps this is the most ordinary miracle—that a boy who once walked the Valley campus identifying birds by their calls, now identifies the subtle calls of the mind itself. He has moved from Salim Ali’s field guide to Frankl’s logotherapy, but the movement is the same: attention, observation, and trust in what reveals itself when you stop forcing.
For me, reading his note was like being shown my own bookshelf anew. I had skimmed, he had stayed. I had read the first half, he had lived into the second. And in that reversal, the son became the teacher, the father became the student. That is lineage too—not only bloodline, but wisdom line, where insight flows back and forth, unowned, ungrasped.
So I take his words as a reminder: prepare with care, execute with trust. Grip less, condition more. Let the cat curl up. Let the arrow fly. Let the feather dance. And let the law of reversed effect be not just psychology, but practice—practice of living, practice of dying, practice of being.

And perhaps, this is where the circle of education and life shows its hidden symmetry. What began as a child’s morning nature walk in Valley School, listening to bird calls, has now become a young man’s walk through the inner valley of mind, listening to the calls of anxiety and learning to let them perch and fly away. The binoculars of Salim Ali have turned into the lens of Frankl, but the act is the same: seeing clearly, without grasping.

It reminds me that the true inheritance we give our children is not wealth or security, but the courage to observe, the patience to stay, and the humility to learn from reversals. My father’s five-page letter was one kind of inheritance; my silence with my son was another. Both carried concern, but only one gave space. And in that space, he found his own way.

This reversal is not a defeat of the parent, but the flowering of lineage. The son teaches the father and the feather teaches the hand. And life, in its ordinary rhythm, teaches us again and again that the way forward is sometimes to soften, to trust, to let go.

So I bow to this teaching—not as a principle in a book, but as a lived koan in my own home. The law of reversed effect is not only his discovery; it is now mine too.

The Third Electron, Zendog Bhim, and the Early Warmth of Sankranthi…

by Vishy Sankara | Jan 14, 2026 | Harmony, Life, Meaning, Zen

The great biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi once shared:

“When I joined the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, I did this in the hope that by rubbing elbows with those great atomic physicists and mathematicians I would learn something about living matters. But as soon as I revealed that in any living systems there are more than two electrons, the physicists would not speak to me. With all their computers they could not say what the third electron might do. The remarkable thing is that it knows exactly what to do. So that little electron knows something that all the wise men of Princeton don’t, and this can be something very simple.”

What does this statement mean?

I don’t know much about electrons. But I get what he means.

The “third electron” is a metaphor for the mystery of life. Physicists can calculate two electrons with precision. Add a third, and the math breaks down. The system becomes unsolvable.

Two electrons: predictable, solvable.
Three or more: mathematically intractable.
A living system: countless electrons, all cooperating flawlessly.

The paradox is stunning. The "wise men" with their computers cannot predict what that third electron will do, yet in nature, it behaves perfectly. It knows. Life itself embodies a simple, self-organizing intelligence that exists beyond our equations.

This isn't just a technical point. It's a deep mystery: life works through a simplicity hidden within immense complexity. What is unsolvable to the intellect is intuitively resolved by nature itself.

Now, let us turn to Zendog Bhim.

When Bhim is in pain, he yelps. When not, he just doesn’t worry about it. He holds no fear of future pain, nor regret for past pain. We might dismiss this as simple instinct, but what if it is clarity instead? Zendog Bhim lives in the simplicity of the present. He yelps, then returns to now. No shadow of future suffering, no ghost of past hurt.

His existence aligns with that “third electron” intelligence — the kind that knows what to do without being told, that moves in harmony with life’s unscripted flow. We often mistake such presence for a lack of intellect. But perhaps presence is its own wisdom — the wisdom that lets life happen without constantly interpreting it.

And today is Makara Sankranthi.

One thing I have noted in the last four years is this: when the sun’s rays first reach this place in the early morning, Perumalmalai seems to realize it doesn’t have to chill out anymore. Early warmth brings more life. The birds and all the animals sense it too.

To their credit, humans once knew this as well—long before complex machines, just by observing. We felt the sun’s return in our bones.

In the subtle shift of sunlight, in the early rays that touch Perumalmalai, something ancient stirs. The chill loosens its grip. The earth senses the change before the mind can name it. Birds know. Animals know. The land itself seems to exhale.

Sankranthi marks that deep, cellular recognition—a festival born not from dogma, but from observing nature’s quiet intelligence.

It’s the same intelligence that guides the third electron. The same that lets Bhim live without regret or anxiety. The same that tells the earth it’s time to wake.

The “third electron,” Bhim’s yelp, and the golden Sankranthi rays—they all point to the same truth:

Life cannot be reduced to equations alone.
Nature embodies a wisdom that transcends calculation.
What looks simple is often a profound intelligence—an effortless alignment with reality.

In Zen, this is suchness: things as they are, without extra commentary. Bhim yelps when there is pain, rests when there is none. The electron arranges itself without hesitation. Perumalmalai warms up when the sun arrives.

So the little electron knows something the wise men don’t. And Bhim knows something we humans often forget. And Perumalmalai, in its quiet Sankranthi awakening, reminds us of a knowing that exists beyond computation.

We live in an age of magnificent calculation. Yet sometimes our very brilliance distances us from the simpler, deeper knowledge—the kind that doesn’t need to be proved, only perceived.

Sankranthi, in its gentle way, invites us back. Back to the early warmth. Back to the wisdom of cycles. Back to the humility of watching, feeling, and trusting that nature knows what it’s doing.

Maybe wisdom isn’t about having all the answers. Maybe it’s about recognizing the questions that need no answer—only reverence.

Happy Makara Sankranthi.

May your days grow lighter, your heart warmer, and your awareness a little more in tune with the quiet knowing that runs through all things.

Which Horse Are You Riding? Shadows, Centaurs, and the Art of Noticing…

by Vishy Sankara | Jan 13, 2026 | Change, Life, Meaning, Zen

We all have patterns—ways we respond to deadlines, difficult conversations, or the quiet call to care for our health, our relationships, our purpose. Often, we don’t move until we feel the heat.

Why?

Centuries ago, the Buddha offered a mirror in the form of a parable: the Four Horses. It’s a map of our readiness, of our habitual self. Not as a spiritual abstraction, but as a reflection of our everyday life. What we do here and now—this is the practice.

We each ride a deeply conditioned “horse.” Its temperament dictates our reactions:

The Excellent Horse moves at the shadow of the whip. It aligns intuitively with what is needed.
The Good Horse responds when the whip touches its hair. It acts on a clear signal.
The Poor Horse needs the whip to strike its flesh. It requires direct discomfort.
The Worst Horse waits for the pain to reach the bone. Only crisis compels it.

Be honest: Which horse feels most familiar?

For most of my life, I have ridden the fourth horse. My confession is this: "I have not changed, unless there was no other way." My habitual self-waited for the pain in the bone—for circumstances to force my hand.

But seeing the horse is only the beginning. The real inquiry lies in understanding the terrain it runs on. In my experience, between the signal and the response, three primary shadows often fall. They are not flaws, but human patterns. Observing them is the practice.

The Shadow of Reactance
The moment an instruction comes—however well-intentioned—we often perceive it as an intrusion. This is psychological reactance: an automatic, defensive pull away from any perceived threat to our autonomy. The mind resists simply because it can, not because the request lacks value. Where do you feel this subtle pushback?
The Shadow of Subjective Valuation
We act based on a private, internal ledger. As economist Carl Menger showed with the Diamond-Water Paradox, value isn't inherent; it's assigned. We devote our scarcest resources—our time and attention—to what we deem most valuable in the moment. Where is your commitment placed on that ledger right now? Is the value seen in the immediate, or the eventual?
The Shadow of Entitlement
We live in a world where payment can foster the idea that we chart a purely individual course. But as with a symphony ticket—which grants you a seat, not the baton—true engagement often means joining a collective container. Does a subtle expectation for on-demand service obscure your participation in a shared, structured practice?

This isn't just metaphor; it's mechanism. The 'Worst Horse' is often the default of our survival brain, reacting only to sharp threats. The act of observing these shadows is the conscious mind waking up and saying, "I see this pattern." This seeing is the beginning of rewiring.

The Practice: Observing the Horse, Not Judging It
This is not about violently taming your horse into an "Excellent" one. It is to notice, with gentle curiosity, the horse you are riding and the shadow it stands in.

When you delay, when you feel that bristle of resistance, when you rationalize... can you see the horse? Is it ignoring the shadow, waiting for the sting? And which shadow is there? Reactance? A devaluation? A sense of "I should get to do this my way"?

In that moment of noticing, a miracle occurs: you are no longer just the horse. You become the awareness that can see both the horse and the shadow. This is the beginning of freedom.

A Living Example: The Shadow vs. The Bone
When put in charge of our practice schedule, my horse sought comfort. I declared Sundays free—no 4 a.m. wake-up. Everyone was happy.

My 90-year-old teacher, Fr. AMA, said nothing. But on Sunday morning, he was alone in the Zendo, sitting in zazen as always. His practice didn't bend to convenience. He moved with the shadow of the whip, not the ache of the bone.

He was not riding a better horse.

The Centaur: The Unity of Rider and Path
This points us beyond the four types. In mythology, the Centaur represents a profound unity: the human mind seamlessly fused with the horse's body. Awareness and instinct, one being.

The ultimate aim is not to be a frail rider forever struggling to control a wild horse. It is to become the Centaur.

In this integration, the shadows dissolve. There is no separate "self" to feel threatened, to calculate return, or to demand special terms. Action flows from a unified intelligence. The Centaur does not respond to the whip; it moves in harmony with the direction of the path itself. Its movement is its nature.

My teacher that morning was the embodiment of the Centaur. Practice was simply flowing. Rider, path, and steed were not separate.

Chronicles of Meeting: The Languages We Meet In

by Vishy Sankara | Jan 2, 2026 | Communication, Compassion, Empathy, Friendship, Joy, Life, Zen

There are four French practitioners in our Zendo this week. Their presence stirred a memory—first through a reel I happened to see of a tuk‑tuk driver in Jaipur who had picked up French from his passengers, and then through my own halting attempts at the language years ago. He was speaking with surprising fluency. After Thara and I got married, she wanted to better her French. She had studied at Church Park Chennai with French as one of her languages and I had my schooling at the notorious KTMHS Mannarkkad ( which the locals often read it as. Kerala Themmadi Memorial roughly translated to Kerala Rascals Memorial School. ) where language of life was taught without any fees. As I am writing, one of my best friends, classmate and benchmate is the current Head Master of that school. It kind of reminded me, the story of Franklin Roosvelt making. Joseph Kennedy. ( the father of the famous John Kennedy) as the first chairman of SEC in USA. It was reported one of the President’s aid, reminded him about the crooked and dishonest side (especially in Stock market) of the Sr. Kennedy to President’s notice. Roosevelt seems to have replied, “It takes one to catch another”. And my good friend, current Head master indeed reformed and transformed that school .

Back to the French story, so on weekends we would drive down to Alliance Française near Cunningham Road in Bangalore. In those days, the city still had a certain ease, and that part of town was worth visiting just for the atmosphere and food. I too signed up for the course. To the best efforts of my teacher, the only phrase that stayed with me was: “Comment allez‑vous ?”

When Frédéric rode in from Auroville on his bike and entered the Zendo, I greeted him with that phrase. He looked at me with surprise—“You speak French?”—and in that moment, the classroom laughter of long ago returned. I remembered how Thara, my classmates, and even our French teacher would laugh heartily at my expense. What was once comic has now become a bridge.

These days, it is Tamil that surprises me. Sometimes, when I am not self‑conscious, I find myself conversing in the Kodai tongue with the garden workers. But the moment someone comments on my Tamil fluency, the flow collapses. It is like practice itself: when the watcher steps in, the natural ease is lost. The other day, driving toward Dindigul, I began reading aloud the place names painted on the back of a bus. Prakash, our Zendo manager, was astonished. Yet for me, it was simply another reminder: language is not something we master; it is something that meets us when we forget ourselves.

When I shared this Chronicle with Thara as she waited for a doctor’s appointment, it sparked a sudden flurry of French on WhatsApp—messages and voice clips of “Allez, Au revoir, Bon nuit, Bonjour, Merci beaucoup, Très bien.” What began as a memory became play once again. The laughter of the classroom, the greeting at the Zendo, and now the joy of a few words exchanged across a waiting room—all of it, the same language of meeting.

The memory of those French classes also brought back another corner of Cunningham Road—Infinitea, the tea shop we often visited. Thara, though from a family of coffee‑estate owners in Wynad and raised in Chennai, has always been a tea person. My mother, Mysore‑born and long settled in Palakkad, brewed close to a million cups of tea for my father and remains a coffee person till now. And I—well, I am both. A coffee, a tea person. I relish each. Perhaps that too is a kind of practice: not choosing sides, but tasting fully whatever is placed before me. Similarly, we did have some very common interests and common friends... People like Komal, Sheik Iyer, Rajalakshmi, Abhijit and Navita et al are my friends too... We both like movies in Tamil and Malayalam.... And music too...

Then there are things which are absolutely not part of that Venn diagram... For ex: i have Zero artistic ability. Thara is a good painter. And she has zero interest in Tech or Social Media unlike me. .. May be more than the languages we know, it is the language of silence that bonded us. May be the language of heart too is the language of silence. During this Dussera holidays, she chose (at last ) to come to Zendo and meditate. That was a bit of surprise for me. May be the fact that Rishi, my second son, came to Zendo and meditated and had some good words about it, might have been an influence. Even then, Thara is her own person. Though she taught at a Krishnamurti school for more than 16 years and her own Grand uncle was into Krishnamurti, she was not a Krishnamuritite per se. While i read. K, she kind of lived that philosophy without reading or talking about. Closing In the end, whether it is a phrase of French remembered, a few words of Tamil spoken without self‑consciousness, the aroma of tea or coffee, or the quiet presence of Thara sitting in the Zendo, all of it points to the same truth: life speaks in many tongues, yet its deepest voice is silence. And in that silence, we meet—not as teacher and student, husband and wife, or even as speaker and listener—but simply as presence itself.

As Lao Tsu reminds us, it is the empty hub that makes the wheel turn, the silence between notes that makes music, the space in a window that lets in light. And as Gibran wrote, the pillars of a temple do not stand together. Both point to the same truth: it is the space between that allows movement, harmony, and relationship. Without the gap, there is no wheel, no music, no light, no love.

The Goalless Goal: Escaping the Prison of the Timekeeper

by Vishy Sankara | Dec 29, 2025 | Harmony, Joy, Life, Meditation, STRESS, Zen

It was my habit to sit in the last week of December, reflect on the year gone by, and write down goals for the year to come. All the “Success” literature reinforced this: write it down, and it will manifest. (Though research says most new gym signees in the first week of January drop out within 2-3 weeks—hence the insistence on annual payments. The percentage of readers who never go beyond chapter one is very significant.) For a long time, I even carried that quote from mountaineer W. H. Murray, attributed to Goethe: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now!”. Not that it made any difference to my life per se. It was one of those things to showcase effort.

And so, during the last week of a December 2022, after "successfully" shrugging off anxiety attacks, sleepless nights, and the annoyance of tinnitus—like that vetala on Vikramaditya's shoulder—by returning to Zazen as advised by my Zen Master Fr. AMA Samy, I wrote down a vow: for the whole of 2023, I will wake up and meditate every single day. No exceptions.

I had read that if you do something for 21 days, it becomes a habit. Considering the amount of failures I had known, I stretched the vow to a year. And I did it. Even during the Qatar World Cup, when matches ended at impossible hours, I still woke at 4 a.m. and sat. Many times during bus rides to Kodaikanal and back to Bangalore, once even in the early morning cab to the airport. The vow travelled with me.

As the Insight Timer announced milestones along the way, my heart swelled with pride—and my ego too, quite a bit. By year’s end, the streak was complete. 365 days. A circle closed. One evening in the early week of 2024, over tea at Kanzeon, I showed it to Fr. AMA. He might have sensed my vain pride. He smiled, waved it off, and said: “This is not Zen. Zen does not need adrenaline-pumping, teeth-gritting effort.”

Then, with a twinkle, he asked: “Do you count your breaths too like this?”

Zen does talk about Great Doubt, Great Faith, and Great Effort. While it balances faith with doubt, it does not talk much about Great Effort. May be that is due to the most important lesson in Zen: the Great effort in Zen is effortless effort. As the Zen master teaches Prof. Herrigel in that wonderful book Zen and the Art of Archery.

“I seated myself opposite him on a cushion. He handed me tea, but did not speak a word. So we sat for a long while. There was no sound but the singing of the kettle on the hot coals. At last the Master rose and made me a sign to follow him. The practice hall was brightly lit. The Master told me to put a taper, long and thin as a knitting needle in the sand in front of the target, but not to switch on the light in the target sand. It was so dark that I could not even see its outlines, and if the tiny flame of the taper had not been there, I might perhaps have guessed the position of the target, though I could not have made it out with any precision. The Master "danced" the ceremony. His first arrow shot out of dazzling brightness into deep night. I knew from the sound that it had hit the target. The second arrow was a hit, too. When I switched on the light in the target-stand, I discovered to my amazement that the first arrow was lodged full in the middle of the black, while the second arrow had splintered the butt of the first and ploughed through the shaft before embedding itself beside it. I did not dare to pull the arrows out separately, but carried them back together with the target. The Master surveyed them critically. "The first shot," he then said, "was no great feat, you will think, because after all these years I am so familiar with my target-stand that I must know even in pitch darkness where the target is. That may be, and I won’t try to pretend otherwise. But the second arrow which hit the first—what do you make of that? I at any rate know that it is not 'I' who must be given credit for this shot. 'It' shot and 'It' made the hit. Let us bow to the goal as before the Buddha!" The Master had evidently hit me, too, with both arrows: as though transformed overnight, I no longer succumbed to the temptation of worrying about my arrows and what happened to them.”

Later, on Fr. AMA’s insistence I spent time reading Dr. Steven Hays and studying about ACT. Dr. Steven Hayes’ teaching: that we often write our own prison rules for the mind. Our processes build the prison cells like a smart dictator. While we focus on external freedom and borders, we do not notice that we are prisoners of our own mind. The “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts,” the milestone flags it raises, the appreciation and depreciation notes it throws up on our mind’s billboards.

And when we chase our cast-in-stone goals, guided by the chimes of our smartphone timers, zealously driven by the psychological prison-warden in our mind, we hardly realize that the real achievement is gaining freedom from that prison of the watch.

On the last Onam day, after I missed the annual Sadya and ended up instead with a super lunch with Fr. AMA and Prakash at Kodai International hotel, I spent some time reading about calendars and time. The Kollam Era had just entered its new century—Kollavarsham 1200 in August 2024, now 1201 from August 2025. A calendar born in 825 CE, sidereal solar, still guiding rituals and harvests in Kerala. Chingam 1st, Andu Pirappu, the beginning of Onam.

So many calendars humans have made. Yet most of us stick to the Gregorian one, imposed by empire, just as Greenwich became the zero of time. And more curious still: we inherited this whole architecture of hours and minutes. The Babylonians and Egyptians gave us the duodecimal system—that’s why we have 24 hours and 60 minutes. The French Revolution tried to decimalize time, with 100 minutes in an hour, but it didn’t stick. For millennia, sundials and water clocks (clepsydras) measured in broad strokes. In medieval China, they even used incense sticks that burned at a fixed rate—you could literally smell what time it was. Early mechanical clocks in Europe had no minute hand. The second hand is a very recent invention. We’ve even had human alarm clocks: in Victorian England, “knocker-uppers” were paid to tap on workers’ windows with long poles.

And I see now: just as we count days, we count breaths, we count streaks. We build cages of time, cages of achievement. The streak was my personal calendar. The Insight Timer was my Greenwich. My ego was the minute hand, ticking away, and my pride was the knocker-upper, jolting me awake to meet a man-made deadline.

But Zen says: Now.
Wu Wei says: the river flows without measure.
Krishnamurti says: the observer is the observed. Or to paraphrase him in my own crude way the achiever is the achieved.

And Khalil Gibran too, in The Prophet, saw time as immeasurable and sacred. He said: “They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.” He called time timeless, boundless, like love. Not fleeting seconds to be quantified, not a commodity to be sold. He reminded us that yesterday, today, and tomorrow blend into one, that the richness of life is soulful purpose, not profit.

And so the goalless goal emerges not as passivity, but as release.
From outcome to process.
From accumulation to letting go.

From Greed to need.
From time to presence.
From selling days for gold to living them as gifts.

The practice remains—the 4 a.m. wake-up, the cushion—but the why has evaporated. It is no longer a brick in the wall of a spiritual identity. It is simply what I do, as naturally as breathing. And in that naturalness, the freedom the traditions speak of is not something found at the end of the streak. It is felt in the very texture of the sitting itself, unadorned by accomplishment.

And again From Zen in the Art of Archery:

"You see what comes of not being able to wait without purpose in the state of highest tension. You cannot even learn to do this without continually asking yourself: Shall I be able to manage it? Wait patiently, and see what comes—and how it comes!"

I pointed out to the Master that I was already in my fourth year and that my stay in Japan was limited.

"The way to the goal is not to be measured! Of what importance are weeks, months, years?"

"But what if I have to break off halfway?" I asked.

"Once you have grown truly egoless you can break off at any time. Keep on practising that."

Zen, which grew within the Mahayana stream, reflects this spirit of non-standardization. It resists being carved into fixed formulas. Instead of clinging to texts or doctrines, Zen points directly to experience: the sound of the wind, the rustle of a leaf, the ordinariness of attention. Where Theravada often emphasizes preservation, Zen emphasizes immediacy.

This brings us to Ikkyu, the great iconoclastic Zen master. A man once asked him to write down a maxim of the highest wisdom. Ikkyu took up his brush and wrote a single word: Attention.
The man frowned. “Is that all?”
Ikkyu calmly wrote again: Attention. Attention.
The man, now irritated, said, “I don’t see much depth in what you’ve written.”
So Ikkyu wrote a third time: Attention. Attention. Attention.
Exasperated, the man demanded, “What does this word mean, anyway?”
Ikkyu replied gently: “Attention means attention.”

The story is deceptively simple, but it cuts to the heart of Zen. Wisdom is not hidden in elaborate doctrines or clever formulas. It is in the quality of our attention—to breath, to thought, to the rustle of a leaf, to the ordinariness of life. And yet, being attentive cannot be taught by anyone.

The breath, after all, never counts itself. It just rises and falls. And in that endless, unmeasured rhythm—from the very first inhalation at our birth to the last exhalation at our death—everything is already complete.

What I Learnt by Walking Straight on the Road with 99 Curves: Notes from a Late Bloomer

by Vishy Sankara | Dec 25, 2025 | Career, Compassion, Friendship, Gratitude, Harmony, Integrity, Joy, Life, Livingwithawareness, Meaning, Meditation, Peace, Relationships, Transformation, Zen

20 Dec 2025 . Saturday evening 6 pm.

As I was getting into the bus at Kodaikanal bus stand, Amma called. I told her I would call back, and after settling in my seat, I did. She was checking whether I would be coming to Ramapura to visit her. I said yes. Just before the call ended, she asked me whether my training at Kodaikanal had got over. Over the last three or so years, that is what I had told her. She knows I am in a temporary consulting assignment, and she has always been concerned about my future. Last time we met, that was the question in her mind: while my peers in the IT industry are doing well, what ails me? She usually quotes two names she remembers—Komal and Bops—and very wisely, she does not compare me with my own cousin. She knows my past fights at the workplace. And then she cushions the criticism by adding it’s just her concern for Manu and Rishi and my own well-being. It seems nowadays no one really cares for another, and it’s important to have financial security. It quite baffles her that her son, who spent some 30 years in IT, hasn’t learnt it. So, just before the call ended, she asked me again what I am learning new at Kodaikanal, and will it get me a better job. I was about to say yes, and then I did not say it.

Krishnappa, my friend, was the main driver. He is one of my new friends, gained from my three years of regular trips between Blr and Kodaikanal. Now he treats me as though I am also part of KSRTC. When the bus stops at Battalagundu for dinner or early morning coffee near Krishnagiri, he always makes it a point to tell them, “Nammavaru” — our man — so they don’t charge me either.

He was nearing retirement, proud of being one of the early members of the KSRTC Volvo fleet. One summer night, with an extra bus on the route, he suggested I sit in the front seat. I agreed, forgetting my severe fear of heights. For an hour, I was okay. Then, nearing Rat Tail Falls, he overtook a slow car. In that moment, the big bus covered the available width of the mountain road, and I saw the distant lights in the valley like a midnight sun. We were on the just the edge. A sudden, infinite fear switched my senses to high wattage. I got up and moved back to the safety of my seat.

Later, at dinner, he asked gently if I had been frightened. Then he told me, with a calm that was almost Zen-like, that in over thirty years he had not had even a small accident. A state cabinet minister had once asked him to be his personal driver. It was the confidence of a man absolutely sure of his craft—a mastery so complete it needed no explanation, only the steady grip on the wheel and the knowledge of every curve in the dark.

I had fallen asleep after that, and he woke me up for early morning coffee this time. And once I was back in the bus, the questions and concern of Amma popped into my mind. I could not go back to sleep.

I started reflecting on my last three years at Kanzeon Zendo. What did I learn? The second part of her question—whether it will get me a better job—somehow did not land in my mind.

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What did I learn… as a late bloomer in the afternoon, if not the late evening, of my life?

Maybe I learned that my path was never meant to be a straight line. It is a spiral. I look at friends in straight lines—they knew what they wanted at 20, achieved it by 25, solidified it by 30. And then there is me. Starting and stopping. Pursuing passions until the meaning drains away. Years that look like stagnation outside, while inside I am fighting wars no one else sees. I remembered a line that found its way to me, as if by some meaningful coincidence: "The first half of life is merely a preparation. A clearing of the throat before the actual speech begins." For people like me, maybe this first half wasn't for achievement. It was for the friction needed to wear away everything that is not you.

I read something else that felt like it was written for me. It said: You are not failing to launch. You are undergoing a gestation period that is proportional to the size of the destiny you are meant to carry. The teak tree by the side of the forest near my window at the Zendo does not grow at the speed of the grass. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I was building a foundation for a skyscraper, when everyone else was pitching tents. It made me think of another idea: that "until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." All this time, feeling adrift, perhaps I wasn't being passive. I was in the difficult, essential work of turning a fate I didn't choose into a destiny I could understand.

The teachers appeared as guides in that work. The first was Orie.

His name means ‘light’ in Hebrew. He was at the Zendo when Hamas attacked Israel across the border. He had been one of those who chose to stay with the IDF beyond his mandated service. But after one operation, witnessing the outcome scene, he quit to seek peace. For seven or eight years since, he had been travelling from one monastery to another across India, Sri Lanka, Burma, and East Asia.

He was built like a panther and moved without making any sound. He would often come late to the meditation hall, tiptoeing in like a cat, and no one would notice his arrival. He had the most tranquil way of debating. On the day of the Hamas attack, we spoke for a long time. He was cool as a cucumber. He taught me Spinoza’s statement: “There are two sides to any story, however thin you slice it.” He said the koan of the sound of one hand clapping was true, because in almost all conflicts, whether you feel like the victim or the tyrant, you are only ever hearing the sound of two hands.

I had wanted to learn the Wim Hof method to do takigyo, the waterfall misogi, at the Zendo—that ancient practice of standing under icy water to purify the body and mind, to seek oneness with nature. Orie told me Wim Hof was a pale imitation and taught me Tummo instead, the inner fire. As we were bonding as friends, he left without announcing it. He just slid a small piece of paper under my door. It said: thank you. O. And nothing else.

Then there was the visitor from Japan. For a week, an elderly Japanese woman stayed at the Zendo. According to her registration form, she was in her early eighties, yet she was the first to complete her full prostrations during chanting—nimble, healthy, and carrying a profound peace. She wanted to visit The Potter’s Shed in Kodaikanal, and I went along, thinking I could stop at the Pastry Corner afterwards. As I went to open the car door from the traffic side, she gently stopped me. She taught me the Dutch Reach: using the hand farthest from the door to open it, which forces your body to turn and your eyes to look over your shoulder—directly into the blind spot where a cyclist might be. It was a safety technique, yes, but she framed it as more. She told me it was an individual’s compassionate and wise response that, when done by many, becomes a community ritual.

“Compassion for the person in front of you is easy,” she said. “Being compassionate to the one you cannot see, the one who is unknown to you—this is the deepening of the way. It is how we begin to live the vow: ‘Though sentient beings are innumerable, I vow to save them all.’” Enlightenment in a gesture. A small, physical twist to protect an unseen other.

And then, Francois. My journey to him was a spiral of its own. I first heard the word "Tai Chi" from U.G. Krishnamurti, later saw it in Milwaukee, and for years in Bangalore, my wife Thara and I learned the Long Form until life, like the Silk Board flyover, threw its spanner. At the Zendo, split between jungle and city, I couldn't restart. Then I saw him on the terrace—a French martial artist who had spent twenty years in Japan and China. His movement was a perfect symphony. I asked him to teach me. He paused in his considered way, and finally agreed.

For Francois, Tai Chi was not an exercise but a way of living. He took four weeks just to teach us how to stand in Wuji and to master the Tai Chi walk. No forms. Just standing. Just rooting. Root before you rise, he would say. In that endless, patient standing, I finally understood what I had been doing all those years in my career spiral. I wasn't failing to build; I was in the Wuji of my life—the silent, potent stance where all potential gathers before the first movement begins. It was the physical truth of the teak tree growing its roots.

But most importantly, there was Fr. AMA. I first met him properly at a Koan seminar in 2022, as the new Zendo was being built. After hearing my story of living on the edge, his simple suggestion was: do Zazen. By January 2023, I became a regular at the Zendo, taking to Zen as a fish to water. Yet, my questioning mind never stopped. Over three years, I must have asked him a thousand questions, some provocative. He was the only person in my life who never took offence. A mentor in our Sangha once wrote in his autobiography about seeing me in the Zendo, noting how my questions often gave voice to what others wondered but dared not ask, calling it a "questioning spirit and generous heart." After two years of this, Fr. AMA asked me to join him, and I moved in as a full-time student of Zen.

What did I learn from him? Above all, compassion. He taught that without compassion, there is no point in being on the Way. It is as important as enlightenment, if not more. Then, wise discernment—that crucial mindset where great doubt, great effort, and great faith must walk together. It is not about blind acceptance, but about testing everything against the stillness of your own practice. And lastly, the profound importance of striving to live an ordinary life of peace and joy. His teachings became the vessel that held all the other lessons: Orie’s two sides, the visitor’s mindful gesture, Francois’s rooted stance. He taught me how to hold them, question them, and let them shape a life.

And I owe the very possibility of this three-year immersion to another teacher of a different kind: my boss, Robert Meier. A Swiss national in a high-pressure role leading a corporate transformation, Robert was the rarest kind of manager. Amidst immense pressure, he never sacrificed his truthfulness, honesty, or his inherent kindness and compassion. He was, in his own way, a Zen Boss. When he heard of my need to be at the Zendo, he allowed me to work remotely from there. For almost three years, the quiet of the meditation hall existed alongside the digital pulse of my consulting work. One thing he told me has stayed: whenever he had to deliver a difficult truth to the powerful, he would say he was prepared to do any job, even clean public toilets, but he would never sacrifice his authenticity and professionalism out of fear. In him, I saw that the "unshakable" security I sought wasn't just spiritual—it could be a quiet, formidable force in a boardroom, too.

There were, of course, so many others—Christa, Olaf, Meath, Robert Amor—a constellation of fellow travellers at the Zendo who offered their own quiet lessons. That gratitude is for another day.

Then came the lessons that turned the path inward, towards home. When I shared Fr. AMA's invitation to live at the Zendo with Thara, my better half, she paused. Then, calmly and lovingly, she said, "You should take it. It is a calling and you are not seeking anything. Don't worry about anything else. We will take care of the home." In that moment, I learned that love also means letting go, not holding on.

And one morning during breakfast, Rishi told me, "Zen seems to be good for you, Papa." I asked him why. With a smile, he said, "You are not random anymore. We all relate to you better." That is when I understood what Krishnamurti meant: we know ourselves only in the mirror of our relationships. My stillness had become a space they could lean into.

So when Amma asks what I learned…

I learned to sit with the silent suspicion that I failed before I began, and not let it drown me.

I learned that my exhaustion is not laziness—it’s from processing reality at a higher resolution.

I learned that the world needs people who can follow instructions, but it also needs those who can rebuild the instructions when they no longer work.

And from Krishnappa, I learned Nammavaru.

Our man. Belonging without a badge. A free coffee that tastes of community. And a mastery of the spiral path so deep, it feels like stillness.

The bus moves on in the dark. The road is a spiral, not a straight line. Jung said the privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are. For a long time, that privilege felt like a burden. But in the humming dark of this bus, surrounded by the smell of diesel and the quiet breaths of sleeping strangers, it feels less heavy. Maybe that’s how some of us find our way—by circling closer and closer to the centre, where the answer isn’t a job, but a man, finally becoming who he is.

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The Song from Behind the Wall: On My Grandmother, Kathakali, and Kalamandalam Hyderali

by Vishy Sankara | Dec 22, 2025 | Compassion, Harmony, Life, Meaning, Peace, RElationship, Zen

I have mixed feeling about Kathakali.. I have also mixed feeling about my paternal Grandma. … Mixed with likes and dislikes. No idea about the ratio of that proportion though. The artform of Kathakali was introduced to me by my Grandma.. So we got to start from her.

By any yardstick, my grandma was a very strong lady . She went to school only till 3rd standard.. But could remember the poems . especially the song praising the Queen of British Empire, she leant in her school. And she remembered all the slokas from Malayalam version of Ramayana.. Though she was not a great believer of God per se.. Guess her faith was very much rooted in practicality of day to day living. May be she followed Aristotle’s golden mean on that aspect. She liked temples and festivities as such. Especially those temple artforms such as Kathakali.

She was born into a very wealthy family, lost her mother when she was 21 days old. And sooner her father lost all his wealth. Her upbringing was taken care by a relative. She used to tell us that, as in infant she was fed goat milk. May be that explains her health till the very last moment of her life. I don’t remember she was ever hospitalised for any major illness. Though she was as smart or more smart than her cousin brothers, her education was stopped as was the norm during those days. Girl.

And as the daughter of a poor father, she got married to another not so wealthy person in that small Kannadiga community. Her husband, my paternal grandfather had almost a similar story being born into a wealthy family, but his parents squandering all their wealth and become quite poor by the time he finished his FA . ( During those days, intermediate was known as FA.). In our old family home, there was a photo of him in Football jersey . And my father Sankara, used to tell us that he was quite a good centre forward, that got him a job with Spencer’s. Then suppliers of British Army. But when their unit moved to Singapore , he had to leave that job and stay back to take care of his parents at their insistence. Guess not to his choice or liking. As he used to love Football too. And he took a govt. job.. and due to his over honest and over idealistic nature, remained quite poor throughout his life times.

During those times, there were around 10 Kannadiga families in Mannarkkad, 2 temples and a big graveyad just for the Kannadiga community. Rest of them were quite wealthy and due to that my grandparents were kind of socially ignored. Also was at the end of ridicule by them.

May be that environment made her seek cultural wealth. I guess Kathakali was her connection to the lost grandeur , an equalizer and display of cultivated taste.

Another story she used to tell us was on how she and other relatives planning to grow vegetables. During those days, they used to grow most of their needs. And most vegetables were seasonal. And she always used to plant a few a few week before others did and used to harvest and share with her relatives. May be some competitive streak.

In a life where so much was decided for her—her halted education, her marriage, her social standing—controlling the calendar of a seed was a powerful act of sovereignty. Planting earlier was a way to command time itself. And Harvesting and sharing first wasn't just kindness; it was a subtle restructuring of social dynamics. The relatives who may have "socially ignored" them became, briefly, recipients. She transformed from being overlooked to being the source, the one who provides. It turned perceived lack of enough into plenty.

All her life experiences had made her a formidable person. And sometimes ruthless too (most of the times she was quite self-centred too.) When a small infant grows up against all odds, it might have ingrained in her that she got to take care of herself. And she is there to take care of herself. And that reflected the way she treated her others in general and her daughter in laws in particular. May be the dislike part in me for her comes from that.

And the like part comes from all the great stories of our ancestors, she shared with us , and especially the stories of Kathakali. ( Kuchelavritham and Karna Sapatham etc were here favourite) and great insights.

For example, when Rajiv Gandhi was PM of India, there was some commotion about his wife, Sonia Gandhi being an Italian. ( Bofors times). And. I remember , her cousin brother, who was a national award winning school teachers talking to her about it. She said, anyone who can ties a saree so well got to be an Indian. Now when I look back, that was great cultural exams, no one can dispute.

Coming back to Kathakali. During those days, 2 or 3 days Kathakali performance was part of the annual festival at MuMoorthi temple in Mannarkkad. And that was something she never wanted to miss. Every single time, she will tell us, next year no one knows whether she is going to be alive so that this may be her last Kathaakali viewing.

I did not like Kathakali is an understatement. For those who wonder what Kathakali is ! It is an 4 or 5 century old temple art form in Kerala. Now almost dying. That is more to do with its form than its content. Kathakali programs used to be like 3 -4 full days. ( Nights in fact... from after the dinner, till just before the sun rises !). Most of the audience used to be Old people.. and often the younger ones with them were there to go with them. As our attention span, ability to really learn nuances and enjoy the slow pace of life declined , Kathakali too moved to reel size appearances in movie songs or on the welcome program of foreign tourists in those fancy resorts.

On that temple grounds, on the grass mat we used to carry as our seating ( in our case sleeping pad), we kids used to sleep .. While elders used to enjoy every moment of it.

I should say that , I was quite happy when that annual sojourn ended.

Much later , it came back. Through the voice of Kalamandalam Hyderali. He came as an arts festival guest at Govt Vicotria college. As the most famous Kathakali singer , as a Muslim , his invite seems to be more of a political statement. But when as an humble man, he said he is no orator and he would sing a kathakali padam for us. And he sang “Ajita hare” without any accompaniments it hit the heart note of all the audience. That song from KuchelaVirttam might have entered into my brain, during my sleeping stint as an audience on that temple ground. Hyderali's rendering of that, just woke me up from my slumber.

Even then I did not make any attempt to learn about him. Again during 2006, he reappeared in the obituary column of the Hindu. And that was a great story. When Mohanlal and Kalamandalam Gopi’s epic movie based on Kathakali “Vanaprastham” was realised, Hyderali was again in news and the legendary Kathakali Artist Gopiasan told in a TV interview, the most iconic kathakali singer was Hyderali.

Kerala is known as God’s own country.. I would hasten to add that it is also Devil’s own country too… In This small Gaul like state , both profound and profane coexist…. Secularism and fanaticism .. kindness and meanness… Openness and narrowmindedness…

Kerala is also home to K J Yesudas, an Xian who is more known for his Hindu devotional songs, K Raghavan an Hindu whose Mappila songs are evergreen. And Kalamandalam Hyderali a Muslim who went to become a legendary Kathakali singer. Kathakali is a Hindu temple art form and was in the hands of conservative echelons of Kerala society.

One of the Best KATHAKALI singers of his generation, Hyder Ali is the first non-Hindu artiste to make a mark in the four-century-old Classical Dance-Drama KATHAKALI.

It was when he was 11 years old that Hyderali joined Kerala Kalamandalam. Hailing from a poor family, his parents had struggled to pay the admission fee -— incidentally "a Hindu and a Christian" helped him secure admission in the premier performing arts institute, as Hyderali later recalls in his autobiography.

Hyderali was blessed with a light, pliant and sonorous voice that tuned well to softer and melodramatic scenes on Kathakali stage. His emotive singing used to earn him praise from masters like Kalamandalam Gopi.

Hyderali, suave and soft-spoken, nurtured the wish to see Lord Krishna in real life, but had to occasionally suffer professional humiliation on religious grounds, as entry to temples, where a chunk of Kathakali shows finds stage, in Kerala is barred for non-Hindus. Kathakali aficionados recall how those in control of an ancient temple near Haripad actually pulled down a part of the compound wall and extended the platform there for Hyderali to sing for the Kathakali performers inside the compound.

And that was a great story.. And Hyderali in one interview says as he was forced to stand on the stage part which was behind the wall outside the border of the temple, “ My body was outside the temple, but my voice was within.. Had I extended my hand, I would have touched the God.”

After a few years in wandering through the Zen way, I would have told him, that God was within him and may be all the Gods go wherever he used to sing to listen to him.

Coming back to my grandma, maybe she too would have felt , she is standing outside the wall of this world, even from a 21 days old infant till she passed away…

It took the story of a Muslim man singing of Hindu gods from outside a temple wall to make me finally hear my grandmother. Her life, too, was a voice singing from behind a series of walls—of poverty, of gender, of social slight. I had resented the formidable structure of her person, as I had resented the endless nights of Kathakali she loved. But Hyderali taught me to listen for the song within the fortress. The 'Ajita Hare' that seeped into my childhood sleep was that song. Her sharp wisdom about a sari was that song. In the end, the walls—of the temple, of the art form, of her difficult strength—dissolve. What remains is the voice, reaching for the divine. And finally, I am listening.

The Song of Silence That Remains…

by Vishy Sankara | 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

by Vishy Sankara | 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.

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Three questions that remain, even after all this:

Closing reflection:

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The Inner Smile

Breath: The Thread That Weaves the Fragmented Self

The Hara: Energy Rooted in the Earth

Hakuin’s Soft Butter & The Music That Carries It Home

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