2 November. Today is Nithya Chaithanya Yati’s birthday. A long time back, when I started reading Malayalam newspapers, one of the must-reads was his articles—mostly about day-to-day life and challenges. Later in high school, my grand uncle, a National Award–winning teacher, used to talk about him as well as Krishnamurti. Gopala thatha was considered an atheist by many of my relatives. But he was quite spiritual, just not religious. Much before I started seeing Nithya as a spiritual guru, I read him as someone who wrote Malayalam prose really well. Like another spiritual master, Eknath Easwaran’s English.
In my collection, after Krishnamurti’s books, the most number of books I have are by Nithya and Eknath Easwaran. While Easwaran’s spiritual life was almost like that of JK and UG, Nithya belonged to the illustrious lineage of Śrī Narayana Guru—the great Advaita teacher and social reformer from Kerala. Nithya’s guru, Nataraja Guru, was Narayana Guru’s disciple. Nataraja Guru, after a PhD from Sorbonne and teaching in Switzerland, returned and accepted sanyasa. Nithya, after being a monk, went on to do a PhD from TISS and taught in many universities such as Stanford. He also headed ICMR’s yoga division.
Though I was not fortunate to meet them in person, they were all great influences on me—connected through their writing. And another connection: I share my birthday with Nithya Chaithanya Yati, 2 November.
I missed that with my late father Sankara, whose birthday was on 3 November. He passed away on 20 November. So November is a bittersweet month. Like that movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, for me it is “three birthdays and a remembrance (śraddhāñjali) day.”
Like that classic movie Four Weddings and a Funeral. It was such a wonderful comedy and a must watch… especially for that eulogy Matthew delivers during the funeral service of Gareth. That W.H. Auden poem— “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone…” And the best in my view: “He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest.” Maybe someone would rephrase it for me at my memorial in the Zendo: “My resting week and my Sunday work.”
When my father left, I did not cry for a very long time. The tears came much later, one evening as I sat alone on the KAUST beach. With that, my grief cycle turned in full, like the arc described by Kübler‑Ross. Perhaps it turned so full that, later that year, when my mother called to ask if I had done puja on 20 November, I realized I had forgotten the śraddhāñjali day. And after so many years, I see that this forgetting is itself the best śraddhāñjali one can offer to the dear and near—that we forget they are no more, because in truth they are still here, in another form, formless.
I even hope to breathe my last on a 1 November, so that after I am dusted and gone, joyful memories would come up for my dear and near ones after the sad ones—if at all someone cares to remember.
And it is always good to get reincarnated, even in our imagination, like Jesus—though I was not crucified by life in general. After all, don’t we wake up to life after a deep death every single night.
Many religions and concepts of God arose from humanity’s fear of death and the anxiety of being mortal. Some religions and spiritual paths teach that real life begins only after this life, after our death—the very word moksha points to that. But Zen looks at it differently. For Zen, this life is the only life that matters. Samsara is Nirvana.
Fr. AMA often reminds us that life is precious, and any other thought is without true understanding. One begins to live only when one accepts death fully. Only when we accept our mortality and fragility do we become truly immortal. There is no day without night. And if there were an endless day without night in between, would we really value that day at all?
Many years ago, when I joined a Stoic Week program organized by the University of Exeter, there were two important meditations: one to recognize our insignificance in the vast universe as individuals, and the other to face death directly. A few months ago, Fr. AMA too spoke of the Jesuit meditation practice of meeting one’s own death. All these are preparations to face death. And in a way, there can be no better preparation for death than this: to live one’s day-to-day and moment-to-moment life with full presence.
I don’t remember celebrating my birthdays during my growing-up years. One reason was obviously economic—my parents just struggled to take care of the essentials in my and my siblings’ life. And the second reason is that, usually in Kerala, birthdays are celebrated as per the Malayalam calendar. So it kind of complicates things.
The first such celebration was in engineering college hostel, when my friends—the Dagar gang—came up with an impromptu birthday celebration and gifted me a book: Lee Iacocca’s autobiography.
And this time, it is the first birthday in the Zendo. So kind of being reborn.Feel like the first birthday. And like that, life comes in circles… not straight lines. What I missed in childhood, comes back now in another form. Not with cake or candles, but with silence, chanting, and friends on the path. Feels like the day itself is saying—be born again, again and again.
Zen teaches that life and death are not two separate realities, but one continuous unfolding. Yet at the Zendo we still celebrate birthdays, and we also gather in prayer for departed Sangha members. To lean only on the side of the infinite, ignoring the world of form, would be foolishness. We live in this phenomenal world, where grief must be endured and cannot be bypassed. However much one reframes, body pain, loss, hurt—all are truly sorrowful. And just the same, moments we cherish and enjoy bring real joy, laughter, and happiness. To deny either sorrow or joy would make life sterile and empty. To embrace both is to live fully.
Like Kübler‑Ross’s grief cycle, everything else in this universe too has its own life cycle. It is circular in nature. A recognition that the path is not straight, but it is whole. That every loss is woven into the fabric of a larger gain, and every ending is, in some form, a very quiet and gentle beginning.
And perhaps the best wordless way this truth is represented is in the Zen ensō—the circle drawn in a single breath, open or closed, complete yet unfinished.
Yesterday evening, Fr. AMA reminded us of this truth in the most ordinary way: he said today morning we will go to the cemetery for Alosanai’s remembrance — she, the first staff of Bodhi Zendo, who lived Zen without ever needing to sit in meditation. Today evening 630 pm we will gather again for a memorial service to all departed Sangha members. And i plan to include Nithya and my late father Sankara too to that. And in between, he is taking me for a birthday lunch. Life and death, grief and joy, silence and laughter — all folded into one circle
