When you are travelling through India, especially through holy sites and ashrams, you see a lot of people wearing beads around their necks. You also see a lot of old photographs of naked, skinny and intimidating yogis (or sometimes even plump, kindly and radiant yogis) wearing loads of beads. These strings of beads as we all know are called japa malas. They have been used in India for centuries to assist devout Hindus in staying focused during prayerful meditation. The necklace is held in one hand and fingered in a circle, one bead touched for every repetition of mantra.
The traditional japa mala is strung with 108 beads. But in any case, every japa mala has a special extra bead which dangles outside that balanced circle of 108 like pendants. I often used to wonder after my meditation sessions as to why the extra one? The question often cropped up and flew off my head like an evaporated vapor. I derived self-inference that the 109th bead was an emergency spare- like the extra button on a fancy sweater or the youngest son in a royal family or the cherry on top of a fresh fruit pudding! But NO… My recent discovery says that apparently there is an even higher purpose attached to the unsolved mystery and history of assumptions by my little mind. While meditation and recitals of holy mantras, when your fingers reach this marker, you are meant to pause from your absorption in meditation and thank your GURU. You pause to pay homage to your spiritual masters, you pause to seek blessings to gather the sensibilities to see the world with equipoise and believe that everyone is equal manifestation of God’s creative energy- men, women, children, turnips, bedbugs, corals: It’s all God in disguise! Our Guru’s teachings always hold that “a human life is a very special opportunity because only in a human form and only with a human life can God-realization ever occur”. The turnips, the bedbugs, the corals- they never get a chance to find out who they really are. But we do have a chance!
In the end, we must all write a petition to god to thank him for giving us the Guru’s we have in our lives today. Who have helped in our self-mastery in the journey of enlightenment and just be grateful to them, to whom we can repay back NOTHING!!! Maybe it’s just wise to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank-you forever and always, sincerely for as long as we have voices…
Dedicated to my Gurus...
Happy teacher's day!!!
Smriti Shakargaye.
