A Joyful Noise

Krishna Das On Chanting The Names Of God

In the fall of 2008, a week after my forty-second birthday, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Gone was the assumption that my active lifestyle and healthy diet would guarantee me a long life. Gone was the assurance I had felt, looking at my ninety-year-old grandmother, that genetics were on my side. I had two small children, and when I told them, “I am here for you, no matter what,” the words felt empty.

During this time of biopsies and surgeries and pathology reports, I rediscovered the music of Krishna Das, whose low, sonorous voice had been the soundtrack to my weekly yoga class for years. Listening to his cds calmed me and gave me faith that everything would be ok, even if my worst fears came true.

As it turns out, I got lucky. The cancer was caught early, the doctors were able to treat it, and there’s only a small chance of recurrence. As I was recovering from my final surgery, I decided to attend a three-day workshop with Krishna Das at the Ananda Ashram outside of New York City.

Krishna Das was born Jeffrey Kagel in 1947 on Long Island in New York. His parents were Jewish, but as a teenager he began reading books on Eastern religion, and he went on to study meditation in his twenties. In the early 1970s he met spiritual teacher Ram Dass, who told him about the guru Neem Karoli Baba, known to his followers as “Maharaj-ji.” Captivated by Ram Dass’s stories, Kagel traveled to India to meet the guru and spent nearly three years at his ashram. Maharaj-ji gave him his Indian name, Krishna Das, meaning “one who serves [the Hindu god] Krishna,” and introduced him to kirtan, the Indian devotional practice of chanting the names of God. Krishna Das returned to the United States and, over the years, developed his own signature chanting style, mixing traditional kirtan with Western harmonic and rhythmic sensibilities.

Today he stays on the road almost full time, leading kirtans around the world. He has released fourteen cds and recently wrote Chants of a Lifetime: Searching for a Heart of Gold, a mix of biography, teachings, and insights. He has recorded with Sting and sung for Madonna, and the New York Times dubbed him “the chant master of American yoga.”

While at the workshop I participated in a kirtan. It began quietly. Sitting among the musicians on the stage, Krishna Das smiled shyly, cracked a corny joke. Then he closed his eyes, and they began playing: Krishna Das on his harmonium, others on cymbals or tabla or violin or even electric guitar. And Krishna Das sang. His voice reached deep down inside me, tickling my belly like fingers strumming an upright bass. A kirtan is a call-and-response between performers and audience, and the music can be slow and meditative or spirited and cathartic. Like a kid during prayer at a church or synagogue, I snuck a glance around the room. Most people had their eyes closed. Some were smiling. One was crying. A few were dancing in the aisles. I closed my eyes and listened and sang a little, and soon I lost my inhibitions, my skepticism, my shyness, my fear. I sang freely, shamelessly, and my heart opened to the love that filled the room.

I interviewed Krishna Das after the kirtan. Despite the accolades he’s received and the adoration of his audiences, he exuded self-effacing humility. Dressed like the Long Island native he is in a baseball cap and flannel shirt, he seemed profoundly kind and sincere and, at the same time, funny and sarcastic. When asked why he was drawn to kirtan, he answered with a chuckle. “Drawn? I had no choice. I knew it was the only thing that could save my ass.”

Adams: How would you describe kirtan to someone new to the practice?

Krishna Das: It depends who I’m talking to, because I don’t want to scare people away. If I say it’s “meditation with music,” some will be put off by that. In India they call it the “repetition of the sacred names of God,” but I don’t want to say that to someone who doesn’t believe in God. I don’t even know if I believe in God — not the one described in Western religious traditions anyway. In India people understand that God is within. There are Hindu images associated with God — deities like Krishna, Hanuman, and Kali — but when it comes down to it, these deities are symbols of the divine that lives inside each one of us. Indians are more creative about worship, whereas Christians are generally very tense: there’s only one right way to do it and only one God to worship. Of course, there is only one God in the Indian traditions, too, just many forms to symbolize it. It’s ok to worship anything in any way in India, because there it’s understood that nothing is outside of us. There’s only one God, and we’re all it.

Adams: Is it possible for someone like me, who’s never been to India and is not well versed in the Hindu gods and goddesses, to genuinely connect with the tradition?

Krishna Das: Do you feel good when you chant?

Adams: Well, it’s brand-new for me, but yes, I do.

Krishna Das: Then why think about anything else? You don’t need to know all the deities. You don’t need to know anything about Indian culture. You don’t have to know what the words mean, because nobody really knows what the words mean. You can learn the lower, superficial meanings intellectually — Krishna did this, and Ram did that — but the real meaning of these chants is our own deepest being.

I’ve been to yoga-teacher trainings and heard people say, “If you don’t understand the deities, you’ll never be a good yoga teacher.” Bullshit. We’re Americans. We didn’t grow up with this. It’s not native to us. I’ve spent a fair portion of my life in India and still don’t have a clue. It doesn’t mean that much to me. There it is: I told the truth.

All these so-called deities exist inside of us, but we don’t understand that. We don’t know who we are, so we can’t know who they are. Find out who you are, and you’ll know everything you need to know.

When I lived in India, I went to all the temples and holy places, and I read the history and the stories, but these days I don’t really think about all that, because to me the names simply represent the love inside of me, inside of you. Whether we’re chanting about Kali or Durga is irrelevant.

Adams: Flow of Grace, the cd and booklet you released in 2007, is devoted to the Indian deity Hanuman. It comes with an instructional cd on which you teach the Hanuman Chalisa. Can you tell me about that?

Krishna Das: Hanuman is a Hindu deity who takes the form of a monkey, and the Hanuman Chalisa was the first chant I learned in India. It’s a hymn or prayer or invocation, not simply repeating the name of a deity. And it’s long. It takes dedication to learn it all. For me the Chalisa is directly connected to Maharaj-ji, because he was worshiped as a manifestation of Hanuman. Many people actually saw him as Hanuman with their eyes open. When I chant the Chalisa, I’m singing to him.

Adams: Do you take a traditional Indian approach to chanting, or is your method more American?

Krishna Das: It’s kind of Long Island meets Delhi, or kirtan via the Midtown Tunnel. When I was in India, I would try to sing what I heard. After I got back to the U.S., the music I had grown up with began showing through. My melodies are more Western, but the chants are essentially the same as those we sing in India. I sing them the way I like. I’m not trying to please anybody, because from the very beginning I understood that I had to do this for my own heart.

Adams: Do you consider kirtan to be music or something else?

Krishna Das: It’s certainly musical — well, maybe not the way I do it. [Laughs.] Music has tremendous power to soothe and calm us, but it’s not going to get us to enlightenment. The way I look at it, when you want a kid to take medicine, you have to hide it in some kind of syrup. With chanting, the music is the syrup, and the Divine Names are the medicine. It’s the Divine Names that cure your suffering and free you from unhappiness and help you find your true nature. Music touches the divine at times, but there’s no way it can last. The names are the seeds you plant that destroy your illusions and bring about the truth.

Adams: Do you think chant takes us to a place that other methods don’t?

Krishna Das: Things happen more easily with chant, partially because we don’t have all the expectations that we do with meditation. We don’t feel like, OK, I have to sit down now and fight with my mind.

Meditation is misunderstood in the West. It’s taught as a concentration exercise, but that’s only the very beginning, a way to get you to pay attention. Later the practice changes; the instructions change. In the U.S. meditation is seen as an act of will: you’re trying to stop your mind. But you’ll never do it. It’s no wonder so many people give up. But with chanting, because of the music and everyone doing it together, you don’t think of it as a “practice.”

Adams: When you’re leading a kirtan, isn’t something transformative happening?

Krishna Das: Sure. I sing; the audience sings back. As the night goes on, they forget about the car in need of repair or the pile of bills on the kitchen table. People begin to let go of the story lines that brought them here and enter deeper and deeper into the practice, into the moment. And when you have a lot of people doing that, a certain energy builds up. We’re all here for the same purpose: to let this practice work on us, to find our way home.

Adams: Do you consider yourself a musician or a spiritual teacher?

Krishna Das: I’m a kirtan wallah: someone who chants. That’s it. I don’t know anything. I can’t teach anything. I can’t even teach you how to chant. You just sing from your heart. You have to figure out what that means for you.

Adams: Can you tell me some memorable stories about people who’ve come to hear you?

Krishna Das: I remember doing a workshop in California with a friend who’s a yoga teacher. She asked everyone to sit in a circle and tell why they were there, which wasn’t my style. I remember thinking, This is a waste of time. And then the first person to speak said, “On Monday morning I start my first round of chemo. They say I have incurable brain cancer. I came here to find some strength.” And it just killed me. I saw how much chanting means to people, how much they get from it — sometimes much more than I get. It shut me up, and we had a beautiful retreat. That woman became a good friend. She died three weeks ago.

I get e-mails from people who say my cd got them through a divorce, or the death of a child, or a terrible disease. It brings strength to them, and that really humbles me. I may be the one who’s singing, but I’m not the one giving people strength. They’re getting it from their own inner being, which they’re connecting to through the chanting.

Adams: Does chant ever give rise to pain or heartache or suffering?

Krishna Das: It can. When we chant, we’re not trying to get high. We’re not “failures” if we don’t feel happy. Sometimes healing and connecting more deeply to the love inside of us is painful. It can bring us in touch with something we have hidden from. It’s this pain that leads us to deeper questions: What is it we’re looking for? What is it we really need?

You know, this is the blues. We’re singing the blues. And there’s a joy, a strength in our yearning. There’s a beauty in our yearning. And tears are not a sign of failure. This is the world of tears. And there are so many different kinds of tears.

Adams: What are the challenges of this work?

Krishna Das: One is to stay healthy so I can continue doing it. I’m getting old, and it’s not so easy to eat well and take care of myself on the road. Another challenge is to keep giving 100 percent of my usual 3 percent. [Laughs.] But, by my guru’s grace, my work doesn’t get old. The minute I sit down to chant, I let go of boredom, thoughts, memories, judgments.

Adams: When you first began chanting publicly, how did you find an audience?

Krishna Das: The first place I chanted was Jivamukti Yoga School in New York. I called them up, and they said, “Sure, you can come down on Monday.” They had a program for yoga-teacher trainees, and I sang for about twenty minutes before it began. I started doing this every Monday. That went on for a month or two, and then I showed up on a Monday night as usual, and the teachers weren’t there. I was told they had gone to India and wouldn’t return for months. So I sat down and sang for two or three hours. I did it again the next week, and the next, and more and more people came. Monday night became my night.

Adams: Had you performed before then?

Krishna Das: Yes. When I was younger, I was into the blues, folk music, rock-and-roll. I had always been a singer.

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