SEVERAL YEARS AGO IN A SMALL VILLAGE outside New
Delhi, I was sitting in a small, stuffy room with a
very old man and a young priest. The priest sat on the
floor swaying back and forth as he recited words inked
on bark sheets that looked ancient. I listened, having
no idea what the priest was intoning. He was from the
far south and his language, Tamil, was foreign to me.
But I knew he was telling me the story of my life,
past and future. I wondered how I got roped into this
and began to squirm.
It had taken strong persuasion from an old friend to
get me to the small room. "It's not just Jyotish, it's
much more amazing," he coaxed. Indian astrology is
called Jyotish, and it goes back thousands of years.
Visiting your family astrologer is common practice
every-where in India, where people plan weddings,
births, and even routine business transactions around
their astrological charts (Indira Gandhi was a famous
example of someone who followed Jyotish), but modern
times have led to a fading away of tradition. I had
chronically avoided any brushes with Jyotish, being a
child of modern India and later a working doctor in
the West.
But my friend prevailed, and I had to admit that I
was curious about what was going to happen. The young
priest, dressed in a wrapped skirt with bare chest and
hair shiny with coconut oil—both marks of a
southerner—didn't draw up my birth chart. Every chart
he needed had already been drawn up hundreds of years
ago. In other words, someone sitting under a palm tree
many generations ago had taken a strip of bark, known
as a Nadi, and inscribed my life on it.
These Nadis are scattered all over India, and it's
pure chance to run across one that applies to you. My
friend had spent several years tracking down just one
for himself; the priest produced a whole sheaf for me,
much to my friend's amazed delight. You have to come
for the reading, he insisted.
Now the old man sitting across the table was
interpreting in Hindi what the priest was chanting.
Because of overlapping birth times and the vagaries of
the calendar when we are speaking of centuries, Nadis
can overlap, and the first few sheets didn't apply to
me. But by the third sheet or so, the young priest
with the sing-song voice was reading facts that were
startlingly precise: my birth date, my parents' names,
my own name and my wife's, the number of children we
have and where they live now, the day and hour of my
father's recent death, his exact name, and my
mother's.
At first there seemed to be a glitch: The Nadi gave
the wrong first name for my mother, calling her
Suchinta, when in fact her name is Pushpa. This
mistake bothered me, so I took a break and went to a
phone to ask her about it. My mother told me, with
great surprise, that in fact her birth name was
Suchinta, but since it rhymed with the word for "sad"
in Hindi, an uncle suggested that it be changed when
she was three years old. I hung up the phone,
wondering what this whole experience meant, for the
young priest had also read out that a relative would
intervene to change my mother's name. No one in our
family had ever mentioned this incident, so the young
priest wasn't indulging in some kind of mind-reading.
For the benefit of skeptics, the young priest had
passed nearly his whole life in a temple in South
India and did not speak English or Hindi. Neither he
nor the old man knew who I was. Anyway, in this school
of Jyotish, the astrologer doesn't take down your
birth time and cast a personal chart which he then
interprets. Instead, a person walks into a Nadi
reader's house, the reader takes a thumb-print, and
based on that, the matching charts are located (always
keeping in mind that the Nadis may be lost or
scattered to the winds). The astrologer reads out only
what someone else has written down perhaps a thousand
years ago. Here's another twist to the mystery: Nadis
don't have to cover everyone who will ever live, only
those individuals who will one day show up at an
astrologer's door to ask for a reading!
In rapt fascination I sat through an hour of more
arcane information about a past life I had spent in a
South Indian temple, and how my transgressions in that
lifetime led to painful problems in this one, and
(after a moment's hesitation while the reader asked if
I really wanted to know) the day of my own death. The
date falls reassuringly far in the future, although
even more reassuring was the Nadi's promise that my
wife and children would lead long lives full of love
and accomplishment.
I walked away from the old man and the young priest
into the blinding hot Delhi sunshine, almost dizzy
from wondering how my life would change with this new
knowledge. It wasn't the details of the reading that
mattered. I have forgotten nearly all of them, and I
rarely think of the incident except when my eye falls
on one of the polished bark sheets, now framed and
kept in a place of honor in our home. The young priest
handed it to me with a shy smile before we parted. The
one fact that turned out to have a deep impact was the
day of my death. As soon as I heard it, I felt both a
profound sense of peace and a new sobriety that has
been subtly changing my priorities ever since.... Deepak Chopra
No comments:
Post a Comment