Amrit, see those stars. What do you think of them? Are they the one having control over us? Do we behave the way we do due to some messiah out there? These were some of the questions that we discussed every evening as we passed through the stinking yet beautiful Bagmati River. I remember how those walks to Pasupathinath shaped us become a different man strengthening our whimsical and philosophical interpretation of life. We talked of Dickens, Dawkins, Goethe, Plato, Socrates, Hitchens and what not in our journey.

Siddha, see those curtains. While we keep walking, there are billions of things happening behind those curtains, behind those rooms. He turned towards me and with a faint smile, he said,” Dickens isn’t it?” We both laughed. We never had those times where people had had to have a banal talk just to start a conversation.

I remember the talk that we had once where he had quoted Buddha “All that we are is the result of what we have thought”, to which I had replied quoting Buddha “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” We were behind this word ‘truth’ where he would claim ‘death’ to be the one. We used to have overwhelming discussions on an afterlife, the religions aiding those arguments, the atheist connoisseur’s logic-defying the sole meaning of reincarnations and rebirth. Moreover, for us life as a whole was a hoax, a hoax where we find ourselves running after money, living to meet others expectations. We always hated how life was full of desires. We always had this urge to discover more of humanity, kindness and obviously the separation from the materialistic way of living within ourselves.

Moreover, the subject that never missed our talks was meditation. We both were the followers of Buddha’s teachings, the only difference was he used to believe in rebirth and I did not. After a year of walking down the same roads every evening, we were both in the United States. However, our philosophical, spiritual talks never ended, for they were getting even stronger. We were developing Dhamma within ourselves. We were trying to find the inner peace, through one and only technique that Buddha had taught that is Vipassana.

One day we were talking about getting better in the technique and he sent me this inspiring story which reads, “Once a woodcutter got tired of having to cut trees day in and day out. Although he had been happy at first, he slowly began to question why he was doing it at all. So tired and exhausted, he sat down by a river to rest. He kept staring at the river as it flowed.

Suddenly, he saw an angler swim out from under it with a shiny pearl in his hand. He asked the angler if he too would find pearls if he dived in. The angler said, “You will, my young man, you will; but not without some hard work”. Feeling assured by the angler’s words, he dived in. He had seldom swum to the depths of the river. By the time he reached the bottom, his arms and legs burnt like fire. However, his efforts paid off and he found a tiny little pearl that shone like the sun. After that day, he knew what he wanted to do. So every day, he would go to the river, dive in, swim tothe bottom and find more and more pearls.

However, he was afraid that the swift currents of the river would carry him away from his town. As he went further deeper, he found the pearls even bigger and shiner, so he decided to let the currents sweep him as far away as they would. His life went on. He would dive in, gather some pearls, and swim back to the bank and rest. One particular day after a long time, something extraordinary happened.

As the currents carried him further and further, they suddenly gave way into a vast, vast ocean. The woodcutter had never known that there was such an ocean out there. The sight of it made him marvel at what he saw. There he saw shadows of things that were not common. He did not know what they were yet. However, he knew that they were something very extraordinary. And thus began his new exploration into an unknown world.”

Today, while I remain to remember his words and actions, I believe he has already found the world once unknown, and the conclusions of the questions, which were once intriguing – reincarnations, rebirth, and reasons behind existence, inner peace, and enlightenment. Rest in Peace Dhamma Bro.  (The name that we had given to each other)

Amrit is an undergraduate at The University of Mississippi, USA.