The Monkey Man of Vindhyachal and the Meaning of Life
What can a man who dresses up as a monkey and blesses people teach us about the meaning of life?
I’m waiting in line to be blessed by a man sitting in a tree who is dressed up as a monkey. Welcome to India, where the seemingly surreal and astonishing is everyday ordinary. I’m at the Kali temple, Mahakali-Kali Khoh, just outside of Vindhyachal (about 40 miles up the Ganges from Varanasi) with my Varanasi-based friend, Rana P.B. Singh, professor of geography at Benares University. As we wait in line, Rana is telling me the story of Monkey Man of Vindhyachal.
About 25 years ago a young man was hanging around the primate-populated temple, as Rana says. The man was feeling down on his luck and didn't know what he wanted to do with his life. His depressive thoughts, though, were interrupted when he saw a young monkey dying. He ran over and fed the monkey some water and it immediately sprang to life. All the other monkeys surrounded the man and began touching him with great reverence.
It was then that he had an epiphany: he was an incarnation of Hanuman, the great Hindu monkey god. He immediately went home and created a costume (complete with a tale). Once his outfit was made, he turned up at the temple in his new Hanuman outfit and affixed himself in a tree. He apparently even transformed his face and jaw to make it more monkey like.
And so, for the last two and a half decades this mortal-turned-monkey has been sitting on his perch in a tree blessing anyone who stops by with a gentle tap to the forehead with his wand. Tips, Rana says, jokingly, are welcome, in the form of a few rupees and maybe bananas.
At least I think he was joking. As stand in line there, I can’t help but replay this story in my head. Do we really need to spend so much time being preoccupied about finding a purpose in life? I wondered. And if so, does it have to be one that is society-proscribed and approved?
After all, one of the roots of human unhappiness is the sense that life has no meaning. “I believe the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness,” His Holiness the Dalai Lama writes in the first line of his book The Art of Happiness.
I’d recently begun thinking about life, love, meaning, and happiness when I stumbled upon the Zen concept of “mushutoku.” It’s a state of mind where the spirit does not seek to obtain anything nor expect (or even hope for) a profit from one’s actions. It’s doing something just for the love of doing it, with zero calculation, no aspiration for asset, nor any fear of negative outcomes.
It reminds me of a history class I took when I was in school at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The professor was telling us how Buddhist monks spend weeks, months making an intricate mandala with colored sand. “And then when they’re finally finished,” he said, “they’d destroy it.” Why, he asked us, do you think they do that? One guy raised his hand and said: “So they can make it again and perfect it?”
“That’s about the most American thing someone could say,” the professor said.
In the United States we’re so conditioned to strive, to make things better and better. And by doing so, by seeking perfection, we’re robbing ourselves of the wisdom of the process. We focus on goals when we should just take refuge in the direction we’re going instead of only looking to the finish line.
What if we step back for a second and ask: do we have spend so much time and energy seeking meaning in life? Without the pressure to find significance or a purpose, can we then relax more, live in the present more, and find a deeper sense of contentment and compassion?
“The meaning of life is just to be alive,” said philosopher Alan Watts “It’s so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves”
The Chinese refer to it as purposelessness: there is no aim of getting somewhere. That means many of the things that inhabit this rock we live on are without purpose: nature, for example, exists without purpose.
Camus said that it is only when we accept the meaninglessness of our lives, can we face the absurdity of life with our heads held high. The real meaning of life is that there is no meaning, said Watts. He added that life’s purpose is no purpose and that its sense is nonsense.
It all sounds really pessimistic, right? But it doesn’t have to be. Not all.
Alan Watts called this meaninglessness of life “significant nonsense.” Not chaotic nonsense but nonsense with a fascinating complexity to it. “It is this kind of meaninglessness that we can find the most profound meaning.” Sort of like this guy sitting in a tree dressed up as a monkey. He found “significant nonsense” and stuck with it.
“Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth,” wrote Buddhist nun and author Pema Chodron. “If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.”
Which reminds me of one of my favorite Rumi poems. For a 13th-century Persian Sufi mystic, Rumi’s words are unusually congruent and useful for describing some Buddhist concepts.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense.
What Rumi is talking about here—at least to me—is to be simply alive, aware, and here in the present moment. In the field there are no mental filters, no boxes, no categories. It’s a safe space where we’re free of the structure and meaning-making we’ve given to our lives. It’s a place where we need not stress about the significance of life.
In Rumi’s field there is a radical absence of control, confronting the dread and panic of uncertainty where we don’t have to create a false reality to cope with the emptiness of life. The “Fields of Joy,” as Lenny Kravitz once sang about.
It’s more courageous to embrace emptiness, or as it’s called in Pali, the language of the Buddha, anatta. And as I step up to the Monkey Man of Vindhyachal, he gives me a gentle tap on the head with his wand and utters something in Hindi. I offer back a slight bow and steeple my hands and then walk away, telling myself that from here I will move in the direction of Rumi’s field.
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