In this live kirtan performance, Jai Uttal offers a melody he composed specifically to honor Shyam Das, a close friend who died unexpectedly in India in 2013. Rather than glossing over grief as something to transcend, Uttal presents kirtan—the repetitive chanting of the Maha Mantra ("Hare Krishna Hare Krishna / Krishna Krishna Hare Hare / Hare Rama Hare Rama / Rama Rama Hare Hare")—as a practice that holds both pain and sweetness, both longing for the departed and their felt presence. The piece argues that bhakti (devotional practice) is fundamentally about living with the simultaneous reality of loss and connection, and that spiritual texts rarely prepare us for the raw heartbreak of death.
What does bhakti teach us about grief?
Jai Uttal opens his reflections by naming the difficulty spiritual practitioners often face: while sacred texts offer hints about what occurs after death, they rarely address the devastating sense of loss that arrives when someone beloved dies, especially without warning. This is not a small omission. The Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and other foundational texts speak to the eternal nature of the soul and the cycles of rebirth, yet these teachings do not always calm the wracking tears that come when a friend is suddenly gone.
Uttal's approach is to hold both truths at once. Bhakti, he suggests, is not about transcending emotion or rising above loss through intellectual understanding. Instead, it is a practice of presence—of staying with what is true in the heart right now. When Shyam Das died in 2013, Uttal's immediate response was deep and wracking tears. That grief was real, was valid, and was itself a form of bhakti. The longing for another person, the ache of their absence, is "the two sides of Bhakti: the longing and the presence."
How did Jai Uttal meet Shyam Das?
The story of their meeting reveals something about how spiritual friendships form—often unexpectedly, through acts of boldness born from devotion. Shyam Das simply knocked on the door of Uttal's small cottage in West Berkeley, California, introduced himself, and asked for chai. When Uttal hesitated (not having heard of this stranger before), Shyam Das was clear: he wouldn't leave until they sang kirtan together. This directness—this refusal to accept a polite deflection—set the tone for their entire friendship.
After chai and conversation, Uttal took Shyam Das to his garage-turned-temple, and they sang for what felt like hours. From that moment forward, Shyam became one of Uttal's closest friends. When Shyam later moved to the Woodstock area, they stayed in constant touch, exchanging what Uttal calls "spontaneous devotional poems in the style of the medieval Indian lovelorn mystics who wept burning tears calling for their beloved." This friendship was built not on casual connection but on the shared language of longing and worship—the vocabulary of bhakti itself.
What is the practice of remembrance through mantra?
Uttal wrote the melody for the Maha Mantra specifically as a dedication to Shyam Das, naming it "Holy Madman: In Remembrance of Shyam Das." The choice of title is instructive. A "holy madman" (often called a "goswami" or wandering saint in Hindu and Buddhist traditions) is someone who has surrendered so completely to devotion that they appear mad to the world—ecstatic, unbounded, no longer performing the ordinariness that society demands.
Uttal released this composition without fanfare or promotion, trusting that "whoever was meant to hear it would indeed hear it." This reflects a broader bhakti principle: the work of devotion is not for sale, not for metrics, not for validation. It exists because the heart requires it to exist. In singing this mantra, Uttal is not trying to convince anyone else that Shyam Das was important. He is responding to his friend's continued call from beyond the temporal plane: "Sing with me right now, Jai Gopal," Shyam Das seems to say, using Uttal's spiritual name. And Uttal answers that call by creating music, by gathering others in kirtan, by keeping the relationship alive through devotional practice.
How does chanting the Maha Mantra function as connection?
The Maha Mantra itself—"Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare / Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare"—is one of the most widely chanted Sanskrit invocations in Hindu and devotional Buddhist practice. It calls upon two aspects of the divine: Krishna, the form of God associated with divine love and play, and Rama, the form associated with truth and righteousness. "Hare" invokes the divine feminine, the energy that makes the divine accessible.
When chanted in kirtan (often as a group, often with call-and-response), the Maha Mantra becomes a container for presence. The repetition quiets the analytical mind. The rhythm syncs the nervous system across participants. The community of voices singing together creates a field that is larger than any individual loss. Yet in this live kirtan, Uttal has intentionally infused the Maha Mantra with a specific lineage of grief: this melody is for Shyam Das. Every time someone sings it, they may not know the story, but the intention—the dedication—is there, embedded in the music like an offering left at a shrine.
What is the dual nature of bhakti that Uttal describes?
Uttal explicitly states that the two sides of bhakti are "the longing and the presence." This is not a paradox to be resolved but a lived reality to be inhabited. In bhakti practice, you are simultaneously calling out to the divine (or to the beloved, or to the departed) and experiencing their presence. You are incomplete and yet complete. You are grieving and yet not alone. This is the peculiar gift of devotional practice: it permits sadness without requiring despair, and it permits joy without demanding that you deny loss.
This understanding pushes back against a common spiritual cliché—that enlightenment or spiritual maturity means transcending attachment and emotion. In bhakti, the heart is the center of practice. The heart breaks, the heart longs, the heart remembers. These are not obstacles to spiritual realization; they are the very substance of it. When Shyam Das "calls" Uttal to "sing with me right now," this is not a regression into worldly attachment. It is the ongoing reality of a spiritual friendship that death does not sever.
How does sudden death change the practice?
Uttal names something rarely discussed in spiritual teaching: the shock of sudden, unexpected death. His friend did not pass after a long illness or in old age. The news came as a call one day saying that Shyam Das had died in India. The shock, the lack of time to prepare, the absence of final words or rituals—these intensify the longing and make the presence harder to feel. Yet Uttal does not suggest that spiritual practice "should" make this easier. Instead, he says that "to this day, Shyam Das so often calls me to remember him."
This suggests a radical reframing of grief: rather than something to move past, grief becomes an ongoing spiritual conversation. The departed person continues to invite the living into remembrance, into devotion, into song. Every time Uttal sings this melody, Shyam Das's presence is real, not as a ghost or as wishful thinking, but as a genuine channel of devotion and love that transcends the temporary plane of material existence.
Where to go from here
For anyone grieving the loss of a spiritual friend or mentor, Uttal's approach offers a model that does not require you to transcend grief or to prove that you have "moved on." Instead, it suggests that devotional practice—whether through chanting, music, prayer, or any other means—can become the ongoing relationship with the deceased. The practice need not be public or documented. The melody released "with no fanfare or promotion" reminds us that the deepest spiritual acts are often those done only because the heart requires them.
For those interested in exploring kirtan more directly, learning the Maha Mantra and chanting it in community can be a gateway into bhakti practice. The repetition and rhythm of mantra are available to anyone, regardless of religious background. The mantra itself, when held with genuine intention, becomes a vessel for whatever longing or presence the practitioner brings to it.
Finally, Uttal's teaching invites reflection on the spiritual friendships already present in your life—those people with whom you've shared singing, prayer, or deep practice. These relationships, held consciously, can become the actual ground of spiritual work, rather than something incidental to it. When such a friend dies, the relationship does not end; it transforms into a practice.
