You were never born

A visitor asks a cigarette seller in Bombay what happens after death, and gets the question moved.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-22 · Nondual

Chapter 08 of 12 in The masters were funny

Nisargadatta Maharaj sold hand rolled cigarettes from a shop in Bombay and taught in a small mezzanine room in his flat, in Marathi, through translators, to whoever climbed the stairs. He was not gentle. Visitors arrived with the big questions and got them taken apart on the spot.

Somebody asks what happens after death. He says, before you ask what happens after, tell me what happened before birth. And when the visitor has no answer, the line lands: you were not born, and you will not die. What was born was the idea that you are a body.

It has a comedian's structure. The question comes in expecting a long answer about realms and rebirths, and instead the question gets picked up and moved one step to the left, where it does not work anymore.

He left the metaphysical question alone and asked for the other end of the same line. Everybody worries about the exit and nobody has any information about the entrance, and with no memory of arriving, my confidence that I started is doing more work than the evidence.

I get stuck at the same place every time. It is easy to grant that I do not remember being born, and hard to see how that is different from not remembering being two. Missing evidence is not evidence. I do not think that objection kills the claim, but I do think anyone who repeats the line without feeling that objection is repeating a slogan.

What keeps me interested is narrower. Whatever the truth about birth and death, the sense of being here does not itself carry a timestamp. When I look for the start of the awareness in which this sentence is showing up, right now, without consulting my documents, there is no edge in the looking. That proves nothing. It is the only part of the claim I can check.

He would have been unimpressed by that paragraph, which is part of why I keep reading him.