Yogaville Kirtan: The Brick Story Behind Jaya Rama Krishna Hari

On a Friday night in May 2026, the opening session of a weekend retreat at Satchidananda Ashram – Yogaville began the way many kirtan evenings do: a band, a room, and a voice that keeps asking everyone to sing back. Krishna Das, known to his community as KD, opened with a short invocation to "the love that lives within each one of us," then moved through devotional chants, told the story of a devotee and a brick, and closed by inviting everyone to learn the Hanuman Chalisa over the rest of the weekend. The full recording runs nearly two hours. What makes it worth a close listen is less the singing than the way the evening keeps stopping to explain itself, and what those explanations reveal about how devotion is meant to work.

What does a kirtan night open with?

KD did not begin with a song. He began with a prayer, and he framed it plainly. "It's an invocation for the love that lives within each one of us," he said. "It's who we truly are."

(Krishna Das, in the May 22, 2026 Yogaville recording, at 0:09)

That framing matters for kirtan, a practice built on call and response. The leader sings the names of the divine, the room answers, and the chant becomes a shared act rather than a performance on a stage. An invocation before the first chant sets the premise that the love being sung to is not somewhere far off. It is already in the people singing. For a listener who has never sat in a kirtan before, that is the most useful thing to hear first: you are not auditioning for anything. You are answering.

Why does a single mantra need a story behind it?

Midway through the evening, KD turned to "Jaya Rama Krishna Hari." The chant, as the event description tells it, is sung by devotees of Vitthala, the form of Krishna worshipped at Pandharpur in Maharashtra. KD approached it with a joke about the stakes of getting it right. There is, he said, a special hell world you go to if you say it wrong even once, and if you believe that, you are out of your mind. He then stumbled over which deity the chant belonged to, the band tried to help, and the room laughed with him. He did not pretend to have the scholarly answer on hand. He simply kept going toward the story.

That willingness to be imperfect in public is part of the teaching. In this tradition, a mantra is not a test of pronunciation that you pass or fail. It is a relationship, and the story is how the relationship gets its meaning. Once the listener knows who is being addressed and why, the repetition of the names stops sounding like a string of syllables and starts sounding like a conversation that has a history.

KD also explained why the chant calls on two names that sound like separate figures. Ram and Krishna, he said, are both expressions of the same source.

"Both Ram and Krishna are manifestations of Vishnu."

(Krishna Das, in the May 22, 2026 Yogaville recording, at 23:54)

For a Western listener, that is a useful key. Hindu devotional language often holds several divine forms as different doorways into one presence. A chant that names Rama and Krishna together is not confused. It is widening the door.

Who was Pundalik, and why did Krishna have to wait at the door?

The story KD told is the emotional center of the evening. As he recounted it, a devotee named Pundalik was so devoted to serving his parents that he was absorbed in that service when Krishna came to see him. Pundalik did not drop what he was doing. He turned away from the door, and Krishna answered in a way that delighted the room. KD's version runs like this: Krishna said, in effect, that it was him, the devotee's Lord. Pundalik replied that the Lord should wait, because he was nearly finished. By the time Pundalik turned around, Krishna had become a murti, a sacred image, standing on a brick at Pandharpur.

That brick is the detail that makes the story stick. Pundalik had given the Lord a brick to stand on while he finished his work, and the Lord stayed there. The event description adds that the Lord has stood on that brick ever since, moved by such devotion. KD followed the story with a second thread: a related tale in which this same form of Krishna became Ram to grant a vision to someone who wanted to see Rama. That is why the chant carries both names.

(Krishna Das, in the May 22, 2026 Yogaville recording, from about 25:54, as the murti is installed at the temple)

What is the teaching inside the parable? KD's telling points to a specific kind of devotion: not the dramatic renunciation people often imagine when they hear the word bhakti, but faithful, daily care for the people in front of you. Pundalik's service to his parents is the devotion. The Lord's willingness to wait is the response. It is a quiet reversal of the usual picture of the seeker chasing God, and it puts ordinary duty at the center of the path.

How do you sing along when you don't know the words?

The evening's most emotionally direct moment came with "My Foolish Heart," paired in the event listing with "Bhaja Govinda." The lyric is almost conversational, addressing the restless part of the self as if it were a friend who keeps making the same mistake. As sung in the recording, the opening lines run: "My foolish heart, why do you weep? You've thrown yourself away again. Now you cry yourself to sleep." A later line asks, "My foolish heart, when will you learn?"

(Sung in the May 22, 2026 Yogaville recording, at about 47:15)

Those questions do something unusual in a room full of people. The chant is about one person's inner scolding, yet everyone is singing it together, and the scolding softens into shared recognition. Kirtan works this way often. The call and response lowers the pressure to perform. You do not have to know the Sanskrit or the tune. You only have to repeat what you hear, and let the repetition do the work that analysis cannot.

If you are new, a practical approach follows from what KD modeled. Listen to the first pass without worrying about the words. Notice where the room answers the leader. Join when a phrase feels familiar. The first sessions are about getting comfortable enough to let the chant carry you, which is the same thing the Pundalik story asks of its hero: keep doing the thing in front of you, and let the rest arrive.

What does the weekend ask of the people who came to learn?

The evening closed with the Hanuman Chalisa, which KD invited the audience to learn over the rest of the weekend. The invitation shows the arc of the retreat. The first night is about hearing and experiencing. The following sessions are about taking the chants into the body and memory, so that the practice continues when the band goes home.

KD's own path explains why this approach matters to him. The event description notes that his practice traces back to his years as a student of Neem Karoli Baba in India, and that he is credited with helping bring bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, into mainstream spiritual life in the West. The recording itself does not chart the decades between that student life and this May 2026 evening in detail. What it shows is the result: a teacher who is still asking a room full of people to answer a name, still telling the stories that explain why the name matters, and still willing to laugh at his own uncertainty about the details.

That combination is the lesson most worth carrying out of the recording. The stories supply the reason, the call and response supplies the practice, and the honesty about not knowing every detail keeps the whole thing from becoming a performance of expertise. You do not need to master the lineage to sing. You need to show up, answer, and let the stories accumulate.

Where to go from here

• Listen to the full May 22, 2026 recording from the Satchidananda Ashram – Yogaville channel, and pay attention to the moments when KD stops to explain a chant.
• Look up the Pundalik story in your own reading after hearing KD's telling, and compare how the brick and the waiting are described.
• Try the invocation idea on your own: before you sing, name the love you believe is already within you.
• Learn "My Foolish Heart" first, since its questions are direct and its refrain is easy to join.
• Explore more of Krishna Das's work at krishnadas.com, and find retreat and teacher-training listings at yogaville.org.