Today I Arrived at My Own Name

Published on Buddha Purnima, May 2026 (१८ वैशाख २०८३, शुक्रवार) ·  by Rajkumar Banjara, PhD.

Today is Buddha Purnima.

The full moon of awakening. The day Siddhartha was born, attained enlightenment, and left his body, all on the same lunar date, across different years. A day the universe reserves for arrivals and liberations.

I did not choose this day. This day chose me.

Something has been settling in me for a long time. Quietly, the way sediment slowly finds the bottom of still water. I could feel it moving. A name that did not fit. A coat that was well made but not mine. And with it, a kind of suffocation. Not dramatic, not sudden. Just the slow, steady weight of carrying something that belonged to another version of me.

Today, that weight released.

I feel it in my body. Lighter. Freer. Different in a way I do not yet have all the words for. Something that had been held tightly for years simply… opened. And on the full moon of the Buddha, the one who taught that all suffering is the grasping of things that were never truly ours, I find myself arriving, at last, at my own name.

Swami Vimukta Ananda

स्वामी विमुक्त आनन्द

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What Does It Mean?

Let me take you through it slowly, because each word carries weight.

Vimukta   विमुक्त

This is not simply “free.” The prefix vi in Sanskrit intensifies everything it touches. Vimukta means completely liberated. Fully released. Not freedom from something, but freedom as a natural state of being. The way a river is not free from the banks. It simply flows. That is its nature.

Ananda   आनन्द

Not happiness. Not joy. Those are feelings. They come and go depending on what life brings you. Ananda is different. Ananda is the unconditional ground beneath all feelings. The stillness that holds both grief and celebration without being shaken by either. In the Upanishadic tradition, Ananda is one of the three essential qualities of the Absolute. Sat, existence. Chit, consciousness. Ananda, bliss. It is not something you achieve. It is something you remember.

Vimukta Ananda. The completely liberated one, resting in unconditional bliss.

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Why This Name? Why Now?

I was born Rajkumar Banjara.

Rajkumar means the prince. Banjara is the wandering tribe of India and Nepal, the nomads who carried everything they owned and moved with the seasons, with the land, with life itself.

The wandering prince.

I did not understand the poetry of my own birth name until recently. But look at the life it predicted. Thirty years crossing the terrain of coffee, from Himalayan farms to international cupping tables, from the soil of Nepal to cupping rooms across the world. A life of meditation, of sitting with farmers and seekers, of moving between the ordinary and the extraordinary, belonging fully to both and permanently fixed to neither.

A Banjara does not wander because he is lost. He wanders because he is free.

In 2000, when I took Sannyasa from my Guru Swami Shailendra Saraswati, the brother of Osho Rajneesh, I was given the name Devraj Ananda. It was a beautiful name. It honoured where I was at that time. A prince of the divine, still becoming.

But a name must fit the person who carries it today, not only the person who received it. Over twenty-five years of practice, of meditation, of yoga, of sitting with people in their pain and their joy, of watching a coffee cherry teach me more about consciousness than many books, something shifted. The seeker became the sought. The wandering became the arrival.

Not because I stopped moving. But because I found that I was always already home.

Vimukta is the spiritual name for Banjara. The Sanskrit expression of what my family name always carried in its bones. And Ananda, I keep. Because it was given in love, and because it is true. I simply understand it now in a way I could not at thirty.

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What People Feel

People sometimes ask me what I actually do. Am I a coffee person or a meditation teacher or a farmer’s advocate or a podcast host?

I have stopped trying to answer that question with categories.

What I know is this. When people sit with me, whether we are cupping a Nepali single origin, or talking about anxiety and depression, or simply sharing a quiet morning, something happens that I did not cause and cannot take credit for.

I have seen it in their eyes. A kind of settling. An opening. Sometimes tears, sometimes goosebumps, sometimes a silence that is fuller than any words.

In Kashmir Shaivism, there is a concept called Spanda. The sacred tremor of consciousness. The divine pulse that moves through genuine encounter. I believe that is what people are feeling. Not me. The Ananda that is always already present, simply becoming visible in a space where someone is awake enough to let it move through them.

That is what I try to be. A space. A stillness. A wanderer who has found that the wandering was always in the right direction.

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A Note on This Day

I did not choose Buddha Purnima. It chose me.

Or perhaps more accurately, I was ready on this day, and the day was ready for me.

Buddha’s teaching was ultimately simple. Suffering comes from grasping. Liberation comes from releasing. Vimukta, the released one, is in its own way a Nepali Buddhist’s deepest aspiration translated into Sanskrit.

On the day we honour the one who found freedom under the Bodhi tree, I offer this small announcement. Not as a declaration of arrival, but as a recognition of a name that was always waiting.

The full moon does not become full on the night we notice it. It was already full. We simply looked up.

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Going Forward

You can continue to call me Rajkumar. The farmer from Kavre will. The coffee buyer from Tokyo will. My brothers, sisters, and friends certainly will.

But for those walking a path of awareness, of mindfulness, of presence, of the kind of conversation we try to have at Coffee Satsang, the name is now Swami Vimukta Ananda.

Come for the coffee. Stay for the silence between the words.

गहिरो श्वास, प्रशन्नताको साथ

One deep breath, with joy.

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