It’s not necessary to ask Hanuman for anything for He is the ‘knower of all hearts.’ Maharaj-ji would very often tell people to recite the Chaleesa when they came and asked for blessings. And our wish is that he come to live in our hearts, with Ram, Sita and Lakshman.” In the last verses we ask him to grant us our wish. Poppa continued, “So the first verses of the Chaleesa are to remind Hanuman of who he is. So the rishis cursed Hanuman, saying he would not remember his strength unless he was reminded. He asked, “Do you think Hanuman needs you to praise him?” Then he explained that when Hanuman was a child, he had such strength and was so mischievous that he caused havoc all around – disturbing the rishis (sages) during their worship, pulling their beards, and even putting them up in trees. He asked, “Do you know why we sing the Chaleesa?” As I was getting ready to leave for America, he gave me his blessings and a bit of advice. Recently I visited Maharaji’s temple at Kainchi and spent many hours talking and sitting with one of His very old great devotees, Shri Kehar Singh, ‘Poppa’. You wicked, greedy people come to see me out of your own selfish desires!” Of course it was all part of His unique way of showering grace all around.
Out of their love for God, they have left everything behind in America and learned the Chaleesa. With a look of total amazement on his face, he would laughingly abuse His Indian devotees for their supposed lack of devotion and sincerity, saying, “Look at these people. No matter how many times we did it, he would always act as if it were the first time. We now became an official part of the show whenever there were some Indian devotees having darshan he would call us and have us ‘perform,’ as it were. He was very excited and said ‘Sing the Chaleesa!’ We managed to sing the few verses we knew. We hadn’t even learned six out of the forty verses before we were called down from the back of the temple to where Maharaj-ji was sitting. As it turned out that was exactly what happened. My idea was that if we Westerners could learn the Chaleesa, we could ‘bribe’ Maharaj-ji to call us into his presence to sing it for him. I wrote out all the words by sounding out the letters and a friend in Kausani, a little town in the Himalayan foothills where we were spending the rainy season, helped with pronunciation and a melody.
I asked and was told the booklet contained a prayer to Hanuman, so I decided to learn it. In Maharaj-ji’s temples, the Chaleesa is sung around the clock during special celebrations, and little booklets with Hanuman’s picture on them are given to temple visitors. I learned the Hanuman Chaleesa in India in the old days. “Without Hanuman, no one in this world would have known of me.” Then Tulsi Das writes, “I am telling you of the greatness of Hanuman in the very words that the Lord Himself spoke.” There is a song written by Tulsi Das in which he quotes Ram Himself as saying: Maharaj-ji once said, “Hanuman was always present in all time in the universe.” It begins with the phrase,”I take the dust of the Guru’s lotus feet to cleanse the mirror of my heart.” The grace of the Guru is necessary to begin to understand the deepest levels of the story of Hanuman in the Ramayana. The Hanuman Chaleesa is a hymn of 40 verses that describes his life and exploits. He said over and over that Hanuman and Christ were the same. Maharaj-ji always spoke of Hanuman, ther Monkey God as being the “Breath of Ram(God).