Diviyama Wage

Melting away his own life like water, his very breath
How does he live out his days in such hardship?
In this human world, he is my lord of gods
Even my gods are my loving father
(Father, whose chest overflows with love for his children
I fall to the ground and worship him, my Buddha-father…//)

(Father, whose chest overflows with love for his children
I fall to the ground and worship him, my Buddha-father…//)

Caught up in hardship, both day and night
You gave away your own peace like alms
The sorrow you carry for your children’s sake
makes even the gods tremble in wonder
In this saṃsāra (the cycle of rebirth), you are a rain of merit
I bow to you always, my king…

(Father, whose chest overflows with love for his children
I fall to the ground and worship him, my Buddha-father…//)

Never drinking as you wished, never eating as you wished
you gave your children their comfort
Because you fulfil the virtues of a Bodhisattva
may you find peace in nirvana itself
In this saṃsāra (the cycle of rebirth), you are a rain of merit
I bow to you always, my king…

Melting away his own life like water, his very breath….

This is a song for a father, sung by a grown child who has finally understood the cost of everything he was given. The very first line watches a man dissolving his own life like something melting in water, and the question that follows is the one every child asks too late: how did he carry a life that hard and keep going?

The answer the song reaches for is worship. In this world, the singer says, my father is my god, and even the gods I pray to wear my father’s face. That is a big claim in a Sinhala song, and the lyric earns it with small, ordinary detail. He did not drink what he wanted. He did not eat what he wanted. Whatever comfort he had, he handed over, and the word used for that giving is the same word used for offering alms to monks, which turns a father skipping a meal into an act of merit.

Two images carry the weight of the whole song. The first is bowing down flat on the ground, which is how a Sri Lankan Buddhist worships the Buddha, a monk, or a shrine. The child does that to his father, and then names him “budu thaaththa”, my Buddha-father. Parents are often called the Buddhas of the home in Sinhala households, and the line takes that saying at its word. The second is the father as a rain of merit falling across saṃsāra, the long cycle of birth and rebirth, as though the good he did is water landing on every life the family will ever live.

The last verse gives him the only gift a child in this tradition can offer back. Because he lived out the virtues of a Bodhisattva, giving everything away without asking for anything, may he find rest in nirvana. There is no bigger blessing to hand someone, and it lands quietly, without ceremony.

What stays with you at the end is the ache of noticing. Nothing dramatic happens in these verses, just a man wearing himself down day and night while his children sleep fed and safe, and one of those children standing there years later with nothing to give but a bow to the floor.