Amma Mage Lyrics by Theekshana Anuradha

My mother,
you are the breath of my life,
I saw all goodness
in your two eyes, my mother

(Mother:) It is because of you I became a mother,
in every birth through saṃsāra,
I felt all beauty
in your company, my son

There is no comparison for it made in this world,
I saw no limit to your love,
how the white and the red blood flowed
through the body, no one knows

That is the wonder of this world,
the boundless love of a mother

Bound close, a life made equal,
there is no one else in my world

Born as your son in this way,
I will stay forever, through saṃsāra

My mother,
you are the breath of my life,
I saw all goodness
in your two eyes, my mother

(Mother:) It is because of you I became a mother,
in every birth through saṃsāra,
I felt all beauty
in your company, my son

This is a tender song about the bond between a mother and child, sung as a gentle back-and-forth between the two of them. The child begins with the simplest, largest praise: amma mage, my mother, you are the breath of my life, and in your two eyes I have seen all goodness. It sets a mother’s love up as something almost sacred.

The mother answers across lifetimes. It is because of you that I became a mother, she says, and in every birth through saṃsāra I have felt all of life’s beauty in your company, my son. The song then reaches for what makes a mother’s love unlike any other: there is no comparison for it in the world, no limit to it, and no one truly knows, it says, how the white and the red of the blood flowed through the body to make and feed a child.

The last movement is a vow of belonging. Bound close, their two lives made equal, there is no one else in the child’s world; and to be born as her son, just like this, he wants to keep returning, forever, through saṃsāra. It is a warm, unembarrassed hymn to a mother’s boundless love, and to a bond the song imagines outlasting a single lifetime.