Songfacts®:

• The word "namaste" is familiar to yoga students, as it's typically said at the end of a practice. It's Sanskrit, meaning "greetings to you," although in Western yoga it's morphed into a word that can begin or end an encounter, like "aloha."
  
  Yoga wasn't popular in America in 1992, but Adam Yauch (MCA) of Beastie Boys encountered it in his travels to places like India and Nepal. Little did he know the word "namaste" would soon be appropriated by the yoga industry and start showing up on T-shirts and coffee mugs.
• A very atypical Beastie Boys song, "Namaste" is spoken word by MCA, with no rhymes. It's just a series of thoughts and images that were on his mind. In the Beastie Boys Book (published after he died of cancer in 2012), Ad-Rock told the story:
  
  "Yauch was in a full-on transformation. He had started learning about, and practicing, Buddhism. He was traveling the globe any chance he got...
  
  He would hang with anyone, so long as they were fun. His demeanor had an odd, thrilling calmness. One night at the studio he said that he had some thought that he'd written down (not lyrics) and he'd like to try saying them over an instrumental track that we had waiting for just this occasion. And like most of the songs on this record, we were like, M'okay. If you wanna take the lead, go ahead. And so this song kind of tells us where he was at, and where he was headed."