Nivruttinath

He was the first child born to Viṭṭhalpant and Rukmiṇībāī after Viṭṭhalpant came back from Benares to his marriage. Mahīpati names the four in order: Nivṛtti, then Jñāndev, then Sopān, then Muktābāī, three sons and a daughter. The births are often put at Āpegāon, a village on the northern bank of the Godāvarī a few miles from Paiṭhaṇ, where the family held the hereditary village accountantship.

There are two traditions about when he was born and neither has driven the other out. The usual one puts his birth in 1273 and his death in 1297. The other, which goes back to an abhaṅga of Janābāī, puts his birth five years earlier, in 1268, and moves his brothers and sister forward with him. Both are set down here, and the abhaṅga itself has variant readings. The birthplace is disputed in the same way. One account says Āpegāon; another records the counter-claim that the children were born at Āḷandī, and cites an abhaṅga of Nāmdev in support of it. Both places still keep the memory.

Less survives about him than about any of the other three. A book written a century ago to put these poets into English gives him one clause: the eldest of the family, said like the others to have been a saint and a poet. The fullest modern survey of the whole corpus closes its review of the period by saying that Nivṛttināth must have been a great saint, on the ground that he had Jñāndev for a disciple. That is an argument from the pupil back to the teacher, and it is the shape of most of what is known about him.

The yoga lineage was in the family before he was born. Trimbakpant, his great-grandfather, was initiated at Āpegāon by Gorakṣanāth. A document survives making Trimbakpant provincial governor of Bīḍ in 1207 under the king of Devagiri, and another making his son Haripant a captain of an army in 1213. The descent to Nivṛtti runs not through Haripant but through a second son, Govindpant, whose son was Viṭṭhalpant. A nāth is a yogi of that order, and the order had reached the household two generations before the household was disgraced.

Jñāndev sets out the line himself at the end of the Jñāneśvarī. Śaṅkara spoke the secret to Pārvatī on the shore of the sea of milk; Matsyendranāth, hidden in the belly of a fish, overheard it; Matsyendranāth met the maimed Cauraṅgīnāth on Saptaśṛṅga, and Cauraṅgīnāth was made whole; Matsyendranāth passed the secret to Gorakṣanāth; Gorakṣanāth to Gahinīnāth. Gahinīnāth, seeing the age going under, gave it to Nivṛttināth with an order attached to it: that what had come down from the first teacher was now his, and that he was to take it and go quickly and get to the people the age was crushing. Jñāndev says his brother was already compassionate, and that the order fell on him the way monsoon cloud gathers. He calls himself a cātaka bird sitting under that rain with its bill open, and says the book in the reader's hands is what came down.

Mahīpati gives the same line with three more links in it. In the Bhaktavijaya, after Gorakṣanāth has given both his eyes to his teacher and had them back, he initiates Śambhav; Śambhav gives it to Advayānand; Advayānand to Prabhav; Prabhav explains the way of yoga to Gahinīnāth; and Gahinīnāth gives it to Nivṛtti. The shorter reckoning has Gahinīnāth simply as the disciple of Gorakṣanāth with nothing between them, and so does Jñāndev's own epilogue. The sources disagree about how many men stand in that gap. They do not disagree about who stands at the end of it.

Where the Nāths lived is not known. Bengal claims them, the Hindi country claims them, and Maharashtra claims them; in Sātārā district a hill is still called Matsyendragaḍ and a tamarind tree the Gorakṣaciñcā. They may simply have been itinerant, which would account for all three claims at once. The tradition that Gahinīnāth instructed Nivṛtti puts the instruction at Brahmagiri near Nāsik.

Matsyendranāth nobody will vouch for as a historical person. Behind him there is mythology, and after him there is history. Gorakṣanāth is taken as historical because works such as the Gorakṣa-Saṃhitā survive under his name. Gahinīnāth is taken as historical for one reason only, which is that he gave instruction to Nivṛttināth. The boy in the cave is the evidence for the man in the cave.

Viṭṭhalpant knew the mountain already. Years before, a wandering brahmacārī on pilgrimage, he had come up the Godāvarī to Tryambakeśvar, bathed in the Kuśāvart tank, paid his respects at Gaṅgādvār where the river rises, and walked round Brahmagiri keeping it on his left. Mahīpati says it gave him great joy. From there he went on to Bhīmāśaṅkar and then to Āḷandī, where he met Siddhopant and married his daughter.

He came back to the mountain with a wife and four children and no standing. The brahmins of Āḷandī had refused to perform the thread ceremony for his sons, and the family had no place in the town (see Jñāndev, Four children and a verdict). Viṭṭhalpant took them all to Nāsik so that he could spend his days in holy activity, and every day he walked the circuit of Brahmagiri. The fuller account says he bathed at Kuśāvart at midnight and that the circumambulation went on for six months, the whole family walking it together.

One day on the circuit a tiger came at them. The father and the children ran. Viṭṭhalpant got home with Jñāndev, Sopān and Muktābāī. The eldest was not with them.

Nivṛtti had lost the path. Running, he went into a cave. One account puts the cave in Brahmagiri itself. Two others put it on Añjanī, the next mountain over. No source puts it on the road the others took home.

Gahinīnāth was inside, at his practice. The boy fell at his feet. Gahinīnāth looked at him, found him fit, and gave him the instruction, and with it the order Jñāndev would write down at the end of his book years later. After a few days Nivṛtti came home.

The sources do not say what the tiger did, whether anyone went back up the mountain to look for him, or what was said when he walked in. They say what he was carrying when he came down. The brahmins of Āḷandī had ruled that no ceremony could be performed for these children; the order that took the eldest of them asked no such question. It has been pressed further than that, and argued that Gahinīnāth acted at the outcaste father's own request. That last is a modern reconstruction and is given here as one.

How old he was depends on which chronology is followed. The usual dating makes him a boy. One editor of the Jñāneśvarī says he was ten when his parents died, which puts the cave earlier still. Mahīpati, in the Bhaktalīlāmṛta, has Cāṅgdev's messengers report the four children's ages as seven, six, five and four, with Nivṛtti the seven-year-old and already described as a store of spiritual knowledge. The figures cannot all stand together.

When Viṭṭhalpant died, Nivṛttināth initiated Jñāndev. Nothing in any source treats that as remarkable, and Mahīpati's chain of teachers has it the same way: Gahinīnāth gave his instruction to Nivṛtti, and Nivṛtti in turn gave it to Jñāndev. The elder brother became the younger brother's guru. This is not a devotional flourish laid on afterwards. It is what both of the main sources say, and the rest of his life follows from it.

The parents were gone (see Jñāndev, Four children and a verdict). In the Bhaktalīlāmṛta the brahmins are still standing there when the eldest child turns to them and asks the question the chapter is named for. Their father and mother are gone; what is left open to the four of them; let the brahmins say. They tell him to go to Paiṭhaṇ.

What that left him was a house of children under a ban, and he was the eldest of them. One modern account reports the tradition baldly: the elder Nivṛttināth went out with a begging bowl, and the younger Sopān looked after their sister. The one thing the sources agree on about those years is who answered for the family.

At Āḷandī it is Nivṛtti who does the talking. He asks the brahmins for a penance for the six of them. He asks them what the śāstras prescribe. When they tell him to go to Paiṭhaṇ and fetch a letter of purity, it is he who answers that the four of them have no authority to state a caste or a family at all, and then turns to his brother and asks him what they are supposed to say when they get there. Jñāndev answers him, and the buffalo follows (see Jñāndev, Paiṭhaṇ). Afterwards, with the certificate written and the buffalo still reciting, Jñāndev takes the question of what to do with the animal back to Nivṛtti, and only then do they ask the brahmins' leave and take it away.

Nivṛtti is inside the Jñāneśvarī as well as behind it. In the poem Jñāndev imagines his brother sitting in the audience to hear it, while he lays the commentary out in front of a room full of scholars and holy men (see Jñāndev, Nevāsā). At the end of the book he signs himself: in the reign of Rāmacandra of the Yādava line, on the southern bank of the Godāvarī, at the shrine of Mohinīrāj, the Gītā was dressed in the ornaments of Marathi by the disciple of Śrī Nivṛttināth, who carries his lineage back to Maheśa. In the next verse the author gives his own name as Nivṛtti's servant. The closing attribution of the most important work in Marathi names Nivṛtti before it names Jñāndev.

He was not satisfied with it. Both traditions of the family say so. The tradition is plain about it. Nivṛttināth, not content with a work that was only a commentary on the Gītā, ordered his brother to write an independent treatise, and Jñāndev wrote it. Mahīpati puts it as a sentence spoken at Nevāsā. Nivṛtti, who was Jñāndev's sadguru, told him to take his own thoughts on the subject and make the Amṛtānubhava out of them. Jñāndev said he would, put his head on his teacher's feet, thought about what had happened to him, and wrote it. Whether that book came before the Jñāneśvarī or after it is itself disputed and is not settled here.

The book that order produced gives its whole second chapter to him. Jñāndev plays on the name: the glory of the name Nivṛtti is that it means ceasing, action withdrawn, without the least touch of action left in it; and he is called Nivṛtti though there is no action in the Self for him to stop, the way the sun is said to put darkness to flight although no darkness ever comes out to face it. He says his teacher killed the elephant of māyā, took the pearls out of its forehead and set them in front of him on a plate. He says that when he went to bow, the one being bowed to vanished, and so did the one bowing, the way camphor and fire both go when you bring them together. In the Jñāneśvarī he had already called his brother greater than Śiva. In the Amṛtānubhava Śiva comes to Nivṛtti as a man comes to a priest, and asks him for the auspicious day.

Praise of that size came from a household that was still a household. At Daśarā, in the middle of all of it, Nivṛtti asked Muktābāī to make the family some pancakes, and she went out to the potters' quarter for a pan. That errand is where Visobā Cāṭī caught her in the street, which is where the closed door and her verses on it begin (see Muktābāī, The door).

He wrote abhaṅgas of his own, short devotional lyrics in Marathi. The modern survey of the period works through them by number and puts Nivṛtti first, ahead of Jñāndev, Sopān, Muktābāī and Cāṅgdev. What follows is what those numbered abhaṅgas say, in Nivṛtti's own images.

He begins where the Gītā begins, with the tree. Worldly existence is a tree. It has no shade and it has no foliage, and it has power everywhere in the world all the same. It cannot be pulled up by the roots without the grace of the guru (Abhaṅga 2). By that grace, he says, he can see the Self that lives in all things (Abhaṅga 3).

Then he defines the word, and the definition is narrow. Call no man your teacher except the one who is able to show you God directly, to your sight. To that one hand over your money, your mind and your body, and take from him the Self you are asking for (Abhaṅga 4). He had been given the instruction in a cave by a man he had never seen before, and this is the test he sets.

Two of them are about what to do with your ears. When people are running somebody down for nothing, shut them; shut your mouth as well, and think about God instead (Abhaṅga 10). Never listen to your own praise; put your whole attention into the being of God (Abhaṅga 11). The man who wrote those two lines had grown up in a town that talked about his family in the street, and had a brother who was being called greater than Śiva in a book people were already copying.

God shows himself to a man who has good desires in him, and not otherwise (Abhaṅga 8). There is no appointed hour for it; he can be seen always and at all times (Abhaṅga 36). The image for the thing itself is a sun that comes up at night: so the Self shines out, by the grace of the guru (Abhaṅga 22). A good deal of the rest comes through the senses. Stories of God are more fragrant than sandalwood, and God's own fragrance goes past jasmine and jāī and juī and mogarā (Abhaṅga 27). God's sound comes out of the warp and weft of the breath (Abhaṅga 29). God is the moon, and he pants after it like a cakora and looks up for it like a cātaka; we live inside the body and God is outside it (Abhaṅga 32). An English rendering of 1933 gives it this way: "The wish-yielding tree yields whatever we desire, but God is more fragrant than that tree. The light of God to me is fragrance itself, says Nivrittinatha; life in such a one is enough for me."

The last two go out the far side. Once God has been seen, Nivṛtti says, the rest goes: no moon, no sun, no stars, no earth, no sky. There is no corner left anywhere that is not God (Abhaṅga 37). Then the whole world is God, and nothing divides God from the man who worships him, the way nothing in an ocean divides its rising and its falling (Abhaṅga 43).

One abhaṅga of his is evidence of something else. It describes the image of Viṭṭhal at Paṇḍharpūr as carrying the liṅga of Śiva on its head. With a line of Rāmdās and a passage of the Jñāneśvarī, it is the earliest attestation there is of that feature of the image. The Nāth who had Śiva's secret from Gorakṣa is describing the god of the vārkarīs, and putting Śiva on his head.

Mahīpati does not stop the chain of teachers at Nivṛtti. Gahinīnāth gave it to Nivṛtti, Nivṛtti to Jñāndev, Jñāndev to Visobā Kheçar, Visobā to Nāmdev, and Nāmdev laid his hand on Janābāī. That is the instruction of the Nāths arriving, in four steps, out in the Vārkarī community. One link in it is given differently elsewhere, making Visobā the disciple of Sopān rather than of Jñāndev, and the disagreement has never been settled. Either way the line runs back through a brother of Nivṛtti's whom Nivṛtti had initiated.

At Āḷandī, on the thirteenth of the dark half of Kārtik, Jñāndev told Nivṛtti that he would go that day (see Jñāndev, The sañjīvan samādhi at Āḷandī).

Nāmdev was there and made abhaṅgas about that day, and they are the earliest record of it. The reader is hearing his Marathi here, translated freshly for this chapter. At the close of the first of them Jñāndev makes his bow to Hari, and Nivṛtti and Sopān make theirs at once beside him, and Muktābāī comes up quickly and takes her brother by the hand.

Then Jñāndev speaks. He turns to his brother and tells him where to go. You are to go now, to the peak of Tryambak. Make your bow to Hari and go quickly. At his feet always: you, and we, and Sopān.

Nivṛtti answers him. We will go, and go faster still; Sopān after that, without fail, once he has been seated in his samādhi. The eldest is agreeing, out loud, in front of everyone, to the order of the three deaths that are left, and to be quick about it. That is his last recorded speech to his brother.

Nivṛttināth placed the slab on his brother's samādhi.

Then it went as he had said it would. Sopān first, very soon after, whose samādhi is at Sāsvaḍ. Then Muktābāī, whose samādhi is at Edlābād; the story is that she went in a flash of lightning while she was performing kīrtan. On the usual chronology Jñāndev and Sopān both went in 1296, and Muktābāī and Nivṛttināth both in 1297. He outlived the brother he had initiated, and had ordered to write the Amṛtānubhava, by about a year.

He went last of the four, at Tryambakeśvar. His samādhi is there, under the mountain his father had walked round every day for six months, near the cave.

Nāmdev outlived all four of them and made an abhaṅga about that too, counting them off one at a time. A 1919 English rendering of the second couplet runs: "Men talk of knowledge, say, 'It's this and this,' / But still Nivritti's way to truth they miss." Then Jñānobā, then Sopāndev, then Muktābāī. Nāmdev names the eldest first.