Sant Jnaneshwar

Āpegāv stands on the Godāvarī a few miles upriver from Paiṭhaṇ. The kulkarṇi's post there, the village clerkship, belonged to a family that kept it by inheritance. Govindpant held it in his generation. He and his wife Nirābāī had a son. They named him Viṭhobā on the twelfth day, and at eight he was given the sacred thread. He is the man the rest of this chapter calls Viṭṭhalpant. The family had a nāth connection already. Trimbakpant, Jñāndev's great-grandfather, was initiated at Āpegāv by Gorakṣanāth, and a document survives making Trimbakpant provincial governor of Bīḍ in 1207. The physical line comes down not from his son Haripant but from another son, Govindpant. How the nāth line itself ran is a point on which the sources do not agree. Mahīpati counts Gorakṣa, then Śambhav, then Advayānand, then Prabhav, then Gahinīnāth, and only then Nivṛtti and Jñāndev. The later reckoning cuts the middle out and makes Gahinīnāth the direct disciple of Gorakṣanāth.

Viṭṭhalpant studied the Vedas and the śāstras and became competent in grammar and poetry, and then asked his parents for leave to go to Puṣkar. He went, and kept going. He bathed in the Gomatī at Dvārakā. He saw Prabhās and Somnāth in Kathiawar, and Saptaśṛṅgī, and then turned east to the Godāvarī. He walked round the Brahmagiri at Tryambak keeping it on his left. He came down to Bhīmāśaṅkar, and from there to Āḷandī.

He bathed at the Cakratīrth and sat down to worship, and a brahmin named Siddhopant came to bathe and saw him. Siddhopant was the kulkarṇi of Āḷandī. He took the young man home, fed him and put him to sleep, and in the night was told in a dream to give him his daughter. Viṭṭhalpant said the dream had given him no such instruction. Siddhopant said then stay another night, and if he was right the same thing would be said to him too. He arranged his bedding by the tulsī altar and slept, and was told that four avatārs would be born of her. The horoscopes agreed in thirty-six points. They were married, and the brahmins said the eight verses of blessing over them at the town line.

His wife was Rukmiṇībāī, whom the sources also call Rakhumābāī. Four days after the wedding they went to Paṇḍharpūr for the Āṣāḍh pilgrimage, bathed in the Candrabhāgā and stood before Viṭṭhal on his brick, and her father put both their hands at the god's feet. Then Viṭṭhalpant went south to Rāmeśvar and came back by Kolhāpūr. His own parents died at Āpegāv. Siddhopant came out from Āḷandī to fetch him and his daughter back, on the ground that a man indifferent to the world still needs a household run for him. They settled at Āḷandī. Twice a year, in Āṣāḍh and in Kārtik, he walked to Paṇḍharpūr. For a long time no child was born.

He told his wife his mind had gone dark and he wanted to go to Benares and take sannyās, and asked her permission. She did not answer him. She went to her father, who told her the rule: while a man has no child he may not enter that order, and on no account was she to give him leave. After that she was careful what she said. Then one day he asked leave only to go and bathe in the Ganges. She gave it carelessly. He took it and went.

At Puṣkar he heard the Bhagavadgītā expounded and heard the rule of the sannyāsīs explained, and decided. He went as a suppliant, took hold of the feet, and asked to be initiated. The teacher asked what order he had come from, and whether there was a wife, a son, brothers, anyone. He said: I am alone. I have no burden of wife or children. On that answer he was given the mantra and entered the order, and took the name Caitanya.

Who gave him that mantra is not agreed. Mahīpati names a sannyāsī called Śrī Rāmāśram, and calls the head of the order Śrīpād. The later accounts say he was initiated by Rāmānand himself, or by somebody of Rāmānand's school. The order he was received into is disputed on the same ground. Nābhājī, and after him Mahīpati, put Viṭṭhalpant in the Ānanda line. Nāmdev and Nilobā put him in the Āśram line, and Nāmdev calls him Caitanyāśram.

The news reached Āḷandī indirectly. Rukmiṇībāī cried out when she heard it, and her parents talked her back into steadiness, and she went on with the work of the house and worshipped the pipal tree. Then Śrīpād, the head of the order that had taken her husband, came through Āḷandī on his way south to Rāmeśvar. He was sitting on the stone platform round the pipal. She made her bow, and he gave her the blessing: eight sons, and a husband who outlives you. She smiled. He asked her why she was laughing at what he had said. She told him. You have blessed me with sons and with a living husband, she said, and my husband has left me and taken sannyās, so the blessing is seed sown in a fireplace, and a promise of yours cannot come out false, which is why it made me laugh. He understood while she was still speaking that the fault was his own. He asked her who her people were, sent for her father, learned the rest, and turned round and took her to Benares. There he called Caitanya in and put his hand on him and asked him again whether he had had a wife. Viṭṭhalpant said yes. I did abandon my young wife before she had children.

The guru's judgement was that he should take his wife back, go home, and live by the rules that applied to him. He said the order was his authority to obey. That was the whole of the defence Viṭṭhalpant ever had, and it was a good one by one rule and worthless by another, because the law the brahmins of Āḷandī held was that once a sannyāsī always a sannyāsī. When he came back with her the town laughed. They said he had drunk nectar and gone on to liquor, that he had studied the Vedas and picked up an obscene book, that one should not even look at his face. They put him out of caste. His relatives dropped him. He built a hut outside the village, begged food for his wife, and lived there reciting the names. Twelve years passed. Then the children came.

Three sons and a daughter: Nivṛtti, then Jñāndev, then Sopān, then Muktābāī. Where they were born is not settled. One account has all four born at Āpegāv. Mahīpati's runs straight on from the hut outside Āḷandī, which is where the Āḷandī tradition puts them. It has sometimes been suggested that the four names are an allegory of the stages of a mystic's progress and that the children are a figure of speech. The answer to that has always been the same. They left four bodies and four samādhis behind them in four named places.

Nor are the dates. The usual tradition has Nivṛtti born in 1273, Jñāndev in 1275, Sopān in 1277 and Muktābāī in 1279. Janābāī gives a different set in an abhaṅga of her own: Nivṛtti in 1268, Jñāndev in 1271, Sopān in 1274, Muktābāī in 1277. Janābāī's set has been preferred by some, on the ground that a boy of nineteen writing the Jñāneśvarī is hard and a boy of fifteen writing it is harder. Even her abhaṅga has variant readings that fit the other chronology.

The children grew up outside everything. What the town said about them was that they had been born among the low and had put a stain on brahminhood, and that nobody should so much as meet their eyes. There was no thread ceremony for the boys, which in that society meant no teacher, no study, no marriage and no place at any table. Rukmiṇībāī told her husband she could not bear it and that they must ask the brahmins for the thread. He called an assembly, folded his hands, and asked them to look in the books and set a penance for the six of them. Nivṛtti, the eldest, said the same thing in his own words. The pandits consulted the śāstras and gave their answer: there is no penance for you except death. Go under the saw, or go into the fire.

Viṭṭhalpant made his bow to them and walked out, fast, leaving the house and everyone in it, and did not turn his head. Mahīpati says the brahmins were astonished at how fast he went and decided among themselves that he had purified himself by repentance. That is the end of what the Bhaktavijaya gives. It names no river. It narrates no death. It does not say the mother went with him, and after this verse it does not mention her again, which has been noticed since as an omission; at Paiṭhaṇ, well after the buffalo, the brahmins there say blessed are their mother and father in a way that does not read as speaking of the dead.

What happened to the two of them afterwards is told three ways and denied a fourth. The brahmins had prescribed death. Mahīpati has the father walk out of the house and says no more. A second account has both parents journey to Prayāg, which is Allahabad, and go into the water together at the meeting of the Ganges and the Jumnā, and puts the children's ages then at under eleven for the eldest and under nine for Jñāndev. The tradition at Āḷandī puts the water under the town, in the Indrāyaṇī. And the modern study of these lives, which is the check on all of it, gives the whole question one sentence: when Viṭṭhalpant actually died we do not know. Three named waters, and a fourth verdict that the record is silent.

What is not in doubt is that there were four of them and that they were children. Mahīpati says only that they grew day by day and came to look like youths. The fuller modern account has the eldest under eleven and Jñāndev under nine at the time they were orphaned, and has Nivṛtti go out with a begging bowl while Sopān looked after their sister. It is certain that after the father's death Nivṛtti initiated Jñāndev.

Before that, at Nāsik, the father had taken the four of them round the Brahmagiri day after day, and on one of those circuits a tiger came at them and the family scattered, and Nivṛtti was not with them when they got home. He had gone into a cave, and in the cave he met Gahinīnāth, who initiated him into the nāth line (see Nivṛttināth, The tiger and the cave at Tryambakeśvar). What Nivṛtti did with it afterwards Jñāndev says himself in an abhaṅga: I was a blind man and a lame man both, shut in by illusion, with hands and feet that would not answer, and then I saw Nivṛtti, who sat me under a tree and put knowledge into me. He says elsewhere that his teacher put the collyrium of god in his eyes.

The Āḷandī brahmins, having said that only death would serve, then said something else: go to Pratiṣṭhān, which is Paiṭhaṇ, and bring back a letter declaring you pure. Nivṛtti asked the obvious question. What is there for us to tell them? Nothing entitles us to say a word about our caste or our family. We are not vaiśyas, not kṣatriyas, not brahmins. He kept going past the point of the question and into a list of what else they were not: not water, not light, not sky, not earth, not wind, not any of the elements, and not to be called formless either.

Then he turned to his brother and asked him what they should do. Jñāndev's answer is the first thing we hear him say. A man who acts against the scripture is blameable. A man who has knowledge and is free while living still does not step outside the rules laid down for him, and people who are sādhus should show others the road by walking on it themselves. Whatever a man's own duty is, he does it. Sopān put the other side. What is caste worth, what is family worth, without bhakti nobody reaches Hari's feet at all; Durvās, Vasiṣṭha, Gautama, Vyās, Vālmīki, Agasti, the Pāṇḍavas, show me the scripture that calls their families noble. So they gave their answer to the brahmins, bowed to them, and started for Paiṭhaṇ.

It is about a hundred and twenty-five miles. They reached the Godāvarī, did what pilgrims do at a sacred water, went up into Brahmapurī and bowed to the brahmins there. They collected an assembly and told them plainly what had happened. The senior men heard them out and said that they had plainly fallen from their state. Then they read the letter from Āḷandī and the whole thing was clear to them. These are the children of a sannyāsī, they said, and there is no penance that will serve. Bathe a śūdra in the Ganges and he does not become a brahmin. Touch a potsherd with a touchstone and it does not turn to gold. Water a roasted seed and it will not sprout. Having said that, the assembly offered one remedy instead of a penance. Let them go as suppliants to god and worship every existing thing. Let them worship donkeys and dogs and elephants as though there were no difference between them. Let them bow to a hog and to an out-caste with the same reverence, holding that god is in them all. Nivṛtti was delighted. Jñāndev and Sopān were as pleased as he was, and Muktābāī took the ruling gladly, and they remarked that this was exactly what was already in their hearts.

Then they heard the names and stopped on one of them. Why should we call you Jñāndev? How can we call you Jñāndev? Have you studied the Vedas, do you know the purāṇas? A cow with no milk has long horns for nothing. A big eye without sight is no use, and a man without manliness is no use, and food cooked without salt tastes of nothing. Knowledge without compassion for creatures is the same thing. They were still saying it to each other, what is in a name, when one of them looked up the road. A young male buffalo was coming towards them with a leather water-skin on its back. His name is Jñān too, the brahmin said. Jñāndev folded his hands and answered. Between this buffalo and me I can find no difference at all. The self that fills every body is the same in every creature. Fill any number of jars with water and the sun is reflected in all of them. There are eighteen kinds of vegetable and the water at their roots is one water. Gold is the same gold in every ornament and the ornaments look different. One thread goes into the weaving and the cloth comes out in all shapes.

One of the brahmins said he was talking too much, picked up a whip and hit the animal. Jñāndev shook, and the welt came up on his own back. They saw it. If the buffalo and you are not two things, they said, then let it recite the Vedas. He walked over to the animal, put his hand on its head, and told it to say the Ṛgveda and satisfy the men standing there. The buffalo recited with the correct intonation, and then recited all four.

Nobody in the sources explains how. The brahmins said they had studied the Vedānta and the whole body of the Upaniṣads and had never been given anything like it, and that they preached freely to others and did not act on it themselves. Jñāndev told them that whatever he had done was done through their power and that he was an ignorant person. They wrote the letter and put it into Sopān's hand. Mahīpati adds that the buffalo went on reciting afterwards, day and night, and did not stop.

The certificate is dated by tradition to 1288, Śake 1209. How much of it is authentic nobody will say. The most that is claimed is that the brahmins of Paiṭhaṇ must have been struck by the boys and gave them what they asked for, with Hemāḍpant and Bopadev named as the men who brought it about. There is also a Sanskrit poem professing to record the recognition, and its value is disputed, two or three centuries possibly standing between the poem and the thing it records. The same modern account carries the Paiṭhaṇ refusal in a harder form than Mahīpati's: no thread ceremony is possible, which means by caste you are not brahmins, and if not brahmins, then no marriage either.

While they were still at Paiṭhaṇ the man in whose house they were staying began the ceremony for his ancestors, and when he went to invite the brahmins they told him they could not eat in a house that kept a sannyāsī's children. He came home and sat down without speaking. Jñāndev asked him what had happened, and then told him to do the cooking, because the ancestors would come to the feast in visible form. He sprinkled the rice and brought them down. He worshipped their feet, seated them in the first place, gave them cloth and ornaments and tulsī and gold, and served them until they were satisfied, and gave them water for their hands and pān and money, and told them to go home, and they went.

When they left, the brahmins walked out of the town with them with tears in their eyes, and the men and women of Paiṭhaṇ came a mile along the road before Jñāndev asked them to go home. The four walked on singing. They had the buffalo with them; Jñāndev had told Nivṛtti that if the animal went on reciting the Veda in public the whole system of works would come apart, and they had asked the brahmins' leave to take it away.

They came to a town Mahīpati calls Mahālaya and identifies as Nevāsā, bathed in the Pravarā, and paid their respects to the deity of the place. The Jñāneśvarī names the same place independently in its closing verses: in Maharashtra, on the southern bank of the Godāvarī, a pañc-krośī field where Mohinīrāj is, in the reign of a Yādav king called Rāmcandra. That is Rāmadevarāv of Devagiri, in whose reign the work was written and who had visited the temple at Paṇḍharpūr in 1276 and endowed it.

At Nevāsā there was a man called Sacchidānanda Bābā who was dangerously ill, and Jñāndev saved him. What the man did in return was to sit down and write to dictation for as long as it took. A pillar is still shown at Nevāsā where the writing was done. The last verse of the finished book says who held the pen.

So: a room in a small town on the Pravarā, a pillar at the boy's back, a man sitting on the floor with ink, and the Bhagavadgītā going into Marathi line by line. In the book itself Jñāndev sets the scene differently. He imagines Nivṛtti seated to hear him, and himself laying the commentary out before a room of scholars and holy men, and it is Nivṛtti he addresses when he wants permission to go on.

What he was doing there he says himself, and he says it as a picture of a river. The Gītā, he says, is a confluence; my teacher has made it easy to enter this water by the way of hearing; I have cut away its hard banks of Sanskrit and built steps down to it out of the words of the ordinary tongue, so that anybody at all can bathe in it. The steps are the point. The water was already there and had been there for a very long time, and there was no way down to it for most of the people standing on the bank.

Near the end of the eighteenth chapter he stops and answers the objection directly. There is no sense at all, he writes, in the improper saying that we are forbidden to give the meaning of the Gītā in the common language for common people. He has just finished saying that where a sea holds fish the size of a mountain, smaller fish may still swim in it, and that the ant on the ground may look at the sun as well as the dawn does. A few verses further on he says the thing again from the other side: a book like this will feed the qualified in their understanding, and by the plain skill of its speech it will feed ordinary people too.

He knew what he was being accused of and he did not concede an inch of the quality. At the head of the sixth chapter he says that his words are the words of unlettered people, and that he will nevertheless use such sweet ones that they will beat nectar outright, and that the ear will grow a tongue out of greed for them. Mahīpati, writing four and a half centuries later, still reaches for pandits who rebuke authors on sight of a book in Marathi as a figure for pure spite.

The Gītā has seven hundred ślokas and eighteen chapters. The Jñāneśvarī has the same eighteen chapters and something under nine thousand ovīs, and the count depends on which text you hold: Ekanāth's redaction runs to exactly nine thousand, the critical edition to eight thousand eight hundred and ninety-six, and an English account of 1919 rounds the expansion to ten thousand verses. The ovī Jñāndev uses has three lines and a half where Ekanāth's later one has four and a half, and the abhaṅga metre is held to have come out of it.

At the very end he asks his guru for a favour, and the favour is not for himself. Let the crookedness of the wicked drop off them and let them come to love right action. Let there be friendship between creatures. Let the darkness of sin be destroyed and the sun of a man's own duty rise over the world. Let every creature get what it wants. Let the company of god's people keep meeting the world, walking wish-trees, villages of living wish-jewels, speaking oceans of nectar. Let everybody keep company with those moons that have no stain and those suns that give no heat. And particularly, he says, let those who live on this book have happiness here and after. The guru said, granted, and Jñāndev was happy.

The last line gives the year: Śake 1212, which is 1290, and says that Sacchidānanda Bābā wrote it. That date is the one historically accredited fact in Jñāndev's life and has been called the central fact of it, though another reading of the line gives Śake 1206, which is 1284. Not everyone allows even that much. It has been argued that whether the book was written at Nevāsā or at Āpegāv or somewhere else cannot be decided on the evidence, that the tradition of the author's youth is equally undecidable, and that the reference to Sacchidānanda Bābā in the closing verses may have been inserted later. The original copy taken down at Nevāsā has never been found.

When it was done Nivṛtti was not satisfied. A commentary on the Gītā was a commentary on the Gītā. He told his brother to sit down and write out of his own thought, and Jñāndev put his head at his feet and wrote the Amṛtānubhava, which Mahīpati says was aimed at people who argued from their own imaginations. Which of the two books came first is disputed. One argument holds that the language and imagery of the Amṛtānubhava are so much thinner than those of the Jñāneśvarī that it must have come before. Against that, there is a passage in the Amṛtānubhava that refers directly to the way a particular problem is handled in the Jñāneśvarī, which would put it after. And against the first argument there is a plainer explanation: the Amṛtānubhava looks older only because it was recited from memory less. The title itself may have come from the Paramāmṛta of Mukundarāj, who wrote two generations earlier and was the first man to expound Vedānta systematically in Marathi.

They bowed to the goddess of the place and set off home, walking and repeating the names, stopping at night in whatever town they had reached to hold a kīrtan. In the forest belonging to Āḷandī the buffalo that had said the Vedas died. They buried it, and afterwards they came back and worshipped the tomb and smeared it with red. Mahīpati says in his own century the place was still called Mhasobā. It was Muktābāī who said they had to go on into the town. They were to look at the place they had been born in. When they came in, the people were happy to see them, and worshipped their feet and embraced them. Word about Paiṭhaṇ had arrived before they had. Sopān produced the letter and the brahmins listened to it being read and accepted what it said, and after that they came to the kīrtans with everybody else.

One man in Āḷandī did not. Visobā Cāṭī kept on at them, and when Muktābāī was sent out for a clay pan at Daśarā he hit her in the street and then made sure the potter would not sell her one (see Muktābāī, The earthen pan). What is Jñāndev's in it is what he did when she came home crying. He lit the fire inside himself until flame came out of his mouth and his eyes went the colour of blood and his back went the colour of heated gold, and he told her to bake the cakes on his back. She rolled them out and baked them there, and he put the fire out, and the four of them ate.

Visobā had followed them and watched the whole of it through the window. What he thought afterwards was that he had found a mine of jewels and taken them for glass beads, and had seen a wish-tree and put an axe into it thinking it was scrub. So he came in to take their leavings by force, and snatched a mouthful off Jñāndev's plate. Jñāndev asked him why he was feeding like a carrion bird and told him to get out. The sentence undid him. He put his head on Jñāndev's feet and was given the assurance, and from that day he was called Visobā Kheçar. The chain of teachers ran on out of this room and into the next century (see Nivṛttināth, The line that runs through him), and Visobā is the link in it that reaches Nāmdev.

There was an occasion at Āḷandī when the door of Jñāndev's hut was shut and Muktābāī stood outside it and sang until he opened it, telling him that a saint is one who bows to the world's abuse and that anger has no business in a man who is pervading Brahman (see Muktābāī, The door).

The yogi Cāṅgdev lived at Puṇṭāmbā on the Godāvarī. Tradition says he lived fourteen hundred years. Nobody has adjudicated that, and there are three ways of reading it: that there were several men of the name, or that one man collected different names in different places, or that the name ran in a family. Nilobā says in an abhaṅga that Cāṅgdev had fourteen different names, and the fourteen hundred years may have grown out of the fourteen names. What Mahīpati says is that Cāṅgdev had searched the whole world of mortals and could not find a guru fit for him or anyone his equal in power, and then heard a rumour about a man at Āḷandī.

He wrote to him first, and could not decide how to address a man younger than himself whose instruction he wanted, and so sent a sheet with nothing on it. The verdict on that blank sheet is Jñāndev's, not his sister's: fourteen hundred years have gone and the man himself is still blank, a tree grown green without fruit, a lake dug without water, a cloud that rolls through the sky and rains nothing. Then he wrote the reply with his own hand, and the reply is the Cāṅgdev Pāsaṣṭī, sixty-five verses, still counted among his four works (see Muktābāī, The letter with nothing written on it).

Then he came in person, and he came the way a man comes when he has read a letter like that and is not finished arguing. He rode a tiger. He carried a live serpent for a whip. Fourteen hundred disciples came behind him. Jñāndev was at Āḷandī, sitting on a wall. People came and told him a very distinguished guest was on the way, seated on a tiger, using a snake for a whip, and he worked out who it must be. He spoke to the wall he was sitting on and told it that Cāṅgdev was coming on a tiger, and that when sādhus come to his house, it should go forward and meet them too. The wall moved off at speed.

Cāṅgdev saw him coming while he was still outside the village and did the sum himself. Making a dead thing walk is worth more than sitting on a live tiger. He got down and put his face on the ground. They met under a banyan, and Mahīpati says the people still call it the banyan of rest. Jñāndev took him by the hand and brought him home, where Muktābāī was bathing; Cāṅgdev turned back at the door, and she told him from where she was that a man with his guru's favour on him would not have thought what he had just thought, and asked him whether cows in the jungle put on clothes. He took hold of her feet, and then went to Jñāndev, took the mantra from him and became his. That is Mahīpati's account and it is not the only one. It has also been held that the one who initiated him was Muktābāī, and the Bhaktalīlāmṛta calls her his mother-sadguru (see Muktābāī, The tiger, and the back of the house). He died on the Godāvarī in 1305, about ten years after the family he had come to argue with.

About 1293 the four of them went to Paṇḍharpūr. Viṭṭhal had been worshipped at Āḷandī for seventy years before Jñāndev was born, and there is an inscription in the maṭh of Hariharendra Svāmī, dated 1209, with Viṭṭhal and Rakhumāī carved on the pedestal of a samādhi. But it was this visit that made Jñāndev and Nāmdev friends, and that took Jñāndev into the Paṇḍharī sampradāy, the devotion of Paṇḍharpūr, of which he is counted the first apostle. Mahīpati puts the meeting in Nāmdev's house. Jñāndev came to Paṇḍharpūr and wanted to see him, and walked in and saw him across the room, and Nāmdev put himself on the floor in front of him and then got up and embraced him. Then Jñāndev took his hand and walked him to the back of the house and said he had something private to say. Being free while alive does not release a man from worship: not of his guru, not of god, not of the holy places. I want to see every one of them there is on the earth in your company. That is why I came. Tell me whether I am to have it or not.

Nāmdev's face fell. Why would I leave Paṇḍharpūr and go wandering to bathing places? That is throwing away nectar and going house to house begging gruel. Why drive off the royal swan and fetch a crow home instead? Then he thought about it and said the only thing he could say. I am not my own master. I belong to the one who raised me. Go to him and ask. If the word comes back that I am to go with you, I will go.

So they went to the temple together. Jñāndev bowed by the eagle platform, went into the inner shrine, took hold of the god standing on his brick, and told him what he wanted. The answer he got was a question. You are intelligence in visible form, you are pure as crystal, why do you want to go trailing round bathing places? Why put paste on the face of the sun, why fan the moon to cool it? Jñāndev said: true, true, all of it, but I want the company of a bhakta like Nāmā, and that is all. Then the god turned to Nāmdev and told him to go, and turned back to Jñāndev and said the rest of it. I could bear separation from Rukmiṇī once. I could not bear it from Nāmā. Then he took Nāmdev's hand and put it into Jñāndev's and said, never neglect him, and his throat closed and his eyes filled.

On the road they argued, and the argument is worth setting down because Jñāndev loses it and is glad to. He told Nāmdev that god fills the whole of things and that there was no need to grieve for a particular face. Nāmdev said the cātak bird will not drink out of a river; it drinks only what falls from the sky. What I love has a shape and qualities, he said, because the sight of it cools the eye and sets me wanting to hear it sung. Jñāndev looked at him and said, blessed is your pure faith, and then asked him to teach him bhakti. He asked it with his hands folded. Tell me how to worship, how to listen, what study is, where courage comes from, what we should call peace; I have wanted to ask you for a long time. Nāmdev held his feet and said he knew nothing and that this was the wish-tree coming to beg at a miser's door. Then he answered anyway. Be indifferent to the passions and keep an unchanging compassion for every creature. Have no troublesome thought of I and thou. When a man reaches that, you may call his worship pure; short of it, there is no use taking up methods at all. You can bow outwardly and be remembering the faults of the person you are bowing to, which is eating good food with a fly in it. To hold nothing in your mind as superior and nothing as common, that is worship without a break.

They were gone for years and they covered most of India, up to Benares and the Ganges, across to Dvārakā, north into the Himālaya, east to Jagannāth and down the whole length of the country to Rāmeśvar. Mahīpati lists the seven cities and the twelve jyotirliṅgas and then says he will stop, because the rest would make the book too long. The journey itself is Nāmdev's and is told in his chapter (see Nāmdev, The road north). Two things on it belong here, because in both of them Jñāndev is the one who is corrected.

The first was a deep well in the Mārvāḍ desert that they could not reach the water of. Jñāndev got down it by reducing his own size, drank, came up, and offered to fetch water for his friend in his hands. Nāmdev shut his eyes and asked instead, and the well came up of itself and ran over. Jñāndev watched it and said he did not understand how Nāmā had made god his debtor. He had gone down by a power he had trained for years to get; the other man had simply asked.

The second was at Auṇḍhā Nāgnāth on Śivarātri, where the brahmins sent Nāmdev round to the back of the temple to sing out of their way, and the temple turned on itself to face him. Jñāndev was standing there for it and it is Nāmdev's scene, not his.

The kīrtan as a method, the sung and spoken performance of a devotional story in front of a crowd, arose out of the plain need to make what these men thought intelligible to the pilgrims coming into Paṇḍharpūr, and Jñāndev and after him Nāmdev were the greatest of its early performers. They came back down through a country that had just changed. In 1294, two years before Jñāndev died, Alāuddīn Khiljī reached Elichpur meaning to fall on Devagiri, and Rāmadevarāv bought him off with a large ransom and kept his kingdom. Nāmdev's abhaṅgas refer to the invasions and the Jñāneśvarī does not, which is used as an argument about dates and about nothing else.

They came back to Paṇḍharpūr about 1296, in the bright half of Kārtik, on the eleventh day, with the great festival going on. When the ceremony was finished on the full-moon day, Jñāndev told Nāmdev he wanted to go to Āḷandī, because he wanted to leave the world. Nāmdev went with him, and so did a number of other men, and so did his brothers and his sister.

For what happened next the earliest witness is Nāmdev, who was standing there. A run of his abhaṅgas, numbered from 353 in the gāthā under the heading of Jñāndev's samādhi-mahimā, tells the whole of it from inside the crowd. The Marathi is his, and the English that follows was made fresh from his lines for this book. Where his words are given, the voice the reader is hearing is Nāmdev's.

It opens with Jñāndev talking to Viṭṭhal, and the first thing he does is turn a word over. Jñāndev said to Viṭṭhal: you yourself are my rest, but the rest I shall take, I shall take here beside you. I do not want enjoyment. I do not want release. My longing is great, and it is at your feet. Viṭṭhal answers him by his titles, ocean of knowledge, king of knowledge, you are knowledge's own image, and says he has understood what is being asked. Then Nāmdev puts himself in the frame in the eighth verse of that first abhaṅga, and he does it in one line and without any expansion. Nāmā is standing in front of them. Hearing it, great grief, great pain. He says: the collyrium of knowledge is taking samādhi, in great joy.

He gives the days by name. The tenth was the time of setting out. The eleventh was the festival of the night-watch. On the twelfth Jñāndev made the great feast. On the thirteenth Pāṇḍuraṅg says, do not be anxious about anything; the samādhi at Alaṅkāpurī, do it, do it quickly. Alaṅkāpurī is Āḷandī. That calendar is exactly the one reconstructed four and a half centuries later out of quite different material: the eleventh of the dark half of Kārtik, a night kept awake, the twelfth spent the same way, and on the thirteenth Jñāndev telling Nivṛtti that today was the day.

Viṭṭhal gives him the two pilgrimages as a gift, and it is a practical gift, the kind you can put in a calendar. In the month of Kārtik, on the bright eleventh, the Paṇḍharī pilgrimage will fall; the second, in the dark fortnight, is given to you. That is the Kārtik vārī, and it is still walked. Then the saints set up a great grief, Nāmdev says, and they went to Alaṅkāpurī. He names the tree in the fourth verse of the same abhaṅga, before anything has happened under it. The great spreading tree, the ajāna; there the Full One was laid. Later, when it is over, a voice out of the sky says it again: blessed, blessed the ajāna tree; blessed, blessed the place of Siddheśvara; Jñāndev's rest; blessed Alaṅkāpurī.

The Vaiṣṇavas came, he says, and all of them gathered at Alaṅkāpurī, and Jñāndev sat down in the happiness of samādhi. They sat on the bank of the Indrāyaṇī with the garlanded one among them, some saying praises, some repeating the name, some singing Vedic verses. Nārā, Nāmdev's son, pushed forward through the assembly to ask his father what place this was, and Nāmdev stood up and put the question on to the god. The answer already given to Jñāndev was that the Indrāyaṇī runs south here, that the Bhāgīrathī and the Maṇikarṇikā meet it in a confluence of three, and that whoever worships at this Siddheśvara is an inward friend. For five days the mantras were sounded according to rule.

Then they came to the Siddheśvara liṅga, and Sopān arrived, running over with love, and took hold of Jñāndev's feet, and was told to get up, get up, open your eyes, meet your brother. The bed of the samādhi was laid. At the end of that abhaṅga Nāmdev writes down the name of the thing, and it is his own word for it and not a later label: he tells of the sañjīvan samādhi; they came to Alaṅkāpurī. Nivṛtti had been sitting seven days in the unmanī state and came out of it to look at his brother's face.

A hand was placed on Jñāndev's head and he touched the feet under it, and Viṭṭhal said, quickly now, sit down for the samādhi. Nāmdev describes what filled the sky and then says the one flat sentence in the middle of it: the saints understood it by knowledge; Jñāndev's becoming Brahman, this is Viṭṭhal's doing. He leaves it there. Earlier in the same run there is a line that has Jñāndev crying, with a hand stroking him and looking him over.

Before he goes down he says goodbye to his friend, and this is Jñāndev's side of it. Jñāndev made his bow. He held Nāmā to his heart. He embraced him again with love and said, blessed, blessed, my friend. Nāmdev was rolling on the ground and had gone out of his senses for the dust of his feet. When liberation was offered to Nāmdev a little later he would not take it, and Jñāndev's answer to that refusal is the last thing he is recorded as doing among them: Nāmdev looks back, and Jñāndev has raised both arms, and says, this is what devotion to Viṣṇu is.

Then the four of them part, and Nāmdev writes it down in four lines without any ceremony at all. Jñāndev bowed to Hari. Nivṛtti and Sopān at once. Muktābāī came quickly and took Jñāndev by the hand. Then joy came to the devotees, and Jñāndev began to speak, and what he says to his elder brother is an instruction about where to die. He says to Nivṛtti: you must go now, to the peak of Tryambak. Make your bow and go quickly; always at Hari's feet, you, and we, and Sopān. Tryambakeśvar is where Nivṛtti's own samādhi is. Jñāndev is sending him to the place he will die in, and Nivṛtti does not argue.

Then Muktābāī asks her brother to carry messages for her. Muktābāī says: Jñāndev, commend me to Viṭhobā. Let his regard rest on me, and mother Rukmiṇī's, and the rest. Commend me to Puṇḍalīk. Say my farewell to all of them. Let your kind eye look on me. Then she asks for the thing itself: having turned knowledge into realisation, expound bhakti; give the sañjīvan samādhi; come quickly. Nivṛtti answered. We shall go more swiftly than that, and Sopān comes behind, seated in samādhi. That is the order in which the three of them died, spoken aloud by Nivṛtti before any of it had happened. Sopān went first, at Sāsvaḍ; then Muktābāī, at Edlābād; then Nivṛtti, at Tryambakeśvar.

What followed, in Nāmdev's account, was a great noise of lamentation. Sopān put himself full length on the ground. Muktābāī took hold of the feet. A form like Jñāndev's, they say, we shall not see. Nāmdev, standing there, went out of his mind with it, and the abhaṅgas that carry his grief are his own and belong to his own chapter. One line of his may stand here because it is what the family was left with as well. You are my father and mother, he says to Viṭṭhal, but without Jñāndev the earth feels empty to me, like a fish out of water.

An abhaṅga attributed to Jñāndev himself says he sat performing kīrtan and meditating and passed away in that state. Nivṛtti laid a slab over the samādhi. It is before the temple of Siddheśvara, which is still there, and which holds an image of Śiva. The temple is a temple and not itself a saint's tomb, and pilgrims had been coming to it long before Jñāndev was born. The face of the samādhi must have been turned west, towards the temple, which is a curious thing to set beside the Jñāneśvarī, where a man is told to go out facing north.

Nāmdev's own last word on it is not that Jñāndev went but that he stayed, and he says it in a verse that puts the place and the fact together. At the Siddheśvara liṅga, the giver of attainment and understanding. In such a place Jñāndev remained, and remaining, carried the dull across. That is what sañjīvan means here. It is not a euphemism the tradition reached for afterwards. It is what the man standing next to him wrote down.

How old he was nobody can settle. The year 1296 is attested by the abhaṅgas of Nāmdev, Visobā Kheçar, Cokhāmeḷā and Janābāī. One modern dating puts the day at 21 October 1296 and Jñāndev a month or two over twenty-one. An abhaṅga that goes under his own name says he lived twenty-two years and passed away at twenty-two. The arithmetic has been laid out and it will not close. If Janābāī's birth-date of 1271 is right and the 1296 death is right, he lived twenty-five years, which contradicts what many men and Jñāndev himself say; if the twenty-two years are an accredited fact, the death has to be pulled back to 1293. Both ends are left showing. And there is a harder view still, which will not accept the received account of the samādhi at any point and doubts even Nāmdev's testimony, which is the chief testimony there is.

Three hundred years later Ekanāth was ill in the throat. Jñāndev came to him in his sleep and said that a root of the ajāna tree had grown round his neck at Āḷandī, and that he should come and take it off. Ekanāth went. His abhaṅga about it says the way in was through a hole by the river, which is the reason for thinking the Indrāyaṇī ran closer to the temple then than it does now. What he did afterwards was redact the Jñāneśvarī, in 1584, modernising the word-forms and settling a text that had been copied for three centuries. He said himself that anyone who put new verses into that book would be dropping a coconut shell into a dish of nectar. His text has been the authoritative one ever since.

Nāmdev's account of the samādhi twice says that it was finished with the Haripāṭh and kīrtan. The Haripāṭh is the short sequence of abhaṅgas on the name that the vārkarīs still recite on the road, twenty-seven verses in some printed editions and twenty-eight in others. Whether Jñāndev wrote it is argued, and the arguments cancel. One of its English editors thought the style old, his co-editor doubted the attribution, and the standard modern collection simply lists the verses among Jñāndev's abhaṅgas without comment, including the one that says the name may be said at any hour and in any month, there being no season for it. An English rendering of its first verse, made in 1919, runs:

Stand at the door of God one moment nigh,

Thou hast the fourfold bliss obtained thereby.

Cry Hari, cry aloud, let the name ring.

A visitor writing from outside all of it noticed what the pilgrims on the Paṇḍharpūr road were chanting as they walked. Two names, in chorus, three and a half centuries apart. Jñānobā, Tukārām. Jñānobā, Tukārām.