'दशमद्वारीं गेली जनी'

Of all of Janabai's late verses, the four that anchor this chapter are the most surprising. They use the precise technical vocabulary of Nāth-yoga: the kuṇḍalinī rising through the central channel, the four levels of speech reaching their limit, the so'haṃ-flame appearing at the heart, the cosmic chakras above the crown, and finally the piercing of the nine bodily doors and the entry into the tenth, the Brahmarandhra at the crown, where in Nāth practice the released consciousness joins Śiva. A maidservant who never received formal initiation is using the language of the Siddha tradition with the fluency of a long-trained yoginī. The chapter asks how that came to be possible, and what it tells us about the syncretic richness of the early Vārkarī sampradāya.

A short introduction to the Nāth Sampradāya

The Nāth Sampradāya is a Śaiva sub-tradition within Hinduism that emerged in north India in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Its founding figure is Matsyendranāth; its most famous teacher is Gorakṣanāth (also spelled Gorakhnāth), who is credited as the founder of the Nāth monastic movement and as the author of nearly all the foundational hathayogic texts.1

The Nāth tradition's distinctive contribution to Indian religious practice is haṭha-yoga: a system of bodily and breath disciplines designed to awaken the dormant kuṇḍalinī-śakti (the serpent-coiled energy at the base of the spine) and direct her upward through the central suṣumnā channel toward the brahmarandhra at the crown. When the rising kuṇḍalinī reaches the brahmarandhra, the practitioner enters the state called laya (dissolution), manonmanī (mind-beyond-mind), or sahajāvasthā (natural state), and consciousness joins Śiva.2

The body, in Nāth cosmography, has nine ordinary openings (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, the mouth, plus the two lower apertures). The crown of the head, where the suṣumnā emerges, is the tenth, the daśama-dvāra. It is closed in the unrealised body. To pierce the nine and enter the tenth is the Nāth idiom for the full rising of the kuṇḍalinī to the crown and the realisation of śiva-śakti-sāmarasya, the equipoise of consciousness and energy.3

This is the technical vocabulary Janabai uses in her four anchor verses. None of it is invented for the verses; it is, in 1300 CE, established Nāth-tradition vocabulary that any Nāth siddha would have recognised on hearing.

The Maharashtrian Nāth lineage and the Vārkarī

The Nāth Sampradāya reached Maharashtra through a specific lineage that Vārkarī tradition itself records: Gorakṣanāth → Gahinīnāth → Niv­ṛttinātha (Jñāneśvar's elder brother) → Jñāneśvar and his three siblings (Sopān, Muktābāī, and Jñāneśvar himself).4 The Jñāneśvar family is, in social-historical fact, a Maharashtrian Nāth household; Jñāneśvar's Jñāneśvarī includes a chapter (the sixth) on yoga that uses Nāth technical terms throughout.

Of the four siblings, Muktābāī (the youngest, c. 1279–1297) is the most fully Nāth in her devotional formation. She is recognised in Marathi sant tradition as a yoginī of the highest order; her brief surviving body of work is dominated by Nāth-yoga technical verses on śiva-śakti-sāmarasya. She and Janabai were rough contemporaries (Muktābāī perhaps a decade younger), and the Vārkarī tradition records that they spent time together at Pandharpur in the period before Muktābāī's own samādhi at Edalābād.5

Janabai's Nāth-yoga vocabulary almost certainly comes from this contact. She did not undertake formal Nāth initiation (her own verses on svayam-bodha, self-arrived realisation, are explicit on the absence of a formal guru-mantra), but she was inside the saint-circle in which the Nāth vocabulary was being spoken every day. The Marathi sant tradition's distinctive feature is its absorption of Nāth-yoga, Vaiṣṇava bhakti, and Vedānta into a single working synthesis; Janabai's verses are evidence that the synthesis was complete enough by 1300 CE that a Matang dāsī could fluently use Nāth technical terms inside a Vaiṣṇava devotional poem.

The four verses, briefly

The four abhangas anchored in this chapter are in the Abhangas page's Nāth-yoga cluster. Each is glossed below at the level of the technical vocabulary it uses; the parallel-text on the Abhangas page has line-by-line translation.

Abhanga 336, the four śūnyas. The verse names four colored "voids" the meditator passes through: the lower void (red), the upper void (white), the middle void (dark), and the great void (blue). In Nāth meditative cosmography these are stations of laya the inward gaze passes through as it rises toward the crown. The verse closes with the anāhata-nāda, the unstruck sound, traditionally heard in deep meditation as a continuous bell-tone, ringing in the meditator's ear.6

Abhanga 337, the four speeches and the so'haṃ-flame. The verse names the four levels of speech in classical Indian linguistics: parā (transcendent), paśyantī (visionary), madhyamā (intermediate), and vaikharī (gross/audible). When all four reach their limit and stop, what remains is the so'haṃ-jyoti, the "I-am-That" flame, the realisation of identity-with-Brahman fused with light. The verse closes addressing Niranjana (the Stainless One), a name for the Absolute that is neither saguṇa nor strictly nirguṇa but the ground of both.7

Abhanga 338, the three nāḍīs in the heart-realm. The verse names the three principal channels of the subtle body: iḍā (lunar, on the left), piṅgalā (solar, on the right), and suṣumnā (central, through which kuṇḍalinī rises). Their convergence at the heart-realm is, in Nāth practice, the precondition for the rise to the crown. The verse mentions khecharī mudrā, the haṭha-yoga practice of turning the tongue back into the cavity above the soft palate, and closes with the imperative: enter slowly into the heart-lotus, and you become free.8

Abhanga 335, the cosmic chakras and the tenth door. The verse names four of the five brahmāṇḍa stations above the crown: Trikuṭī (the three-peaked place, red), Śrīhaṭa (the marketplace of grace, white), Golhāṭa (etymology contested, dark), and Auṭa-pīṭha (the eight-fold seat, where the blue point, nīla-bindu, is seen). Above them is Bhramara-guphā, the bee-cave. And above that is the daśama-dvāra, the tenth door, where the guru is. The verse closes with what is, in Marathi sant literature, Janabai's most-quoted line: navadvārāte bhedunī, daśamadvārī gelī Janī, "piercing the nine doors, Jani entered the tenth." The chapter title takes its name from this verse.9

What this chapter argues

Three things are worth saying explicitly about Janabai's Nāth-yoga verses, because they are easily missed by readers approaching from outside the Marathi sant tradition.

One. Janabai's use of Nāth-yoga vocabulary is not borrowed terminology dressed up as devotional poetry. The verses are records of inner experience using the only vocabulary that was available, in 1300 CE Maharashtra, for the kind of experience they describe. The Nāth tradition had spent two centuries by then developing precisely the vocabulary the verses need: śūnya-cosmography, anāhata-nāda, the four speeches, the three nāḍīs, the cosmic chakras, the tenth door. Janabai inherited the vocabulary; the experience came her own way.

Two. She did this without formal Nāth initiation. In a tradition that, like most siddha traditions, places great weight on lineage transmission and guru-mantra, this is unusual. Her own verses on svayam-bodha are explicit on the point: realisation arrived inside the labor itself, with no formal occasion. The Vārkarī tradition received her verses anyway, and received them as Nāth-grade, because the Marathi sant synthesis treated lineage proximity (being inside the saint-circle) as sufficient transmission, even when formal initiation was absent.

Three. What is unusual is the dāsī coming to this register at all. Nāth-yoga vocabulary in the thirteenth century was guarded by lineage and by training; Muktābāī had it by birth-right (Niv­ṛtti's pupil, Gorakhnāth's lineage by descent). Janabai had to walk in from the kitchen door. The dāsī who entered the tenth gate did it without ever having been formally let in. The Marathi tradition has held this fact for seven centuries as one of the proofs of what the Vārkarī sampradāya is for.

What this chapter sets up

Chapter VII turns from Janabai's mystical accomplishments to her sectarian work as a Vārkarī: her contributions to the standard themes the tradition recognises (Pundalika praise, Pandharī-mahatmya, the praise of fellow saints, the glory of the Name). The same dāsī who entered the tenth door also helped build the Vārkarī sect's literary canon. Both are her work.