Shri Jayadev Ji

On a path leading out of the temple town of Puri, a girl barely of marriageable age walked holding her father's hand, until beneath a spreading tree at the roadside they found the man they had been sent to find: gaunt, sun-darkened, sitting cross-legged with his eyes closed and Hari's name moving on his lips, a single patched quilt folded beneath him and a clay water-pot resting by his knee, nothing else to his name in the world. Her father bowed low and said the words he had carried the length of the journey. "Maharaj, I give you my daughter. Jagannath Himself has commanded it." The ascetic did not open his eyes for a long moment. Then he said, gently, that the man should reconsider.

The ascetic's name was Jayadev, and in his own verses he tells us where he was from: Kendubilva, "born by the sea." Tradition places that seaside village near Puri, in the country the Ganga kings of Kalinga ruled through the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and remembers his father's name as Bhojadev and his mother's, across different tellings, as Radhadevi, Ramadevi, or Vamadevi. A rival and much-loved tradition, kept alive every winter at a village called Kenduli in Bengal's Birbhum district where great crowds still gather to bathe in the Ajay river in his memory, claims him instead as one of the five jewels of the Bengali king Lakshmana Sena's court. Scholars who have weighed both traditions tend to lean toward Puri, partly because Jayadev himself calls his birthplace a village "by the sea," and Birbhum has no sea within any reasonable walk, and partly because Lakshmana Sena's reign is usually dated a good century later than most reckonings of Jayadev's own life allow. Whichever soil first held him, the man who reached that roadside tree had already given up every other kind of holding. Custom says he never spent two nights running under the same roof, and that his whole estate was the patched kantha across his shoulders and the kamandalu in his hand.

His refusal was not pride. "Think again," he told the girl's father. "He whom you serve, Jagannath, is Lord of all; a thousand graceful women adorn His glory, and He carries it easily. I carry nothing so easily. One wife, for a man like me, is a mountain: unclimbable, unliftable. Go your way, and trouble neither of us further." But the father had not come on his own authority. Years before, he said, he had made a vow before the deity to give his daughter into the Lord's service when she came of age, and when the day arrived and he brought her to the temple, it was Jagannath's own voice from within the sanctum that had named this one wanderer, this rasika-bhakta who tasted the sweetness of divine love in a way no one else quite did, as no different from His own form, and ordered that the girl be given to him and to no one else. "This is not my wish laid on you," the father said. "It is His command, and to turn from it is a fault I dare not carry, nor should you wish it carried." Then, without waiting for any further argument, he settled his daughter on the ground beside the ascetic, said "sit here; I cannot undo what the Lord of the three worlds has ordered," and walked away, leaving Jayadev to argue with an empty road. What could not be refused was accepted. He married her. Her name was Padmavati, and so entwined did his devotion to her become with his devotion to God that he began signing his own verses Padmavati-carana-carana-cakravartin, "sovereign among those who serve at Padmavati's feet": a husband who turned even his marriage into a form of surrender.

Out of that marriage, and out of years spent near the great temple where Krishna is worshipped at Puri under his form as Lord of the Universe, came the Gita Govinda: twelve cantos, twenty-four song-sections, each carrying its ashtapadi, an eight-versed lyric meant to be sung, not merely read. The poem follows Radha and Krishna through the ache of separation, viraha, brought on by Krishna's wandering eye, until the two are folded back together in reunion; on its surface it is love poetry as bold and physical as Sanskrit had ever produced, and that very boldness was its offering. Jayadev was writing theology in the grammar of longing: Radha as the jivatma, the individual soul, Krishna as the Paramatma, the very thing that soul was born wanting, and the whole drama of jealousy, estrangement, and joyful reunion nothing other than bhakti's own private weather. Two centuries later, when Chaitanya Mahaprabhu spent his last years absorbed in Puri, this was the text he returned to at night, reciting its verses until he wept; the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition that grew out of him came to treat the Gita Govinda as very nearly scripture. To this day, more than eight hundred years after it was written, the poem is sung every evening before the image of Jagannath as a fixed part of temple worship, an unbroken chain of ashtapadis reaching all the way back to a man who married a stranger's daughter because her father refused to walk away.

One particular evening of that composing is kept more carefully by the tradition than any other. Jayadev had reached the line where Krishna, humbled at last by Radha's anger, longs to lay his own head beneath her foot: dehi pada-pallavam udaram, "place your tender foot here." He could not make himself write it. That the Lord of all should ask a soul to set her foot upon his head felt, even to the poet singing out His love story, too much to commit to the page; so he set down his stylus, left the palm-leaf blank, and went out to bathe, turning the unwritten line over in his mind. While he was gone, someone who looked exactly like Jayadev, spoke in his voice, and moved with his very manner walked into the house, sat at the same leaf, and wrote the line himself in Jayadev's own hand, then ate the meal Padmavati had prepared and went out again, as her husband so often did. When the real Jayadev came back from his bath, Padmavati said she was glad he had already eaten; he told her he had eaten nothing and touched no page since morning. They went together to look. The line was there, dehi pada-pallavam udaram, written by a hand that was and was not his own. He did not need anyone to tell him who his guest had been. The lesson he carried away from it, and the lesson that has outlived him in every retelling since, is that love need not wait on its own courage: what a devotee is too humble to ask of God, God will sometimes simply give, and even write down Himself.

Word of the Gita Govinda's fame, known, as the old phrase has it, in all three worlds, reached a learned king who also lived in Jagannath's shadow, a man who had spent his own life at poetry and could not bear that another man's verses should carry such glory while his own went unread. So he composed a volume of his own in secret, gave it the very same title, Sri Gitagovinda, summoned scholars, and had it copied and carried through the countryside as though it were the true work. When both books were laid before the temple's own learned circle, the pandits only smiled: this leaf here, they said, is the real Gitagovinda, and that one someone has lately made in imitation. The two manuscripts, so the story goes, were left overnight before the deity in the Puri sanctum, and by morning the priests found the counterfeit flung outside the doors while Jayadev's own pages had been drawn close and wound about the Lord's chest the way a garland is worn. The king's shame at being overturned so publicly by his own god was total; he walked straight toward the sea, meaning to drown himself rather than survive the disgrace of having claimed another man's gift as his own. It was Jagannath, appearing before him at the water's edge, who stopped him: do not drown yourself over a false shame, He told the king; there neither is nor will ever be a work equal to Jayadev's, but since you wrote from a heart that at least wished to honor me, take some lines of your own making and set them into the poem's closing canto, so that your words too will travel, bound forever to his, wherever the Gitagovinda is carried. Different tellers count the borrowed lines differently, some a dozen, some more, but every version agrees on the shape of the mercy: even a plagiarist's wound was dressed, not left open.

The gentlest, and in some ways the most searching, story remembered about Jayadev concerns money rather than verse. He had set out one day, so the old telling goes, with coins knotted into his cloth to buy grain and ghee for a bhandara, a feast he meant to lay before wandering sadhus, when several armed men fell into step beside him on a forest road. "Where are you going?" he asked them. "Wherever you are going," they answered, and Jayadev understood at once what kind of company he had found. Rather than risk a struggle over money for a body that existed, in his own accounting, only to go on doing bhajan, he untied the knot himself and handed over everything before anyone had to ask twice. The men, reading generosity as cunning, decided among themselves that he had only surrendered the coins so easily to lull them, meaning to have them seized the moment they reached the next village, and resolved to strike first. What followed instead was that Jayadev asked the local king to raise a temple, install an image of Bhagwan in it, and build beside it a santashala, a guest-house where wandering sadhus could be received daily with food and welcome; the king did exactly as asked. When those same armed men heard how lavishly this court was now honoring holy visitors, they smeared their foreheads with tilak, hung malas around their necks, and arrived dressed as sadhus to collect what such visitors were given. Jayadev, seeing them come, was overjoyed rather than suspicious. "Look," he told the people gathered nearby, "here are my elder god-brothers; go and take their darshan." The king, hearing that Jayadev himself had named and blessed them, sent the men off loaded with gold, jewels, and coin, and even provided armed escorts to see the treasure safely wherever the "sadhus" were bound. Whether those particular men ever became what they had merely dressed as, the story does not say, and that silence may be the point: Jayadev's welcome was never a judgment rendered on the person standing in front of him.

It is worth saying plainly that other branches of the wider Jayadev legend remember the story of thieves on the road quite differently, and far more violently: in the version best known outside this particular telling, robbers cut off Jayadev's hands and feet and left him for dead in a dry well, and it was Krishna who walked into a local king's court wearing Jayadev's own face and form to make the crime known, restoring the poet afterward by the same grace that had once finished his unwritten verse. The two versions cannot be reconciled into one factual event, and nothing here claims to settle which, if either, happened exactly as told. What both agree on, across every telling, is Jayadev's temperament, the shanti, the sahanshilta, the sadhuta, the peace, patient endurance, and unforced holiness that those who remembered him kept trying to capture in story after story, because no single anecdote seemed to hold all of it.

The Gita Govinda did not stay inside one temple. Its ashtapadis became the backbone of Odissi dance, are sung today across Manipuri and other classical repertoires, and its way of speaking to God in the grammar of romantic longing opened a road that Vidyapati, Chandidas, and generations of Vaishnava poets after Jayadev would all walk in their own languages. In Puri, the nightly singing of his verses before Jagannath has, by most accounts, never stopped since his own lifetime. Nabhadas, setting down the Bhaktamal itself some centuries later, gave Jayadev a single closing couplet that later poets kept repeating rather than trying to improve on: that from his mouth appeared the astonishing Gitagovinda, and that it should be called the nectar of prem itself, steeped in the great rasa of divine romance.

What lingers, after the plagiarizing king and the disguised thieves and the counterfeit manuscript have all folded back into legend, is the picture of a man too poor to own a second blanket who could not finish a single line because it asked God to bow, and who found, on returning from his bath, that God had simply bowed and written it Himself. Every evening the line is still sung in Puri, dehi pada-pallavam udaram, and every time a dancer's foot comes to rest at the height of that phrase, something of the same wonder is being handed forward: that love, however small the hand holding the pen, is never finally left to write alone.