Roka picked up a handful of dust and flung it over a bag of gold coins lying in the road. He did not want to touch it. He did not want to see it. He was a Kshatriya, and he knew the pull that wealth could exert on a warrior's mind, so he buried the temptation right there in the dirt and walked on.
His wife, Banka, came along the same path moments later. She saw the freshly scattered dust and asked what he had been doing. He told her. And instead of praising him, she pierced him with a single question: "So your mind still has awareness of wealth?"
He stopped. Then a slow smile broke across his face. "Everyone calls me Roka, the crooked one," he said. "But today I see that you are the truly Banka, the brave one."
Behind them, hidden in the forest, Prabhu turned to Shri Namdevji and said quietly, "Is My word true or not?"
The whole episode had been Prabhu's doing. Namdevji had begged Him to relieve this couple's poverty. They lived in Pandharpur, utterly virakta, gathering dry firewood from the forest each day and selling it for just enough to eat. Beyond Prabhu, not the slightest worldly desire lived in either of their hearts. Their only true life was the constant dhyana of Shri Hari's rupa.
Prabhu had answered Namdevji plainly: "My wits have been defeated by them. They simply will not accept anything, so what can I do? Come, I will show you."
So He placed a bag of gold muhars on the path and hid. And both husband and wife walked past it as though it were poison.
Victory to shanti. Victory to vairagya. Victory to the love that needs nothing at all.
The Lord Cannot Give What Love Has No Room For
Ranka and Banka of Pandharpur were so saturated with the presence of Vitthal that when the Lord himself placed a bag of gold coins on their forest path, neither one took it. Prabhu confessed to Namdevji with something close to warm amusement: "My wits have been defeated by these two. They will not accept anything. What can I possibly do?" This is the teaching that stops the ordinary mind cold. Grace is not absent from the life of the genuine devotee. It arrives constantly. But when the heart is already full, there is simply no hollow place left where a worldly gift could land. The poverty of Ranka and Banka was not a hardship they endured. It was the natural shape of a life in which everything that was not Hari had, quite gently and without drama, fallen away.
Bhaktamal of Nabhadas, tika of Priyadas, entry 202 (Ranka-Banka, Pandharpur)
Even the Noting of Desire Is Worth Examining
When Ranka saw the bag of gold on the path, he did not take it. He covered it with dust and walked on. By any ordinary measure this was heroic restraint. But when his wife Banka heard what he had done, she asked him quietly: "So your mind still had awareness of the wealth?" She was not scolding him. She was pointing to something more subtle. The need to scatter dust over the coins was itself evidence that the mind had registered them as a temptation, had felt a pull, however brief. True vairagya, her question implies, is not a victory over desire. It is the condition in which desire simply does not arise because there is nothing inside that answers its call. The seeker on this path is invited not to fight craving but to keep deepening the love that leaves craving with nowhere to root.
Bhaktamal of Nabhadas, tika of Priyadas, entry 202 (Ranka-Banka, Pandharpur)
Daily Labor as a Container for Contemplation
Each morning Ranka and Banka rose before the birds, walked into the forest, gathered dry fallen branches no one else wanted, carried them back to the bazaar on their heads, sold them for a few small coins, and fed themselves for the day. There was no surplus. There was no plan for tomorrow. And through every step of this ordinary labor, the texts tell us, the dhyana of Shri Hari's form never left them. The rupa of Vitthal lived as a continuous current beneath all their activity. This is not the spirituality of the temple alone. It is the spirituality of the bundle of sticks, the haggled coin, the dust of the road. The interior life does not require conditions of leisure or formal practice. It requires only that one thing be kept steadily in the center, and everything else arranged around it.
Bhaktamal of Nabhadas, tika of Priyadas, entry 202 (Ranka-Banka, Pandharpur)
Asking Nothing Is the Deepest Form of Trust
When Prabhu appeared before Ranka and Banka and urged them to accept something, they offered him an observation he could not easily answer. If a devotee goes to the Lord wanting something, they said, that devotee is no better than a beggar. And Namdevji, for all his love, was dragging the Lord through forests on this errand of giving, which made the Lord look like someone managing a charitable circuit. The couplet the Bhaktamal preserves makes the same point with economy: one who never desires anything from you at all, O Lord, let his heart be your perpetual home. This is not ingratitude. It is the recognition that asking implies a gap between the asker and what is needed. When there is no gap, when the Lord himself is felt as the only real wealth, then the act of asking would be as strange as asking the sun to give you sunlight while you are standing in it.
Bhaktamal of Nabhadas, tika of Priyadas, entry 202 (doha: jahi ne chahiye kabahu kachu)
The Name Becomes the Truth
Ranka means the crooked one, and Banka means the brave or bent one. The couple had been given these names as a kind of local joke, the way a village gives nicknames that stick. But at the end of the gold-bag story, Ranka turned to his wife and said something that reversed the joke entirely: "Everyone calls me Ranka, the crooked one. But today I see that you are the truly Banka, the brave one." He gave her the truer meaning of her own name as a gift, recognizing that her dispassion was one step more complete than his own. The names had always been accurate, the texts seem to suggest, only the surface reading was wrong. In devotional life the apparent limitation, the poverty, the nickname, the low station, is often the precise vessel in which the grace is being quietly carried.
Bhaktamal of Nabhadas, tika of Priyadas, entry 202 (Ranka-Banka, Pandharpur)
Hindi text from OCR scan (Khemraj Shrikrishnadas Prakashan, CC0). May contain errors.