Parshuramdev

A man came looking for a fraud. He had heard the couplets that Swami Parshuramdev was reciting to whoever would listen: that maya is no kin, that the body is no kin, that this whole world is no kin, and that for the soul only the Maker is kin. Fine words, the man thought, but this Parshuramdev lived like a man of substance, a mahant with land and following and the bearing of a raja, not like someone who had actually let go of anything. So he sought him out and threw the saint's own verse back in his face: you say much and do little, he said, in my eyes you are a great pretender, and this claim of yours will be settled only in the doing, in the place where the Lord himself cracks a thing open to see if it is hollow. If you truly hold that only Hari is kin and maya is no kin at all, then prove it. Renounce it. All of it.

Parshuramdev did not argue. He said, very well, and did exactly that. He walked out of the math that day wearing nothing but a single kaupin, the plain loincloth of a wandering ascetic, and let his challenger walk beside him to watch. They went up into the hill country, into the wild, forested tract around Pushkar known in that age simply as jangli desh, the wilderness, and Parshuramdev found a cave in the rock that pleased him and sat down inside it. He had nothing left to renounce. He simply sat, and began to remember God.

It did not take long for the world to answer him. A banjara, one of the itinerant traders who moved salt and grain across Rajasthan in long camel caravans, happened by that stretch of hill with his laden animals and his accumulated wealth. Something in the sight of the ascetic in the cave stopped him in his tracks. He unloaded his goods at Parshuramdev's feet, along with a palanquin, and asked to be taken as a disciple, asking for nothing in return. The examiner, who had come up that mountain to expose a hypocrite, stood watching this instead: a man who owned nothing being handed everything, precisely because he no longer wanted it. He ran forward, threw himself at Parshuramdev's feet, and confessed that he had understood nothing of the man's greatness before that day. Now, he said, something in me wants to lay down my very life for you.

That is the only story about Parshuramdev that his own tradition bothered to preserve in detail, and it tells you almost everything he cared about being remembered for. He was, by the account both Nabhadas and later commentators give of him, one of the foremost among the twelve principal disciples of the great Vrindavan acharya Sri Harivyasdevacharya, and tradition names him first among them, the one whose branch of the lineage grew widest of all. In the telling that Nimbarka sampradaya sadhus still hand down, Harivyasdev's circle of disciples fanned out to become the seedbed of several major streams of Krishna devotion; some accounts even count the founders of the Haridasi and Radhavallabhi paths of worship among the same guru's spiritual family, though those branches remember their own beginnings differently, and this is best held as one thread of memory rather than settled fact. What is not in dispute is that Parshuramdev spent his life exactly as the old verse describes him: tongue never still from reciting Hari's qualities, ear never far from katha and kirtan, a man who took his own devotion as seriously as medicine taken for a mortal illness.

That medicine, his tradition says, was for an entire country, not just for himself. His guru sent him toward Pushkar, the desert lake that legend says sprang up where Brahma let fall a lotus, at a time when the wilderness ringing that holy water had fallen under the terror of a fearsome tantric ascetic remembered as Masting Shah, who held pilgrims and villagers alike in dread of his powers. Parshuramdev went into that same wild country and broke the grip of that fear, not with force but with presence: teaching, singing, sitting among the forest people until, as the old chhappay puts it, the ignorance of the jangli desh lifted the way a long, thick darkness lifts before a single lamp, the way the scent of sandalwood turns even a bitter neem tree fragrant when the wind carries it far enough. The wild folk of that country became, in the phrase his tradition uses, God's own companions. Where there had been dread, there was now katha in the evenings and Hari's name on people's tongues.

Out of that same mission grew something that still stands: the seat that Parshuramdev founded in the village of Salemabad, in the Rupangarh tract near Pushkar, which the Nimbarka sampradaya has kept as one of its great centers ever since, its succession of acharyas unbroken down to the present day. Tradition places his life in the sixteenth century, though the exact years given for his birth and passing vary from telling to telling, and nothing in the record is precise enough to fix them with confidence.

One strand of memory reaches further still, into the story of Meera Bai. The Nimbarka sampradaya remembers Parshuramdev as the guru who gave the poet-queen her Vaishnavi initiation at Pushkar and placed in her hands the small murti of Giridhar Gopal that she is said to have carried and served for the rest of her wandering life, the same image other traditions describe her clutching as she vanished into the deity at Dwarka. Other lineages tell Meera's guru-story differently, and no independent record outside devotional memory confirms the meeting, so it is offered here as the Nimbarka sampradaya's own cherished claim rather than as established history. True or not in its particulars, it says something honest about how this tradition wanted Parshuramdev remembered: as a man whose company deepened the devotion of anyone who came near him.

It is worth sitting for a moment with why he made so much of the tilak, since an entire verse of Nabhadas is given over to almost nothing else. In the Nimbarka reckoning, the tilak is not decoration; two lines of gopi-chandana rising from the bridge of the nose to the brow, with a dark point set between them, are read as the walls of God's own dwelling and the presence of Radha and Krishna held together within it. To wear it is to sign yourself over, publicly and daily, the way one might renew a covenant each morning to a spouse one has already given everything to. That is why the old verse insists that without the tilak, whatever else a person does turns to fruit with nothing inside it. Parshuramdev was not defending a caste mark or a fashion. He was defending the idea that devotion needs an outward seal, something that cannot be taken back in private the way a feeling can, and that a soul which will not make that public vow has not yet actually decided anything.

His other sayings press on the same nerve from a different angle. Maya is no kin of yours, he taught, nor is this body, nor is the world you were born into; the only one who is truly your own is the one who made you. He did not offer that as a comforting abstraction, he had already shown, in that cave above Pushkar, exactly what he meant by it when it was demanded of him without warning. And he held listeners to the same discipline he held himself to: a person who will not sit still for katha and kirtan, who only wants to talk over the story with his own opinions, should simply get up and go, Parshuramdev said, plainly, without apology. The listener worth keeping is the one whose body and mind already belong to Ram, and the speaker worth hearing is a devotee to whom worldly business has stopped being interesting. He asked for nothing from others that he had not already paid out of his own life first.

He is remembered to have ended that life the way certain great yogis of his line are said to end theirs, entering samadhi alive at Pushkar rather than dying in the ordinary way, at the site still called Parashuram Dwara near Brahma Ghat, where his tomb-shrine stands to this day and where the murti tradition connects to Meera Bai is said to have later been installed. People still climb up to that shrine, particularly couples longing for a child, to sit in the presence of a man who spent his whole recorded life proving, in the smallest and largest ways he could find, that whatever a person is finally willing to let go of, God tends to fill the empty hands anyway.