Nārāyaṇīyam

There are works in the Sanskrit canon that are Vedānta. There are works that are bhakti. The Nārāyaṇīyam is the rare hymn-cycle that is both at once. Mēlpattūr Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭatiri was a grammarian of the first rank. His Prakriyā-sarvasvam is still studied. He could carve in Sanskrit without strain. When his guru fell paralysed and Mēlpattūr, in an act of guru-bhakti the texts call almost reckless, took the disease into his own body, the only thing he could think to do with the long dying that followed was to walk to Guruvāyur, sit on the south veranda, and begin a hundred-day prayer in the medium that was his real medium.

He did not stop being a grammarian when he became a devotee. The hundred daśakas are written in Sanskrit so polished that pundits study them simply for the metre. Each daśaka closes with a refrain-line addressed by name to Guruvāyurappan, asking, almost without exception, for some specific bodily cure. Healing me, healing me, healing me, with a thousand polished verses for offering. He bet that the Lord would accept rigorously composed Sanskrit as an act of love. The kṣetra holds that the bet was won. On the hundredth day he wrote the closing benediction āyurārogya-saukhyam, long life, health, well-being, and stood up.

What survives is the temple's daily liturgy. Devotees in Kerala and around the world read one daśaka per day for one hundred days, and in those hundred days they have read the entire Bhāgavata Purāṇa in compressed form, in some of the most beautiful Sanskrit the language has produced. The cure that visited Mēlpattūr may or may not visit them. The discipline will. The rhythm of the hundred days, the slow building of intimacy with the murti at Guruvāyur through one daśaka at dawn, is itself the practice.

The traditional practice is one daśaka per day for one hundred days. Begin at dawn, before the first sunlight has cleared the courtyard. The Sanskrit is dense and aural. Recite slowly, even if you do not yet know what every word means. The metric tug of the verse is doing devotional work on the body of the reciter independent of comprehension.

If a hundred days is too much for the householder's life, the kṣetra suggests at minimum the first daśaka, daśaka thirty-seven (the birth of Kṛṣṇa), daśaka eighty-six (the closing verses of Kṛṣṇa-līlā), and daśaka one hundred (the head-to-toe darśan). These four daśakas are the spine of the work. Read all four in order at one sitting and you have the Bhāgavata in compressed form, in Mēlpattūr's voice.

Every daśaka closes with a personal petition. Read those refrain-lines slowly. They are how Mēlpattūr asked for healing. They are how the temple asks for healing now. The work is, on its inner face, a hundred-day prayer. Treat it as such, and it will work as such.