Harināma Kīrtanam · Verse 13

The thirteenth verse holds the simplest non-dual recognition in the work and gives it the simplest possible image. Mat-prāṇanum paranum onnennu urappavannu: for one who is sure that his own breath and the Supreme are one, the body, the spouse, and the wealth are all momentary. The Sanskrit canon names this jīva-paramātma-aikya, the unity of the individual self and the Supreme Self. The verse names the same recognition in the Malayalam grammar of urappu, the firming, the settling-into-certainty. (Krishna Priya notes that this verse and the surrounding stanzas use the opening letters of the age-old invocation Hari Śrī Gaṇapataye Namaḥ, which is recited when a Kerala child is first taught the alphabet.)

If you have come to this verse with attachments you cannot will away, with a marriage or a body or a savings account that has owned the inside of your mind, the verse is not asking you to renounce them. It is asking you to recognize what they are made of. Anityam, not-eternal. The verse offers one image: a long dream, with many things seen inside it. The dream-objects had real weight while you were asleep. They have no weight at all when you wake. The verse asks you to grasp your waking life the same way: not by force of will, but by the same act of waking.

The Living Words

Mat-prāṇanum paranum onnennu urappavannu. For the one who is sure that my breath and the Supreme are one. Mat-prāṇa is my breath, my life-self; paran is the Supreme, the Other Beyond; onn is one; urappu is firming, settling into certainty. The Sanskrit canon names this realization in the four Mahāvākyas: aham brahmāsmi (I am Brahman), tat tvam asi (that you are), ayam ātmā brahma (this Self is Brahman), prajñānaṁ brahma (consciousness is Brahman). All four say the same thing: the breath inside is the Supreme outside.

Tat-prāṇa-dehavum anityaṁ kalatra-dhanam. For that one, the breath, the body, the spouse, and the wealth are anitya, not-eternal. Anitya is the Sanskrit not-permanent, momentary. The verse does not say these are unreal. It says they do not last.

Svapnādiyil palavu kaṇḍāl uṇarṇṇavan oduppaṁ grahikka. As one who, after seeing many things in a dream, wakes up and grasps it that way. Svapna is dream; ādi is and so on, and the like; palavu is many things; kaṇḍāl is if seen; uṇarṇṇavan is the one who has woken; oduppam is equally, in the same way; grahikka is grasp, hold. The verse asks for the same act, in waking life, that the body performs every morning when it wakes from a dream: the recognition that the dream-objects had no weight outside the dreaming.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

The verse is the bhakti-jñāna synthesis at its sharpest. My breath and the Supreme are one: that is the jñāna claim. Hari Nārāyaṇāya namaḥ: that is the bhakti close. The verse holds both, and refuses to choose.

The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad gave the canonical Sanskrit form. Sa vā ayam ātmā brahma, this Self is Brahman. The Self the seeker has been calling I is the same Self the canon has been calling Brahman. The recognition is not an arrival; it is a firming, an uraippu. The recognition does not change the breath. It changes what the breath is recognized to be.

The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, in its short twelve verses, gives the same teaching the dream-image. The waking state, the dream state, and the deep-sleep state come and go. The fourth state, turīya, is the silent witness in whose presence the three appear and disappear. The verse-13 dream-analogy is the Malayalam form of the Māṇḍūkya teaching: the contents of any dream, including the long dream this body has been calling its life, are anitya. The witness behind the contents is the only thing that is not.

Gauḍapāda, in his Māṇḍūkya Kārikā, walked the analogy further. Vaitathyam sarva-bhāvānāṁ, the unreality of all forms. The waking world's objects, the kārikā says, have the same status as the dream's objects: they appear, they hold the senses, they pass. The seeker who recognizes the equivalence has done what the verse asks: uṇarṇṇavan oduppaṁ grahikka, grasp it the way the one who has woken grasps the dream.

If you have come to this verse with attachments you cannot will away, with a body that has dictated decades of your fears, with a marriage or a savings account that has felt more real than the breath itself, the verse is not asking for renunciation. The verse is asking for anitya-darśana, the seeing of impermanence. The objects do not have to be removed. The seeing of what they are is enough. A dream-house does not have to be torn down when you wake; the waking handles it.

Krishna Priya is honest about how slow this is. As one realizes and confirms, she writes, own soul and God are one. The verb is realizes-and-confirms. Two movements. The realizing comes first; the confirming, the urappu, comes after, with time, with practice, with the daily bow of verse 7. The Krishna Priya gloss does not pretend the urappu arrives in one moment. The verse does not pretend it arrives in one moment either. The verse names the seeker who has, over time, become sure.

The verse's own structural detail is worth pausing on. Krishna Priya notes that this stanza and its surrounding verses begin with the letters of the age-old Kerala invocation Hari Śrī Gaṇapataye Namaḥ, the prayer recited at the moment a child is first taught the alphabet. The verse-13 m-a of mat-prāṇanum is the m of namaḥ. Ezhuthachan, even at the height of the metaphysical recognition, has woven into the alphabet the prayer of the child being taught to write. The recognition is for the seeker; the prayer is for the child the seeker once was.

If you have come to this verse with the suspicion that the recognition is too high for the kind of life you are actually living, the verse is gentler than the suspicion. The verse does not ask the seeker to be the realized one. It describes the realized one in third person: for the one who is sure. The seeker's job is to keep practicing until the third person becomes the first. Hari Nārāyaṇāya namaḥ in the meantime. The bow keeps the path open.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Four saints lived the verse-13 awakening.

Sage Aṣṭāvakra is the central figure of the Aṣṭāvakra Saṁhitā, the short Sanskrit dialogue with King Janaka of Mithilā. The legend records him as the boy who, while still in his mother's womb, corrected his father's Vedic recitation, was cursed by the irritated father to be born deformed in eight places (whence aṣṭa-vakra, eight-bent), and walked into Janaka's court at twelve to teach. The dialogue's first chapter says it as plainly as the verse: if you wish to be free, regard the objects of the senses as poison, and regard forgiveness, simplicity, kindness, contentment, and truth as nectar. The body image is the small deformed sage walking into the king's gold-leafed court, and the king who, recognizing the recognition, took the teaching from a body the orthodox would have refused to look at.

King Janaka, in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad and the Aṣṭāvakra Saṁhitā, was the king-sage of Mithilā who held both the throne and the recognition without conflict. The legend records him standing in his court when a messenger reported that Mithilā was on fire. The king said: I have no Mithilā that can burn. The body image is the king at the center of the burning city, holding the recognition steady, the body and the city alike anitya.

Vasiṣṭha, in the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha, is the sage who teaches the young Rāma the recognition before Rāma is even crowned. The dialogue is long, the dream-analogy is its central image: every story, every life, every world is a dream nested inside another dream until the dreamer wakes. The body image is the sage and the boy in conversation in the gardens of Daśaratha's palace, the future king learning, before he ever sits on the throne, that thrones are made of dream-stuff.

Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, sixteenth-century Bengal-Banaras, was an Advaitin who refused the school's standard rejection of bhakti and wrote the Bhakti-Rasāyana, the elixir of devotion, inside the Advaita framework. He brought together the jīva-paramātma-aikya recognition with the practice of the Name and lived the synthesis verse 13 names: the recognition that the two are one, and the daily worship that holds the recognition steady. The body image is the saint at the Banaras ghāṭs, manuscripts on his lap, bhajan on his lips, refusing the false choice between knowledge and love.