Harināma Kīrtanam · Verse 14

The fourteenth verse is Ezhuthachan's own bow to his teacher. Śrīnīlakaṇṭha guru, the blue-throated teacher, lotus-eyed, of limitless mercy, is praised in the seeker's mind. The verse asks the guru's grace to let each one of the fifty-one letters of the Malayalam alphabet enter the poem. The Krishna Priya tradition reads Śrīnīlakaṇṭha two ways at once: as the paramācārya Lord Dakṣiṇāmūrti, the highest of teachers; and possibly as Ezhuthachan's own historical guru, who tradition records was named Nīlakaṇṭha. The verse holds both readings.

If you have come to this verse with a long love for a teacher, the verse hands you the language for that love. Anpu, love-by-mercy. Vāḻttunnu, I praise. The verse is not embarrassed about the love.

If you have come to this verse without a teacher to praise, the verse is for you too. The teacher named here is also Dakṣiṇāmūrti, the silent guru under the banyan tree, who teaches without speaking. That guru is available to anyone who learns to listen.

The Living Words

Anpenam en-manasi. Let love arise in my mind. Anpu is the Tamil-Malayalam word for love; here it is the anpu the disciple feels for the teacher, the love-by-mercy (kṛpā with prema).

Śrīnīlakaṇṭha guru. The blue-throated teacher. Nīlakaṇṭha is the name of Śiva, the blue-throated one, who drank the cosmic poison at the churning of the ocean and held it in his throat to save the world. The Krishna Priya tradition reads the epithet here as Dakṣiṇāmūrti, the form of Śiva as the silent young teacher under the banyan tree. The blue throat marks the teacher who has held the poison so the disciple can drink the nectar.

Vambhoruhākṣa. Lotus-eyed. The same epithet used in verse 11. The eyes shaped like lotus petals are the eyes of the deity, lotus-soft and not afraid.

Vāḻttunnu jñān-um iha. I, here, praise. Vāḻttuka is to praise, to celebrate aloud; the Malayalam grammar makes the praise a present-tense ongoing act.

Ambathu-or akṣaravum oroonn iten moḻiyil anpoḍu chērkka. In my speech, lovingly insert each of the fifty-one letters. Ambathu-or is fifty-one; akṣaravum is each letter; oroonn is one by one; moḻi is speech, word; anpoḍu is with love; chērkka is please add, please join. Krishna Priya's note: Malayalam language has 51 alphabets. The verse is asking the guru to put each one of the fifty-one letters into the poem the seeker is composing, with love. The Harināma Kīrtanam, alphabet-keyed, is the fulfilment of this prayer.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

The verse is the most personal in the work so far. After thirteen verses of teaching, the poet stops, turns to his own teacher, and bows.

The Krishna Priya gloss is honest about the doubled reference. I feel Sreeneelakanda Guru as Lord Dakshinamoorthy, she writes, the highest of gurus, the gem of knowledge who with limitless mercy imparts knowledge to disciples through silence. Feels like Ezhuthachan is asking the blessings of Lord Dakshinamoorthy or maybe his guru whose name was Neelakanda. The Kerala tradition has held both readings open for four centuries; the verse refuses to choose, and so does the gloss.

The Adi Śaṅkara of the Dakṣiṇāmūrti Stotra, eight hundred years before Ezhuthachan, gave the tradition its canonical Sanskrit form of this same prayer. Maunavyākhyā prakaṭita-parabrahma-tattvaṁ yuvānaṁ varṣiṣṭhāntevasad-ṛṣigaṇair āvṛtaṁ: the youthful guru who reveals the Brahman-truth through silence, surrounded by aged disciples who already know the Vedas. Verse 1 of this work named the Lord as paramācārya-rūpa, the form of the supreme teacher. Verse 14 names the same teacher by his Śaiva epithet Nīlakaṇṭha and asks him for the alphabet.

If you have come to this verse with a love for a teacher in your life, the verse blesses the love. Anpu is not a small word. The same Tamil-Malayalam word the bhakti tradition uses for the love of the divine is the word the verse uses for the love of the human teacher. The two loves are not different. The teacher carries the divine, in this tradition; the love for the teacher is the form the love for the divine takes when it has a body to address.

If you have come to this verse without a teacher in your life, or with a teacher who has wounded you, the verse offers the second reading. Dakṣiṇāmūrti is the silent young guru under the banyan tree, who teaches without speaking. That guru does not require a building, a robe, or a fee. That guru is the silent recognition that arrives when the seeker is ready to receive it. The verse-10 upadeśa is what Dakṣiṇāmūrti gives, in the size of the hand that is open to receive it.

The verse's most quietly remarkable feature is the alphabet-detail. Ezhuthachan, who tradition records as the father of the Malayalam language, wrote the Harināma Kīrtanam so that each of its sixty-eight stanzas opens with the next letter of the Malayalam alphabet. Verse 1 begins with ō (long o). Verse 2 with o (short o). Verse 14 begins with a (short a) of anpu. By the time the work closes at verse 67 or 68, the entire fifty-one-letter alphabet has been used. Any Kerala child who learned to read learned to read by reading this poem. The child learning the aksharas (letters) was, at the same time, learning the Names of Hari. The poem is a primer; the primer is a hymn.

The verse is asking the guru to bless this very project. Anpoḍu chērkka, lovingly insert each one of the fifty-one letters. The poem cannot be written without grace. The alphabet itself is a gift. The verse's bow is to the source of both: the Nīlakaṇṭha who held the poison so the aksharas could carry the nectar.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Three saints of the verse-14 silent transmission.

Adi Śaṅkarācārya, eighth-century Kerala, walked from Kalady on the Periyar to every corner of the subcontinent and wrote the Dakṣiṇāmūrti Stotra: ten Sanskrit verses in praise of Śiva as the youthful silent guru under the banyan tree. The closing line is the canonical praṇāma the entire Vedānta tradition uses: gurave dakṣiṇāmūrtaye tasmai śrī-gurave namaḥ. To that guru, Śrī Dakṣiṇāmūrti, salutation. Verse 14 of the Harināma Kīrtanam is the Malayalam echo of Śaṅkara's stotra, written by a Kerala poet who walked the same red earth.

Ezhuthachan's own teacher, traditionally remembered as Nīlakaṇṭha Somayājī of the Tamil-Kerala border (the dating and identification are debated by modern scholarship), is the historical guru the verse may also be addressing. Tradition records that Ezhuthachan, who was denied the sacred thread by the orthodox Brahmins of his birth, found a Brahmin teacher who agreed to teach him the Vedas anyway and gave him the Hari Nāma Sankīrtana commission. The body image is the disciple at the teacher's house in the Kerala forest, the manuscripts being copied by lamplight, the child of a non-Brahmin caste being given the alphabet that the orthodox would have refused.

Ramaṇa Mahāṛṣi, twentieth-century Tamil Nadu, was the modern face of the Dakṣiṇāmūrti image. He sat on the lower slope of Aruṇācala for fifty-four years, gave most of his answers in silence, and the eyes that watched without strain did the teaching that words could not. He composed the Aruṇācala Akṣaramaṇāmālai, the garland of letters of Aruṇācala: a hundred-and-eight verse hymn whose stanzas are alphabetical, each beginning with a different Tamil letter, the same alphabet-key that Ezhuthachan used in Malayalam. The body image is the silent hall at Tiruvannamalai, the visitor's question dissolving in the saint's gaze, the silence finishing the question before the question was spoken aloud.