Harināma Kīrtanam · Verse 15

The fifteenth verse names the inner reason the entire poem is alphabet-keyed. Krishna Priya gives the etymology that opens the verse: in Sanskrit-Malayalam, akṣaram means the imperishable. Each of the fifty-one letters is, by its very name, indestructible. The verse holds the simplest possible inference. If each letter is imperishable, and Brahman is the imperishable, then each letter is a small body of Brahman. From these small bodies the whole poem is being woven; in them the whole poem will, in time, dissolve. The seeker asks the Lord's mercy to take each letter, one at a time, and use it to glorify the All-Pervading.

If you have come to this verse with no Sanskrit background, the verse is gentler than it looks. It is asking, in plain language, that the letters be allowed to do what letters are for: carry the Name. The verse is the poet's invocation to his own tools. The reader's parallel invocation, even at this moment, is to let the words you read here carry the Name to you.

The Living Words

Adhya-akṣarattil. In the first letter. Adhya is first, primary; akṣaram is letter, the imperishable. The Sanskrit-Malayalam word akṣara literally means not-perishing: a letter does not, in its essence, decay. The first letter, the a of the Indian alphabets, is the seed-letter from which the rest unfold; the Bhagavad Gītā 10.33 names the same letter as a form of the Lord himself.

Ulavāy onnu itha okkeyum. Everything has been formed, all this. Ulavāy is having become; itha is here; okkeyum is all. The whole field of the poem and of the world is what has come from the letter.

Ādya-akṣarattil itha aṭaṅṅunnatum. And in that very first letter, all this dissolves. Aṭaṅṅuka is to subside, to dissolve back into source. The arc is one Sanskrit half-line: from the letter, all this; into the letter, all this returns.

Karuti. Believing this, holding this in mind. Karuti is thinking, contemplating.

Ādya-akṣarāḷi-ayil ūroonn eḍuttu pari-keerttippatu inn aruḷka. Picking each of the first-and-following letters, glorify (the Lord); please grant. The verse is asking for the grace to take each akṣara in its turn (the alphabet-key of the poem) and use it to praise. Each verse, each line, each letter, is a small kīrtana.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

The Krishna Priya gloss is the verse's compact theology in plain English. In Malayalam, alphabet is known as 'Aksharam' meaning without destruction. Due to the non-destructing nature, each alphabet is believed as Brahman, from which everything arises and dissolves. Keeping this belief in mind, asking Lord's mercy to take each one of these alphabets to compose the poem to glorify the Brahman. The single Sanskrit-Malayalam word akṣara carries the entire move. Akṣara is Brahman. Each letter is therefore a small Brahman. The poem composed from the letters is, in its own grammar, a poem composed from Brahman.

The Bhagavad Gītā, in its tenth chapter, gave the canonical Sanskrit form. Akṣarāṇām akāro'smi: among letters I am the letter A. Krishna does not say I am the meaning of all letters, or I am the cause of letters. He says I am the letter A. The first letter, the seed of every alphabet, is the Lord himself. Verse 15's ādya-akṣaram, the first letter, is the Malayalam form of the Sanskrit akāra, and the Sanskrit akāra is, in Krishna's own naming, the Lord.

The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad opens with the same compression: om ity etad akṣaram idaṁ sarvam, Om, this single imperishable syllable, is all this. Verse 1 of this work opened by naming Omkāra as the poruḷ, the meaning that has split into three. Verse 15 is the same Om-recognition extended to every letter. Each akṣara is a small Om. Each verse of this poem is a small omkāra-kīrtana.

If you have come to this verse with no Sanskrit and no special love of grammar, the verse is still for you. The verse is asking that the language you read in, the letters that arrive on this page, the words that carry meaning to you right now, be received as small bodies of the imperishable. Your own reading, in this very moment, is a participation in the kīrtana the verse is performing. The letters were borrowed from the Lord; the reading returns them to him.

The Kerala tradition has held this verse as the explicit statement of Ezhuthachan's whole project. The poem is alphabet-keyed not for ornament; it is alphabet-keyed because the alphabet itself is the form of Brahman in which every Kerala child first encounters the Name. A child learning to read learns to read by reading these verses. By the time the child can write his own name, he has written the Name of Hari fifty-one times. The recognition of akṣara as imperishable is, for that child, not metaphysics. It is the daily lived fact that the letters are what last.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Three saints who built whole temples out of the alphabet of their language.

Bhakta Pothana, fifteenth-century Telangana-Andhra, was a small farmer's son who, the tradition records, was instructed by Lord Rāma in a dream to translate the Sanskrit Bhāgavata Purāṇa into Telugu. The local king offered him patronage if he would dedicate the translation to him; Pothana refused. The translation he composed in his small village over many years became the Pothana Bhāgavatamu, the work that brought the Bhāgavata to ordinary Telugu speakers and is still memorized in Telugu households. Each verse, each Telugu padyam, is alphabet-built like Ezhuthachan's. The body image is the farmer-poet at the field's edge, the Sanskrit text on his lap, the Telugu verses arriving as the seasons turned.

Sarvajña, sixteenth-century Karnataka, was a wandering poet of the tripadi, a three-line Kannada verse-form he raised to a popular sacred genre. Two thousand of his vacanas are remembered by name; another tradition records eight thousand. He walked the villages of north Karnataka teaching by short verse. The body image is the wanderer at the village square, the children gathered, the tripadi arriving at the size of a child's memory. He named his work itself the vacana of the imperishable letters.

Tāyumāṉavar, eighteenth-century Tamil Nadu, was a Śaiva mystic who composed about fifteen hundred Tamil verses on the silent Self that is one with all. Court poet of the Nāyaka kings of Trichy, he gave up the court at his teacher's word, walked into the temple at Tiruchirapalli, sat at the foot of the liṅga, and continued to compose for decades. His Tamil is alphabet-keyed and song-keyed, set to paṇs (Tamil rāgas) the bhakti tradition still sings. The body image is the saint at the liṅga in Tiruchirapalli, the Tamil verses arriving as the lamp burned through the night, the alphabet of the imperishable being arranged in praise of the imperishable Lord.