Harināma Kīrtanam · Verse 16

The sixteenth verse names the cosmic order and asks for the grace to remember it. Ikkaṇḍa viśvam, this seen universe; indrādi devakaḷ, Indra and the other gods; arkk-īndu vahni, the sun, the moon, fire; trimūrti, the trinity of Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Maheśvara. All of these, the verse says, come from one source: the Virāṭ Puruṣa, the cosmic Person whose form is the entire universe. The Krishna Priya tradition points the reader to the Puruṣa Sūkta of the Yajurveda, where the same Person is described as the body from which sun, moon, gods, and worlds all arise.

If you have come to this verse with a tendency to scatter, with attention divided across many forms (each god a different shrine, each guru a different lineage, each scripture a different demand), the verse offers a single re-collection. All of it, the verse says, is one Person. The remembering of this is itself the practice. The seeker does not have to argue the unity. The seeker has to keep remembering it.

The verse closes with the simplest possible plea: mōrkkāy varīṇam-iha, may I always come to remember. Not let me know. Not let me see. Let me come to remember. The recognition is described in the Sanskrit canon as a remembering of what the seeker has always known.

The Living Words

Ikkaṇḍa viśvam-atum. This seen universe also. Ikkaṇḍa is this seen; viśvam is the universe; atum is also, even this. The verse begins with the world the eyes are looking at right now.

Indrādi devakaḷ-um. And Indra and the other gods. The pluralism of the Vedic pantheon is acknowledged.

Arkka-īndu vahnikaḷ-oḍuppam tri-mūrtikaḷ-um. Sun, moon, fire, along with the three forms (Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Maheśvara). Tri-mūrti is the threefold form of the Lord as creator, sustainer, dissolver.

Agre Virāṭ Puruṣa nin-mūlam. In front, the Virāṭ Puruṣa, your root. Agre is in front, before; Virāṭ Puruṣa is the cosmic Person of the Puruṣa Sūkta, the Person whose body is the entire visible universe; nin-mūlam is your source. The verse names everything from world-stage to gods to elements to trimūrti as having one source: the cosmic Person.

Mōrkkāy varīṇam-iha. May I come to remember, here. Mōrkka is to remember; varīṇam is let it come; iha is here, in this very life. The plea is for the remembering itself, not for any further accomplishment.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

The Krishna Priya gloss is the cleanest summary. Whatever seen in the universe including Indra, devas, sun, moon, fire along with the trimūrtis are formed from Virāṭ Puruṣa. The Puruṣa Sūkta in the Yajurveda clearly describes Virāṭrūpa. Kindly bless me Lord to always remember this truth. The verse points to a specific Vedic hymn (the Puruṣa Sūkta, Ṛgveda 10.90, also recited in the Yajurveda's Vājasaneyī Saṁhitā 31) as its source-text.

The Puruṣa Sūkta opens with the cosmic Person. Sahasra-śīrṣā puruṣaḥ sahasrākṣaḥ sahasra-pāt; sa bhūmiṁ viśvato vṛtvā atyatiṣṭhad daśāṅgulam. The Person has a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet; he covered the earth from every side and stood beyond by ten fingers. The hymn goes on to describe the world as the Person's body: the moon arose from his mind, the sun from his eyes, fire from his mouth, the gods from his breath, the four social orders from his limbs. The hymn does not say the Person became these things; it says these things are these things because the Person is. The Person is not destroyed when the universe runs through him. The verse-16 phrase mūlam, root, is the Sanskrit-Malayalam form of the Veda's Puruṣa: not the start of a chain that ends in the visible world, but the underlying source that the visible world is currently the surface of.

The Bhagavad Gītā, in its eleventh chapter, gave Arjuna the same vision in personal form. Paśya me pārtha rūpāṇi śataśo'tha sahasraśaḥ; nānā-vidhāni divyāni nānā-varṇākṛtīni ca. Behold my forms, son of Pṛthā, hundreds and thousands, of many kinds, divine, of many colors and shapes. Krishna's Viśvarūpa-darśana is the personal Sanskrit form of the verse-16 cosmic recollection. Indra, the gods, the sun, the moon, the fire, the trimūrti, all are present inside the single body of the Lord that Arjuna sees.

If you have come to this verse with a tendency to scatter, the verse is the discipline of recollection. The seeker has been taught, by a thousand sources, that the world is many. The verse holds the same world in one Person. The recollection is not a denial of the many; the verse names Indra, the devas, the sun, the moon, the fire, the trimūrti, the worlds. The recollection is the re-rooting of the many in the one. The Sanskrit-Malayalam mūlam (root) is the verse's whole work.

The verb the verse uses is precise. Mōrkkāy varīṇam: may I come to remember. Not let me see, not let me reach, not let me become. Let me come to remember. The Sanskrit anusmṛti, the post-rememberance, is the remembering of what was always known. The recognition the canon promises is not new information; it is the rising-up of a knowledge the seeker has been carrying without remembering. The verse's plea is for that rising-up, iha, here, in this very life.

If you have come to this verse with a sense that the recognition is far, the verse changes the metric. The remembering is what is asked for. The remembering happens in instants. Always is built up by short rememberings, each lasting a breath. The seeker does not have to hold the cosmic vision for a year. The seeker has to remember it once, and then to remember it again, and again, until the remembering becomes the texture of the breath.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Three saints in the lineage of cosmic remembrance.

Vyāsa, the legendary compiler of the Vedas and author of the Mahābhārata, sits at the head of the lineage that gave India both the Puruṣa Sūkta and the Bhagavad Gītā's eleventh chapter. The tradition records him on the bank of the Sarasvatī, the four Vedas spread before him, the Mahābhārata unfolding through Gaṇeśa's pen, the Bhāgavata being composed at the end of his life. The Viśvarūpa-darśana the verse celebrates is, in the Mahābhārata's narrative, presented as Vyāsa's gift to Sañjaya the charioteer-narrator and through him to the blind King Dhṛtarāṣṭra. The body image is the sage at the manuscript-bank, the four Vedas in a circle around him, the cosmic Person being written down for any later seeker to read.

Arjuna, in the eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā, asks Krishna for the cosmic vision and receives it. The chapter records his terror at the form (it is too vast, too many-mouthed, too full of fire) and his subsequent plea: namaḥ pūrvāya pakṣe namaḥ paścāttat te: salutation in front, salutation behind. After the vision passes, Arjuna asks to see Krishna again in the four-armed form he can stand. Krishna obliges. The body image is the warrior on the chariot-floor, the cosmic vision so total that the warrior cannot stand, the four-armed form that is the daily face of the Lord arriving as the relief that the warrior can carry into the battle.

Tiruvaḷḷuvar, the Tamil sage of the Tirukkuṛaḷ (the dating is debated; tradition places him around the second-third century, scholarship places him later), composed 1330 short Tamil couplets on dharma, artha, and kāma that the Tamil tradition has held as the universal compendium. He is named teyva-pulavar, the divine poet. The opening verse of the Tirukkuṛaḷ is the verse-16 recognition in Tamil: akara mudala eḻuttu ellām, ādi bhagavan mudaṟṟē ulaku: the letter A is the source of all letters; the Primal Lord is the source of the world. The Tamil verse and Ezhuthachan's Malayalam verse meet at the same recognition. The body image is the sage at the loom (tradition records him as a weaver), the kuṟaḷs arriving as the warp went over the weft.