Harināma Kīrtanam · Verse 18

The eighteenth verse extends verse 17. Even when the mind is full of pride, competitiveness, and the small wars the day produces, reciting the Name in the mind opens the way to the good path. The Krishna Priya gloss is plain: Living in the world, one may feel strong influences of ego, pride, competitiveness, etc., which leads to loss of mind peace. Reciting any of the Lord's divine names is the quickest way to calm down the mind. The peaceful inner silence is actually the liberation experience. The verse names the moment most people give up on practice (the moment of agitation) as the moment the Name is most needed.

If you have come to this verse in the middle of a workday with a difficult colleague, with a competitor's success that has just stung, with the slow burn of comparison, the verse hands you the simplest possible inner motion. The mind cannot, by its own argument, calm itself down. The Name can. Cholluka: speak it, recite it, in the mind, where no one else hears.

The Living Words

Uḷḷil kanatha madha mātsaryam-ennivakaḷ. Inside, the dense pride and competitiveness and so on. Uḷḷil is inside, in the mind; kanatha is thick, dense, heavy; madha is intoxication of pride; mātsaryam is envy, competitiveness; enniva-kaḷ is and the like. The verse names, in plain Malayalam, the bhakti tradition's classical ariṣaḍ-varga, the six inner enemies (lust, anger, greed, delusion, pride, envy). The verse only lists the last two; ennivakaḷ, and the like, holds the rest.

Uḷḷoru-kālam-uden enn-āgilum manasi. At a moment when these are present in my mind. The Malayalam grammar is permissive: it does not say if the mind is calm, but even when it is not.

Chollunnatu āru tiru-nāmaṅgaḷ annavannu. The one who recites the divine names, even then. Cholluka is to speak, to recite; tiru is holy, divine; nāmaṅgaḷ is names. The recitation is in the mind; the speaking is silent.

Nalla gatikkuvaḻi. The way to the good path. Nalla is good; gati is the going, the way. The Sanskrit sad-gati (the supreme destination) is the same word.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

Verse 17 said: when the illusion comes, recite the Name. Verse 18 makes the same claim more daring. Even when the mind is full of pride and competitiveness and the small wars of the day, recite the Name. The Name does not require a calm preparation. The Name does the calming.

The Krishna Priya gloss says it plainly. Reciting any of the Lord's divine names is the quickest way to calm down the mind. The peaceful inner silence is actually the liberation experience. The Sanskrit canon has named this two ways. The first: citta-vṛtti-nirodha, the cessation of the modifications of the mind, in Patañjali's Yoga Sūtra 1.2. The second: bhakti-yoga ahaituky apratihatā, motiveless and uninterrupted devotion, in Bhāgavata 1.2.6. The verse-18 claim is that these two paths converge at the same point. The Name, when it enters the agitated mind, replaces the agitation; the mind, in that moment, is silent; the silence is mukti.

The verse's structural innovation is the word enn-āgilum, even then. The classical Yoga Sūtra path treats agitation as something the seeker must first calm before the deep practice can begin. Verse 18 inverts this. Begin the practice when the agitation is at its loudest. The Name does the work the seeker cannot.

The Bhagavad Gītā says it gently in the twelfth chapter. Mayy āveśya mano ye māṁ nitya-yuktā upāsate: those whose mind is fixed on me and who worship me, ever-yoked. Krishna does not say those who have first calmed the mind; he says those who have placed the mind on me. The placing is the calming.

If you have come to this verse in the middle of a difficult day, the verse changes nothing about the day. The day stays. What changes is what is being said inside the mind while the day continues. Tiru-nāmaṅgaḷ chollunnatu: the divine names, recited. The speaking is silent. No one else has to know. The colleague does not stop being difficult; the Name keeps being recited; the mind that holds them both at once finds, after a few minutes, that the mind has gone quiet around the colleague even before the colleague has gone quiet outside.

The verse's most personal word is manasi, in the mind. The recitation does not require breath, lips, or sound. The mind itself, while pride and competitiveness still echo there, can hold a name. The name is, in this exact moment, the gati, the way out. Nalla gatikkuvaḻi: the way to the good path. Not later. Now.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Three saints in the verse-18 lineage of nāma in agitation.

Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, sixth-century Tamil Nadu, is the earliest of the Nāyaṉār poet-saints, and one of the three women in the sixty-three. Her story is famously sharp. Born to a wealthy Tamil merchant's family, married to a man who would not understand her devotion, miraculously providing him a Śiva-given mango when he asked for one and not the one he had eaten that morning. When she revealed the miracle, the husband, frightened, left her. She gave up her beautiful young body and asked Śiva for the form of a peyy, a wandering skeletal devotee, and walked the Tamil country composing the Aṟputat-tiruvantāti in a body that could not be desired by anyone. The body image is the saint dancing on the cremation ground at Tiruvāḻaṅkāḍu, the Tiru-nāmam of Śiva on her lips, the pride and competitiveness of the merchant world she had walked out of dissolved in the dance.

Bhakta Sahjobai, eighteenth-century Hindi region, was a female Nirguṇa saint and disciple of Charandas, the founder of the Charandasi sampradāya. She composed Sahaj Prakāśa in plain Hindi padas on the Name as the only practice that survives in the agitations of household life. Her famous line: guru bin kaun batāve baat? Without the guru, who tells the secret? But the secret she tells, in her own padas, is the one verse 18 names: when the mind is loud, the Name is louder. Body image: the female saint at the village threshold, the padas arriving in plain Hindi while the household duties continued.

Bhakta Daduji Dayāl, sixteenth-seventeenth-century Rajasthan, was a Nirguṇa saint and a contemporary of Mīrā. He composed two thousand five hundred sākhīs and padas in Rajasthani-Hindi, taught the Brahmagyānī path of inner Name-japa amid the work of the cotton-carding trade he had been raised in. His followers became the Dādū-panth, a Sant tradition that has lasted four hundred years. Body image: the cotton-carder at his bench, the sākhī arriving while the work continued, the small group of disciples gathered around him at evening to sing the Name into the agitations of their own days.