Harināma Kīrtanam · Verse 19

The nineteenth verse strips the Name down to its absolute minimum. Uurinnu venda: a special place is not needed. Neerinnu venda: water is not needed. The Brahmin's bath, the holy ground, the ritual implements: none of these are required. Narayana, Acyuta, Hare ennatinn: to say Nārāyaṇa, Acyuta, Hare, only the tongue is needed. The Krishna Priya gloss makes the social claim explicit: the Lord is everywhere; no place is more sacred than another for the Name; no water is purer than the Name; no spouse, family, or institution is needed; one's own heart thinking of the Lord is better than plucked flowers.

If you have come to this verse and felt that real spiritual practice requires a temple, a teacher in a robe, a quiet hour, a body that has not eaten meat or has not bled, the verse refuses every requirement. Naavonne vendu: the tongue alone is needed. The orthodoxy that has, for centuries, gatekept access to the Name through ritual and place is, in this single Malayalam line, set aside.

The Living Words

Uurinnu venda chila bhāraṅṅaḷ. Some burdens are not needed for the village/place. Uur is village, place; venda is not needed, not necessary; bhāraṅṅaḷ is burdens, weights. The Sanskrit-Malayalam bhāra names the ritual upakaraṇas (implements) usually required for worship.

Neerinnu venda nija-dhāraṅṅaḷ. For water, ritual streams are not needed. Neer is water; nija-dhāra is one's own ritual stream, the proper-canonical-water. The verse names the orthodox Vedic insistence on tīrtha and abhiṣeka, holy bathing-ritual.

Narayana, Acyuta, Hare yennatinu oru-vaḻ. For saying Nārāyaṇa, Acyuta, Hare, one way: the tongue. The verse names three of the most common divine names in Indian devotion.

Naavu onne vendu Hari Nārāyaṇāya namaḥ. Only the tongue is needed; salutation to Hari Nārāyaṇa. Naavu is tongue; onne is only; vendu is is needed. The Malayalam grammar is uncompromising. Tongue. Only. That is all.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

The verse is a quiet but radical anti-orthodox statement. The Vedic tradition Ezhuthachan was raised inside, especially in its Brahmin-Mīmāṁsaka form, had built up an enormous architecture around right place, right time, right water, right implements, right caste, right marriage, right ritual partner. The verse-19 line sets all of this aside in a single half-line. Naavu onne vendu: only the tongue is needed.

The Padma Purāṇa, Uttara-khaṇḍa, recorded the same teaching in Sanskrit centuries earlier: na deśa-niyamas tasmin na kāla-niyamas tathā; nocchiṣṭādau niṣedho'sti śrī-harer nāmni lubdhaka. There is no rule of place in this, no rule of time, no prohibition of impurity (such as having food in the mouth) in the Name of Hari, O fowler. The Sanskrit verse is given to a low-caste fowler in a Purāṇic dialogue: the social register of the teaching is built into the Sanskrit verse itself. The Name is for everyone, anywhere, at any time, and the orthodox prohibitions about deśa (place), kāla (time), and ucchiṣṭa (the impurity of having something in the mouth) do not apply.

The Krishna Priya gloss says the same in plain English. To do the recitation of Lord's divine name, one does not need to search a right place. Lord is present everywhere, so anywhere is apt for doing nāma-japa. Also, one should not feel concerned about availability of holy water to cleanse the body or flowers and other items to do ritualistic worship or presence of spouse to do nāma-japa because Lord's name is so powerful that it cleanses the mind, one's own heart thinking of Lord is better than plucked flowers, and only the relationship with Lord is eternal. Each clause sets aside one of the orthodox conditions that the Brahmin-priestly culture had built up around access to the divine.

If you have come to this verse with a long history of being told you cannot do real practice (because of caste, gender, body, marital status, place of residence, or simply not having the right setup), the verse is yours. The verse does not invite you to argue with the gatekeepers. The verse closes the gate by removing what was being gatekept. The tongue alone is needed. No gate.

The Bhagavad Gītā, in its ninth chapter, gave this same teaching its boldest Sanskrit form. Māṁ hi pārtha vyapāśritya ye'pi syuḥ pāpa-yonayaḥ; striyo vaiśyās tathā śūdrās te'pi yānti parāṁ gatim. For those who take refuge in me, even those of so-called pāpa-yoni (impure birth), women, vaiśyas, śūdras, even they reach the supreme state. Krishna is explicit, and his explicitness is the reason the bhakti movement has, for centuries, named him as the patron of the marginalized seeker.

If you have a complicated daily schedule, no time for ritual, no money for offerings, no Brahmin in your family, no one to teach you the right mudrās, the verse is the closing of the gate. The orthodox setup was a path; it is a real path; it is not the only path. The Name, on the tongue, anywhere, at any time, is a path the verse names as enough.

Krishna Priya's last clause is worth holding onto. Only the relationship with Lord is eternal. Marriage ends. Family ends. Lineage ends. Caste ends. Body ends. The relationship with the Lord, established through the Name on the tongue, does not end. That alone is the nija (one's own) the verse names worth carrying.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Three saints whose lives demonstrated the verse-19 instruction.

Tiruppāṇ Āḻvār, eighth-century Tamil Nadu, was the only one of the twelve Vaiṣṇava Āḻvārs who was born outside Brahmin caste; he was a paṉar, a low-caste musician of the Cōḻa country. The legend records that he stood every day on the south bank of the Kāveri at Śrīraṅgam, singing to the deity inside the temple he was forbidden to enter. One day a Brahmin temple priest, in anger at his presence, threw a stone that struck him on the head; the temple gates opened. The deity inside the temple summoned the Brahmin in a dream and ordered the priest to carry the paṉar on his shoulders into the inner sanctum. Tiruppāṇ composed the Amalanādipirān, ten Tamil verses to the deity, while being carried over the threshold he had not been allowed to cross. He merged into the deity at the end of the tenth verse. The body image is the saint at the river's south bank, the vīṇā in his hands, the Name on his lips, the threshold he walked across only with the deity's own command.

Nandaṉār, ninth-century Tamil Nadu, was a Dalit Pulayan devotee of Śiva, a leather-worker who longed to enter the temple of Śiva at Cidambaram. He stood outside the temple for years, singing the Names of Śiva. The legend records that the temple priests required him to walk through a fire to enter; he walked through, the legend says, and emerged on the other side as pure light, dissolved into Śiva. The legend is myth-form; the Tamil tradition has remembered him as the nāmadhārī who was not stopped by the gate, in any of its forms. The body image is the leather-worker at the temple's outer wall, the Names on his lips, the gate dissolved in the lasting song.

Bhakta Sadanā, twelfth-thirteenth-century Sindh, was a Muslim butcher who, as a boy, had been a Hindu temple-priest's child. The legend records his transformation when he found a śālagrām-śilā (Viṣṇu-stone) in his butcher's stall and used it as a weight without recognizing it; the deity revealed himself; the butcher was so undone that the legend has him weeping over the stone, recognizing he had been weighing meat with the Lord. He recited the Name in the slaughterhouse for the rest of his life. One of his couplets is in the Sikh Ādi Granth: the rules of the orthodox have nothing to do with the Lord's name; the Lord receives the butcher who has nothing else to give. The body image is the butcher at his stall, the śālagrām on the scale, the Name on his tongue while the meat was being weighed.