Harināma Kīrtanam · Verse 26

The twenty-sixth verse holds a piece of pure Sāṅkhya-Yogic accounting. The Malayalam line counts in numbers: five into five plus five, five into six plus eight, eight into three plus seven, then five and two plus one. The Krishna Priya gloss spells out what the numbers refer to: ninety-six tattvas, ninety-six principles into which the Sāṅkhya-Tantric tradition divides the embodied human being and the cosmos. Lord resides in each one of these principles, the gloss concludes. The verse hands the seeker a complete map of the body and asks the seeker to recognize that every square inch of the map is the Lord's residence.

If you have come to this verse with no Sāṅkhya training and no interest in the technical accounting, the verse is still for you. The numbers are the verse's way of saying no part of your body or mind is outside the Lord. Every breath, every sense, every thought, every nerve-channel: each is a small house the Lord lives in.

The Living Words

Ayyañjum añjumudan ayyaruṁ eṭṭum-udan avvaṇṇam-eṭṭum-udan en-mūnnum eḻum atha covv-ūḍ-or-añjum api raṇḍ-onnu tatvam atil mevunna nātha. The numbers, expanded into the standard Sāṅkhya/Tantric list per Krishna Priya's gloss, name: the five elements (water, fire, space, earth, air); the five sense-organs (eyes, ears, nose, skin, tongue); the five sense-objects; the five action-organs; the five major prāṇas; the five minor prāṇas; the six chakras; the eight attractions (lust, anger, greed, delusion, pride, envy, intoxication, partiality); the eight antaḥkaraṇa-functions; the three nāḍīs (iḍā, piṅgalā, suṣumnā); the three solar-lunar-fire maṇḍalas; the three eṣaṇās (desires for wealth, family, fame); the three doṣas (kapha, vāta, pitta); the three guṇas (sattva, rajas, tamas); the three states (waking, dream, deep sleep); the three bodies (gross, subtle, causal); the three presiding deities (viśva, taijasa, prājña); the seven dhātus (skin, blood, flesh, fat, bone, marrow, semen); the five kośas (food, breath, mind, intellect, bliss); and the three tāpas (the threefold suffering: from oneself, from beings, from gods). Ninety-six in total. Mevunna nātha is the Lord who resides; the verse names the Lord as resident in each of these.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

The verse looks technical, and is. The Sāṅkhya-Tantric list of tattvas is long, schematic, and demanding. The verse does not dilute the list; it hands the entire ninety-six-fold accounting to the reader and says: the Lord is in each of these.

Why does the verse, after twenty-five verses of mostly bhakti language, suddenly speak Sāṅkhya? Because the Krishna Priya tradition reads the verse as the bhakti-jñāna synthesis at full reach. The bhakti seeker has been told to recite the Name, to bow daily, to ask for grace. The verse-26 reminder is: the Lord you are reciting is, at this very moment, in your eyes, in your ears, in your breath, in the kapha and pitta of your body, in the iḍā and piṅgalā of your spine, in the waking and dream and deep sleep of your day. The recitation is not addressed to a distant Lord. The recitation is the body recognizing what it is made of.

The Bhagavad Gītā, in its tenth chapter, gave the same recognition in personal form. Aham ātmā guḍākeśa sarva-bhūtāśaya-sthitaḥ: I am the Self, Arjuna, residing in the heart of all beings. Krishna does not say I created the body and now reside outside it. He says I reside in the heart of all beings. The body is the Lord's house, not a separate construction. Verse 26 walks the same recognition through ninety-six rooms of the house.

If you have come to this verse from a long history of being told the body is impure, the senses are evil, the mind is the enemy, the verse refuses the framework. The body is impure only if it is read against an outside-the-body Lord; the body is the Lord's residence if read against the inside-the-body Lord the verse names. Mevunna nātha: the resident Lord. Each of the ninety-six tattvas is, by virtue of being a tattva, a small piece of the Lord's actual location.

The Krishna Priya gloss is gracious about the long list. Upon self-realization by Lord's grace, one may be able to realize Lord's presence in everything and all the differences will thus vanish. The seeker does not have to memorize the ninety-six tattvas. The seeker has to keep reciting the Name. When the recitation deepens, the recognition descends; when the recognition descends, the tattvas are seen, one at a time or all at once, as the Lord's residence. The verse hands the seeker the map; the Name is what walks it.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Two saints whose practice walked the verse-26 ninety-six.

Sage Kapila, the legendary founder of the Sāṅkhya-darśana, is the source of the technical accounting the verse compresses. The Sāṅkhya-Kārikā of Īśvarakṛṣṇa (4th-5th c CE) preserves the schema in seventy-two Sanskrit verses. The Bhāgavata Purāṇa names Kapila as an avatar of Viṣṇu and stages, in its third book, his teaching to his mother Devahūti. The body image is the sage at the bank of the Sarasvatī, the mother seated before him, the entire Sāṅkhya schema arriving as a son's teaching to his mother, with the bhakti of son-to-mother holding the jñāna of the technical map.

Ādi Śaṅkara, eighth-century Kerala, in his Bhaja Govindam and his Vivekacūḍāmaṇi and his Aparokṣānubhūti, walked the seeker through the tattva-by-tattva recognition while always closing with the bhakti note: the body, the breath, the mind, the intellect, the bliss-sheath, all of these are not the Self; the Self is one with the Lord; bow at the Name. The body image is the saint walking the country at twelve and at thirty, the Sanskrit verses arriving as the seasons changed, the tattva-map being woven into the bhakti-stotra at every step.