Harināma Kīrtanam · Verse 29

The twenty-ninth verse holds one of the most piercing self-images in the work. Inside the fig fruit, the worm believes there is no pleasure higher than this. The seeker, watching himself, recognizes the worm in himself: convinced, by the small range of what he can see, that the body and the world are the highest possible enjoyment. The verse asks the Lord not to let the seeker stay deluded inside the fig.

Krishna Priya's gloss is plain. A worm born and living inside the sweet fig fruit feels there is no pleasure higher than it as it had seen only the inside of fig fruit. Similar to that, due to illusion which is also a part of Lord, one may feel this body and the related things are true and the pleasure felt through these attaches one to body and forgets one's true self. The verse names the situation, asks the Lord to prevent the deepening of the delusion, and bows.

If you have come to this verse aware that your sense of the highest happiness possible may be limited by the small fruit you have grown up inside, the verse hands you the simplest plea. Let me not be deluded. The verse does not require the seeker to escape the fig. The verse asks the Lord to keep the seeker awake while still inside it.

The Living Words

Audumbarattil masakattinu thōnnum itu mīte kim api sukham illennu tal-paricu. The fig-worm thinks that beyond this there is no possible happiness. Audumbara is the fig; masaka is the small fly or worm that lives inside the fig; thōnnu is to feel, to think; kim api sukham illa is no other happiness; tal-paricu is with that habitual conviction.

Ceto-vimohini-māyā mayakkaika tava deha-aham-ennivayil. Let your delusive Māyā not deceive me, in such notions as body and I. Ceto-vimohini is that which deludes the heart-mind; māyā is the divine illusion; mayakkaika is please do not let it stupefy; deha is body; aham is I. The verse explicitly names the two delusions: identification with the body and identification with the limited I.

Hari Nārāyaṇāya namaḥ. Salutation.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

The fig-worm image is brutal in its kindness. The worm is not stupid. The worm is doing perfectly well, by its own measure. The fig is sweet, the fig is the world, the fig contains everything the worm has known. The worm has no occasion to suspect that anything outside the fig exists, much less anything sweeter. The seeker, in his own life, has no occasion to suspect that anything beyond the body, the family, the work, and the small daily pleasures exists. Tal-paricu, by habit, by long custom, the seeker concludes that the small range of his experience is the entire field of possible happiness.

The verse is asking the Lord to break this conclusion not by destroying the fig, but by preventing the worm from staying deluded inside it. The fig is fine. The worm is fine. The error is the worm's belief that this is all there is.

The Bhāgavata Purāṇa, in its eleventh book, gives a similar image. Yathā vāyur ākāśam apāram apracāra-citram: as wind moves in the boundless sky and yet the sky is undisturbed, so the seer is in the body but the body's pleasures and pains do not finally bind. The Bhāgavata's Sanskrit ground is the same as the verse's Malayalam: the seer is in the body, like a wind in the sky, but the seer is not the body's small fig-pleasure.

Krishna Priya is honest about why the delusion is so durable. The pleasure felt through these attaches one to body and forgets one's true self. The pleasure is real. The body is real. The fig is sweet. The error is not in tasting; the error is in concluding that the tasting is the whole. The verse is not anti-pleasure. The verse is anti-conclusion. The seeker may continue to enjoy what the body enjoys; the seeker is asked only to stop concluding that the body's small audumbara is the entire range of possible joy.

The Bhagavad Gītā says it more sharply in its second chapter. Mātrā-sparśās tu kaunteya śītoṣṇa-sukha-duḥkha-dāḥ; āgamāpāyino'nityāḥ tāṁs titikṣasva bhārata. The contacts with the senses, son of Kuntī, give cold and heat, pleasure and pain; they come and go, they are impermanent; bear them, Bhārata. Krishna does not say avoid them. He says bear them, knowing they are impermanent. Verse 29's plea is for the same: let the impermanent be experienced as impermanent, not concluded as ultimate.

The verse closes with one of its most personal phrases. Mayakkaika, please do not stupefy me. The Sanskrit-Malayalam mayakkam is the dazed, half-drunk state of one who has just come out of sleep but has not quite woken. The seeker is asking the Lord to keep him from this half-drunk state inside the fig. The asking, said at all, is itself the first awakening: the worm who has begun to ask whether the fig is everything has, in that asking, already opened a small hole in the fig's wall.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Two saints whose practice walked the verse-29 fig.

Buddha (Gautama, 6th-5th c BCE) walked out of a different palace fig: a Śākya prince's palace where every form of pleasure had been arranged so the prince would not see suffering. The legend records the four sights (the old man, the sick man, the corpse, the renunciate) as the moment the wall of the palace-fig opened and Gautama saw what had been hidden. The body image is the prince at the palace gate at twenty-nine, the chariot returning, the silent decision to leave. The bhakti tradition does not always include Buddha as a saint of its own lineage, but the verse-29 image of the worm in the fig names the Gautama-recognition before the recognition has a name.

Sant Tukārām (re-used here in a different aspect) records, in his abhangas, the years when the small grocer's-fig of his life seemed sufficient. The collapse of his shop in the Maharashtrian famines, the death of his wife and child, the loss of his family's small wealth: each of these was a tear in the fig. He emerged from the tearing as the saint the Vārkari tradition has held as central. The body image is the grocer at his ruined shop, the abhangas arriving as the small fig's wall thinned.