Harināma Kīrtanam · Verse 4

The fourth verse is a single trace of light, drawn backwards. The sun lights the room. The eye gathers the light. Behind the eye is the eye of mind. Behind the mind is the seeing essence which is itself the seer. And then, in the last line, Ezhuthachan stops tracing and gasps. Vānandamentu. What is the joy.

If you have come to this verse expecting a difficult metaphysical argument, you will be surprised. The argument is simple. Every light you have ever seen has reached you because something in you was lit first. Find that. The argument does not require you to leave the world. It requires you to look back along the light to its source.

If you have come to this verse exhausted by inner work and wondering if there is any joy at the end of the road, the verse promises one thing. The joy is not in arrival; the joy is in the moment the recognition lands. Tān-ennu uṟaykkum aḷavu: the very moment you become sure that you ARE the seer the world has been lit by. The verse does not delay the joy until later. It puts the joy in the landing itself.

The Living Words

Arkkānalādi veḷivokke grahikkumoru kaṇṇu. The eye that grasps every light, sun and fire and so on. Arkka is the sun; anala is fire; ādi is and so on. Veḷivu is the Malayalam word for light, brightness, the visible. Grahikkuka is to grasp, to receive. The phrase names the visible eye, the Sanskrit cakṣus, the organ that catches what is bright. Ezhuthachan begins where every reader begins: the eye in the head.

Manamākunna kaṇṇu. The eye that is the mind. Manas is the mind; manamākunna is the active participle, which has become, which is. Ezhuthachan locates a second eye, behind the first. The mind sees what the eye has gathered. Without the mind, the eye is open and sees nothing. The Sanskrit canon will call this second eye manaso manaḥ, the mind of the mind, in the next verse of the Kena Upaniṣad.

Kaṇṇāyirunna poruḷ. The essence which is the eye. Poruḷ, the Malayalam word the verse 1 commentary unfolded, returns: meaning itself, the kernel, the indwelling truth of the thing. Kaṇṇāyirunna is the active form, which has been the eye. The phrase names a third eye, behind the second. The Self is the eye of the mind. Without the Self, the mind, even when it is open, sees nothing.

Tān-ennu uṟaykkum aḷavu. In the very moment one is sure that one IS that. Tān is one's own self; enn is thus; uṟaykkum is firms, settles, becomes certain. The Malayalam word uṟaykka in this lineage hears as firming, not flashing: not a sudden glare, but a quiet settling of the weight. Aḷavu is measure, moment. The recognition is not a gradual arrival. It is the moment the inner ground steadies under the seeing.

Vānandamentu. What is the joy. Vā is an interjection of wonder. Ānandam is the bliss of the recognition; entu is the question-word, what. The Malayalam grammar refuses to contain the joy: it does not describe; it gasps. Ānanda in this canon is not pleasure, not relief, not the absence of trouble. It is the natural luminescence of the Self when the Self has been recognized as itself. The Bhagavad Gītā will name this same Self, two verses later than its Sanskrit cognate of this verse, as the Light of all lights.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

Verse 4 is the Kena Upaniṣad in four Malayalam lines.

The Kena begins by asking: who sends the eye to its work, who sends the mind to its thinking, who breathes the breath? The answer it gives is one of the simplest in the Vedic canon. The eye that you call yours is sent by an eye behind it. The mind you call yours is moved by a mind behind it. Cakṣuṣaḥ cakṣuḥ. The eye of the eye. Manaso manaḥ. The mind of the mind. The Kena does not name the One behind these inner organs; it only points behind. Verse 4 of the Harināma Kīrtanam does the same gesture in Malayalam. The eye, behind the eye, behind the mind, the seeing essence, which is itself the seer. Whoever follows the line of light backwards will arrive at the same place the Kena's pupil arrives.

Why does the Kena, and Ezhuthachan after him, refuse to stop with the eye in the head? Because the eye in the head is not actually doing the seeing. The Krishna Priya gloss puts it in plain English: it is not the mind's own ability; the ever-enlightened Self stands behind the mind and helps to perceive the light. The eye is an organ of borrowed light. The mind is a second organ of borrowed light. The Self is the lender. When the lender stops lending, the lights go out. When the lender is recognized, what is the joy.

The Bhagavad Gītā, in its thirteenth chapter, names the same teaching. Jyotiṣām api taj jyotis tamasaḥ param ucyate. That is called the Light of all lights, beyond darkness. Krishna does not say the Self is another light, brighter than the rest. He says the Self is the lighting in every light. Sun, eye, lamp, mind: each one shines because the Self is shining behind it. The Kaṭha Upaniṣad, in a verse the entire Vedic tradition has memorized, gives the same image its full reach. Tameva bhāntam anubhāti sarvaṁ; tasya bhāsā sarvam idaṁ vibhāti. By his shining, all this shines; by his light, all this is lit. There the sun does not shine, nor the moon and the stars, nor the lightnings. He shines, and they shine after him.

If you have come to this verse with eyes that have been tired by what they have seen, the verse is for you. Ezhuthachan does not ask you to close them. He asks you to trace the light back along the same line your eyes have been used for. The same eye that watched a parent suffer is also the eye through which the light of awareness has been arriving for as long as you have lived. The light did not pause when the suffering came. The light did not pause when you closed the eye. The lender does not stop lending; the lender is what sees behind the closed eye.

The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, in the long fourth chapter where Yājñavalkya teaches King Janaka, names the seer behind the mind as antar-jyotiḥ puruṣaḥ, the inner-light Person who lives in the heart, among the breaths. He does not call this Person far. He calls this Person vijñānamaya, made of consciousness, present in the very thinking by which you read this sentence. The teaching is not about a remote light at the end of a long road. The teaching is about the light under your reading, right now.

If you have come to this verse with a tired faith, with a long history of practice and not enough to show for it, with the suspicion that the joy you have been promised has been delayed indefinitely, the verse offers one substitution. Stop waiting for the joy. Trace the light back. The joy is not at the end of the line; the joy is the line being traced. Tasya bhāsā sarvam idaṁ vibhāti. By his light, all this is lit. Including the part of you that has been tired.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Four saints, each on a different soil, made the trace audible.

Tirumūlar, the ancient Tamil Siddhar of the Tirumantiram, gave the tradition a Tamil name for the seer behind the mind. Vetta veli, the cosmic sky of consciousness in which body, mind, and world all appear and disappear. The legend records that he had been a yogi from the Himalayas who entered the body of a dead cowherd named Mūlar in order to teach Śaiva yoga in Tamil; the cowherd's body became the saint's body for the rest of his life, and the verses that came out of that body are the Tirumantiram. The legend is myth-form. The three thousand verses are not. He named the same Self that Yājñavalkya called antar-jyotiḥ, in a Tamil that any cattle-tender could speak.

Jñāneśvara, thirteenth-century Maharashtra, wrote the verse-4 teaching as a long Marathi commentary on the Gītā. He was an outcast Brahmin's outcast son, born to a father who had broken his vows; the orthodox Brahmins of Alandi refused him the sacred thread and the Sanskrit education he was due. He wrote the Jñāneśvarī in the Marathi the village spoke. The commentary's centre of gravity is Gītā 13.18, jyotiṣām api taj jyotiḥ; he unfolds it for chapters. At twenty-one, in the year 1296, he asked his elder brothers to take him to a small underground chamber under the Siddheśvara temple at Alandi. He went down the steps in his own body, sat in meditation, and asked the door to be sealed. The shrine has not been opened since. The Vārkari pilgrims walk to it twice a year, in millions, and the small chamber is the verse-4 kaṇṇāyirunna poruḷ in stone.

Janabai, fourteenth-century Pandharpur, lived the verse-4 trace at a millstone. The grinding stone made its slow revolution while the household slept; her hand turned the upper stone over the lower; the wheat broke between them. She was a maidservant in the home of Sant Nāmdev, and she had no education and very little time, and she composed abhangas in the slow time of the grinding. The tradition records that on certain nights, when her arms were too tired to keep going, the Lord Viṭṭhala himself would come down from the temple and turn the stone with her, hand on her hand. The image is the truest verse-4 image in this gallery. The eye in her hand was Janabai's. The eye behind the hand was Viṭṭhala's. Kaṇṇāyirunna poruḷ. The Self that lit the hand that lit the stone. The reader who has been tired in a kitchen, in a hospital, on a night shift, can stand next to her and recognize.

Kabīr, fifteenth-century Banaras, dictated the verse-4 teaching as dohās his weaver's hands could not write down. He was illiterate; the disciples wrote. The teaching he kept hammering: the lamp is burning inside the house, and you have been searching for it outside. The body image is the loom, the weaving fingers, the song that ran across the warp threads as he worked. The story the tradition has kept of his death: when his body lay covered with a cloth in Maghar, his Hindu followers and his Muslim followers came to claim it for cremation and burial; when the cloth was lifted, the body had become flowers, and the two communities divided the flowers between them. The story is myth-form. The dohās, which still get sung in north Indian villages and concert halls, are not.