Harināma Kīrtanam · Verse 47

The forty-seventh verse names the deepest claim of the work explicitly. There is the truth-meaning of all this. At the foot of you who shine within sounds, your own words say: this very sound is the cause of liberation. The verse points to the Veda itself as testimony: the Sanskrit-Vedic śruti tradition has, the verse claims, named the sound (the Name, the Om, the praṇava) as the cause of mukti. The seeker is not making this up. The seeker is being told this by the very Lord-of-sounds whose own scripture is being cited.

If you have come to this verse with the suspicion that nāma-yoga is a private invention, the verse points back to the Veda: the practice the work has been advocating since verse 5 is, by the Lord's own words, the Vedic-canonical way out.

The Living Words

Tatva-arttham ittham akhilattinnu uṇḍu bata. The truth-meaning of all this exists, alas (the bata here is wonder, not lament). Tatva-arttha is the truth-meaning, the kernel-meaning; akhila is all this.

Śabdaṅṅaḷ-uḷḷil vilasīṭunna ninn-aḍiyil mukti-kku kāraṇam itē-śabdam-ennu tava vākyaṅṅaḷ tanne Hari Nārāyaṇāya namaḥ. At the foot of you who shine within sounds, that this very sound is the cause of liberation is what your own words say. Śabda is sound; vākya is word, sentence.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

The verse claims that the Veda itself has named the sound (the Name, the praṇava, the mantra) as the mukti-kāraṇa, the cause of liberation. The Sanskrit śabda-brahman tradition holds this explicitly: the Bhagavad Gītā 8.11 says the Veda-vidaḥ call this akṣara (the imperishable syllable Om). The Bhāgavata 2.4.18 names the nāma as the eka-mātra-anyathā-akṣayaṁ, the unwasting syllable. The Padma Purāṇa, the Bṛhan-Nāradīya, all converge on this: the Lord's name is the cause of liberation.

The verse-47 claim is not new doctrine; it is reminding the reader that the doctrine has always been here, in the Veda, and is being repeated in Malayalam for the Kerala householder who has not, perhaps, read the Sanskrit śruti. Tava vākyaṅṅaḷ tanne, your own words alone: Ezhuthachan is not advocating a private practice; he is repeating the Lord's own scripture in the language of the people.

The seeker, by this verse, is being relieved of any anxiety that he is doing something idiosyncratic. The Name is the way the Veda names. The seeker is in the middle of the śruti-tradition, not outside it.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Two saints whose work was the verse-47 Veda-in-the-vernacular gesture.

Ezhuthachan himself, sixteenth-century Kerala, is the primary figure of this verse. Tradition records him as the Father of the Malayalam language: he composed the Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇam Kiḷipāṭṭu (the Rāmāyaṇa told by a parrot in alphabet-keyed Malayalam) and the Mahābhārata Kiḷipāṭṭu and the Harināma Kīrtanam itself. Each of his works does the verse-47 move: take what the Sanskrit Veda-Vedānta tradition has named in its own language and re-name it in the language the Kerala householder actually speaks. Body image: the saint at his small house in Tirur, the parrot-format devised so that even the most illiterate child could memorize the verses, the alphabet-key designed so that Malayalam itself becomes a Vedic instrument.

Sant Jñāneśvara (already in verse 4) did the same gesture in Marathi. The Jñāneśvarī, his commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā, was composed at Newasa in the late thirteenth century when Marathi was still considered a prākṛta-vernacular unfit for sacred discourse. Jñāneśvara wrote the entire commentary in Marathi ovī-meter, declared the Veda's own words to be available to the speakers of any language, and gave the bhakti-tradition its central Marathi text. The body image is the boy at the small temple at Newasa, the Jñāneśvarī arriving in seven thousand verses at the age of sixteen.