Harināma Kīrtanam · Verse 50

The fiftieth verse names the I-thought once more, this time as a forest. I am blessed. I am respectable. I am the man who has done meritorious deeds. See, the verse says, that is no single creature; that is a whole forest of wild elephants gathered together. The seeker is being shown that what he calls I is not a unified person but a herd of separate self-images, each as large as an elephant, each charging in a different direction. The unity is illusory; the herd is real.

If you have come to this verse exhausted by the multiple selves you carry (the professional self, the family self, the spiritual self, the secret self), the verse names the multiplication and offers no quick fix. The verse's gift is the recognition itself: this is what is happening; this is the I the seeker has been treating as one.

The Living Words

Dhanyō'ham ennum iti mānyō'ham ennum iti puṇyaṅṅaḷ ceyta puruṣan ñān-ennum iti. I am blessed; I am honored; I am the man who has done meritorious deeds. The verse uses three Sanskrit-style first-person assertions, each ending in iti (thus, in this way).

Onnalla kāṇkoru koṭuṅ-kāṭu-danti-mayam onniccu kūḍiyatu Hari Nārāyaṇāya namaḥ. That is not one; see, it is a fierce forest made of elephants gathered together. Onnalla is not one; koṭuṅ-kāṭu is fierce/dense forest; danti is elephant; onniccu kūḍiyatu is gathered together as one.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

The verse uses the forest-of-elephants image to name what the seeker calls his I. Each self-assertion (I am blessed, I am honored, I am the meritorious one) is, on this telling, a separate elephant in the same forest. The elephants are not coordinated. They charge in different directions. The seeker who tries to keep them all happy is the small herd-keeper running between them.

The Sanskrit canon's name for this is ahaṁ-vṛtti, the I-modification of the mind. The Yoga Sūtra and the Sāṅkhya tradition name ahaṁ-vṛtti as one, but the bhakti-tradition (especially the Bhāgavata's seventh book on Prahlāda's teaching) repeatedly notes that the ahaṁ-vṛtti fragments the moment it identifies with multiple roles. I am the king, I am the father, I am the warrior, I am the devotee: each role becomes a separate vṛtti; the seeker becomes a herd-keeper.

The verse does not offer a yoga-technique to consolidate the herd. The verse only names the situation. The implicit claim of the surrounding verses (47, 48, 49) is the same as before: the bhakti at the feet is the only place the herd can be set down. The seeker who bows is not consolidating his I; he is laying down all the I-elephants at once, on the same ground.

If you have come to this verse with a sense that you are many people at once and that the multiplicity is exhausting, the verse names the experience and gives it a name: a forest of wild elephants. The exhaustion is not your failure. The exhaustion is the natural consequence of trying to be a herd-keeper. The bow lays the herd down.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Two saints who laid the verse-50 elephants down.

Sant Bahinābāī (already in verse 21), seventeenth-century Maharashtra, the Brahmin-married female disciple of Tukārām, named her own I-elephants in many of her abhangas: I am the wife, I am the Brahmin's wife, I am the silenced one, I am the writer in secret. She did not consolidate them; she offered them all at once. The abhangas record the laying-down. The body image is the woman at the inner room of the household, each I-role of the day setting itself down at the edge of the page where the abhanga was being secretly written.

Āṇṭāḷ (already in verse 3), the Tamil Āḻvār, lived only sixteen years and refused every social I-role her father offered her. I am not the marriageable daughter, I am not the temple-priest's foster-child, I am the gopi who waits for Krishna at Vrindavan. The Tiruppāvai's thirty verses are the laying-down of the I-roles in favor of the single bhāva. The body image is the small girl at the temple gate, the garlands falling from her, the body finally walking into the inner sanctum at Srirangam where no role was needed.