Verse 60 of 68
Harināma Kīrtanam · Verse 60
വദനം നമുക്കു ശിഖി വസനങ്ങൾ സന്ധ്യകളു-
മുദരം നമുക്കുദധിയുലകേഴുരണ്ടുമിഹ
ഭുവനം നമുക്കു ശിവനേത്രങ്ങൾ രാത്രിപക-
ലകമേ ഭവിപ്പതിനു നാരായണായ നമഃvadanaṁ namukku śikhi vasanaṅṅaḷ sandhyakaḷu- mudaraṁ namukkudadhiyulakēḻuraṇṭumiha bhuvanaṁ namukku śivanētraṅṅaḷ rātripaka- lakamē bhavippatinu nārāyaṇāya namaḥ
“Our mouth is the fire; our garments are the twilights; our belly is the ocean and the seven worlds. The world is ours; Śiva's eyes are night and day, let all of this come to live within. Salutation to Hari Nārāyaṇa.”
The sixtieth verse holds the Virāṭ Puruṣa image (already cited in verse 16) at full personal scale. Our mouth is the fire; our garments are the twilights; our belly is the ocean and the seven worlds. The world is ours; Śiva's eyes are night and day, let all of this come to live within. The verse compresses the Puruṣa Sūkta's cosmic Person into the seeker's own body and asks the cosmic body to come reside within the personal body.
If you have come to this verse aware that the cosmos has been described in many places as the Lord's body and not aware that your own body is also being described, the verse closes the gap. The cosmic Person is not somewhere else; the seeker's body, in its true measure, is the same body.
The Living Words
Vahniḥ vaktraṁ saṁdhyē vasanaṁ udaraṁ samudro 'bdhi-sapta-bhuvanaṁ. Fire is the mouth; the twilights (dawn and dusk) are the garment; the belly is the ocean and the seven worlds. The verse cites the Puruṣa Sūkta image directly. Vahni is fire; vaktra is mouth; saṁdhyē is twilights; vasana is garment; udara is belly.
Loka-asmākam Śiva-akṣiṇī rātri-divau iha vāsam āyatu Hari Nārāyaṇāya namaḥ. The world is ours; Śiva's eyes are night and day, let all of this come to live within. Akṣi is eye; rātri-divau is night and day.
Scripture References
The Person has a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet; he covered the earth from every side.
सहस्रशीर्षा पुरुषः सहस्राक्षः सहस्रपात् ।
sahasra-śīrṣā puruṣaḥ sahasrākṣaḥ sahasra-pāt |
The Person has a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet.
Re-cited from verse 16. The Puruṣa Sūkta's cosmic Person is the verse-60 *cosmic-body-becomes-our-body*. The fire-as-mouth, twilights-as-garments, etc., are the Sūkta's specific image-list, here folded into the bhakti-prayer.
The Heart of It
The Puruṣa Sūkta's image, cited in verse 16, is here turned into a personal possession. The world is ours. The Sanskrit canon's cosmic-Person schema says: the sun is his eye, the moon is his mind, the wind is his breath, the gods are his body's parts. Verse 60 takes the same schema and gives it the asmākam (ours) inflection. The cosmic body and the seeker's body are not in different places.
The verse closes with one of the work's tenderest pleas: iha vāsam āyatu, let it come to live in this place. The seeker is not asking to leave his body to enter the cosmic Person; the seeker is asking the cosmic Person to come live in his body. The Vaiṣṇava-Tantric aṅga-nyāsa of verse 58 is the practical method; verse 60 is the bhakti-tradition's affective version: the cosmic Person comes home, in this body.
The seeker is not asking to leave his body to enter the cosmic Person; the seeker is asking the cosmic Person to come live in his body.
The Saints Who Walked This Road
Two saints whose practice walked the verse-60 Virāṭ-becomes-our-body.
Arjuna (already in verses 16, 37, 45), at the moment of the Viśvarūpa-darśana in Bhagavad Gītā 11, saw the cosmic Person filling all space, with mouths of fire and worlds in the belly, and was overwhelmed. After the vision, he asked Krishna to return to the four-armed form. The verse-60 plea is the inverse: the seeker asks the cosmic Person, not the four-armed form, to come live within. The body image is the warrior at the chariot-floor, the vision passing, the inner-translation of the vision into the householder body's own hours.
Bhīṣma, in the Mahābhārata on his bed of arrows, recited the Viṣṇu Sahasranāma (the Thousand Names of Viṣṇu) to Yudhiṣṭhira. Each name is a feature of the cosmic Person; reciting the thousand is, in the Sanskrit-Vaiṣṇava tradition, the practice of placing the cosmic Person within. Body image: the dying grandfather on the bed of arrows, the recitation arriving in his last days, the Sanskrit thousand-names as the verse-60 vāsam-āyatu in slow, complete form.
The Refrain
ഹരി നാരായണായ നമഃ
Salutation to Hari Nārāyaṇa.