Harināma Kīrtanam · Verse 9

The ninth verse holds the most yogic image in the work. A green parrot, a coral, a vessel of milk: three colors, blended in one form, sought by those who set out to find the Lord through the body's own ladder. Past the six chakras, ṣaḍ-ādhāra. Past the threefold fork of sattva, rajas, tamas. The form named at the end of the verse is the same Lord, bheda-hari, the one who removes the distinctions. The colored vision is the door. The One without color is the room.

If you have come to this verse with a body that cannot do yoga, with a chronic pain or a disability that makes the climb of the chakras a foreign country, the verse is not asking you to climb. It names the climb that some seekers make, names the colors they see, and walks past all of it to the same Lord every other verse has been calling. The body that cannot climb the ladder can still bow. Hari Nārāyaṇāya namaḥ.

If you have come to this verse with a body that has done yoga and seen colors and felt confused about what the colors meant, the verse is the door from confusion to recognition. The colors are not the destination. The Lord beyond the colors is.

The Living Words

Pacca-kkiḷi paviḻa pāl-varṇam. Green-parrot, coral, milk-color. Three Tantric colors of the visualized form: paccak-kiḷi is green-parrot, the bright green of the South Indian kiḷi; paviḻa is coral, the red of sea-coral; pāl-varṇam is milk-color, the white of fresh milk. The Krishna Priya tradition reads the three: green for tamas (the dark, inert), coral for rajas (the active, fiery), milk-white for sattva (the pure, lucid). This color-mapping is one devotional reading; the older Sāṅkhya tradition places different colors on the same three guṇas. Whichever reading one takes, the Lord's form holds all three.

Ottanira michippavarkku. For those who set out to follow the colors. Otta is blended, joined; nira is line, sequence; michippavar is those who set out, those who pursue. The Malayalam grammar names a particular kind of seeker: the one who follows the colors as they appear at each chakra, ladder by ladder.

Ṣaḍ-ādhāraṁ kaṭannupari. Crossing past the six supports. Ṣaḍ is six; ādhāra is support, foundation; kaṭannu is having crossed; upari is above, beyond. The six ādhāras are the six chakras of the Tantric body: mūlādhāra (root), svādhiṣṭhāna (sex), maṇipūra (navel), anāhata (heart), viśuddha (throat), ājñā (brow). Above them is the sahasrāra, the thousand-petalled lotus at the crown.

Viśva-sthiti pralaya-sṛṣṭikku. For the world's sustenance, dissolution, and creation. Sthiti is sustenance; pralaya is dissolution; sṛṣṭi is creation. The three cosmic functions of the threefold guṇas: rajas creates, sattva sustains, tamas dissolves.

Satva-rajas-tamo-bheda-hari. The Hari who removes the distinctions of sattva, rajas, and tamas. Bheda is distinction, division; hari is read here as the one who takes away. The verse names the One above the three colors and the six chakras as the Lord whose nature is to take the distinctions away.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

The verse opens by drawing the seeker into the Tantric vision. Three colors. Six chakras. A ladder of the body that some yogis make, by sustained practice, into the way they reach the One.

But the deepest claim of the verse is at its very end. Bheda-hari: the Lord whose name Hari means the one who takes, here naming the Lord as the one who takes away the very distinctions the verse has just named. The Bhagavad Gītā gives the Sanskrit form. Tribhir guṇa-mayair bhāvair ebhiḥ sarvam idaṁ jagat; mohitaṁ nābhijānāti mām ebhyaḥ param avyayam. Deluded by these three states arising from the guṇas, this whole world does not recognize me, who am beyond them, imperishable. Krishna's param avyayam, beyond them, imperishable, is Ezhuthachan's bheda-hari. The verse names the colored journey, names the three forces that bind, and ends by naming the Lord who is past all of it.

If you have come to this verse and felt that the Tantric vocabulary belongs to people more disciplined than you are, the verse is gentler than the suspicion. The verse does not require the climb. The verse only requires the recognition that the One the climber is climbing toward is the same One a sleeper, a child, a tired worker can call by name.

Krishna Priya's gloss is honest about the climb. Some people take Hatha yoga and Kundalini rising practices in order to realize the Lord's presence and union with Lord. Only through Lord's grace can one do and reach such a state. Two truths in one breath. The path is real. The grace is what walks the path. The Tantric tradition does not pretend that the climber climbs by his own will alone. The grace of Hari is what lifts the body up the ladder, one chakra at a time, and finally past the ladder altogether.

The Bhagavad Gītā, in its fourteenth chapter, named the same threefold structure. Sattvaṁ rajas tama iti guṇāḥ prakṛti-sambhavāḥ; nibadhnanti mahā-bāho dehe dehinam avyayam. Sattva, rajas, and tamas, the three qualities born of prakṛti, bind the imperishable embodied one inside the body. Krishna does not say the three are illusions; he says they are real qualities of prakṛti, real binders. The verse-9 colors are the Tantric body of these three Sanskrit nouns.

The Tantric tradition formalized the climb in later texts like the Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa of Pūrṇānanda, which describes the six lotus-centers and the thousand-petalled crown as the Sanskrit body of the practitioner. Verse 9 is not a primer on this body; it names the climb as one path among others, and points past it.

If you have come to this verse with a body that has seen colors in meditation and felt confused about what they meant, the verse is for you. The colors are not the destination. The verse is not asking you to interpret what you saw, or to test whether you saw correctly. The verse asks only that, after the colors have come and gone, the bow happen anyway. Hari Nārāyaṇāya namaḥ. Tonight, before sleep, the bow alone is enough. The Lord called bheda-hari knows what to do with the colors.

The deepest claim of the verse is its closing. Hari Nārāyaṇāya namaḥ. The same closing as every other verse in this work. The Tantric vision, the colored climb, the chakra-by-chakra journey: all of it ends in the same bow. The Lord who is beyond the colors is the Lord who has been receiving the bow at the end of every verse.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Four saints walked the Tantric ladder of the body and named what they found.

Matsyendranāth, tenth-century Bengal-Assam border, was the founder of the Nātha lineage of Tantric yoga and the traditional author of the Kaulajñāna-nirṇaya. The legend records him as a fisherman in the river delta who, by chance, overheard Śiva teaching Pārvatī the secret yoga from inside the belly of the fish he had caught, and emerged from his apprenticeship as the first human inheritor of the teaching. The legend is myth-form. The body image is the fisherman who pulled the net up and found himself holding a tradition.

Gorakhnāth, eleventh-twelfth-century north India, was Matsyendranāth's disciple and the central figure of the Nātha-Yogī movement that gave India both the Haṭha-Yoga-Pradīpikā and the lineage Kabīr would inherit. The body image is the wandering yogī with the jhola (the cloth bag), the staff, the kuṇḍala earrings of the Nāthas, walking from one math to the next. The body itself, in his teaching, is the ladder of the chakras; the kuṇḍalinī is the ādhāra-by-ādhāra climb.

Lalleśvarī, Lal Ded, fourteenth-century Kashmir, was a saint shaped by the non-dual Trika tradition of Kashmir, though her affiliation across Śaiva and Sufi readings has been read in more than one way for seven centuries. She composed vakhs, four-line Kashmiri verses that name the chakra journey in the language of the village rather than the Sanskrit of the priests. She walked the Kashmir valley with little or no clothing in protest of the customs that asked her to hide her body from itself. The body image is the woman on the riverbank near Pampore, dancing if the song moved her, falling silent if it did not, attending only to the inner column the Tantra has been describing.

Akkamahādevī, twelfth-century Karnataka, was a Vīraśaiva saint who called Cennamallikārjuna her only one. She walked away from her royal husband, walked the Deccan with her hair as her only clothing, attended at the Anubhava Maṇṭapa of Bāsava in Kalyāṇa, and composed vacanas in Kannada that are the regional cousin of Lal Ded's vakhs. The body image is the bare-foot walk to Śrīśaila, the inner liṅga called by name Cenna (the beautiful) for as many miles as the road had.