Beyond Knowing and Not-Knowing

Dnyaneshwar opens this abhanga by pulling the ground out from under you. In God, he says, there is no knowing and no not-knowing. The two things you spend your entire spiritual life chasing and fleeing, clarity and confusion, both dissolve in the divine. And then, in the same breath, he puts the Name on your tongue: in the utterance of Hari, look, liberation is always present. Not coming. Not earned. Always.

This verse is for the one who is exhausted from trying to get the spiritual life right. You have been reaching for understanding, measuring your progress, sorting your experiences into clarity and confusion. Dnyaneshwar says: both of those categories dissolve where you are headed. You do not need to achieve a state of perfect knowing. You do not need to escape your confusion. You need only to say the Name. The Name carries you past the place where the mind's sorting is useful, into a territory where liberation was never absent.

The Living Words

The two things you chase and flee all day, clarity and confusion, both dissolve in God. Janivaneniva bhagavantin nahin. Knowing and not-knowing are not there. The two Marathi words mirror each other; the second adds a negation to the first. Janiva is the warmth of recognition, the moment a teaching lands in the chest. Neniva is its shadow, the groping, the fog. Your whole inner life moves between them. Dnyaneshwar says, with the softest violence, that neither belongs to the territory you are headed toward. The medicine and the disease are both absent.

Then the gift. Hariuccarani pahi moksha sada. In the utterance of Hari, see: liberation is always. The load-bearing word is sada: always. Not sometimes, not after sufficient practice. Uccarani is the physical act, sound leaving the throat. The body praying. After dismantling the mind's sorting, Dnyaneshwar does not leave you in silence. He puts a word on your tongue. That word is the bridge across the void the mind cannot cross.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

This is the verse where Dnyaneshwar quietly overturns the table.

Every school of Indian thought has organized itself around one basic structure: ignorance is the disease, knowledge is the medicine. Remove ignorance, install knowledge, and you are free. It is the architecture of liberation. And Dnyaneshwar, who wrote the most celebrated Advaitic commentary in Marathi, who had this architecture at his fingertips, says: in God, knowledge itself is not present. The medicine and the disease are both absent. What remains?

He does not answer that question. He does not say what is present in God. He says only what is absent. This is the via negativa of a teenage saint walking the roads of 13th-century Maharashtra.

In his Amritanubhav, Dnyaneshwar takes this position at length. Essential reality, he writes, is beyond both ignorance and knowledge. It can be touched only when knowledge also retires and becomes silent, like ignorance. Not because knowledge is wrong. Because the thing itself is too vast for the knowing faculty to hold. The cup is not defective. The ocean simply does not fit inside it.

But this is not a counsel of despair. This is the doorway.

Because after taking you to the very edge of what the mind can do, after dissolving the last categories the intellect clings to, Dnyaneshwar does not leave you standing in the void. He puts the Name in your mouth. Hariuccarani pahi moksha sada. Say Hari. Liberation is always there. Look.

This is his signature move, and it is the move of the Haripath itself. He takes you to the cliff where philosophy runs out of ground, and then, at the edge of that cliff, he gives you something to say. The Name is the raft that carries you past the point where the mind's tools fail. You do not need to understand the territory you are entering. You need only to speak, and the Name itself becomes the understanding.

What does this mean for the one who sits in the morning and reaches for clarity? It means the clarity you are reaching for is not the destination. The confusion you are trying to escape is not the obstacle. Both are movements of the same mind, and the mind is not the faculty that meets God. Something deeper meets God. Something that has no name in the epistemological vocabulary. And the Name of Hari is addressed to that depth, not to the intellect that sorts and measures.

The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, writing in fourteenth-century England, arrived at the same shore: God cannot be reached through the intellect; the seeker reaches through love, not understanding. Dnyaneshwar would nod. Not because the two systems agree philosophically. But because both discovered the same thing: the mind is a brilliant servant and a blind guide to the last country. The Name carries you where thinking cannot.

So the verse is not anti-intellectual. It is something subtler. It is the recognition that the divine exceeds every instrument designed to apprehend it. And then the gift: an instrument that does not try to apprehend. The Name does not grasp. It offers. It opens. It steps forward into the dark, and the dark turns out to be full of light.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Tukaram spent his life proving this verse with his body.

A shopkeeper from Dehu, poor enough that creditors followed him down the road, grieving the death of his first wife and child to famine, Tukaram did not arrive at the dissolution of knowing and not-knowing through philosophical study. He arrived through the collapse of everything he thought he knew. His abhangas were born from that collapse. And what they report, again and again, is that the Name did what knowledge could not.

He declared that whatever he attained, he attained through the Name alone. Not through study. Not through yoga. Not through the elaborate rituals the Brahmins performed behind the temple walls he was not welcome to enter. The Vedas were vast, the philosophies were sophisticated. But Tukaram, the shopkeeper, found that the Name carried him to a place where the categories of learned and unlearned no longer applied.

When the Brahmin establishment rejected his compositions and ordered his manuscripts thrown into the Indrayani River, it was the learned measuring the unlearned and finding him wanting. The tradition tells us the manuscripts floated back to the surface, undamaged. The river could not dissolve the Name. Neither could the contempt of the scholars. Whether you read this as history or as the tradition's way of teaching, the meaning is the same: the Name does not require the sanction of the learned to do its work.

Eknath, the Brahmin saint of Paithan, stands as the other side of this coin. He knew the scriptures intimately. His Eknathi Bhagavat is a masterwork of learning. And yet his most radical acts were not scholarly. They were acts of love that broke every rule the learned had established: eating with those society called untouchable, touching what orthodoxy called polluted. The man who "knew" the scriptures better than almost anyone in his generation chose to live as though knowledge itself was not the point. The point was love. Eknath did not reject knowledge. He went where knowledge itself was pointing but could not follow.

And Namdev, the tailor's son who walked to Pandharpur and found God standing on a brick. His realization, after years of external devotion and the guidance of Visoba Khechar, was that God is present everywhere, in everything, as everything. If God is everywhere, then the categories we use to divide reality, known and unknown, pure and impure, sacred and profane, all dissolve. You do not know the ocean. You are in it.

Three saints. Three lives. One discovery: the Name carries you past the place where knowing and not-knowing matter. Tukaram found it through poverty and collapse. Eknath found it through love that broke every boundary. Namdev found it through the slow dissolution of every concept he held about where God was and was not. All three would have heard this verse and recognized their own lives in it.