Beyond Knowing and Not-Knowing

Dnyaneshwar closes this abhanga by opening his hand and showing you what the Name has placed there. The fruit of the Narayana recitation, he says, is this: Vaikuntha has been made everywhere. The supreme abode of God, the place devotees spend lifetimes trying to reach, is not a distant heaven. It is here. The kitchen, the street, the hospital room, the cracked pavement under your ordinary feet. The Name does not take you somewhere else. It shows you where you have always been.

This verse is for the one who is looking for God in the wrong direction. You have been reaching upward, outward, toward some extraordinary experience that will confirm you have arrived. Dnyaneshwar says: the arriving has already happened. Vaikuntha is not the destination. It is the ground you are standing on. The Name did not build it. The Name uncovered it. And now the only thing left is to walk as someone who knows that every step falls on sacred ground.

The Living Words

Jnanadeva phala narayana patha. Sarvatra vaikuntha kelen ase. Dnyandev's fruit is the Narayana recitation; everywhere, Vaikuntha has been made. The signature line does not sign off. It opens the hand and shows you what practice has placed there. The load-bearing word is sarvatra: everywhere. Unqualified. Not in the temple, not in the sacred grove, not in the company of saints. Everywhere.

Vaikuntha is the abode of Vishnu, literally vi-kuntha, the place without anxiety, without obstruction. The destination of all devotion. Dnyaneshwar takes it and dissolves the distance. Kelen ase: has been made. Past tense. Not will be, not can be. Has been. The abhanga that opened by dissolving knowing and not-knowing closes by dissolving here and there. The kitchen, the street, the hospital room, the cracked pavement: all already Vaikuntha. The Name did not build it. The Name uncovered it. You were always here. Here was always enough.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

This verse is the arrival point of the most radical movement in the Haripath. Across twenty-five abhangas, Dnyaneshwar has taken the seeker from the threshold of God's door to a declaration that God's abode is everywhere. The journey is not from here to there. It is the recognition that there is only here.

In the devotional tradition Dnyaneshwar inherited, Vaikuntha is a realm. It exists beyond the material universe. Souls who attain liberation travel there after death and dwell in the presence of Vishnu. The Puranas describe it in vivid detail: palaces of gold and gems, rivers of nectar, the Lord seated on His serpent throne. It is the most desirable destination in the cosmos.

Dnyaneshwar dissolves the distance. Vaikuntha is not a destination. It is a description of what is already the case. The recitation of the Name does not transport you to another realm. It reveals that the realm you are in is already Vaikuntha.

This is the Advaitic insight wrapped in devotional language. Brahman is everywhere. The appearance of a world that is not Brahman is what dissolves when the seeing clears. Dnyaneshwar says the same thing in the language of love: Vaikuntha is everywhere, and the appearance of a world that is not Vaikuntha is what dissolves when the Name is spoken.

What does it mean, practically, that Vaikuntha is everywhere? It means that the kitchen where you wash dishes is Vaikuntha. The hospital room where someone you love is dying is Vaikuntha. The traffic, the difficult conversation, the sleepless night: all Vaikuntha. Not because suffering is imaginary. Not because pain does not matter. But because the divine presence that defines Vaikuntha, the absence of anxiety, the removal of obstruction, is available in every moment that the Name is spoken.

Remember the etymology: vi-kuntha, without anxiety, without limitation. Vaikuntha is not a place of pleasure as opposed to pain. It is a place where the fundamental anxiety of separation from God has been dissolved. And that dissolution can happen anywhere. It is not geography. It is recognition.

Dnyaneshwar calls the Narayana recitation his phala, his fruit. But look at the nature of this fruit. A normal fruit is the end of a process: seed, sapling, flower, fruit. But this fruit, Vaikuntha everywhere, is not the end of a process. It is the discovery that the process was unnecessary. You were always in Vaikuntha. The recitation did not build it. It cleared your eyes so you could see where you were standing.

This connects to everything that came before. When the categories of knowledge are removed, as in verse 1, what remains is not a void. It is Vaikuntha. When the dark age cannot enter, as in verse 2, the space that remains is Vaikuntha. When the Vedas cannot measure it, as in verse 3, the unmeasurable territory is Vaikuntha. Each verse has been pointing here. The entire abhanga is a single gesture: the progressive removal of everything that obscured what was always present.

Meister Eckhart said: God is at home; it is we who have gone out for a walk. The divine dwelling is not distant. We have wandered from it. And the wandering is a kind of forgetfulness, not a change in geography. When the forgetfulness lifts, we discover that we were always home.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

The Warkari tradition has always known Vaikuntha was closer than the theologians said.

Tukaram did not dream of Vaikuntha as a distant realm. He found it in Pandharpur, in the presence of Vitthal standing on His brick. His description of complete happiness is simply looking at the Lord who stood there, dark-skinned, hands on hips, waiting on a single brick at the edge of the Chandrabhaga River. When the tradition records that Tukaram departed bodily to Vaikuntha, the deeper teaching is not that he traveled somewhere far away. The boundary between where he stood and Vaikuntha had already dissolved. The chariot did not take him to a new place. It confirmed he was already there.

Pandharpur itself, for the Warkaris, is Vaikuntha on earth. When the pilgrims walk the vari, the biannual pilgrimage from Dehu and Alandi through the Maharashtra countryside to the banks of the Chandrabhaga, they are not traveling to a temple. They are walking into Vaikuntha. The road is the destination. Every step is an utterance. Every utterance is a step into the abode of God. And the songs they sing while walking are the very songs of the Haripath. Dnyaneshwar's verses are on their lips, turning the dust of the road into sacred ground.

Janabai, grinding flour at the millstone in Namdev's household, was in Vaikuntha. The songs say God stood at the millstone and ground the grain with her. The kitchen was the abode. The millstone was the throne. The grinding was the worship. No distance. No travel. No elsewhere. A woman with flour on her hands and the Name on her lips, and all of Vaikuntha right there in the rhythmic turning of the stone.

Chokhamela, standing outside the temple walls, barred from entry by the machinery of caste. If Vaikuntha is everywhere, then it is outside the walls as much as inside them. The untouchable standing in the dust was standing in the abode of God. The boundary the priests enforced was a human invention. Vaikuntha did not recognize it. Chokhamela's bones, tradition says, were still vibrating with the name of Vitthal when they were found. The man they would not let inside the temple had been inside Vaikuntha the entire time.

Namdev, after years of external devotion and the transforming encounter with Visoba Khechar, realized that God is everywhere, in everything, as everything. If God is everywhere, then every place is God's dwelling. And God's dwelling is Vaikuntha. The tailor's son who had been seeking God in one particular temple discovered that the temple was as wide as the world.

Dnyaneshwar's closing verse affirms what the tradition knew in its bones: the practice of the Name does not take you somewhere else. It shows you where you have always been. The Warkaris understood this. They walked hundreds of miles to Pandharpur, and the walking was the arriving. Every step was Vaikuntha. Every song was the abode of God. Every pilgrim carrying a tulsi plant on their head was carrying the temple with them.