The Company of Saints

After five verses building a cathedral of devotion, Dnyaneshwar sets down his tools and says the simplest possible word: easy. Sulabha. The Name is easy. Not powerful, not sublime, not mysterious. Easy. You open your mouth and say Ram. A child can do it. A dying man with his last breath can do it. There is nothing more accessible than a syllable on a human tongue. And then the turn: sarvatra durlabha. Everywhere rare. The same Name. Easy and rare. Both. Simultaneously. Almost no one notices what is right in front of them.

This verse is for you, right now, reading these words. The Name is on your tongue. Not potentially. Not after some preparation. Right now. The rarity is not in the Name. The rarity is in the willingness to say it without requiring proof that it works. Say it. The Name is easy. Begin.

The Living Words

The entire cathedral of six verses is dismantled in a single word. Sulabha. Easy. Jnanadeva mhane nama hen sulabha. Sarvatra durlabha virala jane. Dnyandev says the Name is easy, and everywhere rare, and only the rare one knows this.

Sulabha is su, good or easy, plus labha, obtained. Easily found. The poet who has just invoked Prahlad's persecution and Uddhava's final teaching, who has built sweetness and non-duality and the dissolution of chains, sets his tools down and says: this is easy. No learning. No qualification. Open your mouth.

Then the hinge. Sarvatra durlabha. Everywhere rare. The exact antonym, dur-labha shadowing su-labha, two sounds almost identical, two realities that could not differ more. The Name is easy and the Name is rare. Not a contradiction. A paradox. The rarity is not in the Name. It is in you, walking past the flower in the crack in the sidewalk because you are looking for a garden. Virala jane. Only the rare one knows. And rare does not mean someone else.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

This is the teaching the entire abhanga has been building toward. Six verses of careful construction, and the climax is a paradox.

Why is the Name easy? Because it requires nothing. No initiation. No qualification. No learning. No purity. No special state of mind. You open your mouth and say Ram. Or Krishna. Or Hari. Or any name of the divine. Your tongue can do this right now, this instant, without preparation. A child can do it. An illiterate farmer can do it. A dying man with his last breath can do it. There is nothing in the universe more accessible than a syllable on a human tongue. Sulabha.

Why is the Name rare? Because we do not see what is too close. We look past it. We look through it. We look for something more complicated, more impressive, more worthy of the effort we think liberation should require. We carry the assumption that spiritual attainment must be difficult, must be earned, must come at the end of a long road of striving. And so we walk past the Name the way you walk past a flower growing in a crack in the sidewalk. Not because the flower is hidden. Because you are looking for a garden.

This is the deepest psychology of the spiritual search. The mind is conditioned to seek complexity. The mind believes that what is simple cannot be ultimate. And so the mind, in its very seeking, walks past the thing it seeks.

Dnyaneshwar is not mocking the seeker. He is saying: this is how it works. The Name is sulabha. Your conditioning makes it durlabha. The Name has not hidden itself. Your seeking has hidden the Name.

And then: virala jane. Only the rare one knows. Not the one with the most learning or the most discipline. The rare one is the one who stopped seeking long enough to notice what was already there.

This connects to the first verse of the abhanga. Santance sangati manomargagati. The sant is the virala, the rare one. And what makes the sant rare is not that they possess something you lack. What makes them rare is that they have recognized something you have not yet recognized. The Name that is sulabha, the Name that is right here, the Name that requires nothing. They see it. They taste it. They live in it. And their company can help you see it too.

Rumi said it with his own simplicity: what you seek is seeking you. The distance was never real. It was the seeking itself that created the illusion of distance.

And notice something else. Dnyaneshwar does not say the Name was once easy and has now become rare. He says it is both at the same time. Sulabha and durlabha coexist. In the same moment. For the same person. The Name that is on your tongue right now, the one you can say without any preparation at all, is also the rarest thing in the universe. Not because it has moved. Because you have not looked down at what is already in your hand. The search for God is often the last obstacle to finding God. You are looking so hard at the horizon that you do not notice the ground beneath your feet.

The paradox resolves itself in practice. You cannot think your way through it. But you can chant your way through it. Say the Name. And one day, perhaps today, perhaps in a year, perhaps on your deathbed, you will realize that you have been holding the treasure in your hand the whole time. Not because someone gave it to you. Because it was never not there.

The Haripath's longest abhanga closes with its simplest truth. The Name is easy. The Name is rare. And the rare one is the one who sees that these are not two facts but one.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Tukaram is the living embodiment of the sulabha-durlabha paradox. He was a grocer. Not a Brahmin. Not a scholar. Not a renunciant. A man who sold provisions in a village market in Dehu. And in this ordinary, unelevated life, the Name found him. Or he found the Name. At the level Tukaram lived, the distinction does not hold.

His most powerful testimony is his refusal to make the Name complicated. He did not require Sanskrit learning. He did not require elaborate rituals. He composed in Marathi, the language of the marketplace, and he insisted that the Name was available to everyone. To the Brahmin and the Shudra. To the scholar and the illiterate. To the sinner and the saint. Sulabha. Easy. Right there.

And yet Tukaram also knew the durlabha dimension. His own community rejected him. The Brahmin establishment declared his abhangas invalid because he was not a Brahmin. They forced him to throw his manuscripts into the Indrayani river. The tradition records that the manuscripts floated back, unharmed, after thirteen days. The river itself would not let the Name be silenced. But the rejection reveals the paradox: the Name was available to everyone, and yet almost no one wanted it. The simplicity itself was the obstacle. People preferred the complicated ritual, the exclusive initiation, the structure that told them they were special. The Name, which asked nothing and excluded no one, was too simple to be trusted.

Eknath, the saint of Paithan, grasped the paradox from a different angle. He was a Brahmin, a scholar, a man of deep learning. He could have rested on the elaborate apparatus of Vedic knowledge. Instead, he wrote in Marathi and insisted that the simplest devotion was the most powerful. His acts of dining with untouchables and serving the outcaste were expressions of the sulabha principle: if the Name is available to everyone, then the table must be available to everyone.

Dnyaneshwar himself, the author of this verse, is the original virala. A boy-saint, excommunicated, writing in the common tongue, declaring at fifteen that the entire Bhagavad Gita leads to this: the Name on the lips, the Name in the heart, the Name that is sulabha and durlabha and everything in between. He had tasted the paradox in his own body. Easy and rare. Available and almost missed. The flower in the crack in the sidewalk, blooming for whoever would bend down to look.

And the Warkari vari, the great pilgrimage to Pandharpur, is itself the sulabha principle made visible. Hundreds of thousands of people walking. Not monks. Not scholars. Farmers, weavers, shopkeepers, mothers carrying children. The simplest people doing the simplest thing: putting one foot in front of the other, saying the Name, walking toward Vitthal. No one is excluded. No qualifications are checked at the starting line. The path is open. The Name is easy. And yet, year after year, the world at large ignores this river of devotion flowing through its midst. The pilgrims walk. The world looks the other way. Sulabha. Durlabha. Both at once.