That Beautiful Vision

Before Dnyaneshwar opens his mouth to teach, Tukaram places an image in front of you. Four verses. One form. Then the teaching can begin.

Sundar te dhyan is a dhyana-shloka, a meditation verse, and it sits in the liturgy like a window left open between rooms. Its function is older than any instruction that will follow. Before you sing, before you count the names, before you absorb a single abhanga about the path, Tukaram asks you to stand in the doorway of your own heart and gaze at the form that has been waiting there. The verse describes the murti of Vitthal at Pandharpur. A dark young figure on a brick. Hands resting easily on the hips, the way someone stands who has time. A garland of tulasi at the throat. The gold wrap at the waist, the pitambar. Fish-shaped earrings that catch the lamp. The jewel from the churning of the ocean at the chest. And the face. The whole shloka moves toward the face, and Tukaram, in his signature verse, says plainly: this alone is all my joy. You may have come to this page suspicious of what you are about to read. You may never have meditated on an image in your life. You may worry, quietly, that fixing the mind on a form with earrings and silk is a step toward something you were taught not to do. The hour may be difficult, the reserves low, the practice feeling far away. This commentary is for you. The Haripath opens, then, not with doctrine but with darshan. It places a picture in the heart so that every syllable that follows will have a face to rest on. It is the assurance that before teaching can reach you, beauty has already arrived.

The Living Words

Before the Haripath begins, Tukaram asks for one small thing: that the eye turn, that the attention look. Not think, not analyze, not even chant. Look.

The first word is sundar, beautiful. Not true, not eternal, not supreme. Beautiful. In the grammar of bhakti, beauty is a mode of the real. The figure stands on a brick, vitevari, hands placed on the waist, elbows out, like someone waiting at the door of His own house for a relative who is late. Tulasi at the throat. Yellow silk at the waist. Earrings that flash when the lamp moves. A jewel at the chest. And the face. Tukaram walks the gaze up the body the way a pujari moves the lamp in arati, feet first, waist, chest, face. The eyes are open, wide, painted. They are not closed in meditation. He is looking at you.

The Heart of It

Why begin a scripture with a picture. Why not a mantra, a vow, a definition of God. Why, before teaching, ask the reader to see.

The tradition has its answer, and it is deeply considered. In the twelfth chapter of the Gita, Arjuna asks Krishna whether those who worship the formless absolute are superior, or those who worship the form. Krishna answers that both reach Him, but that for an embodied being, reaching the formless is difficult. The un-manifest is attained with great labor by those who are clothed in a body. We are not pure intellects. We are creatures with eyes, and our hearts are organized around faces. To give such creatures an abstract God is to give them a road with no milestones. Rupa-dhyan, meditation on the form, is not a lower practice for those who cannot do the higher one. It is the practice perfectly sized for what a human being is.

The word dhyan is usually translated as meditation, and the translation misleads almost everyone who meets it. In the modern imagination, meditation means the emptying of the mind. A quieted breath. A blank screen. The watching of thoughts as they pass. There is nothing wrong with these practices, and much that is right. But they are not what Tukaram is asking you to do in these four verses. Dhyan, in the Varkari tradition and across the whole bhakti world, means the steady holding of a beloved form in the eye of the mind. Not emptiness. Fullness. Not absence. The most particular presence you can manage. The mind is not good at nothing. You may have tried to sit in silence and found your mind producing a grocery list, a replay of a conversation, a small dread about tomorrow, and concluded that you cannot meditate. You can. You have been asked to stand in a room with no furniture and told to rest. Of course you cannot rest. Tukaram is handing you furniture. A brick. A pair of hands on a waist. A garland. A face. Rest on this.

The eleventh skandha of the Bhagavata Purana, which Eknath translated into Marathi verse, spends long passages teaching Uddhava exactly this: how to visualize the Lord, limb by limb, ornament by ornament, from the lotus-feet upward. Tukaram is not improvising. He is offering the Varkari who has no Sanskrit, the housewife with flour on her hands, the shopkeeper counting grain, a compressed version of that teaching. Start at the feet on the brick. Move up the body. Rest on the face. He has made the Bhagavata's long visualization small enough to fit in the space between waking and the first cup of tea.

And he has chosen this form. Not Narayana reclining on the cosmic serpent with the worlds spinning from His navel. Not Krishna the cowherd, flute at the lips, surrounded by gopis. Vitthal. Standing. Hands on hips. Waiting. The theological weight of that choice is worth sitting with. The Varkari tradition insists that the central attribute of God is not His omnipotence but His availability. The Lord is the one who waits. He will keep waiting. You do not have to climb anywhere to reach Him. You do not have to accomplish anything first. You only have to turn and look.

And then the hard question. Isn't this idolatry? The question deserves a real answer, not a dismissal. Some readers come from Abrahamic traditions where the prohibition on graven images runs deep. Some come from reform movements within Hinduism itself that argued against image-worship for their own reasons. You are not foolish for asking. Here is the Varkari answer, in the plainest words. The image is not God. The image is where attention rests while God is being remembered. A photograph of your mother is not your mother. It would be strange, at her funeral, to say you refuse to look at her photograph because the photograph is not the person. The photograph is where your love rests. Tukaram's love needs a place to rest. For seven hundred years Varkari saints have said this so plainly that it bears repeating. We are not worshipping stone. We are worshipping through stone. The formless is everywhere, which is why the mind cannot find it. The form is here, on the brick, which is why the mind can begin.

It may help here to listen, lightly, to a distant echo. In the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition, an icon is not a picture of the Holy. It is understood as a window. The believer does not worship the wood and the paint, and the tradition is emphatic about this distinction. But the believer knows that the gaze itself is a form of prayer. When a Russian grandmother stands before the icon of Christ at dawn, she is not reading doctrine. She is being seen. This is not the same as Vaishnava darshan, and we should not pretend it is. The Orthodox do not believe Christ is in the icon the way the Varkari believes the Lord is in the murti at Pandharpur. The theological grammars are different. But across that difference an ember glows in common: human beings are creatures who pray best with their eyes open, looking at a face.

There is also a practical gift in image-meditation that the emptiness practices do not always give. An image can be carried. You can take Vitthal with you onto the train, into the hospital ward, into the bed where you cannot sleep. Emptiness, as a practice, usually requires conditions. A cushion. A quiet room. A posture. But an image, once installed in the eye of the mind, can be called up in traffic. The Varkaris built a spirituality for farmers, for potters, for a woman grinding millet, for a weaver at the loom, for anyone who could not afford an hour of silence but could afford, in the middle of work, a single glance toward Pandharpur.

This is why dhyan comes before the abhangas and not after. A teaching that arrives in a mind that has not first seen the teacher tends to go dry. It becomes information. The Varkari liturgy refuses this from the first moment. It places the image in the heart first so that every sentence of doctrine afterward has a living face to be heard by. When Dnyaneshwar says stand at the door a single moment and liberation is yours, your heart already knows which door. You have been looking at it for four verses.

One more thing. The refrain closes with avade nirantara. Without interval, without gap. Tukaram is telling us what dhyan matures into. In the beginning it is an effort. You close your eyes and assemble the image. Brick. Feet. Hands on hips. Tulasi. Pitambar. Earrings. Jewel. Face. At first it takes minutes. Then it takes seconds. Then, if the practice ripens, it takes no time at all, because the image is simply there, like the color of your own bedroom wall at dawn. That is nirantara dhyan. Not an exercise you perform at certain hours but a presence that has moved in and begun keeping the house. The Haripath begins here because this is where it intends to bring you. The start of the vision is a beautiful form standing on a brick, waiting.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Tukaram of Dehu comes first, because this shloka is his. Born around 1608 in a grain-selling family in the village of Dehu, on the Indrayani river near Pune, he lost his first wife Rakhumabai and a young son in the famine of 1629. He went up into the hills above the village half-broken by grief and sat with the Lord until the Lord became the whole interior of his life. His second wife Jijabai was, as the old biographies put it, worldly and capable. She did not understand his ecstasies, and she nagged. Tukaram kept writing. When his gatha of abhangas grew, local Brahmins, outraged that a low-caste grain-seller was composing scripture in Marathi, compelled him to throw the manuscripts into the Indrayani river. He did, and then sat on a stone in front of the Vitthal temple for thirteen days without food or water, asking either for the manuscripts to be returned or for his life to end. On the thirteenth day the manuscripts surfaced, unstained. His gatha today runs to over four thousand abhangas, and if you read across it you discover something remarkable. Song after song is a description of the form. The brick. The hands on hips. The yellow cloth. The earrings. The jewel. Sundar te dhyan is not an occasional poem. It is the compressed seed of a lifetime's gazing. To chant his dhyana-shloka is to borrow his eyes.

The vision reaches behind Tukaram to Pundalik, the reason the brick is there at all. Pundalik of Pandharpur, in the old stories, was a son who had once mistreated his aging parents, dragging them behind him on pilgrimage while he rode. He met a sage who shamed him with a simple observation, that his parents were themselves his living gods and he had not seen them. Pundalik returned home and began to serve them with total devotion. One night the Lord, moved by the beauty of his seva, came to his door. Pundalik was pressing his father's tired feet. Without turning, without rising, he reached behind him, found a brick, and tossed it outside. Stand on this, he said. I will come when I am done. The Lord stood. He has never stopped standing. The theology compressed into that gesture is immense. The Supreme waits on filial love. Every devotee who approaches Pandharpur is approaching the God whom a son made wait because a father needed water. This is not an incidental legend. It is the inner logic of Varkari devotion. God is reached through the ordinary work of love. The brick is the sign that Pandharpur theology has placed the everyday duty above the spectacular miracle.

From Pundalik the line comes forward to Namdev, the tailor's son of Narsi Bamani in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, who alongside Dnyaneshwar became a founding voice of the Varkari movement. Namdev's companions are famous precisely because of who they were: a dancing woman, a barber, a gardener, a potter, a goldsmith, a maid, an untouchable. In his company, the doors to Vitthal opened wide for those whose birth had closed every other door. There is a story, told with full seriousness in the tradition, that as a small boy Namdev brought food as an offering to the temple and waited for Vitthal to eat it. When Vitthal did not physically eat, the boy wept. He refused to leave. Eventually, the tradition says, Vitthal ate. The story is not the point. The point is what kind of devotion produces such a story. A boy who looks at the form for hours until the form becomes edible.

Inside Namdev's own household was Janabai. She had been handed over as a girl to the care of Namdev's father. She spent her whole life as a dasi, grinding flour, sweeping floors, washing clothes. Her abhangas, about three hundred and forty of them, survived because they were bundled with Namdev's own. What the tradition remembers most is this. When she would pause the grinding stone because she was lost in song, the Lord Himself would come, sit beside her, and turn the stone. In her own verses she describes Him grinding in His pitambar, the yellow cloth glimmering in the morning light while she sings. When Janabai was too tired to finish the grinding, He placed His hands somewhere else, briefly, to help. Then He put them back. Across Maharashtra, to this day, women sing Jani's songs over the flour mill. When you chant sundar te dhyan, you are joining a line of women who saw that same figure in their kitchens at dawn.

The vision reached the unreachable. Chokhamela, born Mahar in the fourteenth century, was by the caste laws of his age not permitted to cross the threshold of the Pandharpur temple. He stood outside. He sang. He wrote over four hundred abhangas, many of them autobiographical, many of them ferocious in their grief at the gate. The tradition tells that Vitthal Himself came out to meet him, because a God who waits on a brick will not let a temple wall keep Him from His devotee. When Chokhamela died in an accident on a construction site, Namdev is said to have found his bones in the rubble, and the bones were still singing the name of Vitthal. Namdev brought them to the temple gate. Chokhamela's tomb stands today in front of the Pandharpur temple. When you meditate on the shrimukha, the holy face, remember that this face looked first upon those the world would not look upon.

Dnyaneshwar comes next in the remembered line, though chronologically he is earlier, 1275 to 1296, the young Nath yogi who wrote the Dnyaneshwari commentary on the Gita in Marathi verse before he was twenty, and then, at twenty-one, entered sanjivan samadhi at Alandi, sealing himself alive in an underground chamber in voluntary final meditation. His relationship to Vitthal is the spine of the Varkari tradition. Every year his silver padukas, his sandals, are carried in a palkhi from Alandi to Pandharpur, and thousands of pilgrims walk behind them, singing. It is his twenty-seven-abhanga Haripath that the dhyana-shloka opens. The logic is exact. Before you recite his teachings, you are given the murti his teachings point toward. You meet the Lord he met.

And Eknath of Paithan, 1533 to 1599, the Brahmin scholar who took a Sufi-influenced guru, Janardan Swami, and then translated the eleventh skandha of the Bhagavata Purana, the book in which Krishna teaches Uddhava rupa-dhyan itself, into Marathi verse. The Eknathi Bhagavata is the reason the method of form-meditation reached the Marathi reader's hands. Eknath famously shocked his own caste by eating with untouchables, cleaning the body of a dead outcaste, and saying that Vitthal had come to him in the form of any beggar at his door. When you meditate on the form of Vitthal in Tukaram's four verses, you are practicing, in condensed form, what Eknath taught in thousands of lines.

And Kanhopatra, the daughter of a courtesan in the fifteenth century, famously beautiful, whom a local Badshah demanded as a concubine. She ran to Pandharpur, entered the sanctum, and cried out to Vitthal that she was His. When the Badshah's soldiers came to take her by force, the story says, she did not move. She did not move because her body had already been taken somewhere else. They found her collapsed at the feet of the image. She was buried, according to her wish, directly below the temple, and a tree grew from her grave up through the floor. The form of Vitthal received a woman nobody else would receive.

Each of these saints saw this same form. Namdev among his companions. Janabai at her grinding mill. Chokhamela across the locked temple threshold. Dnyaneshwar in the fire of jnana. Eknath through the window of the Bhagavata. Pundalik in the gift of unbroken service. Kanhopatra at the last threshold of her life. Tukaram in his grief, and in the manuscripts rising from the river. The dhyan is one. The eyes that saw it are many. When you chant sundar te dhyan, you are joining the longest and most tender gaze in Marathi devotional memory.