The Mantra Received at Dawn

Babaji told me his own name. He gave me the mantra: Ram Krishna Hari. This is the core of the abhanga. The Guru who has been unnamed across the earlier verses is now named. And the mantra he gave is spoken aloud. Three names strung together. Ram, the king of Ayodhya, the upholder of dharma in the Ramayana. Krishna, the cowherd of Vrindavan, the charioteer of the Gita. Hari, the one who takes away, the dissolver of the sense of separation. Three faces of the one divine, held together in a single breath. This is the Warkari maha-mantra. It was not invented by Tukaram. It was received from Babaji. And Babaji, in this moment, hands it over in person.

If the preceding verses have given you the story of the meeting, this verse gives you the gift. Your practice, if you take up the Warkari path after singing this abhanga, begins here. Ram Krishna Hari. Three names. The name of the Guru who gave them is the same name as the mantra he handed down: Chaitanya, pure awareness. The name the Guru carries and the name the Guru gives are not two things. They are one gift, pressed through two openings, landing in the disciple as a single blazing fact.

The Living Words

Babaji apulen sangitalen nama. Babaji himself told me his own name. The word apulen is doing work. It means his own. Not a title. Not a role. His own name, the personal name by which he is Babaji to his own Guru, to his own line. And the name is Chaitanya, the suffix that comes with all three figures of the line: Raghav Chaitanya, Keshav Chaitanya, Babaji Chaitanya. Chaitanya means pure awareness, the consciousness that is itself the ground of all knowing. The Guru's family name is awareness.

Mantra dila rama krishna hari. He gave the mantra: Rama, Krishna, Hari. Dila is gave, handed over, placed into. The mantra is not discovered. It is given. And it is three names: Rama, the delight that dwells within all beings; Krishna, the all-attractive one; Hari, the remover. Three names placed together in the mouth, three facets of one Lord, one continuous invocation whose very sound removes what it names away.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

This is the verse the whole abhanga has been moving toward. Everything before this has been the setting. The grace-without-service of verse one. The hand on the head of the refrain. The ghee forgotten in the dream. The obstacle that rose and the haste that followed. The names of the lineage. All of it has been circling this central giving. And now, in verse five, the name is told and the mantra is handed over.

Notice that two names are given, not one. First, the Guru tells his own name. Then he gives the mantra. These are not the same act. Being told the Guru's name is the first gift: you now know who claimed you. You can speak his name. You can invoke him. You can, in future life, turn toward him with recognition rather than confusion. A disciple who does not know his Guru's name is still in the fog. A disciple who has been told the name has an anchor.

And then the mantra. Ram Krishna Hari. Three syllables of invocation strung together so that no single name dominates. This is deliberate. The Warkari tradition has resisted sectarian narrowing. A Rama-only mantra would place the tradition inside the Ramayana world. A Krishna-only mantra would place it inside the Gita and the Bhagavata. A Hari-only mantra would lean toward the abstract Vishnuism of pure pervasion. By giving all three, Babaji gives a mantra that holds the whole of Vaishnava devotion in one breath.

And there is a deeper logic. Ram is the Lord as upholder of dharma, the one who walks the difficult road of right conduct through exile and war, who rules a kingdom in righteousness. Krishna is the Lord as Lila, the one who comes into the world in play, who loves the cowherd children, who speaks the Gita on the battlefield. Hari is the Lord as remover, the one whose mere name dissolves the sense of separation. Dharma, Lila, Moksha. The three dimensions of the divine life are named in this mantra. To chant Ram Krishna Hari is to invoke, in a single breath, the Lord as the upholder of your life, as the player within your life, and as the remover beyond your life.

The Bhagavata Purana gives the locus classicus for the power of the Name: one who, caught in the terror of samsara, helplessly cries out the Name, is at once released, for that Name is what fear itself fears. The story of Ajamila in Book Six is the tradition's most famous exposition. Ajamila was a fallen brahmana, addicted to wine and pleasure, who, at the moment of death, called out the name of his son Narayana. The Lord, hearing his own name, sent messengers to rescue Ajamila from the agents of death. The Name worked even when spoken for a son, even when spoken helplessly, even when spoken without intent to invoke the divine. The sound itself carried the grace.

Tukaram inherits this theology and carries it into Marathi. When Babaji hands him the mantra, he is not handing him a mere technique. He is handing him the sound that, once placed in the mouth, operates on its own. You do not have to chant it perfectly. You do not have to understand it. You do not even have to believe it in the first instances. You have to say it. The sound will do the rest.

The Gita says: of all sacrifices, I am the japa-yajna. Krishna places the sacrifice of repetition at the top of the hierarchy of sacrifices. The chanting of the Name is not a lower form of devotion accessible to those who cannot perform the Vedic yajnas. It is the highest form of yajna, in Krishna's own testimony. Tukaram, receiving the mantra, is receiving the highest sacrifice a human being can offer. The offering is sound, repeated, placed in the mouth continually through a life.

And the Sikh tradition, five hundred miles to the north and a hundred years after Tukaram, arrived at almost the same recognition. Naam Simran, the remembrance of the Name, is the beating heart of Sikh devotional life. Guru Nanak taught that the Name alone is what carries a human being through the ocean of samsara. The names differ. The practice is the same shape. A teacher gives a Name. The disciple repeats it. The Name works.

Return to the Warkari frame. What Babaji gives, in this verse, is not only a mantra. He gives a place in the community of those who chant this mantra. When Tukaram, years later, stands among the Warkaris on the road to Pandharpur, he is chanting the mantra that Babaji placed in his mouth. He is chanting it with thousands of others who received it from their own Gurus, who received it from theirs. The mantra is a portable community. Wherever two Warkaris meet and chant Ram Krishna Hari together, the lineage is present.

You, now, reading this commentary: if you speak the mantra once, slowly, you have stepped into this stream. Not because the words are magical in the way of a spell, but because the community of those who have spoken these words includes Tukaram, includes Namdev, includes Janabai, includes every chanting Warkari across four centuries. You are added to the chain by the act of speaking. The seal the Guru pressed into Tukaram presses, in a smaller way, into you. Ram Krishna Hari. The three names. The whole lineage in three syllables.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Babaji Chaitanya stands, in the Warkari memory, as the Guru who gave this mantra. Tradition places him in the Chaitanya sampraday, as the inheritor of Raghav and Keshav. Historical details of his life are thin. What is preserved is his role: he appeared to Tukaram in the svapna encounter of this abhanga, gave him his own name, and handed him the maha-mantra. Without Babaji, the four thousand abhangas of Tukaram would not exist. The whole outpouring of the saint's later life runs through the opening Babaji made in him.

Namdev, two centuries earlier, had already sung the maha-mantra in his own fashion. His abhangas return to the three Names again and again, often in the invocation of Vitthal who holds all three Names at Pandharpur. Tradition holds that Namdev carried the chanting into Punjab during his long travels, and that he contributed hymns that were later preserved in the Guru Granth Sahib. The transmission of the Name from Maharashtra into the Sikh tradition, in the tradition's telling, passes through Namdev. The mantra Tukaram receives from Babaji is singing already in Namdev's throat two hundred years earlier.

Chokhamela, the Mahar saint, chanted Vitthal at the closed gate of the temple. His devotion is preserved in abhangas that the tradition has treasured despite the social barriers of his time. He never received formal initiation in the temple precinct. He was not allowed inside. What he had was the Name, and in the Warkari reckoning, the Name was enough. His chanting of Vitthal was, in the deeper sense, the same chanting Tukaram received from Babaji. The Name does not require the temple. It requires only a mouth.

Janabai, servant in the household of Namdev, ground grain while chanting the Name. Her abhangas are some of the most beloved in the Warkari corpus. She did not receive a formal diksha as Tukaram did in this abhanga. She received the Name from the household in which she worked, from Namdev's circle, from the air of devotional Pandharpur. And that was enough. She ripened into a saint whose songs are still sung today. The maha-mantra Tukaram names in verse five runs through her mouth as well, by a different route.

Eknath, the brahmana scholar and householder, made the chanting of the Name the center of a deliberately democratic devotional practice. He crossed caste lines. He invited outcastes into his home. His abhangas on the Name treat it as the one thing that levels every difference, because the Name belongs to no caste, no language, no lineage. Tukaram, in this verse, receives from Babaji what Eknath had already been singing: a mantra that is universal precisely because it is sound. A sound has no caste. A sound can be uttered by anyone. The Warkari mantra is, by its very structure, an invitation that cannot be gatekept.

And the later generations of Warkaris have lived this verse every year on the roads to Pandharpur. The vari, the annual pilgrimage, is in large part a walking kirtan of Ram Krishna Hari. The mantra Babaji gave to Tukaram is now sung by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims at once. The single giving on the road to Ganga has become an ocean of giving that floods Maharashtra twice a year. Each pilgrim who chants is, in effect, receiving the mantra again, from the mouths around them. The giving does not stop. Babaji gave it to Tukaram. Tukaram sings it in this abhanga. The abhanga hands it to you, now, as you read.