The Easy Mantra

The camera lifts from the single giving and looks at the whole traffic of saints. Those who walked ahead have already crossed over. The saints have crossed this ocean of becoming. Tukaram is pointing to the other shore and saying: people you know of, people whose songs you have heard, people whose names the Warkari tradition has preserved for generations, have already completed the crossing you are now beginning. The river is not untested. The raft is not unproven. The far shore is not speculative. Others have arrived. The evidence is in their abhangas, in their samadhis, in the living memory of the community.

If you are ever tempted to think your practice is untried, that you are a lonely pioneer of an uncertain path, this verse is the correction. Tukaram is not a lonely pioneer. Neither are you. The sadhu-sant, the holy ones who have come before, have already done what you are being asked to do. The bhavasagara, the ocean of becoming, has been crossed by many. Your task is not to discover a route. Your task is to take the route they have left behind. The verse places you inside a company of witnesses, and the company is one of the most pastorally solid supports the tradition offers.

The Living Words

Jati pudhen eka utarale para. Those who go ahead, some have landed on the far shore. Jati pudhen, going ahead, walking in front. Eka, some, ones, a scattered but real number of them. Utarale para, have disembarked on the far shore. Para means the other side, the opposite bank, the far end of the crossing. The grammar is past tense and perfective: the disembarking has happened. It is not hoped for. It is accomplished. The saints are already on the other side. The tense matters. Tukaram is not saying someday they will land. He is saying they are already there.

Then the naming. Ha bhavasagara sadhusanta. This is the bhavasagara, the ocean of becoming, that the sadhus and sants have crossed. Ha, this, points to the very river the disciple is now facing. Bhavasagara is the classical compound: bhava, becoming, existence, the ongoing round of birth and death; sagara, ocean, the great unboundable water. It is the standard Sanskrit and Marathi metaphor for samsara. And sadhusanta is the compound for the holy ones, the saints, the spiritual adepts, the company of those whose life has been shaped by practice and grace. The verse joins two words that should not be able to stand in the same sentence: an ocean, and the fact that people have walked out of it. The saints have done both.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

This verse lifts the abhanga out of the private scene of one disciple receiving one mantra and places it in the long traffic of saints across an ocean. The disciple is not alone on the riverbank. The riverbank is crowded. Some are on the near side, still preparing. Some are in the middle of the crossing. And many, the verse insists, have already landed on the far shore.

Sit with the image for a moment, because it is doing a lot of theological work. The bhavasagara, the ocean of becoming, is the standard Indian image for samsara. The world of birth and death. The endless round of becoming this and then becoming that. For most of classical Indian thought, this ocean is something to be crossed, and the crossing is difficult, and the question of how it is crossed is the central question of spiritual life.

Tukaram does not explain the crossing. He does not give you a technique for it. What he does is point at the fact of it. Look, he says, people have already done this. You are not the first. The route is not untested.

This is a different kind of assurance from what the first verse offered. The first verse said: the Guru reads your heart and fits the practice to you. That is a personal assurance. This verse says: the practice fitted to you is of the same family of practices that took many others across. That is a communal assurance. The first speaks to you as an individual. The second speaks to you as a member of a company.

The Warkari tradition has always held both together. The mantra is personal, fitted to each heart. And the mantra is shared, uttered by millions of tongues across centuries. Both. The Guru's individual reading of your heart and the tradition's collective evidence of crossing. Without the first, the practice becomes generic and loses its fit. Without the second, the practice becomes lonely and loses its confidence. Tukaram holds the two together across verses one and two of this abhanga.

Now look at the word eka, some. Tukaram does not say all, which would be triumphalism. He does not say none, which would be despair. He says some have already crossed. A real number. Not every human being who tried ended up on the far shore. But a real company did. The word keeps honesty in the teaching. The crossing is not automatic. It requires the raft, the mantra, the Guru's reading, the disciple's willingness. But for those who combined these, the crossing has actually happened. The evidence is on the other shore.

This is the deep pastoral gift of this verse for any seeker who has been carrying the anxiety of unproven practice. Your practice is not unproven. It has been proven in the lives of saints you can name. In Tukaram's case: Dnyaneshwar, Namdev, Eknath, Janabai, Chokhamela, Muktabai, Gora, Savata, Sena, Narahari. In the wider subcontinental tradition: Kabir, Ravidas, Chaitanya, Mirabai, Tulsidas, Surdas. In your own life, perhaps: a grandmother who chanted, a teacher who died with the Name on his lips, an unknown saint of your local temple whose face you remember but whose name the community has forgotten. The crossing is not theoretical. It is attested by the lives of those who came before you.

And the verse does not make their crossing easy or heroic in a way that puts them out of your reach. It just says they crossed. The way they crossed is the way you are being asked to cross. Same river. Same kind of raft. Same mantra in the mouth. The difference between them and you is not that they were a different species of human. The difference is that they kept going. They took the raft. They stayed on it until the far shore.

The Bhagavad Gita has an extraordinary verse that sits inside the same image. Krishna says that to those whose thought is fixed on him, he himself is the swift lifter out of the ocean of mortal samsara. The image is direct. The Lord is the one who lifts the devotee out of the bhavasagara. The saints who have crossed have crossed because they were lifted. And Krishna's pledge is that the lifting is available to anyone who turns their thought to him. The verse in the Gita and the verse in Tukaram point at the same ocean. The Gita names the lifter by the Lord's own self-reference; Tukaram, in the next verses, will name him as Panduranga. The vocabulary is different. The theology is the same.

One more thing. The verse does not tell you which saints have crossed. It simply says the saints have crossed. This opens the space for your own tradition to populate the list. If you are a Warkari, the list is full of the names sung in the vari. If you come from a different tradition, the list is full of the names your own tradition has preserved. The Lord's company of the crossed-over is not restricted to one language or one lineage. Wherever there has been a mantra given in love and received in love, there have been crossings. Tukaram's verse is a window onto this larger fact. The ocean is one. The rafts are many. The company of those who have arrived is larger than any one tradition can hold.

So stand on the near shore and look across. The water is real. The distance is real. The difficulty is real. And the far shore is also real, and it is populated. Say the Name and begin.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Tukaram's sadhu-sant is not an abstraction. It is the roster of holy ones the Warkari community had by his time come to know by name, song, and samadhi. This verse points at all of them without naming them, and a brief survey helps the pointing land.

Dnyaneshwar, the elder sun of Marathi bhakti, composed the Dnyaneshwari at age sixteen and the Haripath that this very Guru Parampara trails after. Tradition holds that he took samadhi at Alandi at age twenty-one, entering a living tomb under the eyes of his community. Whatever we make of the precise tradition of his going, the Warkari world has treated Alandi as the place where Dnyaneshwar crossed. Tukaram, singing this verse three centuries later, is pointing partly at Alandi when he says some have already landed on the far shore.

Namdev, the tailor's son of Pandharpur, walked the vari in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and sang the Name into the Marathi soul. His life ended in the tradition's memory at Pandharpur, and he is counted among those who crossed. His abhangas themselves are evidence of the far shore in his living voice. When Tukaram says utarale para, Namdev is among the ones he means.

Eknath, the Brahmin householder-saint of Paithan in the sixteenth century, is another sadhu Tukaram's verse points at. Tradition holds that Eknath took jal-samadhi at the Godavari, walking into the river after completing his life's work of writing and singing. Whatever the specific mode, Eknath is counted among the crossed-over. His commentaries on the Bhagavata and his abhangas were already part of the Warkari inheritance by the time Tukaram was composing.

Janabai, the maidservant, is Tukaram's near-contemporary only in the sense that Marathi devotional time tends to collapse the distances between saints. She is remembered as having entered into Vitthal at the end of her life, with little ceremony, as was fitting for the life she had lived. The tradition has always counted her among those who crossed. When Tukaram says sadhu-sant, he is not restricting the word to men, to Brahmins, or to those who walked the vari on their own feet. He is including the woman who ground grain while the Lord helped her with the mill.

Chokhamela and his family, the Mahar saints of Pandharpur, are counted among those who crossed despite the social walls that kept them outside the temple in their lifetimes. Tradition holds that Chokhamela died in a construction accident and that his bones were brought to Pandharpur and buried at the threshold of the Vitthal temple, where the pilgrim touches them before entering. The very foundation of the temple he was forbidden to enter became the place where his body rests. The far shore, in his case, was simply the other side of the door he had lived outside. Tukaram's verse, which refuses to name who crossed and who did not, is pastorally sweeping: everyone whose heart the Guru read, and who stayed with the mantra, is included.

And the sadhu-sant of the verse are not only the famous. The Warkari tradition has kept the memory of many lesser-known saints: Gora the potter, Narahari the goldsmith, Savata the gardener, Sena the barber, Kanhopatra the courtesan. Each of them came with their own work, their own constraints, their own forms of the bhavasagara. The raft that took them across was the same maha-mantra Tukaram received. The far shore on which they landed is the shore the abhanga points at. When you sing this verse, you are remembering not only the saints whose names survived but also the vast unnamed company of those whose names the community did not preserve, whose crossing nonetheless happened.