The Easy Mantra

The third verse widens the promise from the saints who have already crossed to every seeker who is now trying to cross. Wise or unlearned, whatever their bent. Each finds the raft fitted to the burning of their own heat. Two words carry the teaching. Janatya-nenatya, learned and unlearned, the whole spectrum of human intellectual condition. Avadi, the bent, the preference, the love-shaped tilt of each particular person. And sangadi, the raft, the ferry, the practice that actually carries the seeker across. The verse insists that the raft is not one-size-fits-all, and also that the raft is available to everyone. Both. The practice is calibrated. And the calibration is universal.

If you have carried any version of the thought that the spiritual life belongs only to those who can read the scriptures, or only to those with leisure, or only to those who fit a particular temperament, this verse breaks the thought. Wise or unlearned. Whatever your bent. The heat you are burning with, whatever shape it has, is the very thing the raft is sized to. Your fire is not a disqualification. Your fire is the measurement the Guru uses to cut your raft.

The Living Words

Janatya nenatya jya jaisi avadi. For the learned and the unlearned, according to whichever bent each has. Janatya is the present participle of jan, to know: the knowing ones, the learned. Nenatya is the negation: the unlearned, the ones who do not know. Tukaram places the two side by side without privileging either. Jya jaisi avadi is the crucial phrase. Jya, whichever. Jaisi, as is, as it happens to be. Avadi, bent, preference, love-shape, inclination. The grammar insists on the particularity: whatever love-shape each person happens to carry. No two disciples are being given the same fitted raft.

Then the Marathi turns concrete in an unexpected way. Utara sangadi tape pete. The crossing-raft, in the heat, is kindled or burns. Utara is the crossing, or the means of crossing. Sangadi is a raft, a ferry, or even a simple flotation device tied together for a single crossing. Tape is heat, the burning. Pete can mean kindles, catches fire, burns actively. The phrase can be read to say that the raft is fitted to the heat of the seeker's own burning longing. The Marathi is dense and allows more than one reading; commentators have expanded the phrase variously. The stable teaching is clear: the crossing is calibrated to the fire that is already burning in the seeker. The heat is not a problem. The heat is what the raft is sized to.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

Begin with the picture this verse paints. An ocean, the bhavasagara of the previous verse. A shore full of different kinds of people. Some are scholars with thick books under their arms. Some are illiterate. Some are married householders who have never left their village. Some are wandering ascetics with matted hair. Some are laughing children. Some are old men trying to settle accounts before death. And each of them, by the evidence of the saints who have crossed before, will receive a raft to carry them over. But the rafts will not be identical.

Jya jaisi avadi. Whatever their bent. Each will receive the raft fitted to the love-shape of their own heart.

This is where Warkari theology becomes genuinely democratic in a way that many other traditions only claim to be. Most religious systems say that the path is open to all while in practice designing the path for a narrow slice of human temperament. The scholar's path excludes the illiterate. The ascetic's path excludes the householder. The ritualist's path excludes the outcaste. The meditator's path excludes the scattered. Each path speaks of universality and then quietly selects its preferred kind of person.

Tukaram's verse refuses this quiet selection. The learned get a raft. The unlearned get a raft. The ones who are bent toward one kind of practice get a raft. The ones who are bent toward another kind of practice get a raft. Each one's raft is sized to their particular heat. Nobody is told that their fire is the wrong kind of fire. Nobody is told that they first have to become another kind of person before they can board.

Look at how the verse places avadi at the center. The same word, avadi, appeared in the refrain: the mantra of love, the avadicha mantra. The word is not accidental. The Guru's love-reading of the disciple, the mantra fitted to that reading, and the raft sized to that love-shape are all the same movement seen from different angles. The Guru reads the avadi. The mantra is given out of avadi. The raft fits the avadi. Avadi, avadi, avadi. Love-shape, love-shape, love-shape. The whole path is scaled to this one thing: the particular way in which this particular person loves.

Why is this theologically radical? Because most religious systems privilege a single ideal temperament and then try to force everyone into that mold. The ideal monk. The ideal scholar. The ideal mystic. The ideal householder. Those who do not fit are told to become something other than what they are. The Warkari verse says the opposite. Whatever love-shape you arrived with is the shape your raft will be cut to. You do not have to become someone else first. You have to become more fully, more honestly, the particular shape of devotion that is already trying to take form in you.

And this is where the second half of the verse lands with force. Tape pete. The heat, the burning. Each raft is fitted to the burning. What is this burning? It is the spiritual fire that is already in the seeker before the Guru arrives. It is the restlessness that drove the seeker to seek in the first place. It is the ache that cannot be satisfied by ordinary things. The Warkari term for this inner heat is often bhava in the stronger sense, the burning disposition toward the sacred. And the verse says the raft is fitted to this heat.

This does several things at once. It honors the heat. It says the burning you have been carrying is not a problem to be cooled. It is the very thing the Guru uses to measure you. If you are burning with a quiet steady heat, the raft fitted to you will be a quiet steady practice. If you are burning with a fierce explosive heat, the raft fitted to you will be a fierce explosive practice. Neither is better. Neither is worse. The Guru's skill is in the fitting.

The Bhagavata, in its long eleventh canto teaching of Krishna to Uddhava, makes almost exactly this argument. Krishna lists the paths: jnana, karma, bhakti. He does not rank them against each other in the abstract. He says each is given according to the disposition of the person, according to the capacity and inclination already present in the seeker. The paths are not universal offerings forced into every mouth. They are calibrated offerings. Each person receives the path that fits. This is the scriptural ground for Tukaram's jya jaisi avadi. Krishna said it to Uddhava. Tukaram sings it in Marathi.

And the tradition holds this calibration as one of the Guru's core skills. A great Guru is not the one who can give every disciple the same elaborate practice. A great Guru is the one who can see this disciple, read the avadi in them, feel the tape they are burning with, and cut the raft to those measurements. The raft looks small from the outside. It is just a few tied logs. But the fitting is where the mastery lives. The difference between a raft that carries across and a raft that sinks is the fitting. And the fitting comes from the reading.

There is one more note in this verse that should not be missed. The verse does not say some disciples are too unlearned to be given a raft. It says the unlearned get a raft too. This is the Warkari's quiet insistence that the tradition has no intellectual gate. The mantra is available to the non-reader as fully as to the scholar. Tukaram, who had been told by his own opponents that a Shudra had no right to compose scripture, is singing into this verse his own rejection of the gatekeepers. If the raft is fitted to the avadi, then the avadi of an unlearned villager is as honorable as the avadi of a learned Brahmin. Both carry the seeker across. Both are the Guru's actual craft. The scholar who thinks his raft is better because his books are thicker has forgotten what the raft is for. The raft is for crossing. The crossing is the only test.

So sit with your own bent. Sit with your own heat. Do not try to be someone else's kind of seeker. The raft the Guru will cut for you, or has already cut for you, is fitted to what you actually are. The fitting is the grace. Let it be.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

The Warkari tradition is a gallery of fitted rafts. The sants of the tradition, taken together, make the verse's teaching visible in biography.

Dnyaneshwar's raft was commentary. The boy was the kind of genius who could open the Gita in Marathi for the illiterate laity, and that was exactly the raft the tradition says he received. His Dnyaneshwari is a scholar's raft: dense with metaphor, argued at length, taking the reader through every verse of the Gita. The avadi of his heart bent toward understanding that could be shared, and the raft was cut to that bend. He died young, but he left the raft for the others.

Tukaram's raft was the abhanga. A different shape altogether. Short. Lyrical. Cut for singing in the market, on the road, while walking, while working. His raft was not the Dnyaneshwari's philosophical river-ferry. It was a small nimble raft made of breath and meter, and it carried him, and it has carried everyone who has sung his songs since. The same ocean. A different raft. Both reached the far shore.

Janabai's raft was the millstone. She did not compose scholarly commentaries. She could not sit in formal kirtan circles as the male saints did. Her raft was the grinding of grain, shaped into song, sung while her hands were busy. The tape she burned with was the heat of a servant who had no private hour, and the raft the tradition holds was cut to that condition. Vitthal, the tradition says, came to help her at the millstone when her singing became absorbed. The help was itself part of the raft.

Chokhamela's raft was the outside of the temple wall. He was forbidden from entering the sanctum. The practice he was given had to work from where he was allowed to stand. And it did. His abhangas record a Lord who came out of the temple to meet him on his forbidden ground. The raft was cut to the condition of the social barrier he could not cross. Not a raft in spite of the barrier. A raft shaped by the barrier itself, using what he had, turning the wall into a place of meeting.

Kanhopatra, the courtesan-saint, had a raft shaped to her own unique situation. Tradition holds that she took refuge at Pandharpur to escape being taken to the sultan's court, and that she died at Vitthal's feet in the temple. Her abhangas are few but fierce. The raft given to her was the one that allowed a woman in her condition to take the Name as her last refuge. The Guru-wisdom, in whatever form of grace it came to her, cut the raft to the fire she was burning with.

Gora the potter, Narahari the goldsmith, Savata the gardener, Sena the barber: each of these sants, preserved in Warkari memory, received rafts cut to their crafts. The potter wedged his clay while chanting. The goldsmith worked his metal while chanting. The gardener weeded his rows while chanting. The barber shaved his customers while chanting. The raft was not an interruption of their lives. The raft was woven into the life they were already living. The tradition treats this integration as the mark of genuine Warkari practice: the mantra does not require you to leave your work; it travels with you into your work, and the work becomes the raft.

And tradition holds that Tukaram himself, in the years after his initiation, became a reader of avadi and a cutter of rafts. Disciples came to him and received, not a uniform discipline, but a word or a gesture or a song fitted to what he had seen in them. Some of these fittings have been preserved in the later biographical abhangas. Many have been lost. What the tradition has preserved is the principle: a real teacher fits the raft. A teacher who hands out the same raft to every seeker has not been reading.