God Himself Becomes the Guru

Tukaram opens with a question and answers it with a claim that should stop the reader cold. What is the love of my Vithoba like? God himself becomes the Guru. Not a messenger. Not a deputy. Not a lesser servant sent to carry the teaching while the Lord waits in a distant heaven. God himself, apanaci deva, takes the teaching role in person. The Marathi is precise in a way that English must labor to hold. Apanaci means by his own self, of his own accord, with no interposed figure. The Lord does not appoint a Guru; he becomes one.

If you have been waiting for a human teacher to appear on your road and have quietly begun to suspect that the wait might never end, this is your verse. Tukaram is not saying the human Guru is unnecessary. He is saying that behind every real Guru and often in the absence of any visible teacher at all, the Lord himself is the one doing the teaching. The question he opens with is almost a whisper of amazement. Kaisa premabhava. What kind of love is this. It is the love that will not delegate its own disciples. The rest of the abhanga is the patient unpacking of that first line. God himself becomes the Guru. And once you have really heard that, you will read the four verses that follow as a single extended wondering over a single overwhelming fact.

The Living Words

Majhya vithobaca kaisa premabhava. Of my Vithoba, what kind of love is this. The word majhya, my, is possessive without being proprietary. It is the possessive of the devotee, the one who has let the Lord take the place that no idol can fill. Vithoba is the presiding form at Pandharpur, also called Vitthal, also Panduranga, the dark stone figure standing on the brick with hands on hips. Kaisa is what kind, what manner, an interrogative of astonishment. Premabhava is the state of love, the disposition of love, the being-in-love. Tukaram is not asking a question that expects an answer. He is marveling aloud.

Apanaci deva hoya guru. He himself, God, becomes Guru. Apanaci holds the whole line. It means by his own self, of his own will, without the interposition of another. Deva, God. Hoya, becomes, takes the form of, turns into. Guru, teacher, the one who removes darkness. The Marathi grammar is almost impossible to carry into English without loss. The Lord is not said to appoint a Guru, nor to reveal himself through a Guru. He becomes the Guru. The identity is immediate.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

Read the first line again. What is the love of my Vithoba like? God himself becomes the Guru.

Every religious culture of the world has wrestled with the question of who teaches. In most, the answer is a careful hierarchy. There is the Lord in his heaven, and beneath him the prophets, and beneath them the teachers, and beneath them the disciples. The teaching filters downward, from high to low, through named intermediaries. This arrangement has its own dignity. It preserves order. It keeps the distance.

Tukaram, in a single line, collapses the arrangement. He does not say my Vithoba sent a teacher. He does not say my Vithoba inspired a teacher. He says my Vithoba himself becomes the teacher. Apanaci deva hoya guru. The Lord does not delegate the role of Guru. He fills it in person.

Sit with how large a claim this is. In the Warkari theology of Pandharpur, the Lord and the Guru are not two functions performed by two different kinds of being. They are one being seen from two angles. When you bow to the Guru, you bow to the Lord wearing a face. When you invoke the Lord, you invoke the Guru at his deepest source. The hand that is placed on your head is the Lord's hand. The voice that speaks the mantra into your ear is the Lord's voice. The heart that waits patiently through your lapses is the Lord's heart.

This is why the abhanga opens with a question. Kaisa premabhava. What kind of love is this. Tukaram has seen something his ordinary religious vocabulary cannot name. The arrangement most people settle for, God at a distance and teachers in between, is not the arrangement he has found. He has found a Lord who refuses the distance. A Lord who will not delegate. A Lord who, when a disciple is ready, steps forward in his own person to do the work of teaching.

The Bhagavad Gita has a line that sits underneath this claim. Krishna says of his devotees: to those who worship me with undivided attention, constantly turned toward me, I myself carry their getting and their keeping. The verb in Sanskrit is vahamy aham, I myself carry. Not I send someone to carry. Not I arrange for the carrying to happen. I carry. This is the same grammar Tukaram is using in Marathi. The Lord does the work in person. The Gita places this principle at the heart of chapter nine, and Tukaram places it at the opening of this abhanga. The two verses are speaking the same teaching in two tongues.

What does it mean to receive this in your own practice? It means that when you sit down to chant, you are not chanting to a distant Lord who will perhaps one day assign a teacher to you. You are chanting to the one who is already, at the level of the chant itself, teaching you. The teaching is the chant. The mantra you repeat is the Guru you are being formed by. The Name, in the Warkari understanding, is not a key you use to unlock the Lord. The Name is the Lord unlocking himself in you. You do not reach him through the Name. He reaches himself through the Name, and you are the ground on which that reaching takes place.

This changes the posture of the whole spiritual life. If the Lord is the Guru, then your lapses, the long stretches when no human teacher came to your road, the silent years when you thought you had been forgotten, were never empty. The Lord was the teacher throughout. He was teaching through the emptiness itself. The wait was its own instruction. The silence was its own syllable.

And notice who is speaking the line. Tukaram, the failed shopkeeper of Dehu, the one whose manuscripts were thrown into the Indrayani river by his opponents. He is not a priest. He is not a philosopher. He is a householder who lost his family to famine and his standing to his enemies. If any man had reason to suspect that he had been left without a teacher, it was Tukaram. And instead of complaint, the abhanga opens with amazement. What kind of love is this. The Lord himself became my Guru. The man who had nothing discovers that the one he thought was far had been close the whole time.

There is one cross-tradition echo that belongs here, and it is enough. The Gospel of John tells of a Lord who gathered his disciples and told them, in his final hours, that he would not leave them orphans. He promised another who would teach them, and who would be with them forever, in the exact form the world could not recognize. The Warkari intuition is the same. The Lord does not leave his own orphans. He himself is the teacher who stays. The names differ. The claim is one.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

The Warkari tradition holds this verse as one of the clearest statements of its central theological move. The Lord at Pandharpur is not only the object of devotion. He is the teacher within devotion. Tukaram is not the first to claim it. He is the one who stated it most starkly.

Dnyaneshwar, three centuries before Tukaram, sang at length of the Lord who is both the chariot and the charioteer, both the mantra and the mind that chants it. In the Jnaneshwari, his great commentary on the Gita in Marathi, he insisted that the student who truly hears the Gita does not hear a teacher giving instruction to a pupil. He hears the Lord teaching himself through the pupil's own mouth. The gap between Guru and disciple, in Dnyaneshwar's reading, is a convenience of grammar. In the reality, there is one being teaching in two directions. Tukaram inherits this vision and sings it in the plainest possible Marathi.

Namdev, the tailor's son of Pandharpur, reported a life in which Vitthal came to him without intermediary. Tradition tells of a Lord who ate from his plate, played dice with him, came as a small boy to his house, answered him in a voice heard by the community. The hagiographies preserve this as literal fact, not as metaphor. For Namdev, the Lord was not only a distant presence at the shrine. The Lord was the companion who corrected him, scolded him, taught him. When his Guru Visoba Khechar met him in the temple and placed the feet on the Shivalingam, the correction came through Visoba, but the lesson behind Visoba was the Lord himself teaching Namdev a deeper reading of the Name. Namdev left that encounter understanding something he could not have learned from any teacher who was only a teacher.

Janabai, the maidservant in Namdev's household, lived this verse more quietly. Tradition says that Vitthal himself came to grind the grain when her arms grew tired. He picked up the broom. He swept with her. He ate her simple bread. In the Warkari imagination this is not a quaint legend. It is the lived proof of Tukaram's opening line. The Lord who became the Guru for a householder like Janabai did not send a prestigious sanyasi to teach her. He came himself to the kitchen floor. The teaching was not a doctrine. It was the sound of the millstone turning with two pairs of hands on it. Her abhangas carry the record of that teaching.

Chokhamela, the Mahar saint, was barred from the temple precinct by the social rules of his time. He stood at the closed gate. He could not approach the image in the sanctum. And yet his abhangas sing of a Vitthal who came out to him, who ate with him on the road, who shared his simple meal. The priests would not let him in. The Lord would not stay in. Chokhamela did not need a Brahmin Guru to teach him the Name. The Name taught him. The Lord taught him. Tukaram's opening line is his line too, three hundred years earlier in a life even more marginal than Tukaram's.

Eknath, a Brahmin scholar and a full householder, wrote commentaries of enormous learning. Yet he insisted, whenever he turned to speak of his own teacher Janardan Swami, that behind Janardan stood Dattatreya, and behind Dattatreya stood the Lord himself. Eknath treated his human Guru with impeccable devotion and also insisted that the human Guru was a face of a deeper Guru who had no face. The same vision Tukaram sings in this verse.

And the ongoing Warkari liturgy reads this verse as an invitation to every disciple who has not yet been formally initiated by a living teacher. The community sings Tukaram's line and hears it as a promise. If no human Guru has yet arrived on your road, the Lord himself is already the Guru. You have not been forgotten. You are already being taught.