God Himself Becomes the Guru

The Lord, Tukaram now says, knows how heavy the getting and keeping is. He knows the weight of yogakshema. This is the verse where the whole economy of an embodied life is named and placed in the Lord's hands. Yoga is the bringing to one of what one does not yet have. Kshema is the preserving of what one already has. Together they are the entire calculus of a life, the whole ledger of wanting and holding, of acquiring and keeping, of reaching for and not losing. And Tukaram names both with a single breath and says the Lord knows how heavy it is. Jadabhari. The heaviness itself is named.

And then the small, almost domestic act that follows. Vata davi karin dharuniyan. He takes the hand and shows the way. The word karin dharuniyan is the holding of the hand, the physical gesture of the elder who takes the child's hand before setting out. Vata davi is showing the way, pointing to the path. The Lord does not stand at a distance and give directions. He comes up beside the devotee, takes the hand, and walks with him, pointing to the path as they go. The verse is quietly astonishing. The Lord who carries the weight of yogakshema for the whole world is, at the same time, holding this one hand and walking at this one pace. The economy of a life, held in one hand. The path of a life, shown in the same gesture.

The Living Words

Yogakshema tyanca jane jadabhari. Their yogakshema, he knows, the heavy weight of it. Yogakshema is the Sanskrit compound that the Gita uses in chapter nine verse twenty-two. Yoga, from yuj, to bring together, to yoke, here meaning the bringing to one of what one does not yet have. Kshema, from a root meaning to dwell in peace, here meaning the preserving of what one already has. The two words together name the whole economy of human anxiety: the reaching for what is lacking, the protecting of what is held. Tyanca, their, referring to the devotees. Jane is knows, and the verb does not mean abstract knowledge. It means knows from within, recognizes by acquaintance. Jadabhari is the heavy weight, the burdensome heaviness, compounded of jada, dull, heavy, and bhari, weight, load. Tukaram is insisting that yogakshema is not a light thing. It is jadabhari, and the Lord knows precisely how heavy it is.

Vata davi karin dharuniyan. He shows the way, having taken the hand. Vata is the way, the path. Davi, from davine, to show, to point out. Karin, in the hand, on the hand. Dharuniyan, having held, having grasped. The Marathi syntax places the hand-holding as the gerund, the action already completed, before the showing of the way. First the hand is taken. Then the way is shown. The order matters. The contact precedes the instruction.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

The Bhagavad Gita in chapter nine, verse twenty-two, uses the compound yogakshema once and never uses it again. It is a precise, compact term that Krishna reaches for to name what he himself carries for his undivided devotees. Tukaram, three hundred years later in Marathi, places the same word at the center of this verse and insists that the Lord not only carries yogakshema but knows how heavy it is. The word jadabhari is Tukaram's addition to the Gita's compressed phrase. Krishna says he carries it. Tukaram says he carries it knowing the heaviness. The difference is the difference between duty and love.

Sit with what yogakshema actually means. Yoga is the bringing to one of what one does not yet have. You need shelter. You need food. You need the next sufficient amount of money. You need the job, the house, the relationship, the health that has not yet arrived. The seeking of these is yoga in the classical sense of yoking, bringing together the needed good with the needy self. Kshema is the preserving of what one already has. You have shelter, but you need to keep it. You have a relationship, but you need to maintain it. You have health, but you need to guard it. You have the discipline, the practice, but you need to keep them from eroding. The keeping of these is kshema, dwelling in peace with what is held.

Together these two motions are the whole of what most humans do with their days. They try to acquire. They try to hold on. A life is the sum of these two motions repeated in thousands of small decisions, every day, across decades. The tiredness that comes at the end of most days is the tiredness of carrying this double weight. The anxiety that wakes people at four in the morning is the anxiety of this double weight. The ledger that refuses to balance is this ledger.

Tukaram says the Lord knows. Jane jadabhari. He knows how heavy it is. This is not an abstract cosmic knowledge. The verb jane implies the knowing of acquaintance. The Lord has been present inside the weight. He has felt it from within the devotee's own body. He knows from the inside what a life under yogakshema is actually like. The infinite Lord is not so infinite that he stands above the weight of a human life. He is present inside the weight. He carries it from within.

And then the second line. Vata davi karin dharuniyan. He takes the hand and shows the way.

Notice the ordering. First the hand is taken. Then the way is shown. The Marathi grammar places the hand-taking as the gerund, the action that has already occurred before the main verb of showing. The Lord does not point to the path from across the room. He comes to where the devotee is, takes the devotee's hand, and only then points. The instruction is given in the grip.

This matters because it names the particular quality of the Warkari Guru-Lord. He is not a distant cartographer giving directions from a mountaintop. He is a close companion who has come down into the terrain. The path is shown through the hand. The direction is felt through the grip. If you want to know where the Lord is pointing, feel where the hand is pulling. This is how the tradition teaches discernment. Not through abstract principles but through the felt direction of the interior grip. The Lord is already holding your hand. The way is already being shown through the pressure of that hand.

And the yogakshema of your life is the terrain across which the hand is leading you. The Lord does not remove the yogakshema. He leads you through it. The weight of getting and keeping is not canceled by refuge. It is carried, together, by the one who has taken the hand. You still walk. You still feel the heaviness. But the heaviness is no longer yours alone. The one beside you is carrying the greater part, and the direction of the walk is set by him.

The Bhagavata Purana, in the story of the elephant king Gajendra in Book Eight, gives the theological archetype for this verse. Gajendra is caught by a crocodile in the lake and fights for a thousand years to free himself. He exhausts his own strength, and only when he reaches the end of his resources does he call out to the Lord. The Lord, hearing the call, comes at once. Not with a message. Not through a deputy. He comes himself, severs the crocodile with his discus, and lifts Gajendra out by the trunk. The yogakshema of the elephant had become jadabhari beyond endurance. The Lord came and took the hand, which in this case was the trunk, and showed the way.

The verb davi, showing, is a continuous, habitual form. It does not mean he showed the way once and then withdrew. It means he keeps showing it, continues to point as the walk proceeds. The way is not a single sign at the beginning of the path. At every turn, the grip on the hand tightens or loosens to signal the direction. At every juncture, the one holding the hand makes the next turn clear.

You do not need to know where the whole path leads. You do not need to plan the next ten years of your practice. You only need to remain attentive to the hand. The showing is continuous. The next step will be shown when the next step is needed. The Lord who knows how heavy your yogakshema is knows also how much of the path you can hold in sight at once. He shows only what you can walk now. The rest will be shown when the time comes. And when the weight becomes unbearable, the Warkari tradition trusts that the grip tightens. The Lord does not abandon the hand. He holds harder. He carries more of the weight when the devotee can carry less, and the devotee, sometimes without realizing it, continues to walk because the hand is still being held.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

The Warkari tradition reads this verse as a commentary on the actual lives of its saints, and the biographies fit the verse almost too exactly.

Tukaram himself lost his parents early, lost his first wife and eldest son to the famine of the early seventeenth century, saw his shop fail, and watched his manuscripts be destroyed by opponents. The yogakshema of his life was heavy beyond what most could bear. And yet his abhangas, written across this whole arc, insist that the hand was held the entire time. He did not invent this line as pious decoration. He wrote it from inside the weight. The Lord knew the jadabhari because the Lord had been present inside every loss, showing the way as the walk proceeded.

Dnyaneshwar and his siblings were the four orphan children of Vitthalpant, denied thread ceremony and social place because their father had been a renunciate who returned to householder life, then taken his own life along with their mother in an attempt to clear the stain from the children. The four walked from village to village, denied acceptance, denied priestly welcome, denied even the sacraments. The yogakshema of their lives was impossible in the ordinary accounting. And yet, tradition says, the hand was held throughout. The buffalo recited the Vedas at Paithan. The wall moved to meet Changdev. The Jnaneshwari was composed at Nevasa. The hand did not let go. The weight was known from within, and the way was shown through the grip.

Namdev walked into the north in middle age, leaving Pandharpur behind. Tradition says he went at the Lord's own directive. The yogakshema of such a journey, for a low-caste tailor of Pandharpur with family responsibilities, was severe. And yet the hand was held across a thousand miles of travel. Tradition preserves his hymns from as far north as what is now Punjab, and holds that some were taken into the Guru Granth Sahib by Guru Arjan when he was compiling the scripture. The way was shown. Namdev walked it. He returned to Pandharpur at the end of his life and was drawn to Vitthal as he had always been.

Eknath carried the yogakshema of a large household, the social pressure of welcoming outcastes into that household, and the scholarly labor of composing the Bhavartha Ramayana and his own commentary on the eleventh book of the Bhagavata. Tradition remembers that when the weight became too great, the Lord himself came in the form of Shrikhandya, a servant who worked in the household for twelve years and, among many other things, managed the daily yogakshema of getting and keeping. The Lord knew the weight. He came and took the hand, quite literally, by appearing in the form of a servant who could shoulder the practical load.

Janabai, the maidservant in Namdev's household, lived under the most immediate form of yogakshema. She had no wealth. She had no social standing. Her daily work was grinding grain, sweeping, carrying water. The weight of getting and keeping for her was the weight of a servant's life in a society that offered her little. And tradition says that Vitthal himself came to help. He ground the grain. He swept the floor. He carried the water with her. The hand was not only held. The hand joined in the work. The showing of the way became the doing of the work alongside her.

Chokhamela, the Mahar saint, carried a yogakshema that included the social wound of exclusion. He could not enter the temple precinct. He could not walk through the main street of Pandharpur. He could not receive the sacraments of mainstream religion. And yet his abhangas sing of a Lord who met him at the closed gate and showed him a path that did not require any of the access he had been denied. The way was shown through a different terrain. The hand was held in a place the priests had not mapped. The verse's vata davi became, for Chokhamela, a path opened outside the official map.

Savata Mali, the gardener-saint, carried the yogakshema of small-scale agriculture in seasonal uncertainty. Tradition says he never left his village. He never traveled to Pandharpur in the body, because the work of the garden could not be abandoned. And yet his abhangas insist that he met the Lord in the garden, that the Lord came to him there, that the way was shown in the rows of vegetables and in the patterns of the rains. The yogakshema of a farmer's life is visible and measurable. The jadabhari is direct. And Savata's testimony is that the Lord knew how heavy it was and came to the garden and held the hand.

Across these lives, the verse holds. The specific yogakshema differs. The specific blows differ. The specific path shown differs. But the gesture is always the same. The Lord, knowing the weight from within, takes the hand and shows the way.