Janardan, the Refuge of the Orphan

Eknath opens the abhanga with a declaration that sounds, at first, like ordinary joy. Now the three worlds are filled with gladness. But look at where that gladness comes from. It does not come because anything in the three worlds has changed. It comes because one small thing has happened inside the singer. His mind has come to rest at the feet of Jagannath. That is the whole causation. The saint is not describing a world that improved. He is describing a world that became visible once the mind stopped running. When the citta settles at the feet of the Lord of the world, the three worlds discover they have been joyful all along.

If you are reading this and your own mind is tired of its own running, this verse is a quiet mercy. Eknath is not asking you to fix the three worlds. He is not asking you to become worthy of joy. He is telling you where the running can stop. At the feet of Jagannath. That is a specific place. It is the place where the Lord stands as the Lord of the world, the one who is already holding the whole of it, so that you do not have to. Once the mind arrives there, the running is over. And the three worlds, which had seemed so heavy, turn out to have been full of gladness all the while. The heaviness was only ever the running.

The Living Words

Avaghenci trailokya anandacen atan. Avaghenci, all of it, the whole without exception; trailokya, the three worlds, the classical Indian triad of earth, atmosphere, and heaven. Anandacen atan, a vessel of joy, or the abode of joy. Eknath does not say the three worlds have joy. He says they are the dwelling of joy. The joy is prior. The three worlds are where it lives.

Then the cause of the seeing. Caranin jagannatha citta thelen. Caranin, at the feet; Jagannatha, the Lord of the world; citta, the moving mind, the inner organ that keeps running after objects; thelen, has come to rest, has stopped, has settled. Thelen is the verb to watch. It is not the mind being conquered. It is the mind being set down, laid aside like a burden finally too heavy to keep carrying. The feet of Jagannath are where the citta, at last, agrees to stop carrying itself. Everything else in the abhanga unfolds from that one small setting down.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

The three worlds are the whole sweep of what exists. Trailokya is the old Indian way of saying everything that is. The earth beneath you, the air and middle region that holds weather and birds, and the heavens of the gods above. All of it. And Eknath says, in his very first line, that all of it is a vessel of joy.

Read the line slowly. He does not say the three worlds have become joyful. He does not say they used to be suffering and are now happy. He says they are, right now, the dwelling of ananda. This is a theological claim with a gentle edge. If the three worlds are a vessel of joy, then the ordinary human impression that the world is a place of suffering is an impression, not a description of reality. Suffering is real. But it is happening inside a larger vessel that is joy. The running of the mind had made this impossible to see. The resting of the mind makes it visible.

And this is where the second line does its quiet work. Caranin jagannatha citta thelen. At the feet of Jagannath, the mind has come to rest. Sit with the word citta for a moment. In the yoga traditions, citta is the moving mind, the inner organ that runs after objects, the layer that is always heading somewhere else. Patanjali's entire Yoga Sutra is a treatise on the stilling of the citta-vrttis, the modifications of this moving mind. And here Eknath, in two words, gives the whole teaching a home. The citta has come to rest. Not in a cave. Not in a posture. At the feet.

At whose feet? At the feet of Jagannath. Notice the name. Not Janardan, which will arrive in the refrain. Not Vitthal of Pandharpur, which will arrive in later abhangas. Here, at the opening, Eknath names the Lord as Jagannath, the Lord of the world. The Lord of the three worlds you just heard about. The one whose feet are planted in the same reality that, a moment ago, seemed so heavy.

This is a subtle deployment. If the mind came to rest at the feet of some distant, otherworldly deity, the abhanga would be a flight. It would be telling you to leave the three worlds behind in order to find joy. But the feet belong to the Lord of the world. The resting is not a departure. It is an arrival at the one who is already holding the whole of it, and therefore a releasing of the private burden of holding it yourself.

The mind runs because it thinks it has to hold the world together. Even if you have never said this to yourself in so many words, your citta operates on this assumption every day. It runs ahead to arrange the next meeting. It runs back to replay the last conversation. It rehearses the bill that has not been paid, the child who has not been soothed, the work that has not been finished. It runs and runs, and each instance of the running is a small claim: this will not happen unless I hold it. The Jagannath name undoes that claim in a single breath. The Lord of the world is already holding the world. Your citta can set down its share of the work at his feet.

And what happens when the citta actually sets it down? The three worlds appear as what they already were: a vessel of joy. The change is not in the world. The change is in the visibility. Once the running stops, the ananda that was always there comes into view.

There is a cross-tradition echo worth sitting with, but only briefly, because the point is not the comparison. The Christian contemplative tradition speaks of quies, the rest of the soul at the center, in which God is found not beyond the world but at its root. Augustine's famous line, that our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee, comes from the same recognition Eknath is describing here. The restlessness is not the world's problem. The restlessness is what happens when the citta has not yet found its feet. Augustine's requies and Eknath's thelen, across language and century, are pointing at the same setting down. Handle the echo gently. The two traditions are not the same. They are pointing at a human condition that is.

If your citta is tired today, the first verse is not asking you to generate joy. It is asking you to set the running down at the feet of the one who is already holding the three worlds. The joy is not something you have to manufacture. It is already the vessel. The mind only has to stop.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Eknath of Paithan was born into a Deshastha Brahmin family in the first half of the sixteenth century, in the town on the Godavari where the saint-poet Nivrittinath's lineage had already put down deep roots. He was raised by his grandfather Chakradhara. His parents, the tradition records, died early. He grew up as a boy whose immediate nath, the one who holds, was not a father but a grandfather. The word anath shadows his life from the beginning. He carried, in his own biography, the ache that the refrain of this abhanga will name.

As a boy, Eknath read of Janardan Swami at Devgiri, the great fort town later called Daulatabad. Janardan Swami was a Dattatreya devotee and, according to tradition, also a Muslim-era administrator at the fort, serving within a Sultanate court while practicing intense Dattatreya devotion in his inner life. This is already a verse in prose: the Guru Eknath would choose was a man who lived at a crossing, inside a political world that did not share his devotion, holding the inner life steady in an outer life of complexity. Eknath traveled to Devgiri, some say at about the age of twelve, and asked to be taken in. Janardan Swami took him. Eknath served him for years, the tradition says, in combinations of household service, administrative help, and long absorption in the Name. When the Guru sat in meditation, Eknath is said to have held the register of accounts and kept the work moving. When the work was done, he sat beside his Guru and learned.

From Janardan Swami, Eknath received the Dattatreya transmission, the Krishna bhakti of the Warkari stream, and the conviction that the inner life does not need to reject the outer life to flourish. Eknath came back to Paithan, married, raised children, and lived the rest of his days as a householder saint. He composed the Eknathi Bhagavat, a Marathi rendering of the eleventh skandha of the Bhagavata Purana, expanding Shuka's instruction to Parikshit in the language of his own people. He recovered the text of the Dnyaneshwari from centuries of accumulated scribal error and gave the Warkari community a reliable reading of Dnyaneshwar's Gita commentary. He composed the Bhavartha Ramayana. He wrote abhangas in which the Names of Jagannath and Janardan are not two things.

And he lived his theology at street level. He ate with untouchables. He is remembered for insisting that Brahmin purity rules did not outrank the Lord's presence in every human being. He carried a Muslim fakir on his back into the house, the tradition says, when the fakir was exhausted and needed shelter; and when the orthodox Brahmins complained, Eknath answered that the fakir was Hari. A bhagavata who has let his citta rest at the feet of Jagannath does not then rebuild the partitions the world has erected around who is worthy to be fed.

The abhanga we are reading is the inner story behind those outer acts. The mind has come to rest at the feet of the Lord of the world. Because the Lord of the world is already holding everyone, the saint who has rested there cannot then refuse anyone. The joy of the three worlds, once seen, leaves no human being outside of it. Eknath's biography, in the end, is the commentary on his own first line.