Janardan, the Refuge of the Orphan

The signature line is compressed almost to the point of silence. In Eka Janardan, standing as one, the splendor of chaitanya shines forth. Three short phrases, each carrying a weight that could take years to unpack. Eka janardani, Eknath's own verse-seal, the phrase he signs every abhanga with, which literally names his Guru and which the tradition has long also read as standing as one with Janardan. Ekapanen ubha, standing in oneness. Caitanyaci shobha shobhatase, the splendor of pure consciousness is shining.

If you have reached this line from the refrain that came before, notice what has happened. The abhanga began with a mind coming to rest. It moved through the deepest naming of being unheld and the arrival of the one who holds. And it closes here, with a disciple standing as one with the one who held him, and the whole scene radiant with the splendor of chaitanya. Nothing has been forced. The disciple is not described as having achieved anything. He is simply standing. And in that standing, the splendor that had always been there finally has somewhere to shine from. This is the quiet Advaita of the Warkari saints. Not the erasure of the disciple. The standing of the disciple in a oneness in which the splendor of consciousness is visible.

The Living Words

Eka janardanin. This is the saint's mudra, the signature that appears at the close of nearly every abhanga Eknath composed. At the surface, it names the Guru. In Eka Janardan, in the teacher whose hand was placed on the disciple's head, this utterance is made. The tradition has long carried a second reading as well. Eka janardani can also be heard as standing as one with Janardan, disciple and Guru not two. The Warkari commentators do not assert this doubling as the surface grammar of the Marathi. They offer it as traditional, sitting alongside the signature meaning.

Ekapanen ubha. Ekapanen, in a state of oneness; ubha, standing. Not dissolved, not absent, not erased. Standing. The verb is the same Warkari ubha that opens Dnyaneshwar's first abhanga, where the devotee stands at the door.

Caitanyaci shobha shobhatase. Caitanya, pure consciousness; shobha, splendor; shobhatase, is radiant. The line uses the root twice, a Marathi device that makes the splendor itself the agent. The splendor is splendoring. It does not wait to be noticed.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

Every abhanga of Eknath closes with the phrase eka janardani, and it is important to hear what happens in this little seal.

At the most direct level, eka janardani is the saint's mudra, his verse-signature. Every Marathi saint-poet signs his abhangas. Dnyaneshwar signs jnanadeva mhane. Tukaram signs tuka mhane. Namdev signs namdev mhane. Eknath signs eka janardani. The signature is not decorative. It is the signal that the saint is taking responsibility for what has been said, placing his own name on the abhanga, putting his testimony down in public.

And Eknath's signature is remarkable because it does not contain his own name alone. It contains his Guru's. Eka is a short form of Ekanatha. Janardan is his Guru. The signature, at the plainest reading, says Eka of Janardan, Eka in Janardan, the disciple-who-belongs-to-Janardan. Eknath does not sign his verses as a solo voice. He signs them as a member of a pair. Every abhanga ends with the announcement that the speaker is not free-standing. He is in his Guru.

This is already a teaching. The saint who composed thousands of verses does not, at the end of any of them, stand alone. He takes his place back inside the Guru from whom he received everything. The signature is itself a return. Having said what he said, he says: and this was not mine. This was Eka-in-Janardan saying it.

Now the tradition has long read a second meaning into the phrase, and it is important to present this reading honestly. Traditionally, eka janardani is also read as standing as one with Janardan. In this reading, eka is not just a shortening of the saint's name but the number one, oneness. Janardani is the locative. Standing in the one-ness that is Janardan. Disciple and Guru not two. This is the Advaitic reading of the signature.

Present this carefully. This double meaning is traditional. It has been carried in the Warkari tradition for a long time, and Marathi commentators have sat with it and found it rich. But it is not textually self-evident on the surface of the Marathi. At the surface, eka janardani is the signature, Eka-of-Janardan. The double reading is an interpretive gift the tradition has given, and it holds only if the Advaitic horizon is allowed to speak through the signature. Eknath himself does not spell the doubling out. He leaves the two readings resting together, and the tradition has kept both in its mouth.

And notice how beautifully the next words support the traditional double reading. Ekapanen ubha. Standing in oneness. If the signature was only the plain Eka-of-Janardan, one might read the line as a devotional posture: the disciple standing devotedly before the Guru. But Eknath uses the word ekapanen. Oneness. The word is not the word you would choose for the ordinary devotional stance. It is the word you choose when you are describing non-duality. The disciple is not standing before the Guru. The disciple is standing in oneness.

And the standing is not an achievement of the disciple. Read the Marathi carefully. The citta came to rest at the feet of Jagannath in the first verse. The anath found the nath in the refrain. Now, in the closing verse, the one who has been taken in is standing. He did not manufacture the oneness. He did not abolish himself to achieve it. He stopped standing apart from the Guru who had been holding him all along, and the oneness that was already the structure of their relation became visible.

And then the splendor. Caitanyaci shobha shobhatase. The splendor of pure consciousness is shining.

Chaitanya is one of the most important words in the Vedantic vocabulary. It is the aware-ness that is not an object of any perception. It is not a thing that has awareness. It is awareness itself. In the Advaita reading, chaitanya is what you are, most fundamentally, once the layers of identification with body and mind and role have been set aside. It is the ground of the three worlds. It is what Jagannath is, seen from the inside.

And Eknath does not say he has attained chaitanya. He says the splendor of chaitanya is shining. The grammar matters. The splendor is the subject. Eknath is not the subject. Eknath is a place where the splendor is becoming visible, because the disciple has stopped standing apart from the Guru long enough for the splendor that was always there to have somewhere to shine from.

This is the quiet Advaita of the Warkari saints. Dnyaneshwar wrote the Dnyaneshwari on the Bhagavad Gita and was steeped in Advaita. Eknath received that transmission and rendered the Bhagavata in Marathi. When he closes this abhanga with a splendor of chaitanya that shines when the disciple stands in oneness with the Guru, he is not straying from his devotional frame. He is showing that the devotional and the non-dual are not two things in the Warkari reading. The disciple standing as Eka-in-Janardan, which is the same thing as standing-in-oneness-with-Janardan, is the condition in which chaitanya is visibly radiant. The Guru is the face of the one consciousness. The disciple's surrender is the removal of the screen that had been preventing the splendor from being seen.

Sit with this as the last word of the abhanga. The abhanga began with a mind in motion. It passed through the naming of absence. And it ends with a splendor that was always there becoming visible, because the disciple has found the one who holds him and has stopped pretending to be somewhere else. Not erasure. Standing. The splendor does the shining. You only have to stop standing apart.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Eknath's verse-seal, eka janardani, is one of the most recognizable signatures in Marathi devotional poetry. It appears at the close of nearly every abhanga he composed. Marathi readers know an Eknath abhanga at the end, the way English readers might know a Shakespeare sonnet by its couplet. And the signature is itself a small theology of parampara.

Consider what the signature declares. The disciple, at the end of every utterance, places himself back inside his Guru. He does not take the credit for the verse. He does not stand alone as the composer. He signs as Eka-in-Janardan, and the signature travels with the verse forever after. This is unusual even among Marathi saint-signatures. Dnyaneshwar signs as jnanadeva, his own name. Tukaram signs as tuka. Namdev signs as namdev. Only Eknath signs with the Guru's name attached to his own. Every abhanga is a small renewal of the diksha, a small repetition of the statement that the disciple is not free-standing.

And this is not a mere rhetorical habit. Eknath had spent years in direct service to Janardan Swami at Devgiri before he returned to Paithan and began his own career of teaching. The signature is the settled form of a long apprenticeship. He had been taken in. He had been taught. He had lived in the Guru's household. And when he began to compose, he signed every verse with the name of the one who had made the composing possible.

The tradition has preserved stories about how Eknath understood this signature. He is remembered as saying that the verses were not his. They were Janardan's. He was only the mouthpiece. This is a traditional attribution. The biographers and hagiographers of Eknath record versions of this attribution in several places. Whether or not the saint said it in exactly those words, the signature is consistent with the attribution. The signature itself says, at the end of every song, that the song is not alone. It belongs to the pair.

Janardan Swami himself lived, the biographers say, as a devotee of Dattatreya, the great trinitarian form who holds Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva in a single body. Dattatreya is traditionally said to have twenty-four gurus, drawn from the elements, the animals, and the ordinary circumstances of life. The Bhagavata Purana's eleventh skandha preserves this teaching. Janardan Swami, steeped in Dattatreya devotion, transmitted to Eknath both a specific Guru-disciple relation and a wider sensibility in which every being and every circumstance is potentially a Guru. Eknath's signature, eka janardani, concentrates the entire Dattatreya wideness into a single Name, and then lets that Name be the frame in which the disciple stands.

The tradition after Eknath kept the signature alive in practice. Every reciter of an Eknathi Bhagavata passage, every singer of an Eknath abhanga in kirtan, pronounces the mudra at the close. The Guru is invoked every time. Janardan Swami, who lived an administrative life at Daulatabad and left behind no great written corpus of his own, is remembered in the living language of Marathi devotion every time an Eknath verse is sung to the end. This is how parampara works in practice. The disciple preserves the Guru by refusing to sign alone.

Tukaram, who would come later and close his own abhangas with tuka mhane, knew this Eknath signature well. The Warkari tradition sings Eknath, Tukaram, Dnyaneshwar, and the others as a single chorus. Tukaram's abhangas return again and again to the figure of Vitthal as refuge of the poor and the anath, and the lineage of that theology runs through Eknath's refrain. The whole Warkari community, in its annual vari to Pandharpur, sings verses from both saints along the road. Eknath's eka janardani and Tukaram's tuka mhane together hold a lineage in place.

And in the living hearts of readers today, the signature continues to do its work. Each time you close an Eknath abhanga with eka janardani, you stand where the saint stood. Not alone, but inside the frame of a holding. The splendor is already shining. You are only invited to stop standing apart.