The Name, the rasa that ends rebirth
Original Marathi from the Tukaram Gatha · About Sant Tukaram
मराठी मूळ
दुधभात घृत सकरपारे । हरते भुक नहि अंततारे ॥1॥
खावते जुग सब चलिजावे । खटमिठा फिर पचतावे ॥2॥
कहे तुका रामरस जो पावे । बहुरि फेरा वो कबहु न खावे ॥3॥
बारंबार काहे मरत अभागी । बहुरि मरन संक्या तोरेभागी ॥ध्रु.॥
Tukaram Gatha (Marathi Wikisource)
English Translation
Why do you keep dying again and again, O unfortunate one? The count of your deaths is your own portion. Milk, rice, ghee, and shakarpara remove hunger for a time, but they do not carry you across in the end. Eat and enjoy through all the ages, yet time passes away. The sour-and-sweet of it all turns in the end to regret. Says Tuka, the one who attains the rasa of Rama never again enters the rounds of samsara.
We ask forgiveness for any inaccuracies in rendering Tukaram ji’s original Marathi.
In Plain Words
Why do you keep dying again and again, O unfortunate one? The count of your deaths is your own portion. Milk, rice, ghee, and shakarpara remove hunger for a time, but they do not carry you across in the end. Eat and enjoy through all the ages, yet time passes away. The sour-and-sweet of it all turns in the end to regret. Tuka says: the one who attains the rasa of Rama never again enters the rounds of samsara.
What it means
Tukaram contrasts food that fills you for an hour with the one taste that frees you forever. Milk, rice, ghee, sweet shakarpara: they ease hunger now, but they cannot ferry you across death. You can feast through age after age, yet time still runs out, and the rich sour-and-sweet of all that pleasure leaves only regret behind. He names the cost of refusing the cure with stark pity: you die again and again, and that endless count is your own portion, the harvest of your choices. The way out is a different taste entirely, the rasa of Rama, and whoever truly drinks it is never pulled back into the rounds of birth and death.
The Power of the Name
The supremacy of nama-smarana: God's name as the highest practice.
More in this theme →