Bhakta Dhanna: The Farmer Who Was Given a Stone

The story he is known for, and it is one of the best in north Indian devotional literature.

What happened

He was a boy, or a young man, in the accounts.

He saw a brahmana doing puja: bathing a shaligram or a thakur, a household deity, offering food to it, and performing the whole daily service.

And he asked for one.

He wanted to do the same thing, and asked the brahmana to give him a deity and tell him how.

What the brahmana did

Got rid of him.

The accounts vary in tone, and in most of them the response is mocking. He picked up an ordinary stone, a pebble from the ground, handed it to Dhanna, and told him something to the effect that this would do, that he should feed it, and that god would come and eat.

And went back to what he was doing.

What Dhanna did

Exactly what he had been told.

He took the stone home, set it up, washed it, and offered it food.

And it did not eat.

So he waited.

And it still did not eat.

So he did not eat either. He had been told the deity would eat, and it had not, and it did not occur to him that the instruction might have been a joke, so he sat with the food in front of the stone and refused to eat until it did.

How long: the accounts give days.

And the food stayed there, and he wept, and did not move.

And then, in the accounts, god ate.

What the story is doing

Three things at once, and all three are the point.

One. The object did not matter.

The brahmana's deity was a proper shaligram, ritually correct, and installed according to procedure. Dhanna's was a stone off the ground given as a joke.

And the story says the response went to the stone.

Two. The mockery became the instrument.

The brahmana said something dismissive in order to be left alone, and Dhanna took it as instruction, and the instruction worked because he took it as one.

Which is a genuinely strange piece of theology, and the tradition tells it with relish: the thing that was said to get rid of him is the thing that got him there.

Three. He did not know it was impossible.

This is the part the tradition emphasises. Dhanna is not portrayed as clever, or learned, or as having understood something the brahmana had not. He is portrayed as somebody who was told a thing and believed it.

And the story's position is that this was not a deficiency.

How to hold it

It is a devotional legend and the miraculous element is hagiography.

What is historical: a Jat farmer of fifteenth century Rajasthan, outside the class of people who did formal worship, became a figure whose verses are in a scripture, and the story the tradition tells about how it started involves a brahmana treating him with contempt.

And the thing that should not be taken from it: it is not a general instruction to believe whatever anybody tells you. The tradition's own literature, in these same entries, is full of warnings about teachers who exploit people. This story is about sincerity outrunning procedure, and it is not about credulity.

The standing caution: a teacher who charges money for blessings, isolates you from your family, requires secrecy, requires sexual contact, or asks you to do something dangerous, is failing regardless of what they claim. Police 112, women's helpline 181, Childline 1098, Tele MANAS 14416.

Four shabads of his are in the Guru Granth Sahib, and one of them is unlike anything else in it.

What it says

In Raga Dhanasari, and in substance:

Grain, ghee and salt for the cooking. Lentils. Shoes and clothes that are decent. Seed for the field. A milch cow and a buffalo. A good horse. A good household and family.

Dhanna, your servant, is begging for these things.

That is the shabad.

A list of agricultural and domestic requirements, itemised, submitted directly, without apology and without any attempt to make it spiritual.

Why it is remarkable

Because devotional literature almost never does this.

The standard move, across every tradition in this series, is to ask for the relationship rather than for things: Utpaladeva asks for the devotion and not for liberation, Tyagaraja asks whether wealth is happiness, Kabir attacks the whole business of petitioning.

And there is a good reason for the standard move, which is that a religion of transactions is a poor thing and every tradition knows it.

Dhanna asks for a buffalo.

How to read it properly

Two readings, and both are held.

One. It is exactly what it says.

A farmer with a family needs flour, ghee, salt, lentils, shoes, clothes, seed, a milch cow, a buffalo and a horse. Those are the actual contents of a viable agricultural household, and without them the family does not eat.

And he asked for them, because they were what he needed, and because he did not think there was anything unfit about saying so.

Which is a position with some dignity in it. He is not pretending to want less than he wants.

Two. The tradition also reads it as pointing past itself.

Sikh commentary on the shabad reads the list as the beginning of a movement: the petitioner starts with what he needs and ends, in the same breath, as a servant, and the word he uses of himself, jan, is the term for one who belongs to the divine.

And in his other shabads, the material is entirely different: the transience of things, the wasted births, the necessity of the name.

Which suggests the same person wrote both, and that the buffalo shabad is not naivety but a particular stance, taken deliberately.

His other shabads

One, in Raga Asa, on having wandered through many births and got nowhere, and on the name as the only thing that has worked.

One, in Raga Dhanasari, beginning Gopal tera aarta: this is my petition to you, and you set right the affairs of those who serve you. It then names Namdev, Kabir, Ravidas and Sena as examples of people whose affairs were set right, and says that hearing about them is what made Dhanna begin.

Which is worth noticing. A Rajasthani farmer's shabad, preserved in a Punjabi scripture, names a Maharashtrian calico printer, a Kashi weaver, a Kashi leather worker and a barber from central India, as the reason he started.

The network was real, it crossed languages and regions, and people knew about each other.

Where to read them

• The Guru Granth Sahib is freely available online with translation and with the original in Gurmukhi and transliteration, and the four Dhanna shabads are easy to find by name
• Nabhadas's Bhaktamal, the early seventeenth century Braj account of the bhaktas, has an entry on him and is where much of the north Indian material about these figures comes from
• Hindi and Rajasthani devotional collections carry material attributed to him

One. The stone.

The object was a pebble handed over as a joke by somebody who wanted to be left alone, and the tradition says the response went to it.

Which is the tradition's own statement about the relationship between correct procedure and what actually happens, made in the strongest available form: the ritually installed shaligram in the brahmana's house is set directly against a stone off the ground, and the story chooses the stone.

And the practical version: whatever you are worried about doing correctly, in the way of ritual, is almost certainly less important than you think it is. Every tradition in this series says so somewhere, and this is the bluntest version of it.

Two. He did not know it was impossible.

The tradition does not present him as clever. He was told a thing and believed it, and did what he had been told, and would not stop.

And it should be said clearly what this is not: it is not an instruction to believe whatever you are told. This series is full of warnings about teachers who exploit exactly that. The story is about sincerity outrunning procedure, not about credulity.

Three. He asked for a buffalo.

Grain, ghee, salt, lentils, shoes, clothes, seed, a milch cow, a buffalo, a horse, a good household.

Devotional literature almost never does this, and there are good reasons why not, and there is nevertheless something in a man saying plainly what his household needs rather than pretending to want less.

Applied: if you are going to ask for things, ask for the things you actually need, rather than dressing them up as something more presentable. The dressing up is the part that does the damage.

Four. He started because he heard about other people.

His own shabad says so. He names Namdev, Kabir, Ravidas and Sena, and says that hearing about them is what made him begin.

A calico printer from Maharashtra, a weaver and a leather worker from Kashi, and a barber from central India, named by a Jat farmer in Rajasthan, preserved in a Punjabi scripture.

The network was real and it crossed languages, regions, castes and centuries, and the reason we know that is that somebody wrote it down.

Five. The list he is on.

Guru Arjan's shabad names devotees who reached despite their social position: a calico printer, a weaver, a leather worker, a barber, and a Jat who grazed cattle.

That list is an argument made by composition, exactly as the Ramananda list is, and it was included in the scripture of a different tradition by a compiler who put non Sikh low caste devotees into it on purpose.

A daily practice from this entry:

• Ram Ram or Sat Naam or whatever name is yours
• The Gopal tera aarta shabad, read once in translation. It is short
• If you have something you are worried about doing correctly, do it anyway, badly
• And, once, the buffalo test: say what you actually need, without making it sound better

A closing thought

A Jat boy in Rajasthan watched a brahmana washing and feeding a household deity and asked to be given one and shown how.

The brahmana picked a stone off the ground, handed it to him to be rid of him, and told him to feed it and god would come and eat.

He took the stone home, put food in front of it, and when it did not eat he did not eat either, and sat there for days.

Two centuries later a Sikh Guru compiling a scripture in Punjab included four of his compositions, and wrote one of his own naming a printer, a weaver, a leather worker, a barber and a Jat who grazed cattle, as people who had got there directly.

And one of Dhanna's four is a list of what a farm needs: flour, ghee, salt, lentils, shoes, a cow, a buffalo, and a good household, from your servant, who is asking.

Who: Bhakta Dhanna, also Dhanna Bhagat or Dhanna Jat, born around 1415 at Dhuan Kalan in what is now Tonk district, Rajasthan. A Jat farmer who kept animals, grew crops and remained a working cultivator, and who is counted among the disciples of Ramananda in the standard list alongside Kabir the weaver, Ravidas the leather worker, Sena the barber and Pipa the king.

The documentary anchor: four of his shabads are in the Guru Granth Sahib, compiled by Guru Arjan in 1604, and Guru Arjan also wrote a shabad in Raga Asa listing devotees who reached through the name despite their social position, naming Namdev a calico printer, Kabir a weaver, Ravidas a leather worker, Sena a barber, and Dhanna a Jat who grazed cattle, of whom he says that he obtained the divine directly. Most figures of this period have nothing that solid.

The stone: as a boy he saw a brahmana doing puja on a household deity and asked to be given one and shown how. The brahmana, to be rid of him, picked an ordinary stone off the ground, handed it over, and told him to feed it and god would come and eat. Dhanna took it home, washed it, offered it food, and when it did not eat he did not eat either, and sat with the food in front of it for days, and the accounts say god then ate. The story sets a ritually installed shaligram directly against a pebble given as a joke and chooses the pebble.

The buffalo shabad: in Raga Dhanasari, an itemised list of what a farming household needs, submitted directly and without apology: grain, ghee and salt, lentils, decent shoes and clothes, seed for the field, a milch cow and a buffalo, a good horse, a good household, from Dhanna your servant who is begging for these things. Devotional literature almost never asks for things this plainly.

His other shabads: on having wandered through many births and got nowhere; and Gopal tera aarta, which names Namdev, Kabir, Ravidas and Sena as examples of people whose affairs were set right, and says that hearing about them is what made Dhanna begin. A Rajasthani farmer's verse, preserved in a Punjabi scripture, naming a Maharashtrian, two men from Kashi and a barber from central India.