Sant Eknath: The Water Meant for Rameshwaram

The most famous story about him, and the one worth putting first.

The practice. There is an old and difficult vow.

• Carry water from the Ganga at Kashi
• Take it, on foot, the whole length of the country
• Pour it on the shivalinga at Rameshwaram

The distance is around two thousand kilometres. People spent a year or more on it, walking, carrying the pots on a shoulder pole, guarding them.

Eknath was doing it. He had the water, and he was somewhere in the dry country between.

What he saw: a donkey, collapsed at the side of the road, dying of thirst.

What he did: he opened the pot and poured the Ganga water into its mouth.

What the people with him said. What anybody would say.

That he had walked a year for this. That the vow was now broken. That the water was for Rameshwar, and he had given it to an animal.

What he said. The answer is the whole thing.

He said that the purpose of taking the water to Rameshwar was to please the lord, and that the lord was already pleased, and that he could not have carried it past a living creature dying in front of him and still called what he was doing worship.

In some versions he says the lord was in the donkey, and that the water had reached the shrine.

Why this story is the one people tell. Because it is a clean statement of a priority, and it costs something.

He did not find a way to do both. He did not fill the pot again from a nearby well. He spent the year's work, and did not get it back.

The tradition's position, stated through this story: a rule that requires you to walk past somebody dying is not being followed correctly.

And a working version of that, since the point of these entries is use:

• A fast that is harming your health is being done wrong
• A vow that requires you to neglect a dependent is being done wrong
• A ritual purity that requires you to refuse help to somebody is being done wrong
• Money that was promised to a temple, when the household needs it for medicine, goes to the medicine

That is not a modern reading imported onto the story. It is the story. Eknath, a Paithan brahmana in the sixteenth century, poured Ganga water into a donkey and said the worship had been completed.

Two more stories, because they define what he actually did in Paithan.

The shraddha

What a shraddha is: the annual rite for the ancestors, in which brahmanas are fed and the food is understood to reach the dead.

It is the single most caste-bound domestic ritual there is. Who may be fed is specified. Who may not come near is specified.

What happened. Eknath had prepared the shraddha meal.

• Some Mahars, an untouchable community, passed by
• They smelled the food and said aloud that it was worth being born to eat such a thing
• Eknath heard, and invited them in, and fed them the shraddha meal, before the brahmanas

The reaction. Paithan was outraged.

The brahmanas refused to come. He was told the shraddha was void, that the ancestors had been dishonoured, and that he had polluted his own house.

What the story says happened: he prepared the meal again and invited them, and when they still refused, he called on his ancestors, and the ancestors themselves appeared and ate.

How to read that. The miraculous element is hagiography. What is historical is the social fact: a Paithan brahmana in the sixteenth century fed untouchables the shraddha food and took the consequences from his own community, including from his own son.

And it is worth saying what those consequences were. Not an inconvenience. Social death, in a town where his family's standing was its whole security.

The man who spat

The practice: Eknath bathed in the Godavari every morning and walked back.

What happened: a man decided to torment him and spat on him as he passed.

Eknath turned round and went back to the river and bathed again. And came back. And the man spat again. And he went back again.

The number given is a hundred and eight, which is a conventional number and means many.

How it ended: the man gave up, exhausted, and asked why he was not angry.

The answer, and this is what makes the story unusual: Eknath said he was grateful, because he had been given a hundred and eight extra baths in the Godavari, which he would never have taken otherwise.

What that is and what it is not.

What it is: a description of a temperament that could not be provoked, and of a man refusing to hand somebody else control over his own state.

What it is not: an instruction to tolerate abuse.

That distinction has to be made explicitly, because the story gets used badly.

The plain version:

• Eknath was a man of standing in his own town, being harassed by somebody with no power over him, who could not actually harm him
• That is not the situation of a person being abused at home, at work, or by somebody with power over them
• If somebody is hurting you, the relevant response is to stop it and get help, not to be grateful for the opportunity
• In India: women's helpline 181, police 112, Childline 1098 for anybody under eighteen, Tele MANAS 14416 for the mental health side
• No saint's forbearance story is an argument for staying in a situation that is harming you

With that said, the useful part of the story survives: the man spitting wanted a reaction, and the whole of his effort was directed at getting one, and he did not get one, and he ran out of energy before Eknath did.

The recovery of the Jnaneshwari

This is arguably his most consequential act.

The problem. By the sixteenth century, two hundred and fifty years after Jnaneshwar, the text of the Jnaneshwari was corrupt.

• Manuscripts had been copied and recopied
• Verses had been added, dropped, and altered
• Different regions had different texts
• There was no reliable version

What Eknath did:

• He collected manuscripts
• He compared them
• He went to Alandi, to the samadhi
• And he produced a corrected recension, the shuddha prati, in 1584

The tradition's account of the visit to Alandi is that he found a root of the ajanavriksha tree grown around Jnaneshwar's neck, and removed it, and that the correct text was then given to him.

The historical fact underneath: the text of the Jnaneshwari that everybody has read for four hundred and forty years is Eknath's edition. Without it there might not be a reliable Jnaneshwari at all.

He also states in the colophon that he has restored and not composed, and gives the date, which is the kind of thing a careful editor does.

The Eknathi Bhagavata

What it is: a Marathi commentary on the eleventh skandha of the Bhagavata Purana, in around 18,800 ovis.

Why the eleventh. Because it is the philosophical one.

The eleventh book contains the Uddhava Gita, Krishna's final teaching to Uddhava before leaving the world, which is the Bhagavata's equivalent of the Bhagavad Gita and is the book's densest doctrinal section.

Where he wrote it: at Kashi, and the story attached is that the Kashi pandits objected to a Purana being expounded in a vernacular, tried to stop him, and were won over.

Its standing: it is the second pillar of Marathi devotional prose after the Jnaneshwari, and Varkaris read the two together.

His other major works:

• Bhavartha Ramayana, a Marathi Ramayana in around 40,000 ovis, left incomplete at his death at the Yuddha Kanda and completed by his disciple Gavaba
• Rukmini Swayamvar, on Rukmini's marriage to Krishna
• Hastamalak, Shukashtak, Swatmasukha, Ananda Lahari and other shorter works
• Several thousand abhangas
• The bharuds

The bharuds

This is his own invention and it is unlike anything else in the tradition.

What a bharud is: a dramatic folk poem, performed, in which the speaker is a character from ordinary life, and which carries a spiritual meaning underneath a completely mundane surface.

The voices he writes in:

• A vendor calling out wares
• A washerwoman
• A beggar
• A snake charmer
• A woman being possessed, and the exorcist
• A bahurupi, an impersonator
• A Muslim faqir
• A thief
• A drunkard
• A wedding party

How it works: the poem is a completely ordinary scene, in the ordinary idiom of that trade, with its actual vocabulary, and every line has a second meaning about the self, the mind, the guru or the name.

A bharud in the voice of a woman grinding grain is about grinding, and is also about what the mind does with what is put into it. A bharud about a snake charmer is about a snake, and is also about the senses.

Why he did it: because it can be performed, in a village, by anybody, to an audience that cannot read, and it is funny.

Around three hundred survive. They are still performed in Maharashtra, in folk theatre, and they are the direct ancestor of Marathi popular theatre.

The Hindu Turk Samvad. One further work worth naming.

It is a dialogue between a Hindu and a Muslim, in which each attacks the other's practices and each is given real arguments, and which ends in mutual recognition rather than a victory. Written in the sixteenth century, in the Deccan, by a man whose own guru served a Sultan.

It is not a work of doctrine and it is not a conversion text. It is a record of a conversation being possible.

The end. In 1599, at Paithan, on Phalguna Krishna Shashthi.

He took jal samadhi in the Godavari.

As with Jnaneshwar's samadhi, this is a hagiographic account of a saint's end and not a model for anybody. If reading it raises any thought about your own life, Tele MANAS 14416 in India is free and answered by trained people.

Nath Shashthi, also Eknath Shashthi, is the sixth day of the dark fortnight of Phalguna, generally in February or March. It is the principal Eknath observance.

Paithan today:

• On the Godavari, around 50 kilometres from Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, formerly Aurangabad
• The Eknath Maharaj samadhi mandir on the river
• The Nath vada, his house, is shown
• Nath Shashthi brings very large numbers, with a fair
• The Jayakwadi dam and its bird sanctuary are nearby
• Paithan is also the home of the Paithani sari, the silk weave with the gold border, which is the town's other and older fame

The Eknath palkhi:

• Sets out from Paithan for Pandharpur as part of the annual wari
• Joins the larger movement of palkhis from Alandi, Dehu, Saswad, Trimbakeshwar and Muktainagar
• Arrives for Ashadhi Ekadashi

Reading him

Start with the bharuds. They are short, they are funny, they are performable, and recordings and performances are easy to find. Bhalari, Dahi kala, the Virani bharuds and the Joganee are the well known ones.

Then the abhangas, of which there are thousands, and which are in every Varkari collection.

Then the Eknathi Bhagavata, chapter by chapter, alongside the eleventh book of the Bhagavata Purana and particularly the Uddhava Gita.

The Bhavartha Ramayana is very long and is for later.

What to take from him

Four things, all of them usable.

One. Householder life is not a lesser setting. His guru sent him home and told him to marry. Everything he produced was produced by a man running a household in a town where his own son disapproved of him.

Two. Accuracy in small work is a qualification. The account book story is the tradition's answer to what makes somebody teachable, and the answer is not intensity of feeling. It is care.

Three. A living creature in front of you outranks a vow. The donkey.

Four. Say the difficult thing in the language people speak. The Jnaneshwari restoration, the Bhagavata in Marathi, the bharuds in the voice of a washerwoman, and the Hindu Turk dialogue are all the same act performed four different ways.

A daily practice from this entry:

• Rama Krishna Hari, the Varkari name
• One bharud or one abhanga, read or heard
• On Nath Shashthi, feed somebody, which is the observance that actually matches him
• And the standing rule from the donkey story, applied to whatever rule you are keeping

The position he occupies. Between Jnaneshwar and Tukaram, and doing a specific job.

Jnaneshwar made the material available in Marathi and died at twenty one.

Tukaram, a century after Eknath, would take it as far as it could go in the direction of raw personal utterance.

Eknath's job was to hold it together in between, and he did it by:

• Repairing the text so that there was still a Jnaneshwari to read
• Adding to it, with the Bhagavata and the Ramayana in Marathi
• Extending its reach, with the bharuds, into performance and into the villages
• And defending its social claim in the hardest possible place, his own caste, his own town, his own household

The last of those is the one that cost him.

The donkey story is beautiful and everybody tells it. The shraddha story is the one that had consequences: he fed untouchables the ancestral meal in Paithan and his own son left the house.

A note on what this series keeps saying

Across these entries a pattern keeps appearing: Thiruppaan Alvar carried into the Srirangam sanctum, Nandanar at Chidambaram, Chokhamela buried at the step, and here, Eknath feeding the shraddha meal to Mahars.

The pattern is that the exclusion was real, that it was enforced by religion, and that the tradition's own saints kept attacking it from inside.

The honest statement is: the exclusion was wrong, it caused enormous harm over a very long time, the tradition produced both the exclusion and the people who fought it, and the people who fought it are the ones the tradition now venerates.

Eknath is one of them, and he was not a poor man being excluded. He was a brahmana with everything to lose, in the town that had refused Jnaneshwar, and he did it anyway.

One line to keep

When they told him the water was for Rameshwar, he said the water had reached Rameshwar.