Maharashtra in India has always been a great center of the Hindu religious impulse, a veritable treasure house of cultural artifacts along with great masters of the spirit. Bu there is none who has so stupendous a stature as Gnyaneshwar. He was poet, philosopher, master of yoga, Enlightened One, and he lived to be only twenty-six years of age (1271 -1297). He was born of an unusual father, Vithalpant who lived in a small village near the Godavari River and found married life irksome. He abandoned his wife for the traditional refuge of Benaras city where he was initiated by the famous Sri Ramanand Swami. Alas, a fellow villager on pilgrimage saw him there and at once informed his guru that the promising young man had left a wife behind. Since he had lied that he was unmarried to receive initiation, his guru angrily sent him back with the instruction that the life spiritual is not an escape from one's responsibilities. Rakhumabai, his wife was only too overjoyed to find a chastened husband back in the marital fold but his fellow Brahmins took the view that once a man has taken the vow of renunciation, sannyassa he could never return to family life and they pronounced the family outcaste and excommunicate. Vithalpant did not care about this ultimate Indian catastrophe, in a social sense, as he was fortified by the belief that he was only obeying his guru. Four children were born to them the first Nvrittinath, then Gnyaneshwar in 1271 and another boy Sopana and finally a sister Muktabai. Exceedingly strangely, all of them became spiritual masters in their own right, Nvrittinath being popularly regard as the greatest of them all but he was always a hidden master. He left home at the age of eight in pursuit of the spiritual life, emulating and doing one better than the father. Gnyaneshwar was initiated by this brother in a wilderness in somewhat fanciful circumstances if we go by the traditional accounts of the event. The others were content to follow in the long shadow of Gnyaneshwar. Soon after his initiation Gnyaneshwar made the discovery that is practically mandatory in later Hinduism, namely the Bhagvad Gita is the text that best serves the spiritual aspirations and inclinations of the people. But there was a problem. He had his brother to teach him and reveal its inner workings. What would the common people do with a text that was inaccessible to them, written in the remote language of Sanskrit? He took the momentous decision to write a commentary on the Gita in the common tongue and practically invented Marathi, as it is understood today along the way. As is also mandatory in the lives of Indian saints the establishment priesthood raised a great howl at thus tearing off the veils of secrecy over texts they had come to regard as their fiefdom as well as the giver of prestige because they alone could correctly interpret it. Now came this excommunicate Brahmin and he was casting pearls before the great unwashed with abandon and even worse, actually inspiring them to really live religious lives instead of the merely profitable (to them) ritual life. His erudition and intellect was too formidable, none could match swords with him in an intellectual arena and hope to get away unscathed or even worse shown up as pathetically deficient in knowledge or understanding. They resorted to petty harassment denying the family cooking pots in the local market and other acts of spite. Gnyaneshwar is reputed to have won over the chief instigator of such malice by letting him see Muktabai cooking food on his bare back! So intense was his spiritual power, and the heat it gave off that it did not need fire of cooking utensils. At other times he is supposed to have raised the dead to life because he had blessed a young widow with marital bliss and his words could not be in vain. India requires miracles of its saints and they will accrue to his life story once he is dead no matter how strenuously he objects to them as being irrelevant when he is alive. It is noteworthy that Gnyaneshwar has no place for miracles as proof of holiness in his copious writings. His finest miracle however was his famed victory over the great Yogi Chagan Dev. This worthy was a Titanic figure of his times, a far famed Tantrik yogi and disputant. He was reputed to have lived for over a thousand years, blocking off his death because his guru had not yet introduced him to the final ascent in the spiritual climb, and he was in no mood to take a chance on missing him when he reincarnated next. The soul gets covered over with a layer of amnesia with each reincarnation and it is a standard task of the guru to remind the disciple of their bond in each lifetime they meet. Chagan Dev was not going to take the slightest risk however and preferred to wait it out, if there is unfinished spiritual business between guru and disciple then both their final liberations are blocked forever until it is accomplished. His long life and many yogic accomplishments had rendered him arrogant and quarrelsome, perpetually seeking out all rising stars in the spiritual firmament and shooting them down when he realized they were not his promised guru. The fierce Yogi used to move around on a tiger as an advertisement to his having conquered the brute instincts and he carried poisonous snakes and a trident in emulation of Shiva. He heard about this new boy wonder teaching the Gita in the vernacular tongue and he set out to challenge him and show up what he thought were pretensions and cheap attempts at popularity. Gnyaneshwar and his siblings were sitting on a wall when they saw the great yogi approaching on his awesome mount. Stating that it would be rude to make him come towards them when he was so much the older saint Gnyaneshwar is said to have made the wall fly towards the startled and aghast Chagan Dev. Realizing that he had indeed met his match and even more, for Gnyaneshwar was his long lost guru, the Yogi surrendered himself. This caused a sensation all over the land. This was the pinnacle of Gnyaneshwar's triumphs, he did not need any more and was left severely alone to do what he did best, write about the life spiritual. The two main books on which his reputation rests are the Gnyaneshwari and the Amritanumbhava. The former is his famed commentary on the Gita in which he anticipates Tilak's stress on Karma yoga by over seven hundred years. The latter, 'The experience of ambrosia' as the literal translation of the title means is an outpouring of devotion to god and even more so to the reality of saints whose company he classifies as even better than that of the gods. His logic is impeccable though it is expressed in the metaphorical overdose characteristic of the Sanskrit poetry he was trying to simplify by using the vernacular. His philosophical ideas were distinct enough to be classified as the school of Sphurtivada. They may have been simple to him, but Gnyaneshwar is today recognized as one of the great - and difficult - philosophic minds of the nation. He did make one valuable distinction between work for its own sake no matter how noble and work that leads to liberation through realization in his elucidation of karma yoga. Those who are adept should never fall into the trap of work for its own sake, as the nature of interacting with the world is to slide back into the mire of attachment, not to ascend to spiritual experience. It is a vital distinction not clearly made before Gnyaneshwar. Like the great Adi Shankara before him, Gnyaneshwar too had written his philosophic commentary by the time he was sixteen and then wrote devotional poetry for the rest of his life. It is almost as if having got the austere truth of the impersonal Brahman out in the light of day they could relax with the pleasant fiction of the personal god. In the end he gleefully admits, after staggering displays of erudition to precede it, " There is no other thing that can be pointed out besides god as in fact everything is pervaded by Shiva." - Rohit Arya Archive