Gyaneshwari Geeta-1

Gyaneshwari Geeta-1

Shri Jnaneshwar, the well-known saint of Maharashtra, was not only a realised soul but a gifted poet. At a very early age, he wrote his masterpiece, the Jnaneshwari, a commentary on the Gita in Marathi in exquisite poetry. He has explained the Gita not by recourse to rational arguments but by the profuse use of similes, metaphors and illustrations. Initiated into the Natha Sampradaya by his elder brother Nivrittinatha, disciple of Gahininatha, he assimilated, in his later life, the nondual jnana of Vedanta and the pure bhakti of the Bhagavata Dharma. In his Jnaneshwari, he calls the Gita the literary image of Lord Krishna. Indeed one can say that his Jnaneshwari is the literary image of his knowledge and experience.

Like Sri Shankaracharya, he was an advaita-vadin, a non-duelist. He explains verse 9.12 of the Gita as follows:

“The Lord says, although I am formless, without limiting conditions, inactive, beyond the qualities, changeless and all-pervasive, ignorant people ascribe to Me form, limitations, actions, qualities, and a definite place. Although I am unmanifest, desireless and devoid of action and enjoyment, they think of Me as manifest, full of desires, agent and enjoyer. They impute to Me hands and feet, eyes and ears, caste and family, although I do not possess them. Even though I am self-existent, they make idols of Me and install them with proper rites of consecration, and though I am all-pervading, they invite Me with an invocation and bid farewell to Me with an
immersion. They worship an idol as a form of divinity and later throw away the broken idol, as worthless. They thus impute to Me, human attributes.”

Shri Jnaneshwar says that true knowledge consists in knowing God in the non-dual form and that devotion should culminate in Advaita bhakti. The devotee should realise God as all-pervasive; and wherever he casts his eyes, he should see God therein. This shows that Shri Jnaneshwar had become a Jnani-Bhakta of the highest order as described in the Gita (verse 7.17).

Although he was born in a village, Alandi, about 20 Kms. from Pune, he is worshipped all over Maharashtra as Mauli (Mother) by a large number of devotees. The members of the Warkari Sampradaya have kept the lamp of devotion burning in Maharashtra. Shri Jnaneshwar says that every-one should perform his duty as a yajna and offer his or her actions as flowers at the feet of God. This message is as relevant today as seven hundred years ago, and deserves to be known not only in this country but also all over the world. In the meantime, the Marathi Language has undergone changes and even the Marathi speaking people today, find the Jnaneshwari unintelligible. So, a translation of Jnaneshwari in modern Marathi was also a need of the time.

Shri Jnaneshwar was a great poet-saint of Maharashtra, who lived in the thirteenth century. He was born at Alandi, a town near Poona, in 1271 A.D. and took Sanjivani Samadhi when he was only twenty-two years old. As the sun sheds its light before it rises, he attained self-realisation in his young age. As stated by him, his intelligence matured as a result of the austerity of truthfulness practised by him in his former births. He wrote such excellent works as Jnaneshwari, Amritanubhava, Changdeva-Pasashti and devotional songs (abhangas). His commentary Bhavarthadipika, popularly known as Jnaneshwari is a precious gem of the Marathi language. In this work, he has explained an abstruse subject like the Vedanta in lucid words, by the use of appropriate similes, metaphors and illustrations. But many changes have taken place in the vocabulary and the style of Marathi language since then, as a result of which this work has become unintelligible to even the Marathi speaking people. An attempt has been made to translate it in prose, which is easy to understand, without disturbing its character as a dialogue. A translation of the Gita in Marathi in the same metre has been given, so that those who do not know Sanskrit will also understand the doctrine and Yoga of the Gita.

Om Namah Shivay