NAMASMARANA

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NAMASMARANA

 

…… " Naamno asti yaavati scaktih paapa nirharane hareh

Taavat kartum nascaknoti paatakam paataki janah

 

This means, " No sinner can commit so many or so heinous sins as to

make it impossible for God's name to redeem him. " It is folly and

ignorance of a highly self-destructive sort on the part of a sinner

to limit the power of God to redeem him. Hence neither Sai nor

Chaitanya despaired of redeeming desperate characters. Just as

Chaitanya drew Madho and Jagai from the depths of an almost

bottomless pit to the heights of saintliness, so Baba has done in the

case of Das Ganu.

 

The words used in the first stanza above quoted show the power of

God's name. It is just as well to point out that practically God's

name and God are not different. The name has a power because it is

God's name. If it is the name of the devil or any other person, it

would not have such power. But the name is so closely intertwined

with the object that even philosophers confound the two. There is a

school of nominalist philosophers who say that everything is only

name and that there is nothing beyond. Commonsense rebels against

this view and most people join the conceptualist or realist school

saying that objects exist apart from names and we have a conception

of an object to which name is applied as a handle. No doubt the

cleverness of songsters and poets makes them attach undue importance

to the bare fact of the name as in the following stanza:

 

Ninyaako ranga ninhang yako

Nee naama bala ondu iddare sako

 

This means, `O, Ranga (or God), what is the use of your prowess or

anything else except your name? The power of your name is

sufficient'. The songster begins to instance the cases of Draupadi,

Gajendra, Ajamila, etc., to prove that the name was sufficient in all

these cases to save them and that God himself was not wanted for the

purpose of saving. This is obviously absurd in the case of Draupadi

and Gajendra where God himself took action or appeared and saved the

devotees. Only in the case of Ajamila, there is some degree of

justification for the poetic flair, and perhaps some basis for it in

the Bhagavata stanza which runs as follows:

 

Etavata alam agha nirharanaya pumsam

sankritanam bhagavato gunakarma namnam

Aakruscya putram aghavan yat Ajamilo api

Naarayana iti Mriyamanaiyaya muktim.

 

This means. `To wipe off sins of men, it is enough if they go on with

sankirtanam, that is, good singing or recital of God's gunas,

(qualities), karma (deeds), and nama (names). (For example) Ajamila,

though a great sinner, by barely calling out the name of his child

Narayana at the moment of death obtained mukti. This seems a basis

for saying that the bare utterance of God's name, even though the

utterance was only of the name of the child bearing God's name, at

the moment of death, would have the effect of saving a man. " ……