Abhanga 4267

Only a deeper support beyond yourself can cut through anxiety, craving, and the fear of what others think, and this is something you come to know through lived experience, not from what the crowd believes.

The verse

Literal translation

What it means

THE canonical 4-verse only-you-cut-māyā-mōha-loka-lāja text. If your support had not been mine — how this samsāra would have killed me. Who is fully strong — who cuts this anxiety, this hope-noose? The māyā-attachment-noose, the shame-from-the-world shackle — who one but you cuts (them)? I have known this by experience — well in my soul, Pāṇḍurangā. Tukā says: you alone are my witness for this — there is no full-belief in the people-of-the-world. Three nooses-and-shackles enumerated: (1) chinta-āśā-pāśa (anxiety-and-hope-noose); (2) māyā-mōha-fāmsā (māyā-attachment-noose); (3) loka-lāja-bēḍī (shackle-of-shame-from-world). All three only-Lord-can-cut. The closingyou-alone-are-my-witness-not-the-jana-loka is poignant — Tukārām's certainty is private-experiential, not socially-validated.

For someone today

Tukaram says plainly that without God's support, the weight of ordinary life would have destroyed him. He asks who really has the strength to cut through anxiety and the constant grip of hope and craving, and answers that no one else can. It is only God, he says, who can cut the noose of attachment and delusion, and the shackle of caring too much what other people think of you. He knows this not from theory but from his own lived experience, and he says God alone is his witness to it, because the ordinary crowd around him does not carry that same conviction.

मराठी: तुकाराम स्पष्टपणे सांगतात की देवाच्या आधाराशिवाय, या संसाराच्या ओझ्याने त्यांना संपवूनच टाकलं असतं. ते विचारतात, चिंता आणि आशेच्या सततच्या पकडीतून खरोखर कुणाच्यात एवढी ताकद आहे की तो त्यातून सोडवेल, आणि उत्तर देतात की दुसरं कुणीच नाही. फक्त देवच, ते म्हणतात, मायेचा आणि मोहाचा फास आणि लोक काय म्हणतील याची जी बेडी असते, ती तोडू शकतो. हे त्यांना कुठल्या तत्त्वज्ञानातून नाही तर स्वतःच्या जगलेल्या अनुभवातून कळलं आहे, आणि ते म्हणतात याला फक्त देवच साक्षी आहे, कारण आजूबाजूच्या सामान्य लोकांमध्ये तेवढी खात्री नसते.

Where this applies

• When anxiety and endless craving feel like a noose you cannot loosen on your own
• When you realize that worrying about what others think has become its own kind of shackle
• When you look back and recognize that something greater than your own effort has kept you steady
• When you know something true from your own experience even though the people around you do not share that conviction

Related verses

• Abhanga 4481 — Tukaram promises that sincerely calling on the Lord's name, knowingly or unknowingly, with
• Abhanga 4482 — Tukaram teaches that no ritual equals sincerely speaking the Lord's name, that self-center
• Abhanga 4483 — Tukaram tells of the gopis whose all-consuming secret longing for Krishna, hidden beneath
• Abhanga 4495 — Tukaram tells how Krishna's mother and the cowherd families, absorbed in their own practic