Sant Jnaneshwar (Dnyaneshwar Mauli)

Jnaneshwar was the second of four children of Vitthalpant, who had taken sannyasa and then, at his guru’s bidding, returned to married life; for this the Brahmanas of Alandi cast the family out, and the parents, tradition says, gave up their lives in the Ganga at Prayag so that the children might be accepted. The four, Nivrittinath, Jnaneshwar, Sopan and Muktabai, went to Paithan for a certificate of purity. The katha says that when scholars mocked the boy, he laid his hand on a buffalo and it recited the Vedas. Nivrittinath, initiated in the Nath line by Gahininath, became Jnaneshwar’s guru. At Newasa in 1290, still a boy, Jnaneshwar dictated the Bhavarthadipika, known as the Jnaneshwari, nine thousand ovis on the Bhagavad Gita in Marathi, so that ordinary people could hear what had been kept in Sanskrit. He also wrote the Amritanubhava and the Haripath abhangs, which Varkaris recite daily. With Namdev he travelled to the tirthas of the north. In 1296, at the age of twenty-one, he entered sanjeevan samadhi at Alandi, and the samadhi is the second home of the Varkari path. Maharashtra calls him Mauli, mother.