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.â€â€¦â€¦