Varkari
Jñāneśvar (the Gītā voice; the tradition flows on through Nāmdev, Eknāth, Tukārām) · 13th century; the Jñāneśvarī dated c. 1290 · Pandharpur, with Āḷandī, the samādhi seat of Jñāneśvar · Vārkarī sampradāya
The Varkari path begins on the road. Once a year the pilgrim ties on the tulsī beads, takes up the saints' songs, and walks to Pandharpur, where Viṭṭhala stands on a brick, hands on hips, waiting. The school's Gītā is the Jñāneśvarī, sung in Marathi so that a farmer can hold what a paṇḍit holds. Its seeing is gentle and total: the world is not a trap but the play of consciousness, God delighting in being many. What it asks is simple and lifelong: remember the Name, keep the company of the sants, treat no caste as far from God, and let knowledge ripen into love.
The path took shape in thirteenth-century Maharashtra, in the years of the Yādava kings of Devagiri. Jñāneśvar received initiation from his elder brother and guru Nivṛttināth, who carried the Nath yoga lineage descending through Gahinīnāth, and around 1290, during the reign of king Rāmadeva, he composed the Bhāvārtha Dīpikā, remembered as the Jñāneśvarī: some nine thousand Marathi ovī verses unfolding the Gītā's seven hundred. It is the first great vernacular Gītā commentary, and the oldest surviving literary work in Marathi. Tradition holds that Jñāneśvar entered samādhi at Āḷandī in 1296, barely past twenty.
The question the work answered was one of admission: who is allowed to hear the Gītā? Sanskrit had kept it with the learned; Jñāneśvar sang it in the speech of the fields, declaring that the Gītā refreshes the whole world without weighing high birth against low. The movement that gathered around Viṭṭhala worship at Pandharpur made that declaration a society: Nāmdev the tailor, Gorā the potter, Janābāī the maidservant, Chokhāmeḷā from a community the orthodox called untouchable, all honored as sants, all composing abhaṅgas. The sampradāya explicitly refuses caste discrimination on the path, and the pilgrimage walks that refusal out loud.
The tradition renewed itself in waves. In 1584 Eknāth prepared a careful recension of the Jñāneśvarī, which remains the accepted text, and wrote his own Marathi commentary on the Bhāgavata's eleventh book. In the seventeenth century Tukārām's abhaṅgas carried the song to its widest reach, and from 1685 his son Nārāyaṇ Mahārāj began the practice of carrying the saints' sandals in palanquins to Pandharpur. That procession continues: each year in the month of Āṣāḍha hundreds of thousands of Varkaris walk for weeks behind the pālkhīs of Jñāneśvar and Tukārām, reciting the Haripāṭh, singing the sants, treating the Jñāneśvarī itself as scripture.
Whether Jñāneśvar founded the Varkari sampradāya or gave voice to an older one is debated; Viṭṭhala worship and the walking pilgrimage to Pandharpur appear to predate him, so many treat him as the tradition's great consolidator rather than its origin.
The received Jñāneśvarī is Eknāth's recension of 1584, and how closely it preserves the wording of the 1290 original cannot be fully known, though scholars generally accept his text as the most reliable.
Scholars differ on whether the Jñāneśvarī is essentially Śaṅkara's Advaita in Marathi dress or a distinct non-dualism, since its cidvilāsa teaching and the Amṛtānubhava's critique of avidyā depart from the doctrine of the world as illusion.
Brahman is self-luminous consciousness whose nature is not bare stillness but delight. It does not hide behind the world; it shines as the world, the way a face shines as its own smile. The Jñāneśvarī calls this cidvilāsa, the play of awareness. And for the pilgrim, that same absolute stands embodied at Pandharpur as Viṭṭhala, near enough to touch.
The jīva is a wave on the sea of consciousness, never other than the water. Its sense of being a small separate doer is a forgetting, not a fact. Through the guru's grace, as Nivṛttināth gave it to Jñāneśvar, the wave recognizes the sea. Until that dawn it walks, sings the Name, and lets love do the remembering.
The world is not a deception to be argued away. Avidyā, the tradition observes, is by its own definition non-existent, so it cannot be the world's maker. Creation is the spontaneous shining of consciousness, God's own joy taking shape. Diversity does not wound unity; it adorns it, as ornaments do not divide the gold they are made of.
Liberation is recognition, not relocation: nothing new is gained, only the forgetting ends. And here the path keeps walking past its own goal, for the freed soul does not retire from love. Devotion remains after liberation as its fragrance. The sant still goes to Pandharpur, still sings, preferring the sweetness of meeting to the bare fact of oneness.
The Gītā is heard here as a mother's speech, not a court's ruling. Kṛṣṇa is not settling a contest between knowledge and devotion; he is leading Arjuna from bewilderment to a love that knows. At the center stands this: the one consciousness has become all of this, so action offered as worship, knowledge ripened by the guru's grace, and devotion to the Lord's dear form are one movement seen from three sides. The verse promising the highest goal even to those the world counts low is no footnote; it is the door the whole tradition walks through, every year, all the way to Pandharpur.