The Narayaneeyam and Melpathur Nārāyaṇa Bhattathiri

The Shrīmad Bhāgavatam has inspired countless devotees across the ages, and among the most beloved of the works it gave rise to is the Nārāyaṇīyam, a condensed retelling of the Bhāgavatam in Sanskrit verse, composed in Kerala toward the close of the sixteenth century by Melpathur Nārāyaṇa Bhattathiri. Where the Bhāgavatam runs to some eighteen thousand verses, the Nārāyaṇīyam distills its essence into roughly a thousand and thirty-six shlokas, arranged in a hundred cantos called dasakas, each of about ten verses.

To this day it is sung at the Guruvayur temple in Kerala, where its story began.

Bhattathiri was born around 1560 into a Namboothiri Brāhmaṇa family near the temple town of Tirunavaya, on the banks of the Bharathapuzha river. He was a prodigy, and it is said that he had mastered the Vedas, the Vedangas, and the disciplines of Mimamsa, Vyakarana, and Tarka by the age of sixteen, learning first from his own father, Mathrudatta, himself a great scholar, and later from the celebrated grammarian and astronomer Achyuta Pishārati.

Beyond his devotional fame, Bhattathiri was a formidable grammarian in his own right; his treatise on Sanskrit grammar, the Prakriya-sarvasvam, elaborated upon the classical system of Panini and secured his reputation among scholars.

The composition of the Nārāyaṇīyam is bound up with a moving legend. It is said that when Bhattathiri's teacher, Achyuta Pishārati, was afflicted with paralysis, Bhattathiri, out of devotion to his guru, prayed that the disease be transferred to his own body, and so took the ailment upon himself to relieve his teacher. Now himself afflicted and suffering, he had himself carried to the temple of Lord Krishna at Guruvayur, and lay prostrate before the Lord seeking refuge.

He sought counsel from Tuñchath Ezhuthachan, revered as the father of the Malayalam language, who gave him the cryptic advice to "begin with the fish." Bhattathiri understood at once that he was being told to compose a hymn to the incarnations of Vishṇu beginning with Matsya, the fish — that is, to retell the Bhāgavatam itself.

And so, seated before the Lord at Guruvayur, Bhattathiri composed one dasaka each day, ten verses at a time, each canto ending with a heartfelt prayer for relief from his affliction. Over a hundred days he summarized the whole of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, moving through the philosophy of the Supreme, the avataras, the deeds of Krishna, and the teachings of devotion.

Tradition holds that on the hundredth day, as he lifted his head to begin the final canto, he was granted the vision of Guruvayurappan himself standing before him, and was at last cured of his illness; the hundredth dasaka, the celebrated Kesadi-pada Varnanam, is his rapturous description of that vision, tracing the Lord's form from the crown of His head down to His feet. Because the work is about Nārāyaṇa and was composed by one who himself bore the name Nārāyaṇa, the Lord is said to have named it the Nārāyaṇīyam.

The opening of the poem is not narrative but philosophical, establishing at once that the charming cowherd of Guruvayur is none other than the supreme Brahman. Its very first verse describes the Lord as sāndrānanda — the embodiment of dense, unbroken bliss and pure awareness, beyond compare, free of the limits of time and space, eternally liberated, illumined by countless scriptures — and marvels that this very Brahman shines forth directly and visibly in Guruvayur, calling it the great good fortune of all people:

sāndrānandāvabodhātmakam anupamitaṃ kāladeshāvadhibhyāṃ

nirmuktaṃ nityamuktaṃ nigamashatasahasreṇa nirbhāsyamānam;

aspashṭaṃ dṛshṭamātre punar uru purushārthātmakaṃ brahmatattvaṃ

tat tāvad bhāti sākshād gurupavanapure hanta bhāgyaṃ janānām.

In this way the Nārāyaṇīyam holds together two great currents of thought — the vision of the formless, non-dual Supreme, and the loving worship of the Lord in His beautiful, accessible form — and throughout, it lifts up the chanting of the divine name and complete self-surrender, prapatti, as the surest paths to liberation.

Its final canto describes the Lord in intimate detail from head to foot, and the work closes with the celebrated prayer āyurārogya-saukhyam — a plea for long life, health, and happiness — words that devotees have repeated ever since in the faith that the careful recitation of the Nārāyaṇīyam is itself a balm for both body and spirit. The day on which Bhattathiri dedicated his work to the Lord is still observed each year at Guruvayur as Nārāyaṇīyam Dinam.