qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
Illness is destroyed, and every pain carried off,
for the one who keeps saying it over and over without a stop — Hanuman, the brave one.
The chaupai names two different things and does not confuse them. Roga is disease, the word a physician would use. Pīrā, from Sanskrit pīḍā, is pain — the word a person uses about their own, and the one that turns up in songs far more often than the other. One is destroyed, the other is carried off: harai, from har, to take away, the verb of a load being lifted rather than a thing being cancelled.
Then comes the condition, and it is worth reading slowly. Nirantara is nir plus antara, "without an in-between." Not often, not daily, not at the right hour — without a gap. And japata is a participle, not a completed act: repeating, ongoing, somebody in the middle of doing something rather than somebody who has finished and is now waiting. Japa is the quietest of the practices, a name turned over under the breath until it runs beneath whatever else the mind is doing, and it asks for no place, no hour and nobody else in the room.
Illness goes, pain is taken away: the chaupai states that and does not argue for it. What is not in the two lines is as plain as what is. There is no if-then, no quantity, no bargain struck and no hour appointed. Where a price would sit in a transaction, this couplet has a participle with no end to it.
Hanumata is the stem form of the name, Hanumat, rather than the nominative Hanumān — the shape the name takes inside a compound or a chant, which is where this one is.
Is there a word or a song you say to yourself when something hurts? What is it?
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made