અખિલ બ્રહ્માંડમાં

Composed in the mid-fifteenth century, Akhil Brahmand Ma is Narsinh Mehta at his most philosophically ambitious. Where Vaishnav Jan To defines the ideal devotee through ethical conduct, this poem turns inward to ask a deeper question: what is the nature of the divine itself? The answer unfolds across five stanzas of escalating wonder — God is not above the world but woven into its fabric, present in wind and water, body and light, the void where the Vedas hum into existence.

The poem's intellectual centrepiece is the kanak-kundal metaphor in the third stanza: gold fashioned into an earring is still gold; names and forms are mere shapes hammered onto a single, undifferentiated substance. This is classical Advaita Vedanta — the philosophy of non-duality — rendered not in the dense Sanskrit of Shankaracharya's commentaries but in the sung Gujarati of a Junagadh poet-saint. The final stanza completes the circle with a paradox that rivals any Zen koan: the tree is in the seed, the seed is in the tree, and in that infinite recursion, the seeker finds the sought. Preet karoo, premthi pragat thashe — love, and love will make the hidden visible.

This pada has been sung in temples, homes, and satsangs across Gujarat for over five centuries, its philosophical depth never diminishing its musical accessibility. It stands alongside Vaishnav Jan To as one of the twin pillars of Narsinh Mehta's legacy — one defining how to live in the world, the other revealing what the world truly is.