Vachana 1329 – What Need Remains for One Who Is Truly Enamoured?

The vachana moves through three parallel rhetorical questions and culminates in Mahadeviyakka as their living embodiment.
Love of the Formless and the Body
The first question asks what bodily attachment can remain for one enamoured of the Formless.
The body is not said to disappear, nor is embodied life rejected. What falls away is tanuvina hangu—dependence upon, attachment to, or anxious concern for the body as the ground of identity.
Love of the Formless has become so complete that the body no longer demands to be protected, displayed, concealed, or treated as “mine.” It remains present but no longer governs the devotee through self-consciousness.
The rhetorical force is precise: when love rests wholly in that which cannot be confined by form, bodily form loses its power to become a burden.
The Captured Heart and Abhimāna
The second question asks what need for abhimāna remains when the heart has been wholly captured.
Abhimāna includes pride, self-regard, possessive identity, and the inward insistence upon one’s own importance. It depends upon a separate centre that continually thinks of itself—its appearance, honour, status, and recognition.
When the heart has been taken completely by the Divine, there is no remaining inner space in which such self-regard can establish itself.
Pride is not forcibly suppressed. It becomes unnecessary because Divine love has displaced the self-centred claim from which pride arose.
The Digambara and the Loincloth
The third question gives the vachana its most concrete image.
The Digambara is the One clothed in the directions or in space—the Divine whose reality requires no covering. Basavanna asks what need even for a kaupīna, the most minimal garment or loincloth, can remain for one enamoured of that Digambara.
The question does not condemn clothing or prescribe outward nakedness as a spiritual discipline. The loincloth represents the last covering retained through bodily self-consciousness.
For Mahadeviyakka, love has removed even that compulsion. Her condition is not an act of protest, deliberate display, or rejection of dignity. The covering has ceased to carry spiritual necessity because bodily identity no longer stands as a burden.
Mahadeviyakka as the Living Example
The conclusion names Mahadeviyakka directly.
Basavanna does not present an abstract teaching and then leave it unembodied. He points to the devotee in whom the three freedoms have become visible:
freedom from bodily attachment;
freedom from self-regard;
freedom from covering as a burden.
Mahadeviyakka is not described as one who achieved freedom through outward nakedness. Her outward condition arises from inward love so complete that attachment, pride, and bodily self-consciousness no longer claim her.
She remains the devotee; Kudalasangama Deva remains the Lord before whom Basavanna presents her.
“She Has No Burden”
The closing declaration gathers the three questions into one recognition: Mahadeviyakka bears no such burden.
The burden is not the physical body itself. It is the weight created when the body becomes personal possession, when the heart sustains self-regard, and when covering becomes necessary for maintaining a separate identity.
Divine love has removed that weight without denying embodied life.