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Jñāneśvar (Dnyaneshwar)

Jñāneśvar (Dnyaneshwar)

1275 CE · Āpegāv (Apegaon)

c. 1275–1296 CE (traditional; a 13th-century Marathi sant)

Jñāneśvar (also Dnyāneśvar or Jñānadeva) was a short-lived but towering figure of the Marathi bhakti movement, traditionally born at Āpegāv on the Godāvarī and raised, with his remarkable siblings (Nivṛttinātha, Sopāna, Muktābāī), as the children of outcaste Brāhmaṇa parents. His masterwork, the 'Jñāneśvarī' (Bhāvārtha-dīpikā), is a verse commentary on the Bhagavad-Gītā in Marathi — one of the earliest great works of the language — which made the Gītā's non-dual and devotional teaching accessible to ordinary people and helped found the Varkari tradition centered on the god Viṭṭhala of Pandharpur. By tradition he ended his life in 1296 by entering a final meditative absorption (sañjīvana samādhi) at Āḷandī while still very young. His dates and the more miraculous episodes of his life come from the tradition; the literary achievement is securely his.

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Did you know?

  • He wrote a spiritual classic as a teenager — and was gone by 21

    Around 1290, a boy of about sixteen named Jñāneśvar (Dnyaneshwar) composed the Jñāneśvarī, a sweeping ~9,000-verse Marathi commentary on the Bhagavad Gita that became a foundational work of the Marathi language and is still recited today. By tradition he was born in 1275 and entered his final samadhi at Alandi in 1296, at about the age of twenty-one.

    How we know

    Jñāneśvar (Dnyaneshwar): traditional dates c.1275–1296 CE. His Jñāneśvarī, a ~9,000-verse Marathi commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, was composed in 1290 (the undisputed date), when he was about sixteen. He entered his final samadhi at Alandi in 1296, at about twenty-one.

Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→Trace on the map →

Stop 1 of 4Born

Āpegāv (Apegaon)

What they did here

Traditional birthplace, on the banks of the Godāvarī, c. 1275.

About Āpegāv (Apegaon)

Āpegāv (Apegaon) is a village on the Godāvarī River in the Aurangabad (Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar) district of Maharashtra, western India. It is traditionally given as the ancestral village of Jñāneśvar (Dnyāneshwar, 13th c.), author of the Jñāneśvarī.

See other sages who lived in Āpegāv (Apegaon)→

In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Jñāneśvar (Dnyaneshwar)’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

In the same tradition

Namdev

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers, teachers, and rulers whose lives overlapped with Jñāneśvar (Dnyaneshwar)’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works

No works attributed in the corpus yet.