ದತ್ತ ಜಯಂತಿ | Datta Jayanti

Datta Jayanti is the birth day of Dattatreya, the son of the sage Atri and Anasuya, in whom Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva are held to be present together. He is worshipped as a guru rather than as a deity of a temple establishment, and the day belongs above all to the Datta sampradaya of Maharashtra and north Karnataka.

When it falls and why

It is Purnima, the full moon of Margashira, and the day that carries it is the day on which Purnima is running at sunrise.

The tradition holds that the birth took place in the evening, at pradosha, and the principal puja is accordingly done after sunset. The day is still settled by the sunrise tithi, and where the two point at different dates, which happens when Purnima begins in the course of the day, families differ: some keep the sunrise day and do the evening puja on it, others move to the evening on which Purnima is actually running. Anudina gives the sunrise day.

The seven days before

The observance is not really one day. In the Datta sampradaya a parayana of the Gurucharitra, the Marathi text in fifty one chapters that recounts the lives of Sripada Srivallabha and Narasimha Saraswati, is begun seven days earlier and completed on this full moon. The reading is done at a fixed hour each day, in one place, with restrictions on food and on sleep, and the completion is followed by an offering and a meal.

Where it is kept

Ganagapur in Kalaburagi district, on the Bhima, is the principal Datta kshetra of Karnataka, where Narasimha Saraswati stayed and where the nirguna padukas are worshipped. Audumbar and Narasimhawadi on the Krishna, and Akkalkot for Swami Samartha, are the others of the line. The day is kept there with abhisheka, palkhi and a night of bhajan. In Maharashtra it is a household observance as much as a temple one.

Karnataka outside the northern districts observes it more thinly, though Datta temples in Bengaluru and the coastal towns keep the day, and the Sringeri tradition regards Dattatreya as an avatara of the guru principle rather than as the centre of a separate sampradaya.

The form and the tree

Dattatreya is shown with three faces and six arms, holding the emblems of the three gods, with four dogs and a cow beside him. The dogs are read as the four Vedas and the cow as the earth. He is associated with the audumbara, the cluster fig, which is treated as his standing seat, and an audumbara tree in a Datta kshetra is worshipped as the deity is.

The Avadhuta Gita and the account in the Bhagavata of the twenty four gurus, in which Dattatreya says he learnt from the earth, the wind, the python and the honey bee, are read on the day. That account is the reason he is a guru figure rather than a god to be petitioned: what he teaches is observation.