The Sri Ranga Gadyam is the shorter of Bhagavad Ramanuja's three prose-hymns. Where the Saranagati Gadyam is the full, many-layered conversation with Sri and her Lord, this piece speaks directly — and only — to Sri Ranganatha, the reclining Lord of Srirangam.

Ramanuja intends it as something a devotee can carry on the tongue. A form of the surrender that can be uttered daily in the presence of the Lord, in the temple, in the heart. He first asks for the goal (eternal service); then confesses his own helplessness; then takes refuge; then asks that the Lord — on the strength of the refuge alone, and not for any merit of his own — grant what He alone can grant.

Lord — complete in Yourself, lacking nothing —

You hold within Your sway the very nature, existence, and activity of every conscious being (the bound, the freed, and the eternally free) and every unconscious thing (pure sattva, the three-fold prakṛti, and time itself). You stand untouched by the miseries and by the good and evil deeds that afflict them. You are an ocean — broad, boundless, shoreless — of auspicious qualities that rise naturally in You without limit: infinite knowledge and power and sovereignty; valor, might, and splendor; the easy grace with which You mingle with the lowliest; the vatsalya (mother-love) that delights in the devotee's very flaws; tenderness, uprightness, goodwill, equal regard for all; compassion, sweetness, fathomless depth, generosity, cleverness, steadfastness, courage, bravery; the will whose every wish is fulfilled and whose every resolve comes to pass; the gratitude that remembers the smallest offering of a devotee; and countless others that no tongue can count.

You are the Parabrahman. You are Puruṣottama, the Highest Person. You recline upon the serpent-bed at Srirangam. You are my Master.

And I — I have come awake to what I am: forever under Your command, forever Your servant, finding my one joy in being Yours. You alone are the subject of my thought. You alone are my love. Let me experience You — full, clear, unbroken. And out of that experience, out of the boundless love it breeds, let me become the very embodiment of the longing to serve You in every form and under every circumstance. Accept me as Your eternal servant.

Lord — even as I say these words, I know myself.

I know I am naturally fitted to be commanded by You, to live only in Your service, and to dwell upon Your lordship and Your every quality. I know that such remembrance should ripen into the devotion that is the true means to service, into the clear knowledge that makes such devotion real, and into the actions that flow from it.

But in me — none of this is ready. I am empty of the qualities that support such a path: sattva, real faith, self-control, humility. Worse, I am full of the opposite. I am sunk in an ocean of sin, ancient and impassable, raised by ignorance and kept alive by false knowledge and misdirected action. My soul's true light — knowledge, self-luminous — is covered over by prakṛti, which is by its nature ever-changing, compounded of sattva, rajas, and tamas, and which clings to me as oil clings in the sesame seed and fire within the firewood. Only the rarest insight can tell one from the other. I am bound with the ropes of karma — the virtue and the sin that I have gathered over ages. However long I look ahead, through endless time still to come, I see no way to cross this bondage on my own.

O Sriman! O Narayana! Refuge of every creature born! Lord who is ever with Sri —

I fall at Your two lotus feet and take them as my only shelter.

Even in this broken state, I beg You for the fruit — that You grant me eternal servitude to Yourself. I beg, and that is enough. For You are the ocean of unsurpassed mercy, and You will hear the plea alone. My faith is this: that You will give to me a servanthood that is single-pointed, unending, everlasting — the very form of the love that rises from the joy of experiencing You.

Lord, grant me — out of Your own mercy — that servitude to You which is born of the love that rises from experiencing You. Apart from begging You for this, I do not know any other way.

O Lotus-Eyed One, let me be the very embodiment of the longing to serve You in every form and under every condition. You — You alone — must make me so.

And if I lack even the true understanding of the goal You offer, even the proper desire for that understanding — then, Lord, take these very words I have just spoken as the ground on which You act. Make my wandering mind steady in the meaning of what my lips have uttered. Do this now, immediately, out of nothing but Your own grace.

O boundless ocean of mercy!

O refuge of every world, irrespective of distinctions of birth or conduct or knowledge!

O remover of the distress of all who bow before You!

O one great sea of love toward those who have taken shelter in You!

O knower, always and completely, of the true nature of every being!

O Satyakāma (whose every desire is fulfilled)! O Satyasaṅkalpa (whose every will is accomplished)!

O Friend in distress! O Kākutstha — Rama of the line of Kakutstha!

O Sriman, ever with Sri! O Narayana! O Puruṣottama, highest of all beings!

O Sri Ranganatha — Lord of Srirangam!

My Lord —

I bow to You.

This soul, which is Yours, let it serve You eternally and at Your pleasure.

Thus ends the Sri Ranga Gadyam of Bhagavad Ramanuja.