Bhaja Govindam, also called the Moha Mudgara — the hammer that breaks delusion — is a Sanskrit hymn whose refrain calls on the deluded mind to worship Govinda; tradition attributes it to Adi Shankaracharya. Tradition holds that he composed it in Varanasi on hearing an aged scholar learning the rules of grammar by rote: when the appointed hour comes, says the opening verse, the grammar rule dukrin karane will not save you. Its opening verses and its close are held to be his own, with fourteen verses between them added by his disciples, one each; editions differ in number and order, and a common text has thirty-one.
Its short rhyming verses weigh wealth, youth and family against what lasts. One traces how the company of the good leads to freedom from attachment, then from delusion, then to a mind steady in the truth and to liberation in this life; another holds that one who has read even a little of the Bhagavad Gita, drunk a drop of Ganga water and worshipped Murari once has no quarrel left with Yama. The verse that begins punarapi jananam punarapi maranam — again birth, again death — asks Murari to save the singer by his grace.
The refrain's call to Govinda, a name of Krishna, has made the hymn popular with Smartas, Vaishnavas and others alike. M. S. Subbulakshmi's 1970 album of the hymn opens with a short talk by C. Rajagopalachari, whose commentary on it is still in print, and also carries the Vishnu Sahasranama, whose thousand names one verse of the hymn asks to be sung with the Bhagavad Gita. In this collection, Kashi Vishwanath stands in Varanasi, where tradition sets the hymn's beginning.