Bhagavatam · Akrura’s Darshan

Dusk was coming down. Parikshit looked at the sage Shukadeva and said, “Bhagavan, yesterday you told me how Mother Yashoda saw all the worlds inside her boy’s mouth and then forgot. One thing has stayed lodged in my mind. The people who lived beside him day and night could not recognize him, and a man who sat far away was granted the glimpse. How does this happen, Munivar? Is being near not enough?”

Shukadeva stayed silent a while. Then a faint smile came to his lips, the one that came every time before he opened a katha of Krishna.

“Rajan, there was a Yadava named Akrura. He lived in Kamsa’s court, in Mathura, miles upon miles from Shri Hari. And it was to him, in the water of the Yamuna, that the darshan came for which yogis sit in samadhi through lifetimes. Listen.”

The news had already reached Kamsa: Krishna and Balarama were being raised in Nanda’s house in Gokul, and they were growing up.

Every killer he had sent was dead. Putana, Shakatasura, Trinavarta, Bakasura, Aghasura, one after another, ash. Of the demon army not even the name survived.

Now he thought out his final move. Call the two brothers to Mathura on the pretext of a dhanur-yajna, a rite of the bow, and there, before his own eyes, in his own arena, have them killed.

He summoned one of his trusted men, Akrura.

Akrura was of the Yadu line, the son of Swaphalka, and by the reckoning of the clan a kinsman of Kamsa himself. He sat in that court and did the king’s work with his hands, and all the while, for years, his mind ran on a single name. Shri Hari, over and over, under everything else he did.

“Akrura, go to Gokul. Carry the invitation to the dhanur-yajna and bring Krishna and Balarama to Mathura. The rest we will handle.”

Akrura bowed his head. Inside him, two storms rose at once.

On one side, the king’s command. He knew what intent lay behind it, and refusal lay beyond him.

On the other, the thought that quickened his breath. The one whose name he had taken for years, he would now see with his own eyes.

That night he stayed in Mathura. At first light he had the chariot yoked and set out toward Gokul.

Something kept beating inside him along with the drumming of the wheels. The dust kept rising, and thought after thought rose in his mind.

“What good deed have I ever done, what tapas have I ever performed, what gift have I ever laid in a worthy hand, that today I will have darshan of Bhagavan Shri Krishna? My mind runs after the senses like a dog after scraps. How should a man like me earn the sight of him?” Then he would steady himself. “No. Even a wretch may be granted it. A man swept down the river of time washes up on some shore at the last. My evil is burned off today, and my birth has borne fruit, for I will bow at the feet that Brahma and Shiva and the great yogis reach only in the deep of meditation. Kamsa has done me a kindness today without meaning to. His errand is carrying me to those very feet, the feet that walk the forest after the cows, dusted with the saffron the gopis wear on their breasts.”

Then his mind would waver. “I am Kamsa’s envoy. I come at his sending. What if they take me for their enemy?”

And then he would talk his own mind back around. “No. He is without stain. He lives inside and outside every being. He knows the smallest stirring of every mind, and he will know my doubt as well. I will stand before him with folded hands, and he will lift me with the very hand that has stilled men running from the serpent of time, and press me to his chest, and call me uncle. In that instant the dark residue of birth upon birth will wash away.”

Sunk deep in this current of thought, he ate up the road. Even the deer crossed to his right along the way, and he took heart from the sign.

By the time he neared Gokul the sun had begun to set. Close to the cow-pen his gaze fell on the ground, and stopped there.

In the dust were the prints of Shri Hari’s feet. The signs of lotus, barley, goad, and flag, and with them the very soil was glowing.

Such a surge of longing rose in him that Akrura could not hold himself. He leapt from the chariot and rolled in the dust of those footprints. “Aho! This is the dust of my Lord’s feet.”

Then he reached the milking ground, where the two brothers stood among the cows.

The two had bathed and put on fresh clothes. Sandalwood paste cooled their limbs, jeweled necklaces lay at their throats, and garlands of forest flowers hung to their knees. The dark and beautiful Shri Krishna wore yellow, the fair and beautiful Balarama wore blue. The eyes of both were like autumn lotuses in bloom. They had only just stepped into their youth. Arms that swung to the knees, the ease of young elephants in their walk, forms that held the eye. Krishna stood like a rock cut from emerald, Balarama like one of silver washed with gold, and the whole cow-yard seemed to brighten between them. When they moved it was as if mercy itself were walking.

At the sight of them Akrura’s throat closed. He came down from the chariot and fell at the feet of both, full length, like a dropped staff. Tears streamed from his eyes, every pore of his body blossomed, and such fullness rose in his throat that he could not even speak his own name.

Bhagavan, tender to those who take refuge, read the feeling in his heart. With hands marked by the chakra he pulled him up and pressed him to his chest. Balarama embraced him too. Then the two brothers took a hand each and led him home.

At home Balarama asked after his journey, seated him on the finest seat, washed his feet with due rite, and offered him madhuparka. He gave the guest a cow, pressed his tired feet, and fed him with great honor, and after the meal he brought scent and garland to freshen him. Then Nanda Baba came near and asked, “Akrura ji, how do you people live at all, with a man like Kamsa over you? You are like sheep kept by a butcher. What safety can there be for the subjects of a king who murdered the newborns of his own screaming cousin?”

The night deepened. After the meal, when everything had gone quiet, Shri Krishna himself came and sat beside Akrura and asked, in an easy voice, “Chachaji, is all well in Mathura? How does uncle Kamsa treat our clan? And with what purpose has he made you his envoy and sent you to us?”

Akrura told him everything. What deep enmity Kamsa had sworn against the Yadavas, how he had gone as far as attempting to kill Vasudeva, why this invitation had been sent under the pretext of the dhanur-yajna, and how Narada had gone to the king and told him plainly that this Krishna was the eighth child born of Vasudeva, the one fated to end him.

Hearing it, Shri Krishna and Balarama laughed. Then they gave Nanda Baba Kamsa’s command. Nanda Baba ordered the gopas: gather all the milk-goods, load the gift-offerings, and yoke the carts, for at daybreak everyone goes to Mathura. He had the watchman cry it through the whole of Vraja, that they would carry their gifts to the king and see the great festival of the bow.

That night sleep never came to Akrura. The one whose name he had heard for years sat before him. In the form of a boy in his first youth, and still there was someone present who was far greater than the boy.

At dawn the three mounted the chariot. Krishna, Balarama, and Akrura.

By midday the chariot reached the Kalindi, the Yamuna, whose water carries off sin, its slow current still green as an emerald. Krishna and Balarama stepped down, washed their hands and feet, and drank of the sweet water. Then they climbed back into the chariot in the shade of a stand of trees.

Akrura helped the two brothers up and took his leave.

“Wait a moment. Let me perform my midday rites.”

He went off alone to the deep pool the people there called Brahmahrada, the pool of the Endless One, and waded in. The cold climbed from his calves upward.

He took one dip and began the Gayatri under his breath, the mantra that holds the whole of the eternal Veda.

When he lifted his head from the water, his eyes went wide and stayed wide. There in the pool, seated together, were Krishna and Balarama, the same two boys he had just handed up into the chariot.

He came up out of the pool and looked back. The brothers sat in the chariot exactly where he had left them, calm, watching the trees. He looked from the chariot to the water and back to the chariot. “Then what did I just see? Was there nothing there at all?” He filled his chest and went under once more.

This time the water opened onto something else. Where the two boys had been, there now lay Anantadeva Shesha himself, the lord of serpents, a thousand hoods raised and every one of them crowned, his body white as the fiber of a lotus stem and vast as a silver mountain, wound about in blue silk. Siddhas and charanas, gandharvas and even the asuras stood with their heads bowed low, singing him.

And on the coils, at rest, dark as a raincloud, four-armed, utterly serene: Shri Hari. Yellow silk. Eyes long and red as lotus petals. In the four hands the conch, the chakra, the mace, and the lotus. The Shrivatsa curl on his chest, the Kaustubha burning at his throat, the forest garland to his knees. Brahma was there and Shiva, and Narada and Prahlada, and Sanaka and his brothers, and the sages and the guardian gods, and the goddesses who wait upon him. Such a radiance came off the whole of it that even the water seemed to stand holding its breath.

Akrura shut his eyes. “Could this be a delusion of my own mind?”

Then he lifted his eyelids.

The same vision, under the water, in its full stillness.

His throat closed, and his tears began to flow into the river itself.

“My Lord!”

With folded hands, the praise that had been gathering inside him for years came pouring from his mouth.

“I bow to you, Narayana. Oldest of all, wearing out never, the cause behind every cause. From the lotus that rose out of your navel came Brahma, and out of Brahma this whole spread of things, the living and the unliving.

“Earth, water, fire, wind, sky. The mind, the senses, the things the senses reach for, and the powers that govern them. Every one of them broke from your body the way a spark leaves a fire. They cannot know you. They are made things, and you are the awareness that looks out through them. Even Brahma, folded inside the three strands of nature, cannot reach the far edge of what you are.

“Men come at you by a hundred roads, and each one is sure his road is the only road. Some feed the sacred fire and call you by the names of many gods. Some sit in silence, burn away every action, and worship you as pure awareness. Some know you as Vasudeva and Sankarshana and Pradyumna and Aniruddha, four faces of the one. Some bow to Shiva, some to smaller gods, never guessing it is you they are bowing to. Rivers pour down every side of a mountain and lose their many names in the one sea. Every road runs home to you.

“The fire is your mouth and the earth your feet, the sun your eye and the sky your navel, the four directions your ears. Trees are the hair on your body, the clouds your dark locks, the mountains your bones. Day and night are the opening and closing of your eyes. Whole universes with their guardian gods drift inside you like grains of spawn in water, like insects in the hollow of a fig.

“You came as the fish and swam the drowned world. You came as the tortoise and held the mountain on your back, as the boar and lifted the earth on your tusk, as the lion that was no lion, as the dwarf whose three strides swallowed the sky. You came as Parashurama and cut down the arrogant kings, as Rama and brought down Ravana. You will come again as Kalki when the age has run down to its dregs. And you are here now, in this water, as you have been from the beginning.

“And here is what I am. A fool who took the dream for the day. I called this body mine, and the house and the wife and the coins and the kinsmen, and chased all of it the way a thirsty man chases a shimmer of heat across the sand and walks away from the real water at his feet. My mind will not hold still. The senses drag it off in every direction. I have nothing worth bringing you and no ground of my own to stand on, so I have come and fallen at your feet, which the crooked never find and the great yogis reach only in the deep of meditation. Let the dust of those feet rest on my forehead. That is the whole of what I want. I am here, at your feet. Keep me.”

He wept on, waist-deep in the water, hands joined.

Outside, on the chariot, Krishna and Balarama sat, calm. Nothing needed saying. What was passing within him, they knew.

After a while Akrura came out of the water. His eyes were red, his body still trembling.

He returned to the chariot and looked at Krishna.

“Prabhu!”

Krishna smiled and said, “What happened, Akrura chacha? Was the water very cold?”

The same boy sat before him again. Ordinary, laughing, as if nothing had happened at all.

Akrura understood. The one whom yogis search for all their lives had shown a glimpse of himself, and in that same moment had returned to his easy, everyday form. That darshan had been for him alone, the answer to his years of calling.

The chariot moved on, and Gokul kept falling behind. But Gokul did not fall behind quietly.

The gopis ran out behind the chariot. From the moment word went round that their Shyamasundara was being taken to Mathura, a fire had caught in them. Their breath came hot, their lotus faces wilted, their bangles and their veils slipped loose. Some stood emptied of every sense, as though their bodies had been left behind and only the thought of him remained. Past all shame they cried after the wheels, “Govinda! Keeper of the cows!” And they turned on the man at the reins. Akrura, they said, the name means the gentle one, the one who is never cruel, and look what the gentle one is carrying away.

Krishna turned in his seat and sent word back to them, that he would come again, and it reached them like water on a burn. As long as the chariot’s banner and its rising dust stayed in sight, they stood there as if painted into the scene. Then only the wheel-tracks were left on the ground. The gopis bent over those tracks, and stood shielding with the ends of their saris the earth their Shyama’s chariot had run upon, as if that were all that now remained to them.

Akrura looked back from the chariot. He carried his glimpse away inside him. Behind him, the gopis stood in the road watching theirs disappear in the dust.

The story ahead belongs to Mathura, to the slaying of Kamsa. But for Akrura the journey was already complete there, in the water of the Yamuna. He went back to Kamsa’s court, but that vision had settled inside him now, and it was changing everything he did.

After Kamsa’s end he spent the rest of his life near Shri Hari, in Dwarka, sustained by that one glimpse, which never dimmed.