Bhagavatam · The Bewilderment of Brahma

Parikshit looked at the sage and said, “Bhagavan, so far you have shown me the Krishna who delivers Putana, who dances on Kaliya’s hoods. My mind is forgetting how to be afraid. One thing still escapes me. The same small boy who sleeps in the fold of his mother’s anchal, and the same lord of everything that is: how are these two one? My days can be counted on the fingers of a hand now, Munivar. I want to know that one by sight before I go.”

Shukadeva said nothing for a while. Then that faint smile came to his lips, the one that showed only when the talk turned to Krishna.

“Rajan, this very question once rose in the mind of Brahma himself. What he did to answer it ended in his own undoing, and won all of Vraja a whole year’s priceless boon. Listen.”

At the far edge of Vrindavan the morning sun was still drying the dew off the grass. As on any other day, Kanha called out to his cowherd friends, the calves gathered lowing, and the whole troop set off together, some mornings toward a pasture, some toward the bank of the Yamuna.

That day, only lately walked free of Aghasura’s jaws, they grazed the calves along until they came out on the soft sandy shore of the Yamuna. Krishna stopped them all. “Look how soft and clean the sand is here. On one side the colored lotuses have opened and the bees are humming over them; on the other the birds are calling sweetly. The day has climbed high and hunger is on all of us. Let the calves drink and graze the near grass slowly, and let us eat right here.”

The boys answered in one voice, “Done, done.” They watered the calves, loosed them into the green grass, and opened the little bundles their mothers had tied for them at dawn: curd-rice glistening with ghee, pickles and preserves of ginger and lime. The plain food of cowherds, with the smell of home still living in it.

They sat down in a ring, Shyamasundar at the very center, each boy’s meal open in front of him. From a little way off it looked as though the petals of a lotus had been set around the flower’s calyx. He sat at the middle of them, and yet each boy somehow found Krishna’s face turned toward his own.

The meal ran on through laughter and teasing over whose bundle held what. One boy made a cup of a leaf, another of a flower, another of a bud or a strip of bark, and one turned a flat stone into a plate. Kanha kept them all laughing with his jokes, lifted a morsel from one boy’s hand into his own mouth, dropped a morsel of his own into another’s. A ball of curd-rice in his left hand, pickle and preserve wedged between his fingers, the flute tucked in the fold of his waistcloth and the horn and cane pressed under one arm, he shone there in the middle like the enjoyer of every yajna sitting down to play at being a boy. Even the gods of heaven leaned out of the sky to watch.

While they ate with their minds full of him, the calves, greedy for the green grass, wandered off no one knew how far.

“The calves are gone. They are nowhere in sight.”

Krishna, at whom even Death takes fright, only laughed. “Eat on, all of you, and do not worry. I will bring them back this minute.” And with that same ball of curd-rice still in his left hand he rose and set off after the calves, through the hills and caves and bowers, wondering how far they could have strayed.

But in that same hour, high above in his own world, Brahma the lotus-born was watching the whole scene. The maker from whose hands creature after creature comes had been left astonished by the way this child had swallowed and undone even Aghasura. A thought moved in him: “Let me see one more sweet glory of this Shyamasundar, who has made himself a human child by his own play.”

First, by his yogic power, he lifted every calf away and hid them somewhere far off.

Kanha searched the hills, the caves, the bowers, and found no sign of them.

He turned back toward the Yamuna. By then Brahma had done one thing more. The moment Kanha went off after the calves, Brahma with that same power carried away all the cowherd boys as well, hid them elsewhere, and himself slipped out of sight.

Now Shyamasundar stood alone on the shore. No calves, no friends, only the opened bundles of food lying just where they had been left.

He sent one glance around the empty bank, and within himself he knew the whole of it. Krishna, who leaves nothing unknown, saw at once that this was the creator’s doing. The quick smile came back to his mouth.

“So. Pitamaha has come down to play a game.”

And then, to fill the mothers of his calves and his cowherd boys with joy, and Brahma along with them, the almighty set going a play that would leave the maker of the worlds himself turning in circles.

Out of his own self he brought forth countless forms. For every lost cowherd, a Kanha. For every lost calf, a calf.

Every form was exact down to the last hair. As many as they had been, just so many; bodies just as small; hands and feet just as they were; each with the very stick and horn and flute and leaf-cup and sling he had carried, the same clothes and the same ornaments, the same manners, the same nature, the same gifts, the same names, the same faces, the same ages. Each one just so much as that boy had been, and no more. And inside every single one sat that same one Shyamasundar, as though the old word of the Veda, that all this world is made of the form of Vishnu, had taken a body and stepped out where anyone could see it.

Then he herded himself home. He was the calves, driven along by himself in the shape of the boys; he was the guide walking them back; he was the game they played on the way. Each boy’s calves he shut in that boy’s own pen, and into each house he went as that house’s own son. Evening came on, and every one of them went home. Not a mother or father caught the faintest breath of it. The calves came into the pens, the children into the courtyards, and the mothers were beside themselves. “Home at last, my Lala.”

At the first note of the flute the mothers came running. They lifted these Kanha-shaped boys into their arms, held them to their breasts, and, their milk let down by sheer love and sweeter than nectar, fed them, though these were children long since weaned. They rubbed them with ubtan, bathed them, drew sandal paste across their skin, dressed them in good clothes and ornaments, marked their foreheads, and waved away the evil eye, tending the Self of all as their own small sons.

In this way a whole year went by.

In the homes where these boys were growing up, the parents found their children dearer than they had ever been. Day after day, by slow degrees, the creeper of their love for their own boys climbed higher. They never guessed that in every courtyard it was Shyamasundar himself, wearing the face of their darling. The love of Vraja swelled past anything it had known before, and the child who drank it all in, being the one Self of every one of them, kept not a single thread of it as his own.

It was the same with the cows of Vraja. At the mere sight of their new calves their udders filled of their own accord, and they licked them over and over like creatures out of their senses.

When five or six nights were left to finish the year, Shyamasundar went out one day with Balarama, grazing the calves in the forest. The cows were high up on the crest of Govardhana, cropping grass, and from there they caught sight of their calves far below, feeding close to Vraja. The moment they saw them their vatsalya broke loose. Paying no mind to the herdsmen or to the steep and broken path, they went plunging down with a great bellowing, milk running from their udders, necks drawn in at the hump and heads and tails held high so that they seemed almost to run on two legs. They reached their young and stood licking them as though they would draw them back inside. The cowherds strained to turn the cows and could not, and they came down that hard path angry and ashamed at their own failure. Then they saw their sons standing there among the calves, and the anger drained out of them where it stood. Love broke open in their chests; they gathered the boys up, held them close, and breathed in the smell of their heads, and it was the highest joy they knew. They could hardly bring themselves to leave, and even the thought of the boys, once they had turned away, set the tears streaming.

Balarama watched the people and the cows of Vraja pour more and more love, moment upon moment, over children who had even given up their own mothers’ milk. He could not find the cause of it, and it set him thinking. “What a strange thing this is. The love that all of Vraja and I myself carry for Krishna, the Self of all, is now rising in just that measure for these boys and these calves. Whose maya is this? A god’s? A man’s? A demon’s? No. This is my own Lord’s maya, for it has fooled even me, which no lesser power could ever do.”

So Balarama turned the eye of knowledge on them, and he saw that every calf and every boy was Krishna, and Krishna alone. He said to him that these were Vishnu himself standing in all these shapes, and asked him to tell the whole of it. Krishna told him plainly what Brahma had done, and Balarama understood.

Meanwhile Brahma came back. For him only a moment had gone by; on the earth it had been a full year. He came to see what had become of his test, and he found everything just as he had left it: the cowherds at their work, the calves grazing in Vrindavan, Nanda and Yashoda pouring themselves out over their darling.

“How can this be? I hid every one of them away with my own hands.” He steadied the eye of knowledge on the scene to sort out which of the boys were the first ones and which had been made later. But the boys and the calves he had stolen were lying that whole year in a sleep laid on them by the Lord’s own maya, and had never once stirred. So who were these, as many in number, playing a full year with Krishna in the woods and in Vraja? Try as he would, he could not tell which were the true ones and which were not.

He had set out to throw his spell over the one who deludes the whole universe and can himself never be deluded, and now he stood there deluded by his own small power. As the darkness of a mist loses itself in the greater dark of a night, as the little light of a firefly is swallowed in daylight, a lesser maya turned against a greater one cancels even the hold its own owner had on it.

And what he saw next took away every ground he had stood on. One by one, every cowherd, every calf, every boy, all of them, each was Shyamasundar himself in the flesh.

Before his staring eyes each of them turned dark as a raincloud and stood robed in yellow silk, four arms bearing the conch, the discus, the mace, and the lotus. On each a jeweled crown, earrings, a necklace of pearls, the Srivatsa mark bright on the breast, armlets and bracelets and anklets and rings, and over the whole body from head to foot fresh soft garlands of tulsi laid there by devotees of great merit. One consciousness looked out through every form, one being in numberless shapes. And at the feet of each of them he saw all that lives and all that does not, from makers like himself down to the last blade of grass, standing in bodily form, dancing and singing, worshiping with offering upon offering. The mystic powers waited there, and Maya, and the twenty-four principles of the cosmos; and Time, and the nature of things, and old buried desire, and wanting, and action, and the three gunas stood with folded hands, their glory dimmed to nothing beside these forms. Each form was one seamless essence of truth and consciousness and bliss, past the reach even of those whose only eye is knowledge of the Self; and every one of them was that one Absolute by whose light alone this whole world of things stands lit.

Brahma’s senses left him. All eleven of them were shaken and then stopped dead. For some moments he could neither stir nor blink, a doll stood up beside the presiding lord of Vraja.

“What have I done. I set out to test the one whose single glance gave me my own birth. Who am I even to ask the question?”

Then Krishna, without the smallest effort, drew the curtain of his maya aside. He is the one no argument can corner, who shines by his own bliss, who stands past all maya, whom the Upanishads reach only by naming everything he is not. Outer sight came back to Brahma the way life comes back to a dead man. With great difficulty he got his eyes open, and only then did his own body and this world come into view again.

He looked around him and saw Vrindavan spread out, its trees holding up the life of the people, and there its creatures that are born enemies, the man and the beast of prey, moving together like friends, all anger and all greed gone out of the place because Krishna had made his home in it. And in the middle of it he saw the secondless Infinite, wise past all sounding, playing the part of a boy born among cowherds, still standing alone with the ball of curd-rice in his left hand, still looking about for his calves and his friends as though he had stepped away for them only a moment ago.

The instant he saw Bhagavan, Brahma came down off his swan and let his gold-bright body fall to the ground straight as a rod. He touched Krishna’s feet with the crests of his four crowns, one after another, and washed them in a running stream of the tears of joy. The glory he had just seen came back over him again and again, and again and again he rose and fell and lay a long while at those feet. Then he got slowly up, rubbed his eyes, and, his head low and his voice unsteady and his body still shaking, he began to praise the Lord.

“I bow to you, cowherd’s son, your feet soft as a child’s and your body dark as a rain cloud, gunja seeds swinging at your ears and the peacock feather in your hair, the wildflower garland, the morsel in your hand, the cane and the horn and the flute. Even this small shape of yours I cannot get to the bottom of, and it is only your grace, and the longing of your lovers, that gave it to me to see. How then should I fathom you as you truly are, who are nothing but truth and consciousness and bliss?”

“Look at the thing I tried to do. I went to lay a spell over you, the cause of all, the deluder of every deluder. What am I in front of you but a spark in front of the fire it jumped from? Forgive the fool who called himself the maker, whose eyes ignorance had blinded until he thought, I am the one who is never born. This body of mine stands seven spans high and presides over a single egg of a world, a thin-walled pot wrapped in earth and water and fire and air and sky and mind and matter, and it is nothing at all beside you, in whose every pore whole universes drift by like specks of dust. Does an unborn child kicking in the dark offend its mother? Is there anything, named or nameless, that lies anywhere outside your body?”

“They say Brahma sprang from the lotus at the navel of Narayana who lies upon the waters. Then I came out of you, for you are that Narayana, the very life and Self of every creature that breathes, its prompter and its silent witness. The little form you wear here is your play and nothing forced on you. And today, in this one afternoon, you have shown me the whole of it. First you alone were. Then you became the boys and the calves and every stick and flute among them. Then you stood before me in as many four-armed forms, and everything that lives, myself somewhere in the crowd, was worshiping you. Then you became as many universes. And now you stand here the one Brahman with no second. What is all of this but your maya?”

“The ones who master you are the ones who simply let your story fall on their ears and give up the long grind for bare knowledge; and the ones who chase knowledge and leave your love out of it only pound and pound at empty husk. You are the one Self of every being there is. The ignorant hunt for that Self outside themselves, taking this body for the self and taking you, who are their own Self, for a stranger. One grain of the dust of your feet lets a man know your glory; without it he may search his whole life alone and come to nothing.”

“So let this be my one prayer. Set me down for birth wherever you please, a bird, a beast, a blade of grass, so long as it is here in this Gokula, where I may carry on my head the dust of the feet of these cowherds, whose every breath is you, the dust that the Vedas themselves are still out searching for. Blessed past telling are these cows and these mothers, whose milk you drank to the full as their calves and their sons. Your glory is past my mind and my speech and my body. Give me leave now, Lord. You alone hold up the worlds. This world, and this body I once called mine, I lay down at your feet. My head is at your feet until the ages run out.”

Krishna looked at the old maker the way a child looks at a grandfather who has worn himself out, and lifted him with a glance. Given his leave, Brahma walked around him three times, bowed low, and went home to his own realm. Then Krishna brought the true calves back to the bank, to the very spot where his friends still sat waiting, and the countless forms he had worn slipped quietly back into the one.

To the boys not even a moment seemed to have passed, call it half the space of a blink. They looked up and said, “Back already? We have not swallowed a single mouthful yet. Come, sit here, eat your fill.” Kanha laughed and sat down among them, and the meal went on as though it had never once broken off.