Bhagavatam · Damodara, the Lord Who Let Himself Be Bound

Parikshit looked at the sage Shukadeva, then stayed silent for a while.

“Bhagavan,” he said, “yesterday you told of the boy Dhruva, who reached the Lord on the strength of tapas. I have only a few days left now, and I keep wondering: is it only through tapas and force of will that anyone reaches him? Is there another road?”

A faint light came into Shukadeva’s eyes, the light that comes when there is something of Krishna to tell. “Rajan, there is one road that opens through defeat, and strength has never once opened it. Listen. This is the story of a mother who set out to bind the master of all the worlds with her rope.”

A Vrindavan morning. It was the season of the yearly worship of Indra, and the maids of the house were caught up in the preparations, so Yashoda, the lady of Nanda’s house, took up the churning herself, to make fresh butter for her lala.

She worked the churning rod through the curd, one hand pulling the rope, one hand steadying the pot, and as she pulled she sang. The songs were all of her boy, the small wonders he had already worked in Vraja, and she sang them under her breath the way a mother does when her hands are busy and her heart is full. Sweat gathered on her face. Her earrings swung. The bangles slid along her forearms, tired from the pulling, and one jasmine flower and then another loosened from her braid and dropped as she churned. The curd rose and fell, rose and fell, and a first faint gleam of butter floated up.

Just then Kanhaiya arrived. He caught the churning rod in both hands and stopped it. He had come to be fed. Yashoda let the rod go, gathered him into her lap, and put him to her breast, and she watched his smiling face while he drank.

At that moment the milk set to boil on the hearth rose and spilled over. Yashoda put Kanhaiya down, still unsatisfied, and hurried off to save the milk from the fire.

That small desertion lit a temper in him. He bit down on his quivering red lip. With false tears standing in his eyes, he picked up a grinding stone from beside the slab, broke the churning pot with it, and slipped away into an inner room to eat the fresh butter stored there, alone.

When Yashoda came back with the milk saved, the churning pot lay in pieces. She knew at once whose work it was. Not finding him anywhere in the house, she laughed. Then she stepped outside and saw him: Kanhaiya, up on an overturned mortar, scooping butter down from the hanging pot and handing it out to the monkeys.

Butter was smeared across his mouth. In his eyes sat the fear of a thief caught in the act, and he kept glancing warily in every direction. Quietly, so as not to startle him, she began to move up on him from behind.

Inside Yashoda, a mother woke. She picked up a stick.

“Kanhaiya!”

He saw her the moment the stick was in her hand, coming straight for him. In one bound he was off the mortar and running like a frightened child, and Yashoda ran after him. She ran after the one whom the minds of yogis, made subtle and spotless by long tapas, cannot enter or reach. She crossed the courtyard, then ran on past it, gasping, and she would not give up the chase.

He was a small boy, quick and clever. Yashoda was a mother, weary and stubborn. Soon the weight of her hips slowed her. The knot of her braid came loose as she ran, and the jasmine flowers in it dropped behind her one by one as she pressed on. Even so, somehow, she closed the distance and caught him.

She held him fast by the hand. He was crying now, loud and helpless, rubbing his eyes with his fists until the kajal spread in dark smears down his face, looking up at her with eyes unsteady from fear. She raised the stick to threaten him, only to put a little fear in him. Then she saw how frightened he already was, and her heart gave way. She threw the stick aside. But she was a mother, and there was a lesson to teach.

“Ma, I will never do it again,” said Kanhaiya. “Put that stick down with your own hand.” But Yashoda thought, this one should be tied up for once, or he will bolt off somewhere. “Today I will tie you to the mortar, so you learn what stealing butter costs.”

Krishna looked at her through his crying eyes and said nothing.

A heavy wooden mortar stood right there, the kind used for pounding grain, and she decided that was where she would bind him. She had no idea whom she was binding. To her he was her son, unmanifest glory folded into the shape of a small boy, and she set about tying him the way anyone would tie a restless child.

She took a rope, wound it around his belly, and led him to the mortar. She began to tie the knot.

The rope fell two fingers short.

She fetched another rope and joined it on.

Still two fingers short.

When that one fell short too, she knotted on another. And however many ropes she brought and joined, joint after joint, the whole length always came up exactly two fingers short.

Yashoda stood stunned. Her hand stopped. A line of sweat traced down her brow. What was happening? That small belly, and no rope in the house would close around it.

She joined together every rope she owned. Each time, the same two fingers missing.

A mother is trying to tie up her own child. The child has stopped crying now; he only watches. And every single time, the rope stops those same two fingers short.

The gopis who had gathered began to smile at her long defeat, and Yashoda, smiling too at her own helplessness, stood there amazed.

Why would no rope reach? Because the one she was trying to bind has no inside and no outside, no before and no behind. He stands before the universe and after it, within it and all around it. He is the universe itself. No length of rope can pass around the one who has no outer edge.

And still there is a single thing that can bind even him.

Her body was soaked through with sweat. The garlands in her braid had come loose and fallen, and she was spent to the last of her strength.

Then, out of pure compassion, Bhagavan Shri Krishna let himself be bound by his mother. He looked at her, at the sweat on her forehead, the loosened hair, the tired eyes still fixed on him alone.

And he smiled.

The rope now reached all the way around.

Yashoda tied him to the mortar.

From this morning Krishna carried a new name: Damodara. Dama means rope, udara means belly. The one whose belly was bound with a rope is Damodara.

The boy sat there, tied. He shifted a little and dragged the mortar after him.

In that dragging, something else began. Near the courtyard stood two arjuna trees, and as the mortar scraped into the narrow gap between them, both were torn up by the roots. A great crack rolled through the air and the two trunks came down in a cloud of dust. Who those trees had once been, and why they had waited so long for this small boy to pass between them, no one in Vraja learned that day.

The bound Kanhaiya took no notice of any of it. He sat by the mortar, teasing the rope with one finger.

And his mother, who had no idea that she had just bound the whole universe with a length of household rope, finished her chores and sat down at last, worn out.

Shukadeva paused. Parikshit found that his own breath had gone quiet.

“So, Bhagavan,” he said, “the one Dhruva reached through all that tapas, Yashoda bound with her defeat?”

“Rajan, here is the wonder of it. He is master of himself, and this whole universe with Brahma and all its rulers moves at his command, and still he let a cowherd woman tie him to a mortar, to show his devotees what their love can do to him. Brahma never won such grace from him. Shiva never won it. Even Lakshmi, who has her place on his own chest, never received what Yashoda received that morning. The ascetic who conquers his body comes to him slowly. The wise man who dissolves his mind into him comes slowly too. The one who simply loves him arrives first. The day Yashoda set down her labor and her ‘I’, in that same instant her rope reached. In the days you have left, this is the one work worth doing.”

Parikshit said nothing. One more day was gone.