Bhagavatam · Sudama’s Journey

The Ganga glowed like heated copper in the slanting light. Parikshit sat quiet a while, then looked at Shukadeva. “Bhagavan, yesterday you told of the elephant-king who called out as he was going under, and Shri Hari came running. A cry has power, that much I see. But another question rises in me. What of the one who never calls out at all, who shrinks from asking, whose lips will not even open? I have a handful of counted days left, Muniwar, and I keep wondering: to receive from the Lord, must one ask?”

A faint light came into Shukadeva’s eyes, as if the question had pleased him to the depths. “Rajan, the answer lies hidden in a fistful of flattened rice,” he said gently. “Bhagavan Shri Krishna had a dearest friend, a Brahmin named Sudama. Deeply learned, detached from the world’s pleasures, calm of mind, master of his senses. Listen. He never asked for anything.”

This happened in a small village. There lived this same Brahmin, Sudama. A householder, but of such a kind that he stored up nothing and held on to nothing, content with whatever came to him unsought. His clothes were worn to threads, and there was never quite enough cloth in the house to cover the two of them. Many a day the hearth stood cold. His wife was devoted and true, and hunger had worn her down until she was faint with it. They bore it in silence, because Sudama did not know how to ask.

Inside Sudama, one memory of childhood had been treasured for years. At the ashram of the sage Sandipani in Avantipur, where Krishna and Balarama studied the Vedas, this same Sudama had been their fellow student. (A gurukul was the place where disciples lived in the guru’s own home, serving him while they gathered learning.) One day the guru’s wife sent the two of them into the forest to bring firewood. A storm broke over them out of season, wind tearing at the trees, rain coming down in sheets, thunder cracking overhead without a pause. Evening fell and the dark closed in on every side. The ground went under water, and there was no telling where it rose and where it dropped away. Hand in hand, drenched and shivering, lost to every direction, the two boys wandered the forest the whole night through.

When the sun rose, their guru Sandipani came searching and found them. The sight of his two disciples in that state filled his heart to the brim. “A wonder, my sons,” he said. “You have borne such hardship for my sake. To every creature its own body is the dearest thing there is, yet you two set even that aside and gave your minds to my service. A true student lays his whole self before his guru, and that is how the debt is paid. I am pleased with you, jewels of the twice-born. May every wish of yours be fulfilled, and may all the Vedas you have learned from me stay bright in you always, failing you neither in this world nor the next.”

That night settled inside them both like a sweet knot in the thread. No one else knew its worth, but Sudama remembered every single moment of it.

Years went by. Krishna became lord of the Bhoja, Vrishni, and Andhaka Yadavas and ruler of Dwarka. Sudama stayed on in that same hungry village.

One day his wife came to him trembling, her face wilted, and said softly, “You are a friend of Shri Krishna himself, the lord of Lakshmi. To those who love him he is a wish-granting tree, the refuge of everyone who turns to him, and no one is dearer to him than a Brahmin. Go to Dwarka once and meet him. He gives his very Self to anyone who holds his feet in mind, so wealth is a small thing for him to give. When he learns that you have a family and no food to set before them, he will give you more than enough. The children go to sleep hungry.”

Sudama was quiet a while. Then he said, “I cannot go there to beg.”

“Then do not beg,” his wife said. “Forget the wealth. You will have darshan of Bhagavan Shri Krishna, and that is the greatest gain a life can hold. Just go and meet him. After that, let it be as he sees fit.”

Sudama agreed. “Kalyani, is there anything in the house fit to carry as a gift?” His wife went to the neighboring Brahmins’ homes and asked for four handfuls of flattened rice (prithuka, which people also call poha), tied it in an old cloth, and placed it in Sudama’s hands.

“Give him this. How can one go empty-handed to meet a friend, and what else do we have?”

Sudama tucked the little bundle under his arm and set out. On foot, down the dusty road. Dwarka was far.

The whole way, one thought kept circling in his mind: “How will I ever gain sight of Bhagavan Shri Krishna?” And a fear walked beside him too. Krishna was now master of golden Dwarka, risen from the middle of the sea. What if he simply did not recognize him? And even if they did come face to face, what would he manage to say?

But his feet did not stop.

He reached Dwarka. The walls blazed like gold in the sun. Walking with a company of Brahmins, he passed three camps of guards and three great walls, each harder to cross than the one before, and came through the quarter where the Andhaka and Vrishni chiefs kept their mansions, a place closed to ordinary men. No one stopped him. At the heart of it stood the palace of Bhagavan Shri Krishna, with dwellings for his sixteen thousand queens, and Sudama walked straight in.

He entered one of those palaces. It was so adorned, so radiant with beauty, that the moment his foot crossed the threshold Sudama felt himself rising and sinking in an ocean of the bliss of Brahman.

At that hour Bhagavan Shri Krishna was seated on the bed of his beloved Rukmini. He saw the Brahmin from afar, and all at once he was on his feet.

He rose and ran, and reaching his friend, in great joy, he caught Sudama in the bind of his arms and held him hard. The touch of his dear companion’s body so flooded him with happiness that tears of love began to stream from his lotus eyes.

“Sudama! When did you set out? How? All this way on foot? Could you not have sent one word ahead? Would I have failed to send a chariot?”

Sudama could manage nothing in reply. Only the tears kept coming.

Krishna took his hand and led him within. He seated him on his own bed. Then he himself brought the articles of worship and sat down to honor his guest. He washed his dear friend’s feet in a basin and sprinkled that same water on his own head, then anointed him with sandal, aragaja, saffron, and other divine perfumes. With fragrant incense and lamps he performed his friend’s arati. Offering him pan and the gift of a cow, greeting him with sweet words of welcome, he received him. Then he sat down close beside him. Rukmini herself, Lakshmi in living form, took up a chamara whisk and began to fan the guest. Watching this service lavished on a Brahmin in torn old clothes, grimy, his body wasted thin, the women of the inner palace stood astonished. None of them could fathom who this threadbare man might be, for whom the guru of all three worlds kept bending lower and lower, whom he had seated on his own bed and gathered to his heart like his elder brother Balarama, leaving aside even Rukmini, Lakshmi herself.

Krishna fed him with his own hand. Then, still holding that hand, he let the old years come back. “Tell me,” he said, “after you left the guru’s house, did you marry? Is your wife a good match for you?” Sudama answered him, and Krishna smiled. “I know your heart. You have kept a household all this while and never once let wanting take root in it. Men who go on doing their given work with no desire pulling at them, the way I do, only to set the world an example, are rare on this earth.”

His voice turned toward the years they had shared. “Do you remember the guru’s house? That is where the twice-born learn the one thing worth learning and cross the long dark of not-knowing. Three men stand as gurus to us. The father who gives the body is the first. After him comes the teacher who lays the sacred thread on a boy’s shoulder and shows him his duty, and he is to be honored as I am. Last comes the one who opens the knowledge of the Self and turns a man toward God, and he is myself, no other. And of everything a person can lay before me, the household fire, the study of scripture, the fasting of the ascetic, the silence of the man who has renounced the world, nothing pleases me the way a student’s service to his guru does.”

He remembered the night the guru’s wife had sent them out for firewood, and the storm that had swallowed the whole forest, and the two of them holding on to each other in the black rain until the sun came up. “That,” he said, “was such service.”

Sudama listened, and somewhere in the listening he understood at last who sat before him. “Lord of gods, teacher of the world,” he said, “what is left for me to gain? I lived in the guru’s house at your side, and a man who has done that has done everything and reached everything. The four aims of a life, dharma, prosperity, pleasure, and moksha, all rest in the Vedas, and the Vedas are your own body. You went to a guru and studied them the way any boy studies, in play, so that the world would have its example.”

Bhagavan Shri Krishna knows what moves in every heart. Looking at his friend with eyes full of affection, half teasing, he asked, “And what have you brought me from home, Sudama? When someone who loves me offers even a small thing, it grows great in my eyes, and a man with no love in him can pile up gifts and leave me untouched. A leaf, a flower, a piece of fruit, a little water: bring me any of these with love, and I take it and I am glad.”

Sudama’s head went down. The bundle existed, yes, but it was so small, so plain. Before all this splendor, how could he possibly bring it out? He lowered his face in shame and left the flattened rice where it was.

But the Lord knows every stirring of every heart. He saw through it at once: this dear friend of mine has never once worshipped me out of craving for Lakshmi’s riches, and even today he has come only at the urging of his devoted wife. “Now I will give him a fortune rare even for the gods,” he thought, and with that he himself pulled the little bundle out from under Sudama’s arm. He untied the knot. Inside, a fistful of flattened rice.

“Ah! This is my favorite of all,” he said, and lifted a handful and ate it with relish. “This flattened rice is enough to satisfy me, and the whole world besides.” Then he reached for a second handful.

Just then Rukmini caught his hand, for she was Lakshmi herself and could not bear to be parted from him. “Vishvatman, enough,” she said, and there was a smile in it. “One handful of this is enough to give a man the full riches of this world and the next. Eat a second, and it is me you will have given away.”

The night went by. The good Brahmin rested that night in the Lord’s palace in deep comfort, ate and drank, and felt as though he had arrived in Vaikuntha itself. Krishna and Sudama talked of old times. But one thing Sudama never did.

He asked for nothing. From Shri Krishna’s hands he received nothing outwardly, and still he asked for nothing.

In the morning Sudama took his leave. Krishna, from whom the whole universe draws its life, walked beside him a little way down the road, sent him off with warm and gentle words, and bowed to him. Then Sudama started for home, a little abashed at the state of his own mind, rising and sinking in the joy of the Lord’s darshan. He would reach home, and the same old poverty would stand there waiting, open-mouthed. His wife would ask, “What did you bring?” And he would have only one answer.

And yet, though the stomach was empty, something inside had quietly filled.

All along the road he kept thinking to himself, “Ah, what joy this is, and what wonder! Today I have seen with my own eyes the devotion Bhagavan Shri Krishna bears toward Brahmins, he who holds them as his chosen deity. I, the poorest of the poor, and he, the one shelter of Lakshmi herself! And still, thinking ‘this is a Brahmin,’ he gathered me into his arms. He sat me on his own queen’s bed as if I were his brother, and Rukmini herself fanned me, and the God of gods bent down and washed my feet.” And every time, the same answer returned to him: between friendship and begging runs a line, and that line Sudama had not crossed.

He reached the edge of his village.

And stopped short. His village was simply not there.

Where his old mud hut had stood, palaces of jewels now rose seven stories high, blazing like the sun, like fire, like the moon. Gardens and pleasure groves of every design spread around them, flocks of many-colored birds calling through the branches, lotuses open on the ponds. Orchards beyond, cows heavy with milk, horses tethered in rows. Men and women of an almost godly grace were coming and going, and some of them moved out to meet him with singing and the sound of instruments. His wife, hearing he had come, hurried to the doorway like Lakshmi stepping from her own abode, gold at her throat now, radiant among her maidservants, and the children, in clean fresh clothes, stood laughing.

He turned and looked behind him. Had he wandered into some other village by mistake?

The village was the same one. Only, everything of his had changed.

His wife came to him with tears standing in her eyes, lowered them out of shyness, bowed to him, and folded him to her heart. He followed her inside, into halls that might have belonged to Indra himself: pillars of gems, beds of ivory bright with gold and spread with sheets soft as the foam of milk, walls of clear crystal set with emeralds, women shaped out of jewels holding lamps to light the rooms. He sat down quietly.

She came and sat beside him. “What happened?”

He said only this: “I asked him for nothing. And still he gave everything.”

After that he said no more. But in his own mind he turned it over and over. I am poor, he thought, and luckless from the day I was born. Where could a fortune like this come from, if not from one glance of Shri Krishna’s eyes? He gives the way a raincloud gives, holding its water back while the farmer stands and watches, then loosing it in the dark over the sleeping man’s fields, and counting even that as far too little. Let me have, birth after birth, his friendship and his love and the service of his feet. Wealth I do not need. So he lived on among these comforts as gifts of the Lord’s grace, tasting them with a renunciate’s heart, unattached, and day by day his bhakti deepened, until the old knots of ignorance came loose and fell away, and in time he reached the Lord’s own abode. In his mind he kept seeing that fist, once empty, that had filled everything, as if something rested in it still that no scale could weigh.

On the bank of the Ganga, Shukadeva stayed silent for a few moments. It was nearly the hour for lighting lamps, and the first flickers trembled on the water.

“Rajan,” he said at last, “the elephant-king called out and received. Sudama received without calling out. But understand one thing more. Shri Krishna handed Sudama nothing to his face, placed no gift in his hands. He thought: let this poor man not turn giddy with sudden wealth and forget me altogether. So what he gave, he gave quietly, from behind. What moves him is love, Rajan; asking counts for nothing with him. And love often speaks at its clearest exactly where the tongue falls silent.”

Parikshit said nothing. The trembling inside him, the one that had risen at Takshaka’s name until now, was nowhere to be found in this hour. He only watched the flowing water, where a lamp slipped from someone’s hand was drifting away on the current, asking nothing of anyone, lighting the dark a little at a time as it went.