Bhagavatam · The Uddhava Gita

The current of the Ganga flowed on that afternoon, the same as it had flowed the day before. Parikshit had been silent a long while. Then he turned toward Shukadeva.

“Bhagavan, since yesterday one thing has settled in my mind and will not lift. One day or another, every one of us is parted from the person we love above all else. My father went. My grandfather went. Now my own hour stands over my head. But him I never once got to see. For a man who lived with the Lord before his very eyes, who drank water poured from his hand, what must that parting be? Is there an answer even for a pain like that?”

Shukadeva went on gazing at the river a while before he spoke.

“Rajan, that very pain was carried by Uddhava, the Lord’s one wholly devoted friend, and out of that pain came the teaching we now call the Uddhava Gita. The teaching comes later. First hear the parting, because without it the meaning of the teaching does not open at all.”

In Dwarka the day had come toward which the whole lila had been moving. A hundred and twenty-five years had passed since the Lord took birth in the line of Yadu, a hundred and twenty-five years, Rajan, from the dust of Gokul to this golden city at the edge of the sea. Kurukshetra lay behind him. The Yadu house had grown vast and drunk on its own strength, and it had begun to split along the seams of that pride. On the shore of Prabhasa, where the clan would soon gather, a curse spoken by brahmins waited to fall. Brahma had come to Dwarka in person, Shankara beside him and the whole host of the gods at his back, to fold his hands and pray that the Lord return now to his own abode. The Lord heard them out, then told them the thing was already settled in his own mind. The burden of the earth was lifted. The work was done. Even the waves of the sea, it seemed, had begun to press a little too close against the walls of the city.

That morning the Lord sent for Uddhava.

Uddhava was no ordinary man. He was that Yadava whose intellect stood apart, whose judgment was reckoned unmatched in every assembly of Dwarka, who carried every debate by the sheer force of reason, and whom people never tired of calling wise. Yet inside this one man was a place his whole learning had never once reached, and that place opened only before a single dark and lovely face. This morning that same Uddhava was trembling somewhere within, and did not know why.

“Come, Uddhava. Sit close.”

Uddhava sat. In the Lord’s voice this morning lay something he had not heard in a hundred and twenty-five years. There was a stillness in it, the quiet of a man who, before setting out on a very long journey, looks once around the house he is leaving.

“Uddhava, from the curse of the brahmins this house has already burned within. Its own quarrels and its pride will pull it under. The day I lift my foot from this mortal world, all its good fortune will rise and go with me. Seven days from now the sea will take this Dwarka into itself. Not one lane, not one rooftop will be left.”

Uddhava’s breath caught in his throat. The seventh day. This city of gold, these lattice windows, this ghat where the sea wind had always blown, all of it under the water after seven more sunrises. “And you, Lord?”

“My time to go has come as well, Uddhava. My work here is finished.”

They were only a few words, and each fell on Uddhava’s chest like a stone. His hands joined of their own accord, and out of his mouth came, very softly, “Then take me with you too.”

The Lord looked at him a long moment, then smiled. In that smile this morning was something more.

“That very thing you ask, Uddhava, is exactly what I intend for you. The road to it runs through you. Stay a while yet. Then let everything go, break the knot of attachment to every kinsman and friend, fix your mind on me, and wander this earth freely, with an even eye.”

What the Lord said next, Rajan, is the very seed of the Uddhava Gita. He told Uddhava that whatever the mind thinks, whatever the tongue says, whatever the eyes see and the ears hear, all of it is a making of the mind, a play of dreams, only maya. A restless mind falls into the sight of the world as a heap of broken pieces, and out of that broken sight come the notions of merit and fault, of what a man must do and must not do. “Take the reins of every sense into your own hand, Uddhava. Still the turnings of the mind. Then see this whole world spread out within your own self, and see your self standing in me, the Self of all, undivided. A man settled there moves through the world like a child, with no weight of good or evil on anything he does. He is a friend to every creature, quiet at the center, and he looks on all of it as one with me. Sorrow does not touch such a man again, and birth after birth lets go of him.”

Uddhava was listening, and inside him a question was already rising that he had not yet found the voice to speak. But the Lord went on, and what he spoke came in time to be called the Uddhava Gita. It stands in the eleventh Skandha of the Bhagavata, chapters six through twenty-nine, more than a thousand shlokas, a whole road laid end to end.

The Lord told Uddhava an old story, of the avadhuta Dattatreya, who saw across all three times, and of King Yadu, who once asked him how a man who did no work at all had come by a child’s fearlessness and so fine an understanding. The avadhuta laughed and said he had taken twenty-four teachers in this world. From the earth he learned to hold his own course and not swerve from it, though the world tramples and torments him, the way the earth bears every foot that treads her and gives back only patience. From the wind he learned to move among the objects of sense and carry nothing of them inward, to touch every scent and stay odorless. From the ocean he learned the calm that neither swells when the rivers pour in nor shrinks when they fail. From fire he learned the form that takes in everything offered to it and stays unstained, that hides and shows itself by turns and burns away the sins of the one who feeds it. And from a pair of doves who loved their young so wholly that, when a fowler’s net closed over the fledglings, the mother flew straight into it and the father after her, he learned that the cord of affection is the finest snare of all, and that a man who reaches the human birth, a door standing open onto freedom, and clings instead to his nest, falls from a great height the very moment he seems to have climbed it. Twenty-four teachers, and from each one thing that leaves you silent.

Then the Lord recited the Hamsa Gita. Long ago, in some ancient kalpa, the mind-born sages Sanaka and his brothers had gone to their father Brahma with a riddle they could not untie. The mind clings to the objects of sense, and the objects press their images back into the mind, so how was a seeker ever to pry the two apart and set the mind free? Brahma had no answer to give them. Then the Lord himself came before them in the form of a swan, and told them the whole of it, that the mind is loosed by being drawn back from everything else and fixed, straight and steady, on him. He opened the knots of Samkhya, laid out the method of yoga, untangled the weave of knowledge and dispassion, and drew back the whole play of Prakriti’s three gunas until it lay bare.

And then, having shown so many roads, the Lord paused a moment, and laid one finger on a single one.

“Every one of these roads is true, Uddhava. But the road of jnana is hard; on it a man must sift and weigh and understand all his life. Yoga is harder. The riddles of Samkhya, harder still. Bhakti asks one thing only, the mind given over to me completely. Everything else settles of itself.”

“And hold one more thing close, Uddhava. Keep some tie with me, in any form at all, even as a friend. To a friend a man can say everything in his heart. That one tie will carry you through every hour that comes.”

This far the Lord had spoken. And here, Rajan, the question that had been held down in Uddhava so long broke its bank and came out. What came out was a cry.

Uddhava was sitting with his head laid on the Lord’s feet. He raised it. His chin was shaking, and in his throat some knot seemed to have tied itself, so that his voice came through only with great effort.

“Yogeshwara,” he said, “you are all-powerful. Had you wished it, you could have wiped out that curse of the brahmins in a single breath. You did not. And from that I understood that you mean now to gather up this house, leave this world, and go.”

His voice closed on itself. Then, as though drawing the words up from somewhere very deep, he said, “But hear me, Lord. This world that is only maya, you are teaching me to conquer it. The great rishis who go sky-clad, who keep the vow of celibacy their whole lives long, who draw the seed upward and burn in tapas, they cross this maya, their hearts come clean, and they pass into your abode of Brahman. But I, Keshava? I am not that. I cannot make myself into that.”

Drops were falling from his eyes now, and still he did not stop.

“We were with you rising and sitting, Lord. With you asleep and awake. With you coming and going. We bathed beside you, we played beside you, we ate from the one plate with you. How far am I to count it? Every breath we drew was drawn beside you. And now you tell me to conquer maya. On the strength of the tapas of those rishis, who carry none of these memories of you, how am I ever to conquer it?”

He looked up at the Lord’s face, and in that look was the thirst of a man dying for water.

“We will conquer it another way, Lord. We your devotees, we the servants who eat what is left on your plate, we will conquer this maya by wearing the faded garland you have worn, by putting on the sandal paste you have set aside, by wrapping ourselves in the cloth that was yours. We will talk over your virtues, tell your human-seeming lilas again and again, keep remembering and singing everything you said and everything you did. That walk of yours, those curling locks, that sidelong glance, that laugh with mischief melted into it, in the memory of these we will stay drowned. By this, and by this alone, we will cross the maya that no one crosses.”

For a moment he stopped. Then very low, the way the innermost thing of all comes last, he said, “We have no fear of maya, Lord. Our one fear is of being parted from you. Do not leave us. Take me with you too.”

In that chamber of Dwarka no one spoke for a long while. Outside, a wave struck the shore once and slid back. The Lord reached out and laid his hand on Uddhava’s shaking shoulder. The touch was warm, and it was alive, and Uddhava took it down into his very bones in that moment, because he knew that only seven days were left to count.

After a while the Lord spoke, in a very tender voice. “This is exactly why I am holding you here, Uddhava. The more a man loses, the more truly he remembers. My story has to stay alive in one throat, and that throat is yours. This parting inside you is the very thing that will make you the truest speaker of me.”

Uddhava could say nothing. He only looked at the Lord’s face in such a way, as if he meant to settle each line of it inside himself forever, every bend of the brow, that corner of the lip where the laughter used to rest.

By now the teaching had done its quiet work in him. The old darkness he had clung to thinned and lifted, the way cold and fear give way before a man who has walked up to a fire. The tough snare of his love for his own people, the Vrishnis and the Andhakas and the whole house of Yadu, came apart in him like a rope cut clean through. And when the Lord placed into his hands a pair of his own wooden sandals to carry, Uddhava bent and laid his head on the Lord’s feet and washed them with his tears. He had crossed to the far side of joy and grief, and still the tears came.

The Lord lifted the dust of his own feet and touched it to Uddhava’s forehead.

“Now go to Badrikashrama, up toward the Himalaya, where the Ganga comes down clear and cold. Bathe there and drink that water, wear the bark of the trees, live on what the forest gives, and let heat and cold and every pair of opposites pass over you. Turn over in your mind everything you have heard from me, and give your speech and your thought to me alone. And wherever your feet take you, keep telling my story.”

Uddhava bowed his head, went around him once in reverence, and turned to go. He carried the Lord’s sandals on his own head. At the door he stopped once more, and he did not look back. Had he looked, his feet might not have carried him another step.

Toward Badrikashrama. With every step Dwarka fell away behind him, the Dwarka the sea would swallow on the seventh day, and ahead of him rose the climbing cold whiteness of the Himalaya. He reached the place they call Vishala, set the Lord deep at the center of his heart, and gave himself to the sadhana the Lord had taught him. They say Uddhava is there even today, in the silence of that snow, sunk in that practice. And whatever devotee climbs to that height, Uddhava tells him the stories of the Lord, of that same dark and lovely face he had filled his eyes with one last time before he came away.