Lulla family library · Three stops, at your pace
Love climbs by steps: a friend’s company, a servant’s surrender, a lover’s ache, and above them a love whose only object is the Supreme itself. Here are Krishna promising to lift the one who holds to him, the gopis singing on the Yamuna’s sand after he has vanished, and a poor Brahmin walking into Dwarka with a bundle of flattened rice under his arm. Take the steps one at a time; none of them is small.
Stop 1
The gentler road
Bhagavad Gita 12.1 to 8
The vision of the previous chapter still burning behind his eyes, Arjuna asks which devotee stands higher, the one who holds to a form or the one who reaches for the formless. Krishna answers like a practical man: the formless comes hard to anyone still wearing a body, and those who keep him in mind with an undivided love he lifts out of the ocean of birth and death himself, the way a boatman rows a passenger to the far shore. Then the plainest instruction in the chapter: give me your mind and your understanding together.
A moment to consider. Arjuna asks for a face he can speak to. What do you hold on to in your own daily practice?
Stop 2
A song into his absence
Bhagavata 10.31
Krishna vanishes from the center of the rasa, and the flute does not sound for a very long time. The gopis ask a kadamba tree, a doe and a madhavi vine which way he went, and none of them answers. They sit down on the Yamuna’s cool sand, shoulder against shoulder, and sing for his return. Nineteen times the melody rises, each time a little more broken.
A moment to consider. The gopis reproach him in one verse and worship him in the next. Which verse would you have sung?
Stop 3
A friend received at Dwarka
Bhagavata 10.80 to 81
Sudama walks to Dwarka on foot, four handfuls of flattened rice tied in a torn scrap of cloth under his arm, afraid the whole way that Krishna will simply fail to recognize him. The lord of the city sees him from across the hall, runs the length of it, holds him hard, washes his blistered feet and sprinkles that water over his own crowned head. The bundle stays hidden until Krishna pulls it out himself and eats a handful with relish. In the morning Sudama starts for home, having asked for nothing.
A moment to consider. Sudama hides the rice in shame and never asks. What in the welcome had already answered him?
A place to stop
Three scenes, three loves. A hand reaching into the water for the one who holds on; nineteen verses rising on the sand; a king kneeling to wash a beggar’s feet. Reread the one that stays, slowly, the way a letter from someone dear is reread, and let it open at its own pace.
Further reading with this question
- The Rasa Lila
On the full moon of autumn a single flute note crosses the dark water of the Yamuna and finds the women of Gokul at their evening work: milk boils over, a ladle sinks, an infant loses the breast. They go as they are. The whole night turns on one moment, when the thought “we above all others” rises in their hearts and in that instant Shyam vanishes. - The Song to the Bee
Krishna takes Uddhava’s hand in both of his own and sends him to Vraja with a message for the gopis, who have been living on one sentence, that he would come. Uddhava rides out expecting to teach simple herdswomen about the self that stands outside all coming and going. A bee arrives before his lesson does, and all the longing spills over onto it. - Narada Bhakti Sutra · The forms of love
Narada warns at the start that the thing he is about to describe cannot be bound in words; it is like a mute person tasting a sweet. Then he counts its marks as if touching a jewel in the dark, and sets the lesser devotions below it in order: the one who comes because something has broken, the one who comes wanting, the one who comes to understand. - Characters · Hanuman
The summit of Mount Mahendra, a hundred yojanas of sea below it, and a single vanara just risen to his feet after Jambavan reminds him whose son he is. He bears down on the rock until the mountain streams water. Valmiki opens the Sundara Kanda on him: the feat too hard for anyone else to attempt, he stood ready to accomplish alone, without any support at all.
Sources and the scope of this path
Each stop opens onto a passage inside a longer reading. Commentaries are not assumed to agree on any of them.
- Gita passages: Gita Press edition; comparison: 12.1, 12.5, 12.8.
- Bhagavata 10.31 and 10.80 to 81: Gita Press; comparison: BBT 10.31, 10.80, 10.81.
Passages and sequence checked against the editions above.