Yashoda

The praise of Hari-mata, the commentator writes, is no ordinary matter. And then he sets down his pen. He does not attempt a full account. He says only that the story of Maharani Shri Yashoda Ji is exceedingly well known from the Shrimad Bhagavata Purana, from the Sukha-sagara, the Vraja-vilasa, and the Prema-sagara. What need is there, he asks, to write anything further? This deliberate silence is itself the highest form of tribute. For what sentence could hold the woman who held the Infinite in her lap?

Yashoda was the wife of Nanda, chief of the cowherds in Vraja. She was not Krishna's birth mother. That distinction belongs to Devaki, imprisoned in the dungeons of the tyrant Kamsa. On the night of Krishna's birth, by divine arrangement, the infant was carried across the flooding Yamuna to the village of Gokula, where Yashoda lay in the haze of her own delivery, unaware. She woke to find a dark-skinned boy beside her. She never questioned it. She simply loved him. And in that unquestioning love, the entire theology of devotion found its anchor.

The scriptures describe her mornings. She would rise before the household, light the hearth, and begin churning curd into butter. The rhythmic sound of the churning rod, the creak of the rope, the splash of cream: these were her prayers. She sang as she worked, and what she sang were the childhood exploits of her own son. She did not chant mantras. She did not recite hymns composed by sages. She sang about the boy who had stolen butter from the neighbor's house yesterday, about the child who had smeared yogurt on the faces of the calves, about the toddler who had crawled into the storehouse and broken every pot he could reach. Her songs were her scripture.

The butter-stealing is among the most celebrated of Krishna's childhood pastimes. The gopis of Vraja would come to Yashoda with their complaints: your son has broken into our homes, he has eaten all the butter, he has fed it to the monkeys, he has smeared it on the walls. Yashoda would scold him. She would threaten him with a switch. He would open his enormous dark eyes and deny everything, and she would melt. This happened not once but daily. The women of the village knew it would happen. They came to complain not because they expected justice but because the scene of Yashoda scolding Krishna, and Krishna denying his mischief with butter still glistening on his fingers, was itself a form of bliss they could not bear to miss.

One day, while Yashoda was churning butter and singing, little Krishna came and climbed into her lap, wanting to nurse. She set aside the churning rod and began to feed him. But the milk she had placed on the fire began to boil over. She put Krishna down and rushed to save it. He was furious. He picked up a stone and smashed the pot of freshly churned butter, then carried handfuls of it to the monkeys gathered outside. When Yashoda returned and saw the broken pot and the trail of butter leading to the courtyard, she understood at once. She found him perched on an overturned mortar, feeding butter to the monkeys from a hanging pot, his face a picture of guilty delight. She crept up behind him with a rope.

What followed is the Damodara Lila, one of the most theologically significant episodes in all of Vaishnavism. Yashoda attempted to tie Krishna to the wooden grinding mortar as punishment. She took a length of rope and wrapped it around his waist. It fell short by two finger-widths. She fetched another rope and joined it to the first. Still two fingers short. She brought rope after rope, joining them end to end, and every time the total length fell short by exactly the same measure. The women of the village brought their ropes. The entire supply of Gokula was gathered and knotted together, and still it was not enough. The commentators say those two fingers represent two things: the devotee's sincere effort, and the Lord's willing grace. Without both, the Infinite cannot be bound. Finally, when Krishna saw the drops of perspiration on his mother's forehead, when he saw her exhaustion and her unbreakable determination, he allowed himself to be tied. The Supreme Lord, whom the universe cannot contain, was held fast by a cowherd woman's rope. He is called Damodara for this reason: dama, the rope; udara, the belly. The one whose belly was bound by love.

Then there is the cosmic vision. One afternoon, the children of the village came running to Yashoda. Your son has been eating mud, they said. She called Krishna over and demanded that he open his mouth. He refused. She insisted. He opened his mouth, and what she saw there silenced every faculty of her being. She saw the entire universe. She saw the sun and the moon, the stars and the planets, the oceans and the mountains, the rivers and the forests, the wind and the fire. She saw all of space and time, all directions, all worlds within worlds, stretching into infinity. She saw herself standing in Vraja, looking into the mouth of her own child, and within that vision she saw herself again, and within that, again, endlessly. For one vertiginous moment, she knew what he was.

And then, by Krishna's own mercy, the vision dissolved. She forgot. She picked him up, kissed his forehead, wiped the dust from his face, and told him not to eat mud again. This forgetting is not failure. It is the highest grace. The Lord did not want a devotee who trembled before his cosmic form. He wanted a mother who would scold him and feed him and hold him against her chest while he slept. Yashoda's forgetting restored the intimacy that awe would have destroyed.

The Bhagavata Purana makes an astonishing declaration about this woman. It says that neither Brahma, the creator of the universe, nor Shiva, the destroyer, nor Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune who rests eternally on the Lord's own chest, ever received the kind of mercy that Yashoda received. The supreme beings of creation bow before this cowherd mother. Brahma can hymn the Lord with a thousand verses. Shiva can meditate upon him for a thousand ages. Lakshmi can serve him in his eternal abode. But none of them was ever permitted to tie him up with a rope. None of them ever wiped butter from his chin. None of them ever threatened him with a stick for stealing yogurt. That privilege belonged to Yashoda alone.

Her form of devotion is called vatsalya bhakti, the devotion of parental love. Among the many rasas, the many flavors of relationship with the Divine, vatsalya is considered one of the most exalted, because it is the most unself-conscious. A mother does not think of herself as a devotee. She does not calculate the spiritual merit of her actions. She does not perform austerities or observe fasts in order to accumulate grace. She simply loves. She feeds, bathes, dresses, scolds, forgives, and protects. Every one of these ordinary acts, when directed toward the Supreme, becomes worship of the highest order. Yashoda did not know she was worshipping. That is precisely what made her worship perfect.

Consider the paradox she embodies. The Lord of all creation, the being who holds the cosmos in his palm, chose to become helpless before her. He cried when she left the room. He sulked when she scolded him. He ran to her when thunder frightened him. He hid behind her skirt when the older boys teased him. Every one of these acts was a deliberate surrender by the Almighty to the power of maternal love. He did not play at being a child. He became one, fully, so that Yashoda's love would have a real and breathing object, not a theological abstraction.

The commentator Priyadas falls silent before this account, and his silence speaks more than commentary ever could. For how does one annotate the infinite? How does one add footnotes to the love between a mother and the child who happens to be God? The Bhaktamal, which celebrates hundreds of saints, sages, and devotees, finds in Yashoda a figure who makes all commentary redundant. Her story does not need elaboration. It needs only to be remembered. And in the remembering, something of that same tenderness stirs in the heart of the one who remembers.

She remains, across all the centuries, the supreme example of what devotion looks like when it is stripped of all pretension, all formality, all theological scaffolding. It looks like a woman churning butter at dawn, singing about her naughty son, ready to scold him and ready to forgive him, holding nothing back, asking for nothing in return. The Lord of the universe, who cannot be captured by the Vedas, who cannot be reached by the most rigorous meditation, who cannot be comprehended by the sharpest intellect, was captured, reached, and comprehended by this: a mother's love. And he was glad of it.