Gokulnath

A wealthy man once came to the house of Gusainji Gokulnathji carrying, by one telling, lakhs of rupees, more gold than most of Gokul's households would see in a generation, and set it down before him with a single request: make me your disciple. Gokulnathji did not reach for the coins. He asked instead a question that must have startled the man more than any refusal could have: "Tell me, is there any single thing in this world to which you are bound by real love?" The man searched himself honestly and answered that there was none. Nothing he owned, nothing he had ever wanted, held him the way love holds a person. Gokulnathji sent him away with his fortune intact and his petition denied, and the reason he gave has outlived the money by four centuries: "If there is not even the seed of prem in you, I cannot make you a disciple. Had you loved even one thing in this world, that love could have been turned, gently, toward the feet of Shri Shobhadham, the Abode of Beauty himself. But there is nothing here to turn."

Not far from that house, at around the same hour perhaps, a man named Kanha was finishing the day's lowest labor, gathering up the sweepings and refuse from around the temple grounds, work the world had left to a man of his station and no one else. He owned nothing that could fill even one of the rich visitor's money bags. And yet Kanha had exactly what the rich man lacked. Each day, when his work was done, he would find the angle in the temple wall from which the sanctum's open doorway let him glimpse, just for a moment, the child form of Shrinathji at play, and at that glimpse he dissolved. Those who saw him said he wept without shame and stood rooted to the ground, a laborer transfigured by love into something closer to what a soul is actually for.

It happened that Gokulnathji, guarding the reverence due to the Lord's own child-form so that it would not be exposed to every careless glance from the street, had a new wall raised around that stretch of the temple. It was not built against Kanha; it was built for the deity. But it fell on Kanha like a door slammed shut on the one window of his life. With his single channel to the Lord bricked over, he grew wild with longing, refusing food, wandering distracted, until for three nights running Shrinathji himself came to him in dream and gave him a plain instruction: go and tell Gokulnath to bring that wall down. Kanha could not do it. He felt himself too small, too far beneath the master of Gokul's fourth house, to imagine walking up and making such a demand of him. So he did what frightened, faithful people often do: he told someone else, in a whisper, and let the truth travel on its own.

It reached Gokulnathji anyway. He sent for Kanha and asked him plainly what troubled him, and Kanha, no longer able to hide it, told him everything: the darshan, the wall, the three nights, the command he had been too humble to deliver himself. Gokulnathji did not rebuke him for the delay or question the dream's authority. He was, by every account, undone by it. He gathered the sweeper to his chest as a man of grace instantly recognized as such, and ordered the new wall torn down that same day, because a vision granted three nights running was proof enough for him, more binding than any wall he himself had raised. The phrase remembered from that day still circulates in Pushtimarg homes: victory to the receptivity of prem, victory to the lovers. It is, in miniature, the whole of what this man spent his ninety years teaching.

Gokulnathji was born in Gokul on the seventh day of the bright half of the month of Margashirsha in Vikram Samvat 1608, corresponding to December of 1551, the fourth of the seven sons of Vitthalnath, who was himself the son and successor of Vallabhacharya, the Mahaprabhu who had first opened the Pushti Marg, the path of grace, to Braj. When Vitthalnath came at last to divide his devotional inheritance among his sons, each received one image of Krishna and one household, or gruh, to build around it. Gokulnathji's portion was a four-armed golden Krishna that, by a coincidence too fitting to be only coincidence, already carried his own name, Gokulnathji, an image that had belonged, before it ever came into this family's keeping, to the household of Vallabhacharya's own wife. Around that image he raised the fourth of Gokul's seven great havelis, and there, a boy not yet grown, he began the seva that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

He did not withdraw from the world to do it. At sixteen he married a woman named Parvati, and the household they built together held three sons, Gopal, Vitthalrai, and Vrajratna, among other children. This, too, was doctrine as much as biography: the Pushti Marg that his grandfather had founded insisted that a householder's love, rightly offered, could carry a soul further than any renunciate's discipline, and Gokulnathji lived that claim rather than merely teaching it. His own disciples, tradition says, sometimes called him simply Vallabha, his grandfather's name, as if the founder's original fire had not merely passed down through a line but returned whole in this one grandson.

But it is as a teller of stories, not as a builder of walls or a father of sons, that Gokulnathji shaped the sampradaya most permanently. In satsang after satsang he wove into his teaching the remembered lives of the devotees who had gathered around his grandfather and, later, around his own father: eighty-four who had taken shelter with Vallabhacharya, and two hundred fifty-two more who had come to Vitthalnath. He seems to have told these as living illustration rather than formal doctrine, the way a teacher reaches for a story instead of an abstraction, and it fell to a younger kinsman in the line, Harirai, to gather what he had said, set it down in Braj Bhasha prose, and wrap each account in a commentary called the Bhavprakash, the illumination of its inner feeling. Together they became the Chaurasi Vaishnavan ki Varta and the Do Sau Bavan Vaishnavan ki Varta, and no telling of that literature's origin gives Harirai the story without also giving Gokulnathji the voice that first spoke it. What survives in those pages is a startlingly wide company: kings and beggars, Muslims and reformed wrongdoers, women running households no one else noticed, wanderers, drawn from Kabul in the north to the far Tamil country in the south, united by nothing but the one thing Gokulnathji had told the rich man he could not fake and had recognized instantly in a man with a broom. He was not inventing a theology when he wept over Kanha's story. He was watching, in his own courtyard, the very thing he had spent his life narrating about other people's courtyards.

Grief visited that fourth house too. Ghanshyam, the youngest of the seven brothers, kept in his own haveli an image called Madanmohanji, and one day it disappeared from its shrine without a trace. Gokulnathji's response was immediate and severe: whoever had taken his brother's Krishna, he vowed, would see their own line end with them. Ghanshyam himself never recovered from the loss; he gave up food in his sorrow and, tradition holds, died of that grief long before the image was ever found. It was only years afterward that Madanmohanji surfaced again, not in a thief's hands but in the quiet keeping of an old woman, one of the flower-women who strung garlands for Shrinathji's own daily worship, who had sheltered the small image in secret and gone on serving it with her own devotion the whole time it was believed stolen. Even here, in a story that began as theft and vengeance, the deeper current running underneath was the same one that had moved Kanha: love finding its way to hidden, unlikely custodians while everyone with more standing looked elsewhere.

His resolve was tested once more, publicly, late in his life. A rival ascetic named Chidrup, caught having diverted funds the emperor Jahangir had meant for the poor and for Brahmins, is remembered as having turned the emperor's anger away from himself by persuading him instead to strip Vaishnavas of their tulsi malas and their tilaks, the small rosary and the mark of clay on the forehead that carried no material value at all and, for a man like Gokulnathji, carried everything. Old by then, he set out on the long journey toward the emperor's camp regardless, prepared, those who preserved the story insist, to give up his home, his wealth, and his life itself over an ornament no bigger than a few beads and a smear of sandal paste. Word of that willingness is said to have reached Jahangir before Gokulnathji himself did. However the politics of the imperial court actually played out, the sampradaya's own memory of it holds that the emperor's heart changed, that Chidrup's deception came to light, and that the order was withdrawn, restoring to every Vaishnava in the empire the small sacred marks Gokulnathji had been ready to die rather than see stripped from anyone.

He lived to be about eighty-nine, dying in Gokul in early 1641 after more than seven decades spent almost entirely at the seva of the image that shared his name. Tradition remembers that dozens of his own disciples, as many as seventy-eight by one count, could not survive the news of his death and followed him within days; whether that number is meant literally or is simply the only language grief had for what he had been to them, it points at the same fact, that he had stopped being merely their teacher and had become, for many of them, the visible edge of what they loved. After him his followers divided into two streams, one that continued in the pattern of his brothers' houses, and another, called the Bharuchis, who came to hold even his personal belongings as sacred, venerating relics of the man himself alongside the image he had served, as though the Pushti Marg's own logic had arrived, in him, at its most literal conclusion: that a human being wholly given over to prem becomes, himself, a place where it can be found.

Two visitors came to that same threshold in Gokul: one carrying more wealth than the temple's own treasury, the other carrying nothing but a broom and a habit of looking up at the right moment. Only one of them got in. Nabhadas, writing of him within a generation, could spare only a single terse verse for a life this large, but a life does not need many verses if the story itself keeps being told, that the door does not open to what you bring, only to what you already love, however little that turns out to be. Anyone reading this at the end of a long day, with nothing much to offer and no lakhs of rupees to place at any threshold, is standing exactly where Kanha stood. The wall, whatever it is this week, does not have the last word. It never did.