Chaturbhuj

Somewhere in the crowd that had gathered to hear Swami Chaturbhuj open the Bhagavata and sing its stories, one man was trying very hard not to be seen. His fist was still closed around another man's silver, snatched only minutes before in a dash through the lanes, and the man he had robbed was somewhere close behind, scanning faces. The safest place in the whole town turned out to be sitting cross-legged in the middle of a satsang, head bowed like every other listener, as though he too had come only for the story. He had not come for God. He had come to hide from a man he had wronged. But God, as the old tellers of this tale like to say, has a way of finding exactly the ones who are hiding from everything else.

What he heard that evening, with a stranger's coins sweating in his palm, was Chaturbhuj explaining a teaching from the Puranas that he could not afterward stop turning over in his mind: that whoever receives the Bhagavat-mantra from a true guru is, from that very hour, no longer the person he was before. Old debts of the body end there and a new life begins, the way a daughter changes her family name the day she marries, leaving her father's house for her husband's, and no one afterward blames the bride for debts owed by a household she no longer belongs to. Pitṛgotrā yathā kanyā, svāmigotreṇa sā tathā, the old teaching says: a daughter is of her father's line until marriage gives her the name of her husband's house. It was a strange, wonderful, dangerous idea for a man to hear with stolen coins still warm in his hand. He did not wait for the katha to end. He asked, right there, to be given that new name.

Word of a theft in town travels faster than word of any conversion, and it was not long before the man who had lost his silver stood before the local raja pointing a finger, and the crowd around Chaturbhuj's newest disciple went cold and still. The accused did not deny having run through those lanes; he only said that whatever had happened, had happened to somebody who no longer existed, and that he himself had stolen nothing in this life. Unconvinced by theology, the raja ordered the older test that courts of that world still trusted more than sworn words: a plough-iron was heated in the coals until it glowed red, and the accused was told that if he lied, his hands would say so. He picked it up. He held it. When he opened his palms, there was not a mark on them.

This should have ended the matter, and for a moment it seemed to. Now certain that an innocent devotee had been slandered, the raja turned his anger on the accuser instead and ordered him killed for false witness. It was as the guards led the terrified man away that the new disciple could not stay silent. He had been willing to be burned for his own truth; he could not watch another man die for it. Eyes streaming, he called out for them to stop, and said the plain thing aloud: I took the money. It was I.

The raja was baffled. You proved yourself true with fire, he said, so why turn around now and make yourself a liar and a thief again? The disciple answered with what Chaturbhuj had taught him: that his guru's grace had, that day in the crowd, made him genuinely someone new, so the fire had not lied either. What this new man had done was refuse to let another die in his place. He told the raja the whole of it, the running, the hiding in the satsang, the sudden hunger for a different name and a different life. The raja heard him out, freed the accuser, and by the time the telling was finished had already decided something for himself. He asked to be given the same new birth, and knelt to receive it. Tradition remembers that his heart too went soft and wet with love, the way the old Braj poets always describe a heart that has finally been reached.

This was the kind of man Chaturbhuj had already become under his own guru, Sri Hit Harivansh Mahaprabhu, who had founded in Vrindavan the Radhavallabh path, the branch of Krishna bhakti that places Radha, not Krishna, at the very summit of worship and gives itself wholly to the madhurya, the sweetness, of Her love for Him. Chaturbhuj signed his verses with the pen name Muralidhar, the flute-holder, and Nabhadas, writing of him in the Bhaktamal, says plainly that it was the strength of his guru's feet, charanbal, that carried him into Gondwana, the forest country along the Narmada that the Gond kings ruled in those centuries, and let him turn it, by his presence alone, into something as holy as a place of pilgrimage.

Gondwana was no easy field for a wandering bhakta. Nabhadas and the commentators who followed him remembered one village in particular where devotion, in any form a Vrindavan disciple would recognize, simply did not exist: the people there worshipped a fierce local goddess, remembered in the old commentary as Kali, with the darkest offering a community can make, a human life. Chaturbhuj did not arrive with arguments or condemnation. He went to her shrine and, close to the image, spoke the Bhagavat-mantra into her ear, the way one might confide a secret to someone one still respects. That night, the story goes, the goddess herself came to the villagers in their dreams and told them to run to this Swami at first light and become his own, or face ruin. At dawn the whole village came. He gave them mala, kanthi and tilak, and they gave him, in return, all the devotion a village had to give.

He drew that same wide circle around a man whom the society of that age had pushed to its furthest edge, someone others were careful never to come too near. Chaturbhuj put the sacred thread on him anyway, marked his forehead, hung tulsi beads at his throat, and taught him to speak Hari's praises and let go of everything that had been done to him and by him before. The old verse that records this offers no apology for it. It only asks, with something close to delight: after this, why should anyone be surprised that a devotee of Muralidhar can turn iron into gold? For a tradition sometimes accused of guarding its gates, this is Chaturbhuj's clearest sermon, and he preached it without a single argument, simply by laying his hands on a man no one else would touch.

He could be just as unguarded about his own belongings. One season his own field of wheat and gram, the very grain his household lived on, stood ripening, and a band of wandering sants came through and began helping themselves to the ears of grain without asking anyone. The field-watchmen shouted that this was Swami Chaturbhuj's field, hoping that would stop them. It did not; the sadhus laughed and said that made it better, since that meant it was their own too, and went right on gathering. When word reached him that strangers were stripping his field bare and calling it theirs, he did not come running with a grievance. He came running with sweets. Today I am fortunate, he told them, his face shining, the sants have called my field their own, they have accepted me as one of them. He fed them a full meal in his own house that evening, and the talk turned, as it always did around him, to bhakti, until everyone there had drunk their fill of that other harvest, the sweetness of satsang.

His verses, signed Muralidhar, were remembered as unusually free of flaw, and one couplet of his has survived the centuries: that the rasa, the divine sweetness, which even the Brahman of the scriptures cannot touch, lies far beyond ordinary knowing, and that it was Sri Harivansh who made it visible at all, the very root of life for anyone who lives to taste it. Chaturbhuj wore no wealth on his own forehead. What he wore there, by his own account, was the dust off the feet of other devotees, the only ornament he seems to have thought worth having. In satsang, his commentators say again and again, his heart stayed soaked through with love, the way cloth stays soaked long after the rain has passed.

It was Dhruvdas, another of Hit Harivansh's own disciples and one of the great voices of the Radhavallabh line, who left behind a doha in his honor: that at the mere sound of the name Harivansh, the creeper of bliss climbed higher in him, that his heart stayed wet with love, endlessly renewed by the play of the ever-young divine pair, Radha and Shyam. Chaturbhuj, Dhruvdas wrote, made the whole land pure and spread the Lord's fame wherever he walked, singing everywhere of that one, single flavor, ekaras, and wrestling devotion, almost bodily, into being among people who had never known it. It is not a bad description of a man who freed a thief by confessing a theft he had not committed, freed a goddess's whole village with a mantra whispered into stone, and freed himself, it seems, by loving the dust at other people's feet more than anything he owned.