Gusai Gokulnath

The wall went up in the space of a week or two, plastered white and about shoulder height, running the length of the open ground in front of Govardhannath's temple, and for a while Kanha did not understand that it had been built, in part, to keep him out. For years he had come at first light, before the town had properly stirred, and stood at the same patch of packed earth to look on the dark stone face of the god that Vraj called Giriraj, the very body of the Govardhan hill, worshipped in the sampradaya as Shrinathji. He owned nothing worth mentioning and held no place of honor anywhere in the town's reckoning; the one thing in his life that was entirely his was that daily meeting of his eyes with the eyes of the god. Now there was a wall between them, and all he could see over it was a strip of temple roof against the sky.

The wall was not raised out of malice, and the man who ordered it built was not a cruel man. Gusai Gokulnathji, the fourth of Vitthalnath's seven sons and grandson of Vallabhacharya who had founded the Pushtimarg a generation before, wanted only to guard something: a hush, a sense of formality, the feeling that the ground directly before the throne of the Lord of the mountain was not a public square where any passerby might loiter and stare. Every account of him that survives describes a grave, unhurried, deep-natured man, calm as an ocean and sparing with words, whose bearing was said to carry something of the very stillness and grandeur of the hill his family served. Closing off the crowd's idle path in front of the temple seemed to him simple good order. He could not have known that in doing so he had also closed off one particular pair of eyes that the god himself had no wish to lose.

That night Shrinathji came to Kanha in a dream. The image on the altar spoke to him the way a hurt person speaks, plainly and without ornament: this new wall that has risen up as a screen wounds me, it said, go and tell Gokulnathji to have it pulled down at once, so that I may again look out on all my house and hold everyone in view. Kanha woke frightened and told no one. In the morning his courage failed him; he imagined the beating a man of his standing might earn for walking into a goswami's presence uninvited and announcing that the deity had sent him with instructions. He said nothing, and that night the dream came again, word for word, and again the night after that. By the third morning he understood that refusing was no longer a choice he was free to make.

He went to the haveli and asked the men at the door to carry a message inside for him. They laughed in his face. You, they said, you have something to say to him? But something in his insistence must have carried weight, because eventually someone did pass the word in, and Gokulnathji, hearing that a stranger of no consequence was asking to speak with him alone, sent the room clear and had Kanha brought before him. Kanha told him everything: the wall, the three nights, the words the god had used. Gokulnathji's face did not close in suspicion or embarrassment at having a laborer correct his own arrangement of the temple grounds. It opened instead into plain joy. If Shyamsundar himself has spoken my name and given the order, he said, then there is no question of whether I will do it, it will be done. Before the day was over the wall lay in rubble, and Kanha, who had done nothing to earn it and asked for nothing in return, was fed and clothed and honored in the goswami's own house as though he were the guest of highest rank that year.

It is worth sitting with what actually happened in that story, because it is easy to let it pass as a pleasant miracle and miss its edge. A wall built by a revered master of the Pushtimarg, for reasons that seemed sound to him, was undone not by argument or protest but by the direct word of God, delivered through the one man in town least likely to be granted an audience with anyone. And the master's greatness shows less in the building of the wall than in the speed with which he tore it down once he heard, from an unlikely mouth, what the Lord actually wanted. Rank, in that room, decided nothing. Love, prem, was the only currency that mattered, and it had been carried across town that morning inside a frightened man nobody thought worth listening to.

A companion story about Gokulnathji makes the same point from the opposite direction. A wealthy man came to him once wanting diksha, initiation into the Pushtimarg path, and he brought with him an offer of vast riches, enough, by the account that survives, to buy a fortune many times over. Gokulnathji was not impressed by the sum. He asked the man a single question: is there anything in this world, or any being, that you love so much that its absence would leave you restless in body and mind? The man answered honestly that no, there was nothing; he held no such attachment to anyone or anything. Gokulnathji sent him away. We will not make you a disciple, he told him, go and find yourself another guru elsewhere, because on this path there is only one subject of conversation, and that subject is prem. If we accept you and set you to work turning your back on the world, where is the love in your heart from which the tree of bhakti is meant to grow? The man left grieving, and the text that remembers him asks, not unkindly, how a heart that is empty to begin with is ever supposed to take on color. Read beside the story of Kanha, the lesson doubles: a fortune with no love behind it bought a rich man nothing, while a dream with no proof behind it moved a great goswami to instant obedience.

The man capable of holding both of those responses in one lifetime, refusing wealth and honoring a laborer's dream on the same terms, was born, by the sampradaya's own reckoning, on the seventh day of the bright half of the month of Margashirsha in Vikram Samvat 1608, corresponding to the middle of December in 1551. He was the fourth among Vitthalnath's seven sons, each of whom would in time be given charge of one of the seven principal households, the havelis, into which the young Pushtimarg organized itself, and within that family he came to be affectionately called by his grandfather's own name, Vallabha, a name that stayed attached to him for the rest of his life. The community's own memory of his early years adds a detail rarely claimed for anyone else in the lineage: that for some five years in his youth he was not merely a devoted disciple but was said to carry within him a direct outpouring of the Lord's own presence, an inward blaze the tradition calls avesha, before settling into the long, steady, undramatic decades of service that would define the rest of his life.

He married a woman named Parvati at sixteen and raised a family, sons and daughters, inside the Gokul haveli that became the seat of his branch of the sampradaya, the fourth of the seven houses. This matters more than it might first appear. The Pushtimarg has never asked its teachers to abandon home and hearth in order to reach God; grace, pushti, was understood to come as an unearned gift regardless of a person's outward circumstances, and a householder absorbed in seva, in the daily service of the deity's image, was held to stand on exactly the same ground as any renunciate. Gokulnathji lived that teaching rather than merely repeating it, running a household and raising children while devoting his inner life so completely to Govardhannath that visitors and disciples described him as a man whose every ordinary act seemed to circle back to that single center.

His larger legacy to the tradition was less a matter of miracles than of memory. He is remembered as the person chiefly responsible for gathering and setting down, in the everyday Braj Bhasha of the region rather than in scholarly Sanskrit, the stories of the men and women who had walked the Pushtimarg's path before him: the Chaurasi Vaishnavan ki Varta, telling the lives of eighty-four devotees close to Vallabhacharya, and the Do Sau Bavan Vaishnavan ki Varta, telling the lives of two hundred and fifty-two devotees close to his father Vitthalnath. These accounts, later revised and expanded by his grand-nephew Hariray, became some of the earliest sustained prose written in Braj Bhasha and remain, to this day, the most widely read narrative literature the sampradaya possesses, stories of washermen and queens, poets and cowherds, all judged by the same single measure of love rather than by birth or learning. He is also credited with fixing the memory of the Baithaks, the scattered seats across the length of India, from Dwarka to Puri, from the Himalaya to the southern coast, where Vallabhacharya had once sat and taught, turning those bare locations into a living map of pilgrimage that devotees still walk. His own spoken teachings, meanwhile, were collected by a disciple named Kalyan Bhatt into a short work still studied under the name of the Chaubis Vachanamrut, the twenty-four nectar-sayings.

The most demanding test of his life came late, when he was already close to seventy. Around 1617, the Mughal emperor Jahangir, reportedly at the urging of an ascetic remembered in Vaishnava memory as Chidrup who had gained the emperor's ear, issued an order forbidding Vaishnavas from wearing the tulsi-wood mala at the neck or marking the tilak on the forehead, the two visible signs of their devotion. Many of the faithful refused outright, prepared to risk the emperor's anger rather than remove marks they held as dear as life itself. Gokulnathji made the decision to go and answer for his community in person. From Gokul he traveled roughly fifteen hundred kilometers to Kashmir, where the emperor's court then was, a journey across mountain country that took ninety-one days and that he undertook as an old man rather than send anyone else in his place. The story that devotees told afterward, and still tell, is that Jahangir was struck on his travels by a stomach ailment no physician at court could touch, and that he was finally told he would not recover until he had sought the forgiveness of a man his court had wronged; weighing the greed he had seen in the ascetic who prompted the ban against the willingness of this one goswami to give up his home, his wealth, and even his life for his people's right to worship, the emperor sent word asking Gokulnathji's pardon. Gokulnathji blessed him, the emperor's health returned, and the order was withdrawn, restoring to Vaishnavas across the land the mala and tilak they had nearly lost.

He lived to be about eighty-nine years old, passing from the world, by tradition, in Vikram Samvat 1697, corresponding to the early months of 1641, though other accountings place the year a little earlier or later. So deep was the devotion he drew from those closest to him that seventy-eight of his own disciples are remembered to have died within days of hearing that he was gone, unable, it was said, to go on living once the one they had loved most had left. His haveli still stands in Gokul today, one of the seven that mark out the branches of Vitthalnath's family, and the varta stories he set down are still read aloud in Pushtimarg households centuries later, carrying forward the same lesson his own life kept demonstrating: that before the god of Govardhan hill, a fortune without love is worth nothing, and a dream carried by the humblest messenger in town is worth tearing down a wall for.