Mathuradas

In the village of Tijara, in the years when the Bhaktamal's compiler Nabhadas was gathering up the memory of every soul he could find who had burned for God, a strange spectacle drew crowds from the surrounding country. A wandering figure dressed in the ochre and the tilak of a Vaishnava had set himself up with a small throne, and on that throne sat a Shaligram, the smooth black river-stone that devotees the wide length of the Krishna tradition worship as Vishnu himself, needing no image, no chisel, no human hand to make it holy. But this Shaligram did something no stone should do. It rocked. It turned on its little seat as though rapt in its own ecstasy, swaying left and right while the man who had brought it sat back with folded hands and let the wonder speak for him. People came in from the fields and the lanes to see it, householders of substance and ordinary folk together, and what began as astonishment hardened quickly into reverence. Here, surely, was a siddha, a realized soul, and the stone was dancing for love of him.

Mathuradasji did not go. He was, by the account that survives of him, not a man the village would have pointed to first if a stranger asked who among them had God in his fist. He kept one visible discipline more than any other: each day he walked to the temple and carried back on his own head the kalash, the water vessel used in the puja of Krishna, the child of Nanda whom the old poets call Nandanandan. It was such a plain, unspectacular labor that Nabhadas says the whole world knew him for it, not because it was remarkable to look at, but because he had done it every single day without fail, without an audience, and without ever once treating it as beneath him. Where the conjurer in the square offered a miracle, Mathuradasji offered only this: a pot of water on his head, morning after morning, year after year.

Those who had known the elders of the tradition said they saw in him what they had seen in the old acharyas before him: sadachar, an unbroken decency of conduct; santosh, a contentment that did not go hunting for more than what came; suhridayata, a warmth of heart that made him easy to sit beside; and a sheel, a gentleness, that softened everything he said. But it was his grasp of the tattva, the actual substance of devotion, that people found hardest to describe. It was said that knowledge sat in him the way a lamp sits in a dark room, so that wherever he turned it, the shape of things became clear at once. He had not accumulated this from cleverness. He had inherited it from love, specifically his love for his guru, a teacher named Vardhaman, whose every word Mathuradasji had gathered up in his heart in youth and refused, for the rest of his life, to set back down. And it was said of him, in the verse that Nabhadas himself composed, that even in doing kirtan with his own hands, even in dream, no scheme, no performance, no shred of pretense ever took root in him. Whatever counterfeit devotion looked like elsewhere in the world, it had no home in this man.

So when his own disciples came running to tell him about the dancing stone, flushed with the same excitement as everyone else, urging him to come and see this evident master of some great power, he did not share their hurry. He knew, in the way that a lamp knows a shadow for what it is, exactly what kind of thing was happening in the square. And his answer was not scorn. It was tenderness for the very man who was deceiving the village. If I go there, he told them, his heart will be wounded by it. I will not go. He would rather let a fraud continue unchallenged than risk breaking a stranger's spirit by exposing him.

But the disciples would not let it rest. They fell at his feet, the old gesture of a plea that cannot be refused, and pressed him until he relented. He went, but he went the only way he knew how to go anywhere, with the name of God turning over silently inside him, kirtan carried in the body rather than performed for the crowd. He came to the edge of the gathering and stood there quietly, one more face in a crowd that did not know what it was looking at.

And the stone stopped. Whatever thread the conjurer had been working, whatever hidden motion had made the Shaligram sway on its throne, it would not answer him anymore. He strained at it, and it sat as stones are supposed to sit, immovable, indifferent, exposing nothing and revealing nothing except that the performance had run out of whatever had been powering it. The man began to sweat under the weight of all those watching eyes that had, only minutes before, been fixed on him with devotion. He looked out at the crowd and understood, correctly, that the dead spot in his power had walked in and was standing a few feet away.

Fear curdled fast into something uglier. He decided that the quiet man who had ruined his display had to be destroyed, and he reached for the darkest tool in his kit, a mūṭh, the term the old texts use for a curse-missile, a spoken working of black magic aimed to kill at a distance. He muttered the binding mantra over it and let it fly at Mathuradasji, certain that this, at least, would not fail him the way the stone had.

It never reached him. Whatever tej, whatever fire of genuine bhakti burned around Mathuradasji, the curse could not cross it. It turned back in the air, by every telling of this story, and struck the very hand that had thrown it. The conjurer went down in front of the entire crowd he had spent days impressing, as still and lifeless as the stone he had been faking a miracle out of only moments earlier.

What happened next is the part of the story the tradition seems to care about most. Mathuradasji did not stand over him. He did not let the crowd's justice run its course, or savor the reversal, or use the moment to establish his own reputation as the one true power in the village. He went to the fallen man, and with the same plainness with which he carried water to the temple every morning, he revived him. Then, once the man could hear him, he did not scold him. He explained. He showed him, patiently, what the road of real prem looks like, the love that does not need a rigged throne or a frightened crowd to sustain it, the love that had let Mathuradasji himself carry a water pot on his head for years without anyone calling it a wonder.

The conjurer gave up his mantras that day. He became, by every account of this story that has come down through the tradition, a disciple of the very man he had tried to kill, and turned to real kirtan, real remembrance of the divine name, and to worshipping the Shaligram honestly, as an act of love rather than a trick to be worked upon a crowd. The stone that had once danced on command for an audience's applause was, from then on, simply worshipped in silence, which is what a Shaligram was always meant to receive.

It would be dishonest to claim to know much more about Mathuradasji than this. No firm dates survive for his birth or death, and beyond his residence in Tijara, most likely the same town that still stands today northeast of Alwar, and his devotion to his guru Vardhaman, the record that has reached us is essentially this one episode, remembered and re-remembered by devotees long after the man himself was gone. But that may be exactly why Nabhadas thought him worth including among the immortal bhaktas of the Bhaktamal in the first place. He was not a miracle-worker. He was the one steady point in a village that had, for a little while, mistaken spectacle for God. His whole teaching is contained in the difference between a stone that is made to dance for a crowd and a stone that is simply loved, and in the fact that when the moment came to humiliate a man who had tried to murder him, he chose instead to kneel down and lift him back onto his feet.