Uddhava (The Final Teaching)

The chariot crested the last low rise above Nandagram, and for one suspended heartbeat the cowherd women of Vraj forgot to breathe. There, standing in the car with the same long dark arms, the same lotus eyes, the same yellow cloth knotted at the same careless angle, was Krishna, come home at last. They ran toward him. Only when the stranger stepped down and the light caught his face at a slightly different angle did the truth arrive like cold water: this was not their Krishna. It was Uddhava, his kinsman and closest friend, sent from Mathura with a message, and so exact a likeness of the Lord in bearing and dress that generations of poets retelling the scene never tired of describing the confusion.

Uddhava was, by every account the tradition preserves, no ordinary courtier. He was Krishna's cousin, said to be born of Vasudeva's brother Devabhaga, and he had studied as a boy alongside Krishna and Balarama under the sage Brihaspati, so that whatever wisdom passed to the sons of Vasudeva passed also into him. The Rupkala commentary calls him "atisamipi," held nearest of all kin, and a "parama jnani mahabhagavata," a supreme knower of the scriptures and a great devotee at once, a rare combination in a world that usually forces a person to choose between the intellect's cold clarity and the heart's helpless surrender. In Mathura and later in Dwarka he served for decades as Krishna's minister and confidant, the one sent for when a decision was delicate, a message needed tact, or a grief needed a witness who would not flinch from it. It was this Uddhava, proud of his learning, certain that the wisdom of the Upanishads held every answer a suffering heart could need, whom Krishna chose to send to Vraj.

Krishna had left Vraj to kill the tyrant Kansa and had never returned. Nanda and Yashoda wept for a son who did not come back; the gopis, the cowherd girls who had bathed in the Yamuna's water and in Krishna's company as though there were no difference between the two, could no longer eat, sleep, or churn their milk without breaking into fresh weeping. Krishna could not go to them himself, so he sent Uddhava with what he believed was medicine enough: the teaching of Vedanta, that the self has no death and no departure, that Krishna the cowherd boy and Krishna the indwelling witness of every heart are one and the same reality, and that a soul who truly understands this has no cause to grieve any absence. It was, on its own terms, an impeccable teaching. Uddhava carried it into Vraj with total confidence.

He found that his confidence did not survive contact with Vraj. He found women who did not want an indwelling witness; they wanted the particular dark-eyed boy who had stolen their butter and their hearts in the same motion. When Uddhava spoke to them of the atman seated equally in all things, the gopis are remembered to have turned instead to a bee humming near the riverbank and mocked it as they had wished to mock him: go back, they told the bee, to your Krishna, and tell him he need not trouble himself with lessons for women who already know cleverness when they see it. The songs the tradition preserves around this moment are unsparing. One accuses the beloved of never once, on all his journeys, letting the memory of a woman burning in separation cross his mind. Another describes a woman so undone by longing that ordinary food sickens her, that neither shade nor sun brings any comfort, that she does not know the names of the disciplines Uddhava is offering, jnana, dhyana, yoga, and has no wish to learn them, and that she would sooner drink poison than go on living without a single word from her beloved. Against grief of that size, Uddhava's Vedanta had nowhere left to stand.

What happened next is the reason this episode is remembered as one of the tenderest passages in the whole Bhagavata Purana. Uddhava did not argue back. He watched, and listened, and something in him that had been built on cleverness quietly gave way. He began to see that these women, who could not recite a single verse of scripture and had broken every rule of propriety, family, and reputation to run into the forest the moment they heard Krishna's flute, had arrived by love alone at the very union with God that his own years of study had only ever described from the outside. He got down from wherever his pride had been keeping him and rolled in the dust of their feet, the tilak commentary says, calling himself blessed and calling his whole life's discipline fulfilled only in that moment. He is remembered afterward to have prayed, in words devotional literature never tires of quoting, that he wished to be born in Vrindavan not as a man of learning but as a humble shrub, creeper, or blade of grass, so that the dust from a gopi's foot might one day fall upon him.

When he returned to Mathura, he did not deliver a report. He delivered a hymn. He told Krishna of the glory of the Vraj women in terms so extravagant that the Rupkala commentary says no praise anyone could ever offer Uddhava for that single act would be enough: he had gone to teach and come home taught, and had the honesty to say so in front of his own Lord. Blessed, blessed is Uddhava, the commentary sings, who carried the greatness of the Braj women home in his own heart, for whoever's heart holds that greatness, it adds, carries the largest fortune a soul can hold. He accompanied Krishna afterward from Mathura to Dwarka and stayed at his side through the long, glittering decades that followed, the one friend a king could be plainly human with, the one voice in that court that never once flattered.

Decades later, Krishna knew that the story of the Yadu clan, and his own visible time on earth, was closing. A curse laid on the arrogant young princes of Dwarka by sages they had once mocked was working itself out; omens gathered over the city, and the family's slide into pride and drink pointed toward a single catastrophic day at Prabhasa on the western shore, when the Yadavas would destroy one another in a drunken brawl. Before any of it broke, Krishna drew Uddhava aside, away from the court, the way a person pulls one true friend apart from a crowd before a parting too large to announce to everyone at once.

What Krishna gave him there fills close to two dozen chapters of the Bhagavata Purana's eleventh book, and later readers have called it the Uddhava Gita, sometimes the Hamsa Gita, a teaching some hold to be even more complete than the Bhagavad Gita he had once spoken to Arjuna, because this time there was no war left to fight, nothing left to do but understand. Krishna told him the old story of a wandering avadhuta who had learned devotion and detachment from twenty-four teachers drawn from every corner of the world: the patient earth, which endures every insult; the honeybee, punished the one time it gathered more than it needed; the python, which waits without struggle for whatever food comes to it; a moth pulled helplessly toward the very flame that will consume it; and a woman named Pingala who, waiting all night for a lover who never arrived, found the peace she was chasing only once she gave up the waiting itself. Through these and more, Krishna laid out for Uddhava the whole architecture of a life free of grasping: the clear-eyed reckoning of matter and spirit that is sankhya, the paths of jnana and karma and bhakti, and, running beneath all of it like a current, the teaching that a heart wholly surrendered in bhakti has already reached what the seeker of knowledge is still laboring to reach.

Uddhava, hearing all this, understood exactly what it meant, and begged to be allowed to follow his Lord wherever this road was now leading, even into death, rather than be left behind in a world without him. Krishna refused him this, gently but completely. His work was not finished by understanding alone, Krishna told him; he was to carry the teaching forward, and more than that, he was to travel to Badarikashram, the hermitage of the ancient sages Nara and Narayana high in the Himalayan snow, and there fix his mind on nothing else, letting the senses that had once carried him so eagerly toward Vraj and toward Dwarka now turn inward, until nothing at all remained standing between himself and the Krishna who is everywhere.

Uddhava bowed at his Lord's feet one last time and left Dwarka before the city's own ruin overtook it, one of the very few figures of that court remembered as walking out alive and awake into what came after. Word of the Yadavas' destruction at Prabhasa, and soon after of Krishna's own quiet parting from his body in a lonely forest, reached him while he was still on the road. Somewhere along that journey tradition places a meeting with Vidura, the elder statesman of Hastinapura and Krishna's own uncle, who was returning from a long pilgrimage undertaken after the Kurukshetra war and had heard nothing yet of any of it. When Vidura asked after Krishna, Uddhava is remembered breaking down completely, his voice failing him, unable for a long while to say anything at all, until the two of them, an old minister and a grief-stricken seeker, sat together on the riverbank and Uddhava told him, in whatever order grief allowed, the whole story of Krishna's life from the cradle at Gokul to the parting words at Dwarka.

From there Uddhava went on alone to Badarikashram, wearing bark, eating whatever the forest offered, and settling at last into the discipline Krishna had asked of him. Tradition holds that he remained there in unbroken meditation for the rest of his days and, through that steady turning inward, reached the same abode, Vaikuntha, that his Lord had shown him was never, in truth, anywhere other than within. What the Bhaktamal remembers him for is not a miracle or a conquest but something quieter, and in its own way harder: a brilliant mind that met a love greater than itself and had the humility to bow rather than argue. He had gone to Vraj to teach the cowherd women wisdom, and he came back having finally learned what all his wisdom, until that day, had never once taught him.