Shrutideva

The chariot has barely stopped at the crooked lane where the poor houses of Mithila lean into one another when a thin, ink-stained man comes running out of the humblest of them, his upper cloth slipping from his shoulder, both arms thrown up over his head, dancing before he has even finished falling at the visitor's feet. This is Shrutideva, called Shrutadeva in the Sanskrit of the Purana his story comes from, a name that means something like "the deva of the Shruti," the god-touched keeper of the sacred hearing. He has spent his whole life reciting what other men study for advancement, and he owns almost nothing. When he understood, in the space of one breath, that the guest stepping down onto his swept dirt floor was Krishna himself, and not a dream of Krishna, he forgot every rule of dignified brahminical welcome he had ever learned and simply moved his body the way joy moves a body that has stopped pretending to be composed.

The manuscript record of this episode that has come down through Nabhadas and the later Hindi retellings is worn thin in places, a name here, a fragment there, more gap than sentence. But the great Purana that Nabhadas expected his readers to already carry in their hearts, the Bhagavata, tells the story whole, and it is one of the most quietly radical stories in the entire literature of bhakti. Shrutideva lived in the kingdom of Videha, in Mithila, in the same town, by the way the old tellers frame it, as its king, Bahulashva. The two men could not have been less alike. Bahulashva ruled a kingdom, a treasury, an army, a lineage descending from the ancient Janakas. Shrutideva ruled nothing. He earned his bread the way the tradition describes it as ajagara-vritti, the way of the python, an image the old teachers loved because a python does not hunt, does not stalk, does not plan; it lies still and takes only what comes to it without any exertion of its own, and is satisfied. Shrutideva lived like that. Whatever fell to him through the ordinary courtesies owed a Vedic reciter, he accepted, no more and no less, and the rest of his waking hours he gave entirely to Krishna, turning the Shruti over and over in his mind like a man turning a lamp toward every corner of a dark room.

What the two men shared, and the only thing the story cares about, was love. Bahulashva loved Krishna with the whole ceremonial weight of a king who has the means to lavish; Shrutideva loved him with the whole undivided attention of a man who has nothing else. And it is said that in far-off Dwaraka, Krishna, moved by the devotion of both, resolved to go to them. He set out from his capital with a company of great sages riding along in his train: Narada was there, and Vyasa who compiled the Vedas, and Parashurama, and Atri, and elders such as Kanva and Brihaspati and Chyavana and others whose names the old redactors list with evident pride, because a Purana likes nothing better than a procession of its own luminaries. They crossed one kingdom after another on the way to Mithila, and wherever the procession passed, the local people came out with whatever gifts they had, so that, the storyteller says, watching that column of sages surrounding the Lord was like watching the sun arrive with all its planets in attendance.

When they reached Mithila, both Bahulashva and Shrutideva ran out to meet the party and fell at Krishna's feet, and each begged him, in the same breath almost, to be his guest that day. And here the story does something no ordinary story does: rather than choose between the king's palace and the priest's hut, Krishna doubled himself. He walked, whole and entire, not divided into some 'part' of himself, into Bahulashva's court, and at the very same moment he walked, whole and entire, into Shrutideva's yard, and neither host ever suspected that the same Lord who sat at his table was also, in that same hour, sitting at the other's. It is a strange, almost playful miracle, and yet underneath the play is the entire theology of Vaishnava bhakti in one image: Krishna is not rationed. He is not spent more fully in one place because that place can afford more of him. He gives himself completely wherever he is wanted completely.

Inside Shrutideva's house there was no throne to offer, so he laid out a mattress, then failing that a wooden plank, then failing that a mat of woven straw, whatever could be found, and this was where the Lord of Dwaraka sat down among the assembled sages. Shrutideva and his wife washed the feet of every guest with their own hands, and then, because that water had touched the feet of Krishna and of Narada and Vyasa and the rest, they carried it through their own household and sprinkled it over the heads of their family, treating dishwater from an unplanned meal as the most precious substance in the house, which by their reckoning it now was. For offerings there were only the things that grow near a poor house and cost nothing: some fruit picked nearby, a little incense, scented clay, sprigs of tulsi, blades of kusha grass, a few lotus flowers, and a plain meal of rice and dal that Shrutideva's wife had put together from what was in the house that morning. The old telling insists, with something like relief, that Krishna and the sages ate all of it gladly, not despite its plainness but because of the love with which it had been carried to them.

Then Shrutideva, having served his guest, sat and spoke, and what he said has been preserved as one of the tenderest prayers a poor man ever addressed to God. He did not praise Krishna's power or his royal glory, both of which he could see plainly enough sitting in his own doorway. He spoke instead of the Krishna nobody sees: the Paramatma who has been quietly present inside every living being since the beginning of creation, who enters the world of embodied souls almost as if lying down to sleep inside them, watching over their long, confused dream of separateness without waking them by force. He said that this hidden nearness is veiled from the careless by yogamaya, the way a bank of cloud can hide the sun from someone standing directly beneath it, and that only through the patient practices of remembering, hearing his stories, singing his praises, holding his image in the mind, does that cloud ever thin enough to let a person feel what has been in the room with him all along. He said, in effect, that a soul with no bhakti in it feels the nearness of God only as death, the cruelest and most sudden of all approaches, while a soul that loves feels the same nearness every single day as a friend who never actually left.

Krishna listened to the whole of it, and then answered in a way that has startled devotees ever since: he said that seeing sages such as these purifies a person instantly, and that he treasured the worship of a devotee like Shrutideva even above worship offered directly to his own four-armed form as Narayana. To a man with nothing, sitting on a plank, eating dal off a chipped plate, God said, more or less, that this was worth more to him than temples.

Across the town, at the very same hour, Bahulashva was living an entirely different scene with the very same guest. He called for fine seats and cushions, had his household wash Krishna's feet in the manner due a king's honored visitor, brought out garlands, sandal paste, incense, new cloth, ornaments, lamps, and gifts of cattle, and he too, in his own words, poured out his heart in praise. The old storytellers do not treat this as competition. That is the entire point of telling the two receptions side by side: one home glittering, one home bare, and the same undivided Krishna fully present and fully delighted in both, because what moved him was never the furniture.

A further thread of this same friendship survives in another old text, the Skanda Purana's telling of the glories of the month of Vaishakha, where Shrutideva appears again, this time as the one instructing king Bahulashva, explaining to him the power of the Vaishakha vow to release even a suffering spirit from its torment. The details of that story, including exactly whose release was at stake, are told with less certainty across the versions that have survived, and it would be dishonest to press them into a tidy family history; what can be said plainly is that more than one old text remembers this pairing of the humble Vedic reciter and the king of Mithila as teacher and student as well as fellow devotees, two men bound by more than a single afternoon with a visiting Lord.

When the visit at last ended, Krishna returned to his own capital, leaving behind, the storyteller says, a king and a priest both showered with instruction beyond anything money or learning could have purchased, and both, in the end, carried to the same final home. Bhaktamal remembers Shrutideva not because he built anything, ruled anything, or wrote anything that survives in his own name, but because he shows, as plainly as any story in the whole garland of saints, what the economics of bhakti actually are. A man with a plank instead of a throne, dal instead of a feast, and nothing to give but his whole undivided attention, danced when God arrived at his door, and God, by every old account, was every bit as pleased to be there as he was in the palace down the road. It is worth sitting with that a moment before rising from one's own prayer: love was the entire currency, and Shrutideva, of everyone in the story, was somehow the richest man in Mithila that day.