Canto Ten - Chapter 14

Brahmā said: O Lord worthy of all praise, I bow to You. Your body resembles a raincloud, Your garment flashes like lightning, and Your face shines beneath earrings of guñjā berries and a peacock feather. Adorned with a forest garland and marked by the morsel of food, herding stick, horn and flute You carry, Your feet are tender, and You have appeared as the son of a cowherd.

O Lord, even the greatness of this form, which You have mercifully revealed to me by Your own free will and which is not made of material elements, lies beyond the power of my mind to comprehend. How much less, then, could I understand the bliss of Your very Self?

Those who abandon the effort to conquer You through speculative knowledge, bow down, and live by hearing accounts of You spoken by saints, remaining in their own station while honoring those accounts with body, speech and mind, can conquer You, O unconquerable Lord, even though no one in the three worlds can otherwise conquer You.

O all-pervading Lord, those who abandon devotion, the path of true welfare, and labor only to attain bare knowledge are left with nothing but their trouble, just as those who beat empty husks gain no grain.

In the past, O boundless Lord, many yogīs offered all their endeavors to You and, awakened by devotion arising from hearing Your narrations, easily attained Your supreme abode, O Acyuta, through the very results of their ordinary duties.

Even so, O boundless Lord, only those whose hearts are pure may realize something of the greatness of Your qualities through direct, changeless experience of the formless spiritual reality, in which the Self is known by no other means. It cannot be known otherwise.

Who could measure even the qualities You display when You descend for the welfare of this world? One might in time count the particles of earth, the snowflakes in the sky or the rays of the stars, but not Your qualities.

One who lives while earnestly awaiting Your mercy, enduring the results of his own past deeds and offering You reverence with heart, words and body, becomes the rightful heir to liberation.

O Lord, infinite and primeval Supreme Self, behold my uncivilized conduct! Though You are the master of māyā, I spread my own illusion over You and tried to test Your majesty. What am I before You? I am like a spark before a blazing fire.

Therefore, O Acyuta, please forgive me. Born of the mode of passion, I did not understand You and imagined myself a lord independent of You. My eyes were blinded by the dense darkness of pride in being unborn. Please show me compassion, for You are my master.

What am I? Merely a seven-span body within a potlike universe enclosed by the layers of primordial matter, false ego, ether, air, fire, water and earth. And what is Your greatness? Countless universes like this pass through the pores of Your body like particles of dust moving through the openings of a window.

Does a child in the womb offend his mother by kicking his feet? O Adhokṣaja, what within or beyond the categories of existence and nonexistence does not lie within Your boundless womb?

The Vedic statement that I, the unborn Brahmā, emerged from the lotus stem growing from the navel within Nārāyaṇa's abdomen, when the three worlds were submerged in the cosmic ocean, is certainly not false. But, O Lord, did I not therefore emerge from You?

Are You not Nārāyaṇa, the Self of every embodied being, the supreme controller and witness of all worlds? Nārāyaṇa is Your expansion because He rests upon the water born from Nara. That is true, yet even He is a manifestation of Your māyā.

If Your universal form truly lies within the water, O Bhagavān, why did I not see it then? Or why, after I had seen You within my heart, did You not immediately appear again before me?

Here in this very incarnation, O subduer of māyā, You made the illusory nature of the manifest cosmos clear when Your mother saw the entire universe, both without and within, inside Your abdomen.

The whole universe, including You, appears within Your abdomen; yet all of it also appears here within You. How can this be anything but Your māyā?

Have You not today, apart from Yourself, shown everything here to be māyā? At first You stood alone. Then You became all the friends and calves of Vraja. Next You appeared as just as many four-armed forms, whom I worshiped together with all their attendant beings. Then You became just as many universes. When all those manifestations withdrew, the immeasurable, nondual Brahman alone remained.

To those who do not know Your true path, You appear through Your māyā as the individual self within what is not truly the Self. You appear as me at creation, as Yourself for maintenance and as the three-eyed Śiva at dissolution.

O Lord, unborn though You are, You take birth among gods, sages, human beings, animals and aquatic creatures in order to curb the arrogance of the wicked and bestow grace upon the virtuous, O master and creator.

O boundless Bhagavān, Supreme Self and Lord of yoga, who can know where, how, how many times or when You spread Your Yogamāyā and play throughout the three worlds?

Therefore this entire universe is unreal in its passing form, like a dream, devoid of enduring awareness and filled with manifold suffering. Yet because it arises through māyā within You, whose form is eternal, infinite consciousness and bliss, it appears to be real.

You alone are the Self, the primeval Person, reality itself, self-luminous, infinite and original. You are eternal, imperishable, unbroken bliss, stainless, complete, nondual, free from all limiting designations and immortal.

Those who see You in this way as the Self of all selves, using the clear eye of the Upaniṣads received from the guru, cross the unreal ocean of worldly existence.

For those who fail to know the Self as the Self, the entire projected universe arises from that ignorance. Through knowledge it is dissolved again, just as the apparent coming and going of a snake upon a rope arises and disappears.

Bondage to becoming and liberation from it are merely two names born of ignorance; they have no independent reality. When the supreme, solitary Self of unceasing consciousness is rightly considered, they are like day and night imagined upon the sun.

How astonishing is the ignorance of the ignorant! They regard You, their own supreme Self, as something other, and then go searching outside themselves for the Self once more.

O infinite Lord, saints seek You within themselves by rejecting all that is not You. Just as one cannot find a real snake without first rejecting the imagined snake, how could they attain Your reality without giving up the unreal?

Yet, O Lord, only one who has received even the slightest trace of grace from Your two lotus feet can know the truth of Bhagavān's greatness. No one else can know it, even after searching for a very long time.

Therefore, my Lord, may I receive the great good fortune of becoming even one among Your devotees, in this life or another, even in the body of an animal, so that I may serve Your tender lotus feet.

How exceedingly blessed are the cows and women of Vraja! With the greatest joy You drank the nectar of their breast milk in the forms of their calves and sons, O all-pervading Lord. Even all the Vedic sacrifices performed until now have not been sufficient to satisfy You as they did.

Oh, the fortune, the immense fortune of Nanda and the people of Vraja! Their friend is the eternal, complete Brahman, the highest bliss itself.

O Acyuta, let the magnitude of their fortune remain beyond description. We eleven presiding deities, headed by Śiva, are also greatly blessed, for through the cups of their senses we repeatedly drink the intoxicating honey-nectar flowing from Your lotus feet.

My greatest fortune would be to take any birth at all here in the forest of Gokula, so that I might be bathed in the dust from the feet of one of its residents. Their entire life is Bhagavān Mukunda Himself, whose foot-dust the Vedas continue to seek even now.

O Lord, what reward could You possibly give these residents of the cowherd settlement? Our minds become bewildered trying to find any fruit beyond You, the fruit of the entire universe. Even Pūtanā, who merely assumed the appearance of a virtuous nurse, attained You together with her family. But these people have dedicated their homes, wealth, friends, loved ones, bodies, children, lives and hearts wholly to You.

As long as people are not Yours, O Kṛṣṇa, attachment and aversion remain thieves, the home remains a prison, delusion remains a chain upon the feet, and worldly toil remains misery.

Though entirely beyond the material world, You imitate worldly life upon the earth, O Lord, in order to reveal the abundant bliss enjoyed by those who surrender to You.

Let those who claim to know You think that they know. What is gained by saying more, my Lord? Your majesty lies beyond the reach of my mind, body and words.

Please permit me to depart, O Kṛṣṇa. You are the all-seeing knower of everything. You alone are the Lord of all worlds, and this entire universe is offered to You.

O Śrī Kṛṣṇa, You bring joy to the lotus of the Vṛṣṇi dynasty and increase the prosperity of the earth, the gods, the brāhmaṇas, the cows and the oceans. You dispel the darkness of irreligion and destroy the earth's demonic rulers. O Bhagavān, worthy of worship, I bow to You for as long as the sun endures, until the end of the age.

Śrī Śuka said: Having praised the boundless Lord in this way, Brahmā circumambulated Him three times, bowed at His feet and, receiving permission to leave, returned to his own abode.

After granting permission to the self-born Brahmā, Bhagavān brought the calves that had remained where they were back to the riverbank, where His companions were just as before.

O King, although an entire year had passed, the boys, their awareness covered by Kṛṣṇa's māyā, thought that they had been separated from the Lord of their lives for only half a moment.

What do people whose minds are bewildered by māyā not forget in this world? Indeed, the whole universe, repeatedly bewildered by that power, forgets its own true self.

The friends said to Kṛṣṇa, 'Welcome back! You returned so quickly that not even one of us has eaten a morsel. Come here and take Your meal properly.'

Then Hṛṣīkeśa smiled and ate with the boys. Showing them the dried skin of the python Aghāsura, He returned from the forest to Vraja.

His body decorated with peacock feathers, flowers and forest minerals, He entered the cowherd settlement, where the sight of Him was a festival for the gopīs' eyes. The jubilant sounds of flutes, leaf whistles and horns rang out; He called the calves by name, and His followers sang His purifying glories.

The boys sang throughout Vraja, 'Today Yaśodā and Nanda's son killed a huge serpent and saved us from it!'

The King said: O brāhmaṇa, how could the residents of Vraja possess such immense love for Kṛṣṇa, who was another's son, greater even than the unprecedented love they bore their own children? Please explain this.

Śrī Śuka said: O King, for every living being one's own self is the dearest. Children, wealth and other things are dear only because of their relationship to that self.

Therefore, O emperor, embodied beings do not feel the same love for objects of possessiveness such as children, wealth and home as they feel for their own selves.

O best of kings, even for those who identify the body as the self, the body itself is dearer than the children and other things connected with it.

If the body is itself an object of possession, it is not as dear as the self, for even when the body grows old, the desire to continue living remains stronger.

Therefore the self is dearest to every embodied being, and it is for the sake of that self alone that this entire world of moving and unmoving things is dear.

Know this Kṛṣṇa to be the Self of all selves. For the welfare of the universe, He appears here by His māyā as though He were embodied.

For those who know reality, everything here, moving and unmoving, is Kṛṣṇa and is wholly a form of Bhagavān. Nothing else whatsoever exists here.

The essential meaning of every existing thing is grounded in its cause, and Bhagavān Kṛṣṇa is the essential meaning even of that cause. What could possibly be named as something other than Him?

For those who take shelter of the boat of Murāri's tender lotus feet, which are the refuge of the great and whose glories are holy, the ocean of worldly existence becomes no more than the water in a calf's hoofprint. They attain the supreme abode, where there is no danger, rather than this world where danger meets them at every step.

I have now told you everything you asked me here. Although Hari performed these deeds in His childhood, they came to be celebrated as activities of His boyhood.

One who hears or recites these deeds of Murāri with His friends, His killing of Aghāsura, His picnic upon the meadow, His manifest and unmanifest forms, and the unborn Brahmā's exalted prayers, attains every worthy goal.

Thus Kṛṣṇa and Balarāma passed Their early childhood in Vraja through childish games such as hide-and-seek, building bridges and leaping like monkeys.