Bṛhad-Bhāgavatāmṛta

Indra sends him to Brahmā, the four-faced creator. Brahmā says, I create the worlds, but I do not know Krishna's face. I have seen him only as light. The greatest devotee is not the one who builds the house. It is the one who lives inside it. Go to my son, Śiva, who has tasted the bliss the worlds are made of.

Śiva, on Kailāsa, with Pārvatī beside him and the snake at his throat, says, I am his devotee, yes. I sit in meditation and the name itself rises in me without effort. But there is a devotee whose love is more constant than mine, because mine is meditative and his is active and his does not stop even when his body breaks. Go to Prahlāda.

Prahlāda says, I held the name through fire, through poison, through the trampling of elephants, but I held it because I had to, because it was the only thing the demons could not take from me. There is a devotee whose love is freer than mine. He served the Lord as Rāma in a body of fur, leaping the ocean for him without being asked twice, and he is still, somewhere on this earth, with his palms folded, listening for any whisper of the name. Go to Hanumān.

Hanumān says, I served one form of him, the prince of Ayodhyā, and that service is the breath I am still taking. But there are devotees who held him as their kin. They ate from the same plate. They slept in the same tent. They were his cousins and his friends in the war. Their love was the love of a household. Go to the Pāṇḍavas.

The Pāṇḍavas say, yes, he sat at our table. He drove our chariot. He spoke our brother's confusion out of him on the field. But the love between kin is the love of those who have the world in common with the beloved. There is a love whose only world is the beloved. Go to the gopis of Vraja.

He asks one of the older gopis, who is the greatest devotee of Krishna. She looks at him for a moment and then she laughs. Not unkindly. The laugh of a woman who has been asked by a child why the sun rises in the morning. She says, you are asking the wrong question, but I will answer the question you have. Among all of us who love him, every one of us would step aside in a moment for one. Every one of us has stepped aside, again and again, the whole of our lives. The one we step aside for is not the chief among us. She is the reason the rest of us know what loving him is.

She does not say the name yet. She lets the silence do that. Then she says, her name is Rādhā. And before you ask me whether she loves him more, or whether he loves her more, understand the question dissolves. He is who he is because of her. She is who she is because of him. The two of them are the original, and we, all of us, are reflections that have learned, by watching them, what loving looks like.

Nārada sits with this. The chain has ended. Indra had pointed up. Brahmā had pointed up. Śiva had pointed up. Prahlāda had pointed up. Hanumān had pointed up. The Pāṇḍavas had pointed up. The gopis are not pointing anymore. The gopi he has spoken to is pointing across the river, into the grove, where two people are walking who do not need a hierarchy because the hierarchy was made for the rest of the worlds to find its way to them.

He takes his vīṇā and he walks back the way he came. He has his answer. He will carry it for the rest of the book and for the rest of his wandering life. The greatest devotee of Krishna is Radha, because she is also the one whom Krishna himself is devoted to.

His name is Gopa-kumāra. He is a boy in a village somewhere in the foothills. He tends his family's small herd. He has not read the scriptures. He does not know the names of the higher worlds. One afternoon a wandering sādhu comes through the village, sits with him under a tree while the cows graze, and seeing something in him that the boy cannot see in himself, leans forward and whispers a mantra into his ear.

The sādhu does not explain the mantra. He says only, chant this, every day, all day if you can, and do not ask me what it is for. You will find out when you have walked far enough. He blesses the boy on the forehead and walks on. The boy never sees him again.

Gopa-kumāra does what he was told. He chants while he watches the cows. He chants while he eats his small meals. He chants on the path between the village and the pasture. Months pass. Years pass. The mantra becomes the rhythm under all the other rhythms of his day. He does not know what it is for. He does not need to know.

Then, one morning, the world begins to lift around him. The pasture stays where it is, but he is not in it anymore. Something is carrying him upward, gently, the way a current carries a leaf. He understands, with a slowness that is part of the teaching, that the mantra has been doing its work all along. The journey it was preparing him for has now begun.

He arrives first in Svarga, the heaven of pleasures, the same heaven Indra rules. The gardens are bright. The food is the food of the gods. The dancers do not tire. He is welcomed and given a place. For a while it is enough. Then a small unease begins. The pleasures repeat. The dancers come back the next evening with the same gestures. The mantra in him grows louder, the way a bell grows louder when the wind stops, and he understands that he is not yet where he is going. He chants and the heaven lifts away.

He is taken next to Brahma-loka, the realm of the four-faced creator. Here the pleasures are subtler. The bliss is not in the body anymore. It is in knowledge. He sits at the feet of beings whose contemplation has made the worlds. He learns. He grows. Again, after a long time, the mantra rises in him with a question the place cannot answer. He chants and Brahma-loka lifts away.

He passes through Śiva-loka, where consciousness rests in itself, where Śiva sits with Pārvatī and the bliss is the bliss of pure being. The seekers there are dissolved into the absolute and ask for nothing more. Gopa-kumāra finds, with a quiet astonishment, that even this is not what the mantra is reaching for. There is a love in him for which dissolution is not enough. He chants and Śiva-loka lifts away.

He arrives in Vaikuṇṭha, the eternal abode of Viṣṇu, the four-armed Lord on the serpent of infinity. Here he meets devotees who serve the Lord forever, in robes of yellow silk, with conch and disc in their hands. Here the love is finally personal. The Lord knows him by name. Lakṣmī herself smiles at him. He thinks, this surely is the end. The mantra has brought me home. He stays a long time. And still, one morning, the small unease returns.

From Vaikuṇṭha he is carried to Dvāraka, where Krishna sits as king, with Rukmiṇī beside him and the queens of the sixteen thousand palaces in their courtyards. Here the love is no longer formal. The Lord is a husband. He laughs. He plays dice with his friends. He plays with his children on his lap. Gopa-kumāra stands in this Dvāraka and feels his own heart open further than it ever has. Surely this. Surely the king of Dvāraka, in the city of his queens, is the destination.

And yet, even here, after a very long time, the mantra keeps moving in him. He notices that the king of Dvāraka, when he is alone in his garden, sometimes looks toward the north, the way a man looks toward a place he has come from and would still rather be. The king's bliss is real, and the king's bliss has, somewhere inside it, a homesickness. Gopa-kumāra begins to wonder where the king is looking.

He is carried next to Mathurā, the city of Krishna's birth, where the eternal līlā continues in a register closer to the original. Here the love is youth. Krishna is not yet the king. He is the cowherd-prince. The cousins are still the cousins. The flute is still the flute. Gopa-kumāra stays, and grows, and again, in the depth of his heart, the homesickness in the king's eye is now in his own eye.

He understands, slowly, what has been happening. The mantra has been carrying him not through a series of better and better palaces, but along the line of Krishna's own longing. Each world has been a place Krishna himself has lived in and looked outward from. Even the king of Dvāraka, even the prince of Mathurā, was looking outward toward something the mantra has not yet shown its bearer. There is one more world.

He does not realize at first that he has arrived. The land looks like the land he was born in. The cows look like his mother's cows. The pasture is the pasture he played in as a boy. The boys around him are the boys he grew up with. Krishna walks toward him with a flute hanging at his side and asks him where he has been. He embraces him. He calls him by his childhood nickname.

Then a young woman comes through the trees. Gopa-kumāra does not know her face the way he knew the faces in the village, and yet he recognizes her with something deeper than memory. His heart begins to beat in a rhythm that he has never felt before. Krishna, who has been speaking, stops mid-sentence. His attention turns toward her even before her presence is complete. The whole of Goloka turns with him. Gopa-kumāra realizes, with a slowness that takes the rest of his life, that the mantra has been carrying him the whole way to this moment, this grove, this woman walking through these trees.

He had thought he was looking for Krishna. He had thought Krishna was the destination of the mantra. He understands now that Krishna had also been looking, his whole life, for her. The destination of the mantra was not even Krishna alone. The destination was the meeting of the two of them, with him standing nearby, watching, a younger sister finally come home.

He does not become a priest. He does not become a yogi. He becomes a friend of the boys who tend her cows, and a younger sister of the women who arrange her flowers. He takes a form he had not known he carried inside him. He becomes a sakhī of the eternal līlā. The mantra has finished its work. He never chants it again, because he is now living inside what it meant.