Gopāla-tāpanī Upaniṣad

He gave it in this shape. First the seed-syllable, the single sound that contains attraction itself: klīṃ. Then the dative case of the dark one, the one whose body holds all the depth of a rain cloud: kṛṣṇāya. Then the dative of the keeper of the cows, the one whose feet know every path in the forest: govindāya. Then the longer compound, the dative of the one who is the beloved of the cowherd women: gopī-jana-vallabhāya. And then the offering syllable that closes every Vedic invocation, the syllable by which what has been said is given over: svāhā.

Klīṃ kṛṣṇāya govindāya gopī-jana-vallabhāya svāhā. Eighteen syllables. The Upaniṣad does not embellish. It states the form and tells Brahmā that this is the mantra by which Gopāla is reached, the mantra that holds in eighteen syllables what every other Veda says in many thousands.

The Lord tells him: chant this and the worlds chant with you. The cows in the meadow are already chanting it in their breathing. The flute is already chanting it in its hollow. The Yamunā is already chanting it in its current. You will not be adding a sound to the universe. You will be remembering the sound the universe has been making since before there was a universe to make it.

Brahmā receives the mantra. He places it in his heart. He sits with it, the way a man sits with something precious in his lap before he understands what to do with it. And then, because Brahmā is a careful god, he asks his question.

Klīṃ, the seed. It is not a name in the ordinary sense. It is the sound that comes before any name. It is the pull by which a name is heard before its letters arrive. It is the gravity of the mantra. The Upaniṣad calls it the syllable of attraction, the syllable that draws the chanter toward the one being chanted.

Kṛṣṇa, the dark one. The Upaniṣad takes the name in its etymological breadth. The one whose color is the color of a storm cloud about to break. The one who pulls the heart by being beautiful in the way the rain is beautiful. The one whose darkness is not absence of light but the depth of light, the place where every color the eye has ever loved has gone home.

Govinda, the keeper of cows. The Upaniṣad takes the compound apart: go, the cows; vinda, the one who finds them, who keeps them, who knows where each calf is. He is not the king of the cows. He is the boy who walks with them, who counts them at evening, who is missed by the smallest one when she falls behind. The supreme has chosen the work of a cowherd.

Gopī-jana-vallabha, the beloved of the cowherd women. The Upaniṣad takes the compound carefully. Gopī, the cowherd girl. Jana, the people, the company, the gathered ones. Vallabha, the dear one, the one for whose sake. Together: the dear one of the company of cowherd women. He is not their king. He is not their teacher. He is the one for whose sake their hearts are beating in the morning when they wake up.

And svāhā, the offering. The mantra ends not with a period but with a fire. What has been chanted is offered. The chanter does not keep the mantra. The chanter gives the mantra back to the one whose name it carried. Svāhā is the syllable that releases.

He asks the Lord directly. You have given me kṛṣṇāya in two syllables. You have given me govindāya in three. The longest of all the dative compounds in the mantra you have set around the name of the one who is your beloved. Tell me, then. Who is gopī-jana-vallabhā? Who is the beloved of the cowherd women, that the mantra is willing to be longer for her sake than for yours?

The Upaniṣad answers indirectly, in the way the Upaniṣads answer their best questions. She is not one among the gopis. She is not the chief of them in the sense that a queen is the chief of her ladies. She is the one for whose sake the very company of gopis exists. The gopis are her presence multiplied. The Yamunā is her attention flowing. The flute is her name being remembered by the breath that plays it.

She is the one Krishna is who he is because of. Without her he would still be the unbegotten Lord of the worlds. With her he is Gopāla, the cowherd, the one for whose sake the mantra has eighteen syllables instead of however many it would have had. She is the reason the supreme has chosen the form he has chosen.

And the Upaniṣad does not name her further than this. The mantra has named her in the only way she can be named: as the beloved. The text holds itself there. To say more would be to say less. The Vedic anchor of every later Radha tradition has been laid here, in a question Brahmā asked and an answer the Upaniṣad chose to keep folded.

His dwelling is a forest. The forest is not in any of the heavens you have heard of. It is not in any of the realms where the gods retire to rest. It is its own realm, older than the heavens, older than the gods. The trees there do not grow toward the sun because there is no sun above them and they are themselves the source of the light by which they are seen. The flowers there do not fade. The cows there do not age. The cowherd women there do not weary.

It is called Vṛndāvana because Vṛndā, who is Tulasī, who is the holy basil, presides over its grove of groves. It is called the eternal forest because nothing in it falls into time. The morning that has just begun is the morning that has always been beginning. The afternoon when Krishna leaves with the cows is the afternoon when he has always been leaving. The evening when he returns is the evening when he has always been returning.

In this forest he is not separate from his beloved and not joined with her in the way that ordinary lovers are joined. He is what she is and she is what he is, and the two-ness of them is the reason the forest exists. Without their two-ness there would be no rasa, no flute, no path between the trees, no Yamunā curving past the kunja. With their two-ness everything in the forest comes alive in pairs. Even the leaves on a single twig are paired.

The Upaniṣad says: this is the place the mantra reaches. When you chant klīṃ kṛṣṇāya govindāya gopī-jana-vallabhāya svāhā, you do not travel to the forest. The forest comes through the mantra and stands at the threshold of your heart. You step into it without moving. The earth your body is sitting on is the earth of Vṛndāvana, if the chant has been complete.

Sit, the text says, and let the body be a forest. Let the spine be the central tamāla tree. Let the breath be the wind moving through the leaves. Let the heart, that small clearing in the middle of the chest where attention has its seat, be the kunja in the middle of the forest. There is room there for him. There has always been room.

Place him in the clearing. He is small, the size of a thumb, the texts have always said. He is dark like a rain cloud, with a peacock feather in his hair, with a flute at his lips that he is not yet playing. His eyes are looking inward. He is waiting. He is seated on a lotus that has grown in the clearing of its own accord because he came.

And do not place him there alone. The mantra is gopī-jana-vallabha. The one to whom the mantra is offered does not exist alone. Place his beloved beside him on the lotus. She is fair like lightning. She is what he is looking at when his eyes look inward. She is the inwardness of his looking. Without her in the meditation the meditation is incomplete. The Upaniṣad is firm on this.

Now hold the two of them in the clearing of the heart. Do not approach. Do not speak. Do not ask anything of them. The chanter is not a participant in the kunja. The chanter is the kunja. The body is the forest in which the meeting is taking place. Let the meeting take place, and let the chanter be the place that is privileged to hold it. This is the practice the Upaniṣad gives. It is small and it is whole.