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Skandha 10, adhyayas 46-47 · Saptah day 6
Krishna sends his wisest friend to console the gopis with philosophy, and Uddhava goes home wishing to be a creeper in Vrindavan.
Krishna did not go back to Vraja. He had promised the gopis he would, and he stayed in Mathura. In the forty-sixth chapter he takes the hand of Uddhava, the wisest of the Vrishnis, a pupil of Brihaspati and his own dearest friend, and gives him an errand. Go to Vraja, he says. Comfort my parents, and free the gopis from their pain with my message. Their minds are fixed on me, their lives are given to me, they have let the world go for my sake; they keep themselves alive only because I said I would come.
So the most learned man in Krishna's circle set out to console a village of cowherd women with philosophy.
He arrived at sunset, as the cows were coming home. Nanda embraced him, and he and Yashoda spent the night talking of Krishna, remembering his childhood deeds and weeping. Uddhava told them they were fortunate beyond measure, for their love was fixed on the source of all things. Krishna, he said, was not only their son; he was the son, the father and the mother of every being.
In the morning the gopis, churning curd and singing of Krishna, saw a golden chariot at Nanda's gate and wondered whose it was. Had Akrura come back? When they saw Uddhava, long-armed and lotus-eyed and dressed in yellow like their beloved, they drew him aside. We know who you are, they said. Krishna sent you to please his parents. What else would he remember here? Friendship in this world lasts as long as there is something to get from it, as birds leave a tree once its fruit is gone and deer leave a forest once it has burned.
Then one of them, lost in thought of Krishna, saw a bee, and spoke to it as if it were a messenger from him. This is the Bhramara Gita, the song to the bee.
Her choice of listener was not random. A bee drinks from one flower and moves on to the next, and it is dark like Krishna. Friend of a cheat, she called it, do not touch my feet. Go and sing about your master to the women of Mathura who have him now. He gave us the nectar of his lips once and then left us, as you leave a flower. She went further, back through his earlier lives, and listed his harshness: as Rama he shot a monkey king from hiding like a hunter; he disfigured a woman who loved him; as Vamana he took the offering of Bali and then bound him. Enough of friendship with this dark one, she said, but we cannot give up talking about him. The bee flew off and came back, and her tone changed. Has my beloved sent you again? Does he still remember his father's house, and us? Will he ever lay his fragrant hand on our heads?
Uddhava now gave Krishna's message, and it was the philosophy he had been sent to deliver. You are never separate from me, Krishna had said, for I am the self of all, as the elements are in everything. I am far from you so that your minds stay fixed on me, for the mind dwells more on a beloved who is far away.
The gopis took comfort in this, and then asked whether he was happy, and whether he would ever come. They knew, they said, that the courtesan Pingala had found that giving up hope is the highest happiness. Knowing that, their hope in Krishna was still too strong to give up.
Uddhava stayed for some months, talking of Krishna, but it is clear who had been taught. Before he left, he sang his own verses. Only these women's lives have borne fruit, he said, for their whole being is fixed on Govinda. What is the use of being born a brahmana, or living as long as Brahma, without this love? Lakshmi herself did not receive the grace these gopis received. And then the wish that has made this chapter famous: may I be one of the bushes, creepers or herbs of Vrindavan, touched by the dust of these women's feet, who gave up their kin and the respectable path, both so hard to give up, to follow the path to Mukunda that the Vedas themselves are still searching for. Retellings often make it a blade of grass; the text names bushes, creepers and herbs. He bowed again and again to the dust of the feet of the women of Nanda's Vraja.
He took leave of Yashoda and Nanda and the gopis, and returned to Mathura with gifts. The cowherds asked for only one thing: that whatever births their karma brought them, their minds would stay at Krishna's feet.
The Bhagavatam sends its most learned devotee to its least learned ones and lets him come home their student. This chapter prepares the ground for the eleventh book, where the same Uddhava will receive Krishna's longest teaching: he has already seen, in Vraja, what that teaching is pointing at.
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