The story

It begins with a picnic. Krishna and the cowherd boys sat down to eat on a sandy bank of the Yamuna in rings around him, the text says, like petals round the heart of a lotus. He sat in the middle with his flute tucked into his waistcloth, a lump of rice and curd in his hand and bits of fruit between his fingers, making them all laugh.

The calves, meanwhile, had wandered deep into the forest after grass. Krishna told the anxious boys to keep eating; he would fetch the calves himself, and he went off still holding his mouthful of food.

Brahma had been watching. He had seen, from the sky, Krishna free the demon Agha only a little earlier, and he wanted to see some further glory of this Lord who was playing at being a boy. So he took the calves and hid them somewhere else. When Krishna came back empty-handed, Brahma took the boys too.

Krishna searched the forest and the riverbank and found neither, and then he understood who had done it. What he did next is the heart of the episode. To keep the mothers of the boys and the mothers of the calves from grief, and also to give Brahma what he had come to see, he became them all. He took the form of every calf and every boy exactly: the same size, the same sticks and flutes, ornaments and clothes, the same natures, names, ages and games. The text sums it up in a phrase: everything there became Vishnu.

Then he walked home, surrounded by himself, and each boy went to his own house and each calf to its own cow.

The mothers noticed nothing wrong, only that they loved their sons more than they ever had, and the cows suckled their calves with the same new intensity. This went on for a full year.

Balarama was the first to notice. Near the end of the year, the cows grazing on Govardhana saw their calves near Vraja and rushed down the slope to feed them, though those calves had long been weaned. The cowherds ran after them, furious, and then found themselves embracing their own sons with the same overflowing love. Balarama wondered at it, looked within, and saw that every boy and calf was Krishna.

Then Brahma came back. Only a moment had passed in his own measure of time; here, a year had gone by. He saw Krishna playing with the boys and calves as before, and he knew the ones he had taken were still asleep where he had left them. He looked from one to the other and could not tell which were real. The illusion he had tried to lay over Krishna had covered only himself; his power here was like a haze lost in the dark of night, or a firefly's glow at midday.

As he stared, every calf and every boy appeared to him in the form of Vishnu, dark, four-armed, dressed in yellow, holding conch, discus, mace and lotus, each worshipped by a whole universe of beings, Brahmas among them. Brahma stood stunned and silent like a statue. Then Krishna drew the curtain back, and Brahma saw only Vrindavan and a cowherd boy hunting for his calves with a mouthful of food still in his hand.

Brahma came down from his swan and fell at Krishna's feet, touching them with his four crowned heads and washing them with tears. His prayer in the fourteenth chapter is one of the great hymns of the book. In it he likens his offence to an unborn child kicking in its mother's womb, which no mother holds against it. He says that the one who waits for Krishna's compassion, tat te 'nukampām, accepting the fruits of his own past actions and bowing in heart, word and body, is the rightful heir to liberation. And he cries out at the good fortune of the cowherds, whose friend is the complete Brahman, and asks to be born as anything at all in this forest of Gokula, if only it might be touched by the dust from the feet of someone who lives there.

He circled Krishna three times, bowed, and went home. Krishna gathered the returned calves and walked back to the riverbank, where the boys were still sitting at their meal. To them no time had passed. You came back quickly, they said; we haven't eaten a single mouthful without you. Krishna laughed and took them home, and they told everyone that today he had killed the great snake.

When Parikshit asked how the cowherds could have loved Krishna more than their own sons, Shuka answered that each creature's own self is dearest to it, and Krishna is the self of every self. That answer is why this story sits at the centre of the childhood. A year of Vraja's love was in fact love for Krishna, though nobody in Vraja knew it, and Brahma's test ends by showing the creator that the simplest affection of a village had reached further than he had.

Verses in this episode

Who appears, and what it shows

• Brahma — The creator himself is a student here: taught by four verses on a lotus, and humbled by a cowherd boy in Vraja.
• Krishna — Not one avatar among many but 'the Lord himself' (1.3.28) — and the tenth book spends ninety chapters on his single life.
• Theme: Pride humbled
• Theme: Divine play

Keep reading

• Tied with a rope — Skandha 10, adhyayas 9-10 — Every rope Yashoda ties is two fingers short — until she is exhausted, and the child lets himself be bound.
• Krishna dances on Kaliya — Skandha 10, adhyayas 16-17 — A many-headed serpent poisons a lake of the Yamuna, and a boy jumps in and dances on its hoods until it yields.

Questions to explore

• Why did Brahma want to test Krishna?
• How did the mothers of Vraja come to love their sons even more that year?
• What does Brahma say in his prayer after he is humbled?