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Skandha 10, adhyayas 9-10 · Saptah day 5
Every rope Yashoda ties is two fingers short — until she is exhausted, and the child lets himself be bound.
On the morning this story begins, the servants of Nanda's house were busy elsewhere, and Yashoda was churning the curd herself. The Bhagavatam lingers over the scene: the rope pulling back and forth, her bangles and earrings moving, and the songs she sang as she worked, which were songs about her own son's doings.
Krishna came in hungry. He took hold of the churning rod to stop it, and she gave up her work and took him on her lap to nurse him. Then the milk she had set on the fire began to boil over. She put him down, still unsatisfied, and hurried to the stove.
He did not take it well. Biting his lip in anger, he cracked the pot of curd with a stone, went into an inner room, and began eating the fresh butter there, with false tears in his eyes. When Yashoda came back she found the broken pot and smiled, because she knew whose work it was. She went looking and found him standing on an upturned wooden mortar, handing butter to a monkey from a hanging pot and glancing about nervously in case he was seen.
She came up from behind with a stick. He saw her, jumped down and ran, and she ran after him. The text pauses here to make sure the reader sees what is happening: the one whom yogis cannot reach even in meditation is being chased round a cowherd's house by his mother. It was hard going for her, her hair coming loose and its flowers falling, but she caught him at last.
He was crying now, rubbing his eyes with his fists and smearing the kohl across his face. Yashoda threw the stick away. She did not want to frighten him further, but she did not want him running loose either, and so she decided to tie him to the mortar.
The rope fell short by two fingers' width. She tied another rope to the end of it. That too was two fingers short. She brought every rope in the house and knotted them together, and the gap stayed exactly where it was, two fingers wide. The women of the village gathered to watch and laughed, and Yashoda laughed too, astonished.
Then Krishna looked at his mother, sweating and exhausted, the garland slipping from her hair, and the text says that out of compassion he allowed himself to be bound. The rope reached.
Shuka spells out what this means. The Lord, who holds the whole world under his control, here showed that he is under the control of those who love him. Neither Brahma nor Shiva, nor even Lakshmi who lives on his chest, received the grace this cowherd woman received from the giver of liberation. A rope round the belly is what gives him the name Damodara, and the Bhagavatam wants the name heard as a confession: the infinite can be tied, but only with this kind of rope.
Tied to the mortar, Krishna noticed two tall arjuna trees standing together in the yard, and remembered who they were. They had been Nalakuvara and Manigriva, sons of Kubera, the god of wealth. Drunk and proud of their riches, they had been playing naked in a river on Kailasa with a company of women when the sage Narada passed by. The women, ashamed, covered themselves. The two brothers did not even notice him.
Narada's response was a curse that was also a remedy. Wealth, he reflected, blinds people more than anything else; they forget that the body they indulge will end as ash, as worms, or as food for dogs. Let these two stand as trees, unmoving, so that the pride would leave them. By his grace they would keep their memory, and after a hundred years of the gods they would be freed by the touch of Vasudeva himself.
So Krishna crawled between the two trees, dragging the mortar behind him. It caught crosswise between the trunks, he pulled, and both trees came crashing down. From them stepped two shining beings who bowed to him, sang his praise, asked only that their speech, ears, hands, minds and eyes stay turned towards him and his own, and went away north.
The cowherds came running at the noise. The children told them Krishna had done it, and most of the adults refused to believe them. Nanda saw his son tied to a mortar, smiled, and untied him.
The two halves of the episode belong together. In one, a mother's love binds the Lord; in the other, the Lord's touch unbinds two beings that wealth had bound. The Bhagavatam is mapping a reversal it will return to again and again in the tenth book: the poor and the loving have power over God that the rich and the proud do not.
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