Sanatani
Opening your Sanatani workspace
Skandha 1, adhyaya 8 · Saptah day 1
As Krishna's chariot turns for Dvaraka, his aunt stops it and asks for something no one asks for: more trouble.
The war was over. The Pandavas had offered water to their dead on the bank of the Ganga, Yudhishthira was established on his throne, and Krishna, who had stayed with them through the aftermath, was preparing to go home to Dvaraka. He was about to mount his chariot.
Before he could, Uttara came running to him. She was Abhimanyu's widow, and she was carrying his child. A blazing iron arrow, she cried, was coming at her. Let it burn me if it must, she begged, but do not let it destroy the child.
Krishna understood at once what it was. Ashvatthama, beaten and humiliated, had released the brahmastra to end the Pandava line in the womb. The five brothers saw blazing weapons coming at them too and reached for their own. Krishna protected them all with his discus. And then the text says something quiet. The Lord, who dwells within every being, covered the embryo in Uttara's womb with his own power, for the sake of the Kuru line. The brahmastra cannot be stopped by any counter-weapon, but it met Vishnu's power and came to nothing. A few chapters later we learn that the child, Parikshit, saw in the womb a shining figure no bigger than a thumb, whirling a mace to scatter the weapon's heat, and that he spent his life examining every face for that one, which is how he got his name.
Then Kunti came forward with her sons, and before Krishna could leave she began to praise him.
Her prayer runs to some two dozen verses, and it begins in a register no one would expect from an aunt speaking to her brother's son. She calls him the first Person, beyond the material world, inside and outside every being and unseen by any of them, like an actor in costume whom the audience fails to recognise. She asks how women like her could ever know him, when even the great sages cannot.
Then she counts. You freed Devaki from Kamsa's prison, she says, and you saved me and my children again and again: from poison, from the great fire, from the sight of man-eating demons, from the wicked assembly where the dice were thrown, from the hardships of the forest, from every battle against great chariot-warriors, and now from Ashvatthama's weapon.
And then, having listed the dangers, she asks for more of them. vipadaḥ santu: let those calamities come again and again, teacher of the world, because in them we saw you, and seeing you puts an end to seeing birth again.
The next verse gives her reasoning. A person whose pride swells with high birth, power, learning and beauty, she says, cannot even speak your name with feeling. You are within reach of those who have nothing. She calls him akiñcana-vitta, the wealth of those who own nothing. Comfort is not wicked, in her account; it is distracting. The years in which she could least protect her sons were the years in which Krishna was most plainly beside them.
The prayer does not stay in that register. Kunti calls him Time, without beginning or end, moving equally among all, with no one he favours and no one he hates, though people imagine otherwise. He is unborn and is born; he does not act and he acts. And then, among these large statements, she remembers a small one. When you misbehaved as a child, she says, and the gopi picked up a rope to tie you, you stood with tears washing the kohl from your eyes and your face lowered in fear. Fear itself is afraid of you, and you were afraid. That, she says, bewilders me.
She also reports what people say about why he was born: to bring glory to the Yadu line, as sandalwood brings fame to the Malaya hills; in answer to the prayers of Vasudeva and Devaki; to lighten the earth's burden; or so that people suffering in the world could hear his deeds and remember him. She does not choose between them.
She ends with two requests. Cut this strong cord of affection, she asks, that ties me to my kin, the Pandavas and the Vrishnis. And let my mind turn to you constantly, with no other object, as the Ganga flows without pause into the sea.
Krishna, the text says, smiled a little, as though bewildering her with his maya, and agreed. He went back into Hastinapura, and when he was ready to set out for his own city, Yudhishthira held him back out of love.
The prayer belongs at this exact point. The war that fills eighteen books of the Mahabharata has just ended, and the Bhagavatam passes over it in a few verses to give its space to a widowed mother beside a chariot. This is the first long prayer in the book, and it sets terms the rest will keep: the Lord as cosmic Time and as a child afraid of a rope, and devotion measured not by what it asks to escape but by what it asks to keep in view.
विपदः सन्तु ताः शश्वत्तत्र तत्र जगद्गुरो । भवतो दर्शनं यत्स्यादपुनर्भवदर्शनम् ॥Let those calamities come again and again, teacher of the world, for in them we see you — and seeing you is the end of seeing birth again.
Opening your Sanatani workspace