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Skandha 10, adhyaya 8 · Saptah day 5
Told her toddler ate mud, a mother opens his mouth to check — and sees the whole universe, herself and her village inside it.
The chapter that holds this story opens with a guest. Garga, the family priest of the Yadus and a man of long austerity, came to Nanda's settlement because Vasudeva had quietly asked him to. Nanda received him with honour and asked a simple thing: would he perform the naming rite for the two boys growing up in his house?
Garga hesitated, and his reason shows how dangerous the moment still was. Everyone knew he served the Yadus. If he named Nanda's son in public, Kamsa might draw the connection and guess that this child was the eighth one he had been warned about. So the rite was done in secret, in the cowshed, with no one else present.
Rohini's son, Garga said, would be called Rama because he would give delight, Bala because of his great strength, and Sankarshana because he would hold the Yadus together. Of the dark boy he said more. In other ages this child had taken white, red and yellow complexions; now he had come dark, krishna. He had once been born somewhere as Vasudeva's son, so those who knew would call him Vasudeva too. He had many names and many forms, as many as his deeds and qualities. He would bring the cowherds good fortune and carry them through every trouble, and Nanda should guard him carefully, for in his qualities he was the equal of Narayana. Then Garga went home, and Nanda was left holding a sentence far too large for a cowherd's yard.
The boys grew in the ordinary way. They crawled through the mud of the yard, followed strangers and then scurried back to their mothers in alarm, and caught hold of calves' tails and were dragged about while the women laughed. When Krishna could walk he became the subject of a steady stream of complaints. The women of Vraja came to Yashoda with a list: he untied the calves before milking time; he stole curd and milk and gave what he could not eat to the monkeys; when the pots were hung out of reach he piled up mortars and stools, or simply made holes in them; and in a dark storeroom his own body gave him light to steal by. Then, they said, he stood in front of his mother looking perfectly innocent. Yashoda listened, watched his face, and could not bring herself to scold him.
One day Balarama and the other boys came running with a fresh charge. Krishna had been eating earth. Yashoda took him by the hand and demanded to know why he had eaten dirt in secret; his friends said so, and so did his elder brother. Krishna, eyes darting with fright, denied it. They were all lying, he said. If she believed them, she could look in his mouth herself.
She told him to open it, and he did.
Inside she saw everything. The moving and the unmoving world, the sky and the quarters, the earth with its mountains, islands and seas; wind and fire, the moon and the stars and the whole turning circle of the heavens; and beyond these, the senses and the mind, the three gunas, time, nature, action and the desires that drive it. And somewhere in all of it she saw Vraja, and herself standing in it.
Her mind raced through explanations. Was this a dream, a god's illusion, a confusion in her own thinking, or some power that belonged to the child? Then she stopped explaining and bowed to the one whose nature no thought or word can reach. She took refuge in him, the text says, as the one whose power had made her think, I am I, this is my husband, this is my son, these cowherds and their wealth are mine.
And then Krishna drew a veil over what she had seen. The Bhagavatam names it precisely: his own maya, spread over her in the form of a mother's love. The vision vanished from her memory. She took him on her lap, and loved him exactly as before.
Parikshit, listening to Shuka, could not let this pass. What had Nanda and Yashoda done, he asked, to receive what even great sages never receive? Shuka answered that in an earlier life they had been Drona, best of the Vasus, and his wife Dhara. When Brahma told them to bring forth beings, they asked for one thing only: supreme devotion to Hari when he came into the world. Brahma granted it, and they were born in Vraja to receive it.
The episode is small, a mother and a toddler and a mouthful of mud, but it sets the terms for the whole tenth book. The Lord who contains the universe will be fed, scolded, chased and tied up, and the Bhagavatam does not treat this as a disguise to be seen through. It treats it as the point. Yashoda's forgetting is what makes the next chapter possible, where the same mother runs after the same child with a stick in her hand.
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