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Skandha 3, adhyayas 1-4 · Saptah day 2
Cast out by Duryodhana before the war, Vidura returns from pilgrimage to learn from weeping Uddhava that both clans and Krishna are gone.
The third book of the Srimad Bhagavatam opens a vast inner dialogue that will run through the end of the fourth book. Sitting by the Ganga with Emperor Parikshit, Shukadeva introduces the three figures whose meeting on the banks of the Yamuna and the Ganga brings this teaching to light (3.1–4): **Vidura** (also called Kshatta), the saintly younger half-brother of King Dhritarashtra and Pandu, who was actually the god of justice Yama reborn under the sage Mandavya's curse; **Uddhava**, the cousin, chief counselor, and dearest boyhood friend and disciple of Lord Krishna among the Vrishnis; and **Maitreya Muni**, the great sage who stood quietly beside Uddhava at Prabhasa during Krishna's final hours on earth and whom Krishna personally appointed to instruct Vidura.
Before the great war of Kurukshetra broke out, Vidura had walked away from his luxurious home, his horses, and his high office in Hastinapura to wander the earth as a solitary pilgrim (3.1.1–17). When Parikshit asks how so noble a man could bear to leave his family behind, Shukadeva tells the story of the final council before the war (3.1.3–16).
After Krishna himself had traveled to Dhritarashtra's court as a peace messenger for the Pandavas and been ignored, the blind king Dhritarashtra summoned his younger brother Vidura for advice in a house that was already metaphorically on fire (3.1.6–7). Vidura gave the only honest counsel a righteous minister could give (3.1.8–10): "Return the rightful share of the kingdom to Yudhishthira, who has patiently endured untold offenses from you and your sons! Meanwhile your eldest son Duryodhana sits in your household like a venomous cobra while you look on helplessly. Cast out this single villain who hates Lord Krishna, the god of the Vrishnis and the deity of the brahmanas; for his fault alone your entire clan has already been stripped of fortune and goodness!"
Sitting right there in the assembly with Karna, Shakuni, and Duhshasana beside him, Duryodhana boiled over with rage, his lips trembling and his eyes blazing (3.1.11–12). "Who invited this crooked son of a slave-woman (*dasi-putra*) into our council?" Duryodhana snarled (3.1.12–15). "He eats the salt and bread of the man who raised him, and then acts as a spy for our enemies the Pandavas! Throw him out of the city at once and let him breath his last outside — only avoid killing him so my royal honor is not stained!"
Pierced through the ear by arrows of such bitter cruelty right in front of his elder brother Dhritarashtra, who sat silent without saying a single word to defend him, Vidura felt no personal hatred (3.1.16). Recognising that the Lord's external potency (*maya*) was gripping the Kuru princes to bring about their end, he quietly laid his great bow across the palace threshold and walked out of Hastinapura forever (3.1.16). Why did he consider his banishment a stroke of grace? Because it saved him from having to fight on either side against his own family when the war began.
Walking alone across the sacred geography of India — bathing in rivers, sleeping on the bare ground, dressing as an unrecognized mendicant so no one would flatter him, and performing vows developed purely to please Hari — Vidura visited Ayodhya, Mathura, Dvaraka, and every forest, hill, and lake marked by banners of Vishnu's Sudarshana discus (3.1.17–23). At last he crossed through Prabhasa, heard shocking rumors that the entire Bharata world and his own Kuru kinsmen had burned each other to ashes like a bamboo forest catching fire from its own friction, came silently along the Sarasvati with its eleven holy shrines from Trita to Yamuna, and arrived on the bank of the **Yamuna** in Vrindavana — where he suddenly spotted **Uddhava**, the foremost devotee of Vasudeva and former student of Brihaspati, sitting quietly in deep absorption (3.1.20–24).
Seeing his dear friend, Vidura embraced Uddhava with both arms and asked naturally for news of their family, not yet knowing the full extent of what had happened while he was away in the south and west (3.1.25–45). Are Vasudeva and Devaki thriving now that Krishna and Balarama have fulfilled the wish of Brahma by descending to earth? Are Nanda Maharaja, Yashoda, Rohini, Akrura, Ugrasena, Satvabhama, Rukmini, Pradyumna, Aniruddha, and Samba well? Are Yudhishthira and Arjuna governing in dharma now that Duryodhana's arrogance has burned itself out? Having asked after dozens of living names one by one, Vidura notices the expression on Uddhava's face.
At the sound of Krishna's name and the names of his family, Uddhava is struck with grief as sharp as salt rubbed into an open wound (3.2.1–6). Remembering how he had waited upon Krishna's feet from the time he was a five-year-old boy — so absorbed in playing at Krishna's side that even when his mother called him for his morning meal he refused to come away — Uddhava falls completely silent for several moments, swept away on a flood of loving memory (*anuraga*). Wiping the tears that stream down his cheeks with his cloth, he finally speaks out a heavy sigh (3.2.6–7):
**"The blazing sun of Lord Krishna has set, O Vidura, and the house of our kinsmen has been swallowed whole by the great serpent of Time! What can I tell you of our welfare?"**
This whole world, along with the Yadu clan inside it, was exquisitely fortunate and yet terribly blind, Uddhava says (3.2.7–11). Just as fish swimming in the milk ocean take the rising full moon to be merely another creature of the water without knowing its cool celestial nectar, the Vrishnis lived, ate, slept, walked, and talked every day beside the Master of all masters while thinking of him only as their clan chief! Even the women of the world whose eyes rested once upon that smiling face — where playful eyebrows danced above lotus eyes and gleaming shark-shaped earrings swung against his cheeks — could never pull their eyes away again (3.2.12).
Then, in verses 3.2.13–34, sitting by the Yamuna where Krishna had played as a child, Uddhava remembers the Lord's childhood and youth in Vraja and Mathura with aching tenderness. He marvels that the Lord of the three worlds chose to hide his majesty inside the cowherd village of Nanda as though afraid of Kamsa, herding calves through the forests of Vrindavana with Balarama and the cowherd boys while lifting the whole mountain of Govardhana on one hand for seven days like a child holding up a play-mushroom to shelter the cows from Indra's storm (3.2.21–33)! Most astounding of all is the paradox of his boundless mercy toward even his enemies (3.2.23–24):
**"Alas, wait and tell me — whom else could a person ever take shelter of more merciful than this Krishna? For when the demoness Putana came to Gokul with deadly poison smeared across her breast to murder him as an infant, he accepted her nursing and gave her the exalted rank of a foster-mother (*dhatri-gatim*) in the spiritual world!"**
In truth, Uddhava says (3.2.24), I count even the demons who fixed their minds on the Lord in fierce hatred on the battlefield as blessed, because as they died looking directly at the Lord holding the Sudarshana discus above them, they attained the path beyond rebirth! Born in the darkness of Kamsa's iron-chained prison to free his parents and relieve the earth, killing Kamsa by dragging him down from his high platform in the wrestling ring, studying the sixty-four arts in sixty-four days under Sandipani Muni and bringing his teacher's dead son back from Yama's court as tuition, winning Princess Rukmini like Garuda snatching nectar from the feet of rival kings, marrying sixteen thousand imprisoned princesses in a single hour after slaying Narakasura, and listening submissively to the counsels of Yudhishthira and Arjuna — how can anyone bear to remember all that now that he is gone (3.3.1–28)?
Having recounted how the Yadu princes grew intoxicated with power and liquor at Prabhasa after mocking the sages, fought each other to the last man with iron reeds on the seashore, and how Krishna himself sat alone beneath a pipal tree on the bank of the Sarasvati after sending Uddhava away to Badarikashrama (3.3.18–28, 3.4.1–22), Uddhava comes to the final moment before the hunter Jara's arrow touched the Lord's foot.
As Uddhava stood weeping before Krishna, begging like Queen Kunti and the gopis never to be separated from his lotus feet and praying purely for a heart that loves his stories (3.4.12–18), the sage **Maitreya** arrived at Prabhasa to take his final leave of the Lord (3.4.9, 3.4.25). Right there in Maitreya's hearing, Krishna instructed Uddhava to pass on his transcendental knowledge to those who are pure and devoted — and **specifically named Vidura as the rightful recipient**.
Why then does Uddhava not simply teach Vidura himself right there on the bank of the Yamuna? When Vidura begs him to impart that wisdom, Uddhava answers with extraordinary humility and fidelity to his master's word (3.4.25–26): "For a true student of the soul, the sage Maitreya should be worshipped for this teaching! Because while I stood beside the Lord at the end, **Bhagavan himself directly instructed Maitreya in person to teach you (*bhagavan aha maitreyam tvam evoddishya sri-mukhat*)**." Furthermore, Uddhava knows that he himself can scarcely speak ten sentences about Krishna without his voice choking with tears of separation.
So the two old friends pass the night together on the sandy bank of the Yamuna, talking of Krishna until the night passes like a single fraction of a second (3.4.27). At dawn, Uddhava sets out north toward Badarikashrama as Krishna commanded, while Vidura walks with a quiet, expectant heart to the bank of the Ganga at Haridwar (3.4.28–36), where Maitreya Muni sits ready to open the book of creation.
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