Roberto Calasso - Ka

Before they covered themselves up again, Kṛṣṇa wanted to gaze at them once more, to see those bodies he had stared at, dreamed of, completely naked, out of the water. So, finding a solemn voice, he said: “By bathing naked in the Yamunā, you have sinned against Varuṇa, you have exposed yourselves to him without shame. Now you must seek his forgiveness. Before dressing, raise your arms above your heads, press the palms of your hands together, then bow down. May the god forgive you.” The gopīs obeyed. Kṛṣṇa watched them putting on a stern face, while making mental notes: that one had breasts that pointed away from each other, a sort of felicitous squinting; this one had buttocks that arched over two dimples, like hills rising from tiny lakes; that one’s knees were small, round shields; this one’s eyes couldn’t concentrate on the invisible Varuṇa but were shifting sideways to follow Kṛṣṇa, as though tied to him by a thin thread. The ceremony went on a long time, a ceremony that in no way resembled the one the gopīs had come down to the river for. Kṛṣṇa was eager that it be as solemn as possible. Everything proceeded in silence. In the end, Kṛṣṇa said: “My beloved ones, I know you want nothing better than to adore me. Your desire has made me glad, and deserves to be fulfilled. When this desire has been satisfied, no other desire will replace it. It is a flower that hides no seed. You may touch my feet with your hands. Then go back to Gokula.” Immediately afterwards, one by one, the gopīs were to hear the words that would stay with them all their lives. They heard Kṛṣṇa say their names and then: “I will be with you every night.” Then, bowing their heads, reluctantly, the gopīs walked off in single file and without looking back returned to the village.

While spying on the gopīs , hidden in the leaves of the nīpa tree, Kṛṣṇa was discovering a higher form of theft, which was his vocation and delight: the theft you commit with your eyes. But was he the inventor of that theft? Or was this gesture the reflection of another? The gopīs had shown him the way, before their dripping bodies became the way itself. One day — Kṛṣṇa was five years old — Yaśodā was holding him in her lap, feeding him something white and creamy. They called it “butter,” but it was curdled milk, the common milk that came from the cows of Vraja. Kṛṣṇa was having his breakfast. The god’s face had the round brightness of the moon, and wore an expression of total absorption, as if the butter dripping on his dark chest were everything there was. In the kitchen, hidden in the shadows, two gopīs were watching the scene. It was a “vision,” daŕsana , and if by vision we mean the surrender of he who looks to that which he sees, then this was the first of all. The substance of the world and the substance of the god mixed together, rising and falling, like the wave of the first beginnings, where all was dissolved and latent. The gopīs felt they were immersed in the god, as one day they would be immersed up to their eyebrows in the Yamunā to escape his gaze.

Another day Kṛṣṇa had climbed on a stool and plunged his hands into a terra-cotta jar full of butter. Motionless in the shadows, two gopīs watched that black creature whose glossy skin overlay the gloom of the dark. Did they glimpse two small, flailing arms? Or were there four? As they watched Kṛṣṇa in the deep silence of the kitchen, they felt liquid and warm, and each in her mind spoke the same words: “Oh, come and steal from me, come and steal me.”

And there was another time when the gopīs got together to watch Kṛṣṇa. Exasperated by the complaints of all those Kṛṣṇa had stolen from, Yaśodā had bound him to the mortar, exposing him to the public gaze. This time the gopīs came openly, and in numbers. The show of morality gave the scene its erotic spicing. Could anyone imagine anything more exciting? To be asked to watch a punishment that offered the witnesses material for pure pleasure: to gaze on the body of a helpless Kṛṣṇa? The gopīs tried to look as stern as they could. Their eyes were greedier than ever: for the first time they saw a Kṛṣṇa who was forced to stay still, not that flashing, darting creature they were used to. Then Kṛṣṇa cried, tied up as he was, and the teardrops that fell on his chest sparkled together with his earrings like golden crocodiles. Yaśodā played prison guard. The gopīs ’ eyes were directed at Kṛṣṇa, but it was Yaśodā they pierced. Never had they felt so jealous of her, handling Kṛṣṇa and bossing him around as if he were a little animal.

The gopīs , about sixteen thousand of them, suffered jealousy for Kṛṣṇa, a jealousy galvanized by three rivals: Yaśodā, the mother; Rādhā, the favorite lover; Muralī, the flute.

What we call “history,” right up to its blazing conclusion, appears between the seventh and tenth “descents,” avatāras , of Viṣṇu. From that moment on, the key players are no longer prodigious animals, like the turtle, Kūrma, and the boar, Varāha, but two men, in succession: Kṛṣṇa and the Buddha. Since then the white horse that will be the harbinger of the end has never appeared, but in the meantime life has swung back and forth between the consequences of Kṛṣṇa and Buddha, the eighth and ninth descents of Viṣṇu. We mull over the deeds of these two as if they were characters in a novel, sharing with them an intimacy we cannot have with the primordial beasts.

It is to Kṛṣṇa that the world owes the extinction of the heroes — and of himself, when he took part in the massacre of Kurukṣetra, the “field of the Kurus,” as counselor and ally of the sons of Pāṇḍu. But in his infancy and adolescence, when he wandered around Vraja like a cowherd surrounded by cow girls, he had already made us a gift that was to be the most precious viaticum for the age of conflict, then about to begin and as yet still with us: the gift of “devotion,” bhakti . In this dark and faltering age, one cannot practice knowledge without oiling it with devotion, without subjecting it to that impetus of the heart which the gopīs unearthed once and for all. At once superior and inferior to every distinct form of knowledge founded in itself, devotion is an ambiguous gift, yet not so ambiguous as that offered by the next aratāra. For the knowledge the Buddha brought has a corrosive quality, which can lead to a dissolution of devotion or to its exaltation in a sparer and more abstract form, of a kind the gopīs hadn’t yet achieved, and perhaps never wanted to.

Kṛṣṇa came down into the world when many possibilities had already been exhausted. Wars no longer took place between gods but between potentates. There were no more ṛṣis , powerful as the wild beasts of the forest, threatening the heavens with the stillness of their minds. Instead there were shabby, shaggy ascetics. The Apsaras no longer sallied forth from their celestial palaces in embroidered robes and sparkling sandals to meet together by wood or riverbank. Instead there were wild-eyed, barefooted girls gathering herbs, quick to theft and flight.

The gopīs knew no discipline. Their days were not arranged around ritual duties. They obeyed only their emotions. They were the first quietists. It was not that they weren’t familiar with the ceremonies or didn’t respect them, just that as soon as they got the chance they ran off to tend the cows. They neither imagined nor desired that their lives should have direction. They thought of the city as a foreign place that you might visit for the market, or to sell butter and buy small trinkets. Every gopī was obedient to a secret vow. They welcomed new arrivals as though into a sorority. But there was no need to explain a doctrine, just as one doesn’t explain what water is. Some didn’t stay the course. They would go back to the village and wander from room to room for a while with gloomy faces. Then they forgot — or pretended to forget. They became part of the family again. Whereas the gopīs belonged to no one, answered to no one.