A story · Krishna Lilas · The Forest Years

Rains and Autumn in Vraja

Bhagavata Purana 10.20 · read aloud in the app

The story · English

When the cowherd boys got home they couldn't keep it in. They told the women everything: the wonderful thing Krishna and Balarāma had done, how the two had brought them out of the forest fire alive, and how the demon Pralamba had been killed. The old cowherds and the gopis listened in amazement, and they came to a quiet conclusion. These were no ordinary boys. They had to be the greatest of the gods, come to live in Vraja. Then the rains set in, the season that brings every living thing to birth. Lightning flickered around the horizon and thunder cracked across the sky. Dense blue-black clouds rolled in and hid the sun and the stars, and the sky glowed dimly through them, the way Brahman, which is pure light, shows dimly through the qualities it takes on.

For eight months the sun had been drinking up the earth's water, and now that its season had come, it began to give it back. Great clouds full of lightning, shaken by fierce winds, let their water go as if out of pity, and that water was life. The earth, worn thin by the heat, filled out again. At nightfall the fireflies glittered in the dark and the planets stayed hidden. The frogs had been silent all through the hot months. Now they heard the thunder and found their voices, like priests who begin their chanting once their morning vows are done. Little streams that had dried to nothing ran wild out of their beds. The ground turned green with new grass and red with tiny indragopa insects, and mushrooms made little umbrellas of shade. The fields filled with crops, and the farmers were glad.

Every creature of water and land shone with new beauty from the fresh water, like people who give themselves to Hari. The sea, swollen by the rivers, heaved in the wind like the mind of a yogi who is not yet ripe. The mountains took the pounding rain without flinching. Paths nobody walked were lost under the grass. The lightning, fickle in its friendship, never stayed long with the clouds. Indra's bow hung stringless in the sky, and the moon, hidden behind clouds lit by its own light, could not shine. The peacocks cried out in delight to welcome the clouds, like weary people at home when devotees of Achyuta come to visit. The trees drank through their roots and filled out. Sārasa cranes kept to the muddy banks, floods broke the dikes, and the clouds, driven by the wind, poured out water like nectar for every living thing.

Krishna went out to play in that rain-soaked forest, heavy with ripe dates and jambu fruit, with Balarāma, the cowherd boys and the cows all around him. The cows walked slowly under their heavy udders, but when he called they hurried to him out of love, milk running from them as they came. He saw the forest creatures glad, trees dripping honey, streams roaring off the hill, caves close by. When the rain poured down he slipped into a hollow tree or a cave and played there, eating roots and fruit. On a rock by the water he ate the curd and rice brought from home, with Balarāma and the boys. Then he sat on the grass and watched the bulls, the calves and the cows lying full, chewing with their eyes closed. He looked at that beauty of the rains, gladdening every creature and grown from his own power, and he honored it.

So Balarāma and Krishna lived on in Vraja, and autumn came, with a cloudless sky, clear water and a gentle wind. Lotuses opened, and the waters settled back into themselves. Autumn took the clouds from the sky, the crush from the creatures, the mud from the ground and the silt from the water, as devotion to Krishna clears away what is wrong in any life. The clouds, having given everything away, shone white, like sages at peace. On the hills some streams ran clear and some ran dry. The creatures of the shallows never noticed their water shrinking, just as a man busy with his family never notices his own life shrinking day by day, until the autumn sun began to burn them. Slowly the ground gave up its mud, and the plants lost their green and ripened.

The sea lay still and silent, like a sage whose mind has come to rest. Farmers held the water in their fields behind strong dikes. By night the moon drew off the heat the autumn sun had left in every creature, as understanding takes away the pain of thinking we are only the body, and as Mukunda took away the ache of the women of Vraja. The cloudless sky glittered with clear stars, and the full moon, its circle unbroken, shone among them the way Krishna, lord of the Yadus, shines in the circle of the Vrishnis. People let the breeze from the flowering forest, neither hot nor cold, wrap around them, and their heat left them. The gopis could not let theirs go. Krishna had stolen their hearts.

Cows, deer, birds and women came into their season, and their mates followed them, as fruit follows work done for the Lord. At sunrise every lotus opened except the kumuda, the night lily, the way a whole kingdom rests without fear under a good king, all except the thieves. In the towns and villages there were harvest rites for the first new grain, and great festivals, and the earth, heavy with ripe crops, shone brighter than ever, most of all because Krishna and Balarāma, the two portions of Hari, were there. Then everyone the rains had kept indoors went out after their business: merchants, sages, kings, and students who had finished their studies, just as the siddhas take up their own bodies again when their time comes.

कथा · हिन्दी

In this book

• Before: The Forest Fire · Bhagavata Purana 10.19
• All of Krishna Lilas · Ask Krishna about it

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