Uddhava's Message

Krishna had not been in Vrindavan for many years. He had left as a boy to go to Mathura, and from Mathura to Dwarka, and Dwarka had grown around him until he was a king with cities and queens and councils. But the gopis of Vrindavan — the cowherd women who had grown up beside him, who had carried curds on their heads and run barefoot beside his flute — had never stopped waiting for him to come back.

They did not say so. They went on with their lives. They milked the cows. They washed their saris in the Yamuna. They sang the old songs in the evenings under the kadamba trees. But anyone who looked closely saw that a part of each of them lived a little further away than their bodies — somewhere down a forest path that Krishna had once walked.

Krishna knew. Of course he knew. One evening in Dwarka he called his closest friend, Uddhava — a scholar, a thinker, a man of clear philosophy. He said, My friend, the gopis are still grieving for me. Go to Vrindavan. Take them my teaching. Tell them that the self is one, that there is no separation, that I am inside them already and they need not weep. Uddhava bowed. He took his chariot. He rode out at dawn.

He arrived in Vrindavan in the cool of the afternoon. The women came out to meet him. They saw the chariot, and they saw who was not in it, and a small quiet settled over the lane that was sadder than weeping. They led Uddhava to a place beside the river and sat down around him.

Uddhava cleared his throat. He had prepared his words on the road. He spoke about the formless. He spoke about the soul that does not come and does not go. He spoke about the foolishness of grieving for a body when the truth is beyond all bodies. The gopis listened. They did not interrupt. They watched his face the way one watches a child reciting a lesson.

When he had finished, an older gopi spoke. She did not argue. She said only, Uddhava, you are kind to have come so far. Tell us — does the bee that has tasted the lotus argue with the lotus about whether the lotus exists? She smiled. The other women smiled. A little wind moved through the kadamba trees.

Uddhava sat very still. He had come with a teaching. He left with a teaching he had not expected to receive. He stayed in Vrindavan for many days, longer than Krishna had asked him to. He walked the paths Krishna had walked. He sat where the gopis sat. He stopped speaking about the formless. He began, slowly, to weep. And in the weeping he understood, for the first time, what Krishna had really sent him to learn.

You are at the edge of a long week. The small body in you has its own kind of waiting going on — listening, growing, missing nothing. Tonight, do not give the people you love a teaching. Sit beside them the way Uddhava finally sat beside the gopis — without your prepared sentences. The deepest love is not a message we deliver. It is the way we let ourselves stay near.