Brahmā Mohana

In the Brahma Vaivarta Purāṇa, Brahmā decides to test the child Kṛshṇa in Vṛndāvana. He takes away all the cowherd boys, the calves and the cows. Kṛshṇa answers by making exact copies of every one of them through his yogamāyā. A year goes by, but Brahmā feels it as a moment. When Brahmā comes back, he sees every being in Vṛndāvana as Kṛshṇa. He praises Kṛshṇa in a stotra (a hymn of praise) and surrenders to him. The account is in Chapter 20 of the Śrī Kṛshṇa Janana Khaṇḍa.

Brahmā’s question and the taking of the boys

Brahmā is the maker of the fourteen worlds. He holds the lotus, and he was the first to be born from Vishṇu’s navel. Yet he is held by a question that his great mind cannot settle by thought alone. What is the true nature of this child Kṛshṇa in Vṛndāvana? Is he the Supreme Being, the Ādi-purusha, or is he only a part of the Supreme, an avatāra whose powers have limits? Brahmā decides to test him. He will take away what Kṛshṇa loves and watch what the child does.

One day Kṛshṇa and his friends have taken the calves deep into the Vṛndāvana forest. The boys are resting while the calves graze. Brahmā acts. By his own divine power he gathers every one of the cowherd boys, and all the calves and cows that have wandered into that part of the forest. He hides them in the cave of his own creative space. He does it quietly and without a fight, and then he withdraws to watch from far away.

Kṛshṇa makes the copies

Kṛshṇa sees at once that they are gone. He understands what has happened: Brahmā’s mind has moved through the forest and his friends are missing. He waits a moment. He could call them back with a thought. Instead he chooses to teach Brahmā what no amount of power to create and no cosmic intelligence could teach Brahmā by himself. Kṛshṇa spreads out his yogamāyā.

Out of his own consciousness Kṛshṇa makes exact copies, perfect in every detail, of every missing boy, every missing calf and every missing cow. They are not tricks of the eye or rough likenesses. They are complete in body, memory, character and manner, and even in spiritual identity. The copy of Rāma cannot be told from the real Rāma. The copy calves have the same markings and the same playful energy. Kṛshṇa makes himself many through yogamāyā, into all these forms at once, and plays the part of each boy and each animal. He herds the calves, laughs with the “other” boys, runs through the forest, and goes back each day to each boy’s home.

A year that passes like a day

By human reckoning this goes on for a whole year. The copy boys go home each evening, eat with their families, sleep in their own beds, greet their mothers and play with their brothers and sisters. They do everything the real boys would have done. Their mothers love them without any doubt. Their friends play with them and feel no difference. Even the small habits are copied exactly: the way one boy stammers when he is excited, the way another always takes the best piece of fruit at meals.

Yet a faint feeling that no one can explain begins to rise in the homes of Vṛndāvana. The mothers find that they love their sons even more than before, as if something in these boys is deeper, more worthy of love and more divine. Some of the gopikās who see the boys in the street feel tears come up for no reason, tears that feel like the edge of bhakti. None of them can say why, and none of them guess the truth. Something in the nearness of Kṛshṇa himself, even hidden and playing as each boy, raises the love of all who are near.

For Brahmā this whole year passes as one moment. The pace of time for a being of Brahmā’s size is so vast that a human year is like the blink of his eye. He has been watching and waiting to see Kṛshṇa upset or confused at the loss of his companions.

Brahmā’s puzzlement and samādhi

Brahmā comes back to Vṛndāvana after what feels to him like a short time. He arrives at Bhāṇḍīravana, expecting to find the place thrown into disorder, a child lost and the village disturbed. Instead he finds everything quite normal. The boys are playing. The cows are grazing. Kṛshṇa is among them, laughing. Nothing is out of place. He tries to understand whether these are the same boys he took. He looks more carefully and cannot tell. From outside, the copies and the originals, or rather Kṛshṇa himself showing as the copies, look just the same.

Brahmā enters deep samādhi to use his inner sight. In that samādhi he sees what the outer eye cannot see. Each cowherd boy he looks at changes in his inner vision. Each boy now appears as a four-armed Vishṇu, with Śrīvatsa on the chest, the Kaustubha gem shining at the throat, dressed in pītāmbara (yellow silk), and holding the śaṅkha (conch), cakra (disc), gadā (mace) and padma (lotus). Every calf too appears as a four-armed divine form. So does every cow, and even the trees of the forest. Brahmā opens his eyes in shock, and the vision goes on. In the outer world too he sees the same: everywhere in Vṛndāvana, every being appears as Kṛshṇa.

He looks for himself, to find the one who watches apart from all this. He cannot find a “Brahmā” who is not also Kṛshṇa. His own body and his own awareness appear to him as another form of Kṛshṇa. The creator, who thought he was testing the child, has himself been drawn into what the child is.

Brahmā’s vision through the cakras

Brahmā does an intense inner yoga to understand what he is seeing. The text describes his meditation through the six cakras. He rises from Mūlādhāra at the base of the spine, through Svādhishṭhāna, Maṇipūra, Anāhata and Viśuddha, to Ājñā, and the prāṇa-vāyu (life wind) is carefully led through each centre. At the top of this meditation, in the light of the sahasrāra, Brahmā sees the daśākshara mantra, the ten-syllable mantra of Kṛshṇa, fully shown as a bright light. In the middle of that light he sees the two-armed form of Kṛshṇa himself. It is not the four-armed form but the near and personal form, the young cowherd with his flute.

Brahmā’s stotra

Brahmā comes out of samādhi changed. What comes from him now is not the calm speech of a cosmic creator but the shaking words of one who has seen beyond the limits of his own greatness. In his stotra:

• He praises Kṛshṇa as sarvavyāpaka, the all-pervader, who is present in every atom of the shown universe and also beyond it.
• He says that Kṛshṇa was before the unshown pradhāna (primal matter), and before the rise of the guṇas (sattva, rajas and tamas), which are the building parts of all that Brahmā himself makes.
• He says that the Vedas, though they are the highest means people have of coming near to truth, cannot fully hold or describe Kṛshṇa. He is always a little beyond the farthest reach of Vedic speech.
• He praises Rādhā and Kṛshṇa together as the one reality that holds both śakti and śaktimān in an eternal embrace in the rāsa. The feminine and masculine principles of the divine are never apart. They only seem two for the sake of the love that flows between them.
• He says that his own work of making all fourteen worlds is only a ripple in the ocean of Kṛshṇa’s creative awareness.

He weeps. He bows down again and again, his four-headed form touching the ground before the cowherd child.

Restoration and return

After this complete surrender Brahmā sets free the real cowherd boys, calves and cows from the place where he has kept them. At the same moment Kṛshṇa draws back the yogamāyā that had held up the copy forms, and they melt back into his consciousness. The real boys return to the Vṛndāvana forest. Kṛshṇa greets them warmly and leads them all home together as the sun begins to set. Brahmā walks around Kṛshṇa, offers namaskāra, and goes back to his own world, a changed being.

The last wonder of the māyā is this. Because Kṛshṇa keeps up his māyā, the cowherd boys feel the whole year as a single day. When they reach home that evening, their mothers ask where they have been and what mischief kept them so late. The boys tell of their day’s doings in the forest. These were in truth the doings of the copy forms, but the boys feel them as their own memories. Not one of them knows that a year has passed, that Brahmā came and took them away, or that Brahmā himself was overcome by the sight of what Kṛshṇa truly is.

Sources

• Brahma Vaivarta Purāṇa, Śrī Kṛshṇa Janana Khaṇḍa, Chapter 20