Govardhana Līlā
By Swāmī Śrī Bhaktivedānta Tripurāri, excerpted from Circle of Friends.
The Bhāgavata informs us that one year during preparation for this Indra yajña, all of the household assistants in Nanda’s house were engaged, leaving Yaśodārāṇī home alone with her mischievous child. Earlier the same year, during his mid-kumāra-līlā, Kṛṣṇa had often stolen butter from Nanda’s neighbors, feeding it to monkeys and creating a disturbance with other young children his age. Thus, Yaśodā had questioned Nanda’s animal husbandry. Why was her child stealing butter and yogurt from others’ homes? Was Nanda’s milk not sweet enough? With no sense of the allure of forbidden fruit to children, she had blamed her husband, who in turn had prepared special graṣes for a select group of cows to remedy the situation.
On this day during the preparations for Indra’s sacrifice, Yaśodā was home alone with her child, nursing him while at the same time boiling milk derived from Nanda’s select group of cows to make milk sweets for her son. However, as Yaśodā was nursing Bala Kṛṣṇa, the milk on the stove began to boil over. With no one there to assist her, she had to choose between suddenly setting Kṛṣṇa down and tending to the milk or letting the milk boil over and continuing to nurse baby Kṛṣṇa. Using her spiritual intelligence, she chose to tend to that which was being prepared for Kṛṣṇa from special grasses and special cows with special attention from Nanda and herself rather than to tend directly to Kṛṣṇa himself, at least for the moment. But despite all that went into her decision, Kṛṣṇa objected and accidentally broke a butter pot in the process. Then, fearing her rebuke, he ran away as she chased him out of fear of losing him altogether. Catching him, she then tied him to a grinding mortar. This in turn traumatized the child, and now in his seventh year, he realized that his childhood trauma was in part caused by Indra with his sacrificial demands. This, together with theological concerns regarding the value of the Indra yajña in the face of uttama-bhakti directed toward himself, the God of gods, caused him to take exception to this year’s preparations for the celestial sacrifice. Thus, he recommended that the entire community’s energy be diverted from the worship of Indra to the worship of Mount Govardhana, who readily supplied the cows’, and thereby the cowherds’, needs.
Convincing Nanda primarily with his charm and secondarily with his philosophical acumen, Kṛṣṇa directed that Govardhana pūjā be performed with considerable pomp and festivity. However, Indra’s pride got the best of him and he showered Vraja with torrential rains, to which Kṛṣṇa responded by lifting the mountain with the smallest finger on his left hand, creating a huge umbrella under which all of the residents of Vraja took shelter. And in the midst of this, Hari showed Mount Govardhana to be nondifferent from himself.
Although the supremacy of Kṛṣṇa is central to this līlā, the reaction of the Vraja vāsīs, especially that of Kṛṣṇa’s cowherd friends, is more important to those of fine theistic intelligence. The Bhāgavata employs majestic descriptions of Kṛṣṇa in Vraja primarily for the purpose of showcasing how his devotees react to such majesty, for their reaction shows the measure of their prema. For example, the Bhāgavata describes how Kṛṣṇa lifted Mount Govardhana, yet this majestic description serves essentially as a background to illustrate the intimate love of his friends, who felt he required their help to lift the mountain. Seeing themselves as his equals, Kṛṣṇa’s friends hoisted up their herding sticks to assist Kṛṣṇa in holding the king of mountains. Śrī Rūpa cites the following verse as an example of the cowherd boys’ affection for Govinda during the Govardhana līlā:
You have endured seven nights on your feet without sleep, holding the hill. Surely you are tired. Our minds are disturbed seeing you in this condition. Dear friend, toss the mountain to Śrīdāmā, or at least place it in your right hand. Then we can massage your left hand.1
Thus, Kṛṣṇa’s display of majesty was no match for his friends’ sakhya-prema, and from this it is clear that the Bhāgavata, properly understood, is not about the power of God but rather his weakness in the face of love. In this līlā, Kṛṣṇa’s power could not interfere with his friends’ sense of intimacy and equality with him. Indeed, it only furthered their sense of intimacy, and this was only more evident after Indra came to his senses and apologized.
- Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu 3.3.18. This is an example of sneha generated by the thought of Kṛṣṇa as an equal. [↩]
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