4.7 — Leaving Vrindavan: The Departure He Never Reversed

Akrura arrives from Mathura with a chariot and an invitation to the wrestling festival. Everyone in Braj knows it is a trap (4.2).

Krishna and Balarama get in.

The village follows the chariot down the road. The gopis stand in front of it. Yashoda holds on. Nanda goes with them and then has to come back alone. The text spends a long time on the leaving and almost no time on the journey.

He is about sixteen. He lives another seventy years or so, across a war, a city, an empire's worth of politics, and the destruction of his own clan.

He never goes back.

Why the tradition cannot let this go

The Braj material returns to it constantly. Whole genres of Indian poetry exist about it. The gopis waiting. Yashoda asking travellers for news. Uddhava's mission (4.6) — Krishna sends his closest friend with a philosophical message about how the divine is everywhere and therefore he has not really left, and the gopis take it apart with such force that Uddhava returns transformed.

Nobody in the tradition accepts the philosophical answer, and the tradition itself is the one that supplies the rejection. That is remarkable and it should be noticed. The devotional literature has the option of resolving this and refuses to.

The reading

Grounded, this is simply what happens.

A young man from a village goes to the city for what everyone expects to be a short trip. The situation there turns out to be enormous — a tyrant killed, a kingdom restored, a war with Jarasandha, an exodus, a city founded, decades of politics. He never has a moment when going back makes sense, and by the time there is one, thirty years have passed and the people he would be going back to have grown old or died.

Every person reading this knows somebody this happened to, and a fair number of you are that person.

The tradition's refusal to resolve it is what makes the story valuable, because the honest fact about leaving is that it is usually permanent and usually not decided.

What it teaches, properly

Three things, and the second is the hard one.

The good thing does not wait for you to be finished with it

He did not choose between Vrindavan and Mathura. He went to Mathura for an afternoon. The choice was made by events, and it became irreversible while he was busy.

Almost every major transition in a life works this way. You do not decide to stop being close to your childhood friends. You take a job in another city, intending to visit. The severing is done by accumulation, not by decision, and the moment it becomes permanent passes without being noticed.

The practical form is narrow and it is worth acting on: things that are ending do not announce it. The last time you carry your child. The last conversation with someone who then declines. The last ordinary evening in a house you are about to leave. If you want any of it, the only working strategy is to treat the current ordinary thing as though it might be the last instance, not because that is morbid but because it is statistically accurate and nobody rings a bell.

Non-attachment is not the absence of feeling

This is the most misunderstood idea in the whole of Indian thought, and this chapter is where it can be seen rather than defined.

The false version: the enlightened person does not mind. They have transcended attachment, they leave without pain, and the leaving costs them nothing.

Krishna is not that. The texts do not show him unmoved. He sends Uddhava, which is the act of a man who cannot stop thinking about people he left. He asks about them. In one late scene he meets Radha again — in some traditions only once, briefly, decades later — and there is nothing serene about it.

The real version, which the Gita states in 5.3 and which this chapter demonstrates: non-attachment is acting rightly without requiring that the outcome be the one you want. He goes because going is correct. He does not stop loving Vrindavan, and he does not go back, and he carries both for seventy years.

The distinction is enormous. The false version produces a person who has anaesthetised themselves and calls it wisdom. The real version produces a person who feels everything at full strength and acts anyway.

And there is a plain test. If your non-attachment has made you feel less, it is suppression. If it has left the feeling intact and removed the demand that reality comply, it is the real thing. Volume VI reaches the same distinction from the psychological side, and calls the fake version avoidance.

What you left is not owed an explanation, and will want one anyway

Uddhava's mission fails. He brings a good argument — the divine is omnipresent, therefore Krishna has not left, therefore your grief is a misunderstanding — and the gopis reject it entirely. They say, in effect: we are not confused, we know exactly what has happened, and your explanation does not touch it.

This is one of the sharpest things in the tradition, and it is a warning to anyone who has ever tried to explain a departure.

An explanation addresses the reasons. Grief is not about the reasons. The person you left is not confused about why you left. They mind that you are not there, and a correct account of your reasoning is experienced as a second injury, because it asks them to agree that their loss was appropriate.

What actually helps is the opposite of an argument. Presence, contact, and the acknowledgement that the thing they lost was real and that they were right to mind. Uddhava eventually learns this, and the tradition says he came back wanting to be a blade of grass in Vrindavan.

Nanda and Yashoda

The hardest part, and the one usually skipped.

They raised him. Not knowing at first that he was not theirs, then knowing and continuing. They hid him under a death sentence for over a decade (4.5). And then a chariot came from the city and he got in it.

Yashoda is not his mother by birth and she is his mother by every other measure, and the tradition is completely clear about that — she is the one who scolded him, fed him, tied him to the grinding stone, and worried. Devaki bore him and Yashoda raised him, and the devotional literature honours Yashoda far more.

And she never sees him again as her son. He becomes a great figure elsewhere. She hears about it.

There is no comfortable reading of this, and the tradition does not offer one. What it offers instead is that it remembers her, at enormous length, in the most tender literature it produced. The person who raises somebody and is then left behind is one of the most common figures in human life and one of the least celebrated, and this tradition made her central.

If you are that person, that is the acknowledgement on offer, and it is worth something. If you are the one who left, the practical instruction is short: go back once, deliberately, before the question becomes theoretical. Krishna did not, and a thousand years of poets have been unable to forgive it.

What to carry from this page

Treat the ordinary current instance as though it might be the last one, because the last one does not identify itself.

Non-attachment that has reduced your feeling is suppression. The real thing leaves the feeling and removes the demand.

Do not answer grief with an explanation. They are not confused. Answer it with presence, and with agreeing that what they lost was real.

And go back once. Not to stay. Once, on purpose, while it is still possible.

Next: 4.8 — Mathura is unholdable, a superior enemy attacks seventeen times, and Krishna does the thing that earns him an insulting nickname he keeps for the rest of his life.