Story 1: Love > Beloved
One fine morning after Lord Krishna had shifted to the newly built city of Dwarka with his fellow Yadavas, the celestial sage Narada came
to visit the lord and his house.
Overwhelmed by the nice and peaceful family with
picture-perfect harmony between the lord’s wives, the sage decided to test, of
all, which wife loved Sri Krishna the most. So he asked for one gift from the
wives, which they obviously could not say no to; being the royal ladies.
Narada had but an intention to only test if the
out-worldly harmony in the house was real and further to know which of Lord’s
wives loved him truly, so he asked the Lord as the gift.
“Ask anything but our beloved please” the wives
pleaded.
“Offer me something of equal weight”, the best bargain
that Narada agrees to offer to the ladies.
Lord was made to sit on one pan of a giant balance, and
on the other was put everything that Satyabhama, the eldest wife had in her
possession like gold, jewelry, gems, etc. But nothing in the world could actually
match up with the creator of all himself, so the more she put lighter the side
became.
Having nothing more to offer she gave up.
The younger one, Rukmini cleared all valuables from the scale and placed a small sprig of Tulsi saying “This sprig symbolizes my love for the lord”, which immediately made the pan sink.
The story can be understood as saying love is truest, purest, and
greatest, only when the love for the beloved is able even to surpass the
beloved. This truth has been the philosophical core of any form of devotion-based form of religious philosophy. From the Rumi of Persia to the Nemai of Bengal, it’s only the love or devotion that could overpower the supreme
beloved or the God, bringing the realization.
Story 2: Place of the lover
Narada
left Dwarka, but with a pinching thought in mind “Is Rukmini’s love even
greater than Radha ?”
The tales of this poor milkmaid’s love for the Lord had
by then become so famous that it actually started being considered as the
epitome.
Though untold, the omniscient lord could know about the
doubt the sage had left with.
A few days later the Lord fell ill; the fever kept rising
and rising and even the best of the treatment could not bring any fruit, with
all the famous practitioners from around the country failing to succeed – the
Lord himself had to give the cure of it.
“Only rubbing of dust on my forehead from the under the
feet of a woman, who truly loves me would cure this”, he said.
The queens protested equivocally saying “The Lord is our
husband, we cannot give the dust of our feet to him to rub on his forehead. The
action itself will generate so much of bad karma, we will rot in hell for
eternity”
The message was sent to Radha, she parted with the dust
with the best of her willingness and hoped that it would cure her beloved.
“Are you not afraid of the consequences” – A curious
Narada descended from heaven to ask.
To which Radha replied, “For the wellbeing of my beloved,
I am ready to suffer anything. Tell him Radha will give whatever he needs and
she won’t ask anything in return”.
This could have been a simple tale of selfless love, had
it not been placed in continuation with the previous story. There might be a
perfect love great enough to have even surpassed the beloved, but greater than
that is oneness, or we may call it the further step in the process. Oneness can
only be achieved when the lover is able to assimilate the “self” she possesses,
into the entity of beloved without a question.
In love, there is nothing called own, even karma, till the time anything would be personal love would remain incomplete. Only when the lover shows the happiest ability to dissolve the sense of 'self' with beloved – divine union happens, they say this very fact is the ultimate truth of God-realization.
Story 3: The power of lover
Narada’s realization about love was still incomplete so God made him witness the next
one.
Once there was a great solar eclipse and as a ritual, all
the members of the royal clans and the commoners from different parts of the
country gathered around the lakes called “Samantapanchaka” to take their
respective holy dips.
Just opposite the grand tents of Yadava royals, stood the
humble camps of the Gwalas, the people of Vrindavana. The wives of Sri Krishna
could not resist taking this opportunity to meet the milkmaid, who once ruled
their husband’s heart and the love stories of whom by then became folklores
known to have been inspiring all those who are in love.
When the queens met Radha, she was nothing like what they
expected. She rather was a very ordinary woman with sunburnt skin in torn
clothes.
Getting to know, who the queens were, Radha welcomed them
courteously and offered them some butter and milk that her beloved loved. The
queens gifted her precious silk and jewelry – she accepted all with utter grace but
distributed them among the children and the other fellow milkmaids.
Completely astonished, the queens asked “But your clothes
are torn and dirty? Why don’t you keep one for yourself too ?”
“They might be torn and dirty” she replied “but they are
the ones which I wore when Sri Krishna held me in his arms, they carry his
fragrance, I can’t leave them even for all the silks in the world”
Love never is or can be with a condition of getting
something out of it or achieving some goal. Love rather is that potion which
gives life to every soul, the expectation out of it can’t be anything
material rather - it can only be love multiplying by itself in lover’s heart, even
in the absence of anything but the thought of the beloved. Love itself is that magic,
which has the power to take one to the state of ultimate realization – as a
Sufi would say.
That all magical, all-powerful love itself is a gift of god absolutely independent of anything else directly or indirectly related. A lover might not union with the beloved, a devotee might not be able to see God, but when the magic of love is realized as the path itself - it has the power to lift up ones living to the ecstatic state.
So, when you are gifted with the magic potion of love, drink it to the heart's content above anything else – that’s in fact all. Now coming to whose Love is greater, it's up to you to decide whom you would want to be a lover like.
~Avirup Chakraborty
0 Comments