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TRANSLATION
All glories to this Personality of Godhead known as the son of Srimati
Devaki devi! All glories to Lord Sri Krishna, the brilliant light of
the Vrishni dynasty! All glories to the Personality of Godhead, the hue
of whose soft body resembles the blackish color of a new cloud! All
glories to Lord Mukunda, who removes the burdens of the earth!
PURPORT
The theme of this verse is that the Supreme Truth is the Supreme
Person. That the Lord's bodily texture and color are described
indicates that He is a person, for the impersonal Brahman cannot have a
body that is as soft as anything or whose hue is visualized. The
Personality of Godhead appeared as the son of Vasudeva and Devaki
because for a very long time they performed severe austerities to have
the Supreme Lord as their son. Satisfied by their penance and
determination, the Lord agreed to become their son.
From the
description of the Lord's birth in the Srimad-Bhagavatam,
we learn that the Lord appeared before Vasudeva and Devaki as Narayana,
with four hands. But when they prayed to Him to conceal His divinity,
the Lord became a small baby with two hands. In the Bhagavad-gita
(4.9) the Lord promises that one who simply understands the mysteries
of His transcendental birth and deeds will be liberated from the
clutches of Maya and go back to Godhead. Therefore there is a gulf of
difference between the birth of Krishna and that of an ordinary child.
One may ask,
Since the Supreme Lord is the original father of all
living entities, how could a lady known as Devaki give birth to Him as
her son? The answer is that Devaki no more gave birth to the Lord than
the eastern horizon gives birth to the sun. The sun rises on the
eastern horizon and sets below the western horizon, but actually the
sun neither rises nor sets. The sun is always in its fixed position in
the sky, but the earth is revolving, and due to the different positions
of the revolving earth, the sun appears to be rising or setting. In the
same way, the Lord always exists, but for His pastimes as a human being
He seems to take birth like an ordinary child.
In His
impersonal feature (Brahman) the Supreme Lord is everywhere,
inside and outside: as the Supersoul (Paramatma) He is inside
everything, from the gigantic universal form down to the atoms and
electrons; and as the Supreme Personality of Godhead (Bhagavan) He
sustains everything with His energies. (We have already described this
feature of the Lord in the purport to the previous verse, in connection
with the name Jagan-nivasa.) Therefore in each of His three
features—Brahman, Paramatma, and Bhagavan—the Lord is present
everywhere in the material world. Yet He remains aloof, busy with His
transcendental pastimes in His supreme abode.
Those with a
poor fund of knowledge cannot accept the idea that the
Lord appears in person on the face of the earth. Because they are not
conversant with the intricacies of the Lord's transcendental position,
whenever such people hear about the appearance of the Lord, they take
Him to be either a superhuman being born with a material body or a
historical personality worshiped as God under the influence of
anthropomorphism or zoomorphism. But the Lord is not the plaything of
such fools. He is what He is and does not agree to be a subject of
their speculations, which perpetually lead them to conclude that His
impersonal feature is supreme. The supreme feature of the Absolute
Truth is personal—the Supreme Personality of Godhead. The impersonal
Brahman is His effulgence, like the light diffused by a powerful fire.
The fire burns in one place but diffuses its warmth and light all
round, thus exhibiting its different energies. Similarly, by means of
His variegated energies the Supreme Lord expands Himself in many ways.
Persons with
a poor fund of knowledge are captivated by one part of His
energy and therefore fail to penetrate into the original source of the
energy. Whatever astounding energies we see manifest in this world,
including atomic and nuclear energies, are all part and parcel of His
material, or external, energy. Superior to this material energy,
however, is the Lord's marginal energy, exhibited as the living being.
Besides these energies, the Supreme Lord has another energy, which is
known as the internal energy. The marginal energy can take shelter of
either the internal energy or the external energy, but factually it
belongs to the Lord's internal energy. The living beings are therefore
infinitesimal samples of the Supreme Lord. Qualitatively the living
being and the Supreme Lord are equal, but quantitatively they are
different, for the Lord is unlimitedly potent whereas the living
entities, being infinitesimal by nature, have limited potency.
Although the
Lord is full with all energies and is thus
self-sufficient, He enjoys transcendental pleasure by subordinating
Himself to His unalloyed devotees. Some great devotees of the Lord
cannot surpass the boundary of awe and veneration. But other devotees
are in such an intense compact of love with the Lord that they forget
His exalted position and regard themselves as His equals or even His
superiors. These eternal associates of the Lord relate with Him in the
higher statuses of friendship, parenthood, and consorthood. Devotees in
a transcendental parental relationship with the Lord think of Him as
their dependent child. They forget His exalted position and think that
unless they properly feed Him He will fall victim to undernourishment
and His health will deteriorate. Devotees in a conjugal relationship
with the Lord rebuke Him to correct His behavior, and the Lord enjoys
those rebukes more than the prayers of the Vedas.
Ordinary devotees bound up by the formalities of Vedic rites cannot
enter deep into such confidential loving service to the Lord, and thus
their realization remains imperfect. Sometimes they even fall victim to
the calamity of impersonalism.
Vasudeva and
Devaki are confidential devotees of the Lord in the mood
of parental love. Even greater than them are Nanda and Yashoda, His
foster parents in Vrindavana. The Lord takes great pleasure in being
addressed as Devaki-nandana ("the son of Devaki"), Nanda-nandana ("the
son of Nanda"), Yashoda-nandana ("the son of Yashoda"), Dasharathi
("the son of King Dasharatha"), Janaki-natha ("the husband of Janaki"),
and so on. The pleasure one gives the Lord by addressing Him by such
names is many, many times greater than the pleasure He enjoys when He
is addressed as the Supreme Father, the Greatest of the Great,
Parameshvara, or anything of that nature, which indicate volumes of awe
and veneration. Therefore the names King Kulashekhara uses to glorify
the Lord in this verse indicate his intimate transcendental
relationship with the Lord.
As explained
above, all the names of the Lord are as powerful as the
Lord Himself, but one can experience different transcendental mellows
by chanting His different transcendental names. For example, the shastra
(scripture) states that there are one thousand principal names of Lord
Vishnu, the Personality of Godhead. But if a person utters the name
Rama only once, he gets the result of chanting one thousand names of
Vishnu. And if somebody once chants the name Krishna, he achieves the
results obtained by chanting the name Rama three times. In other words,
uttering the name Krishna once is equal to uttering three thousand
other names of Vishnu.
Therefore
King Kulashekhara, knowing how pleased the Lord is to be
addressed by a name indicating His transcendental relationships with
His intimate devotees, and knowing also the potency of the name
Krishna, has chosen to glorify the Lord by addressing Him as
Devaki-nandana and Krishna. The king also addresses Him as
Vrishni-vamsa-pradipa ("the brilliant light in the Vrishni dynasty")
because millions of generations of the Vrishni dynasty became
sanctified by the Lord's appearance within it. The shastras
state that a family in which a pure devotee is born is sanctified for
one hundred generations of ancestors and descendants. And the shastras
also state that every place within a radius of one hundred miles from
where a devotee is born becomes sanctified.
If a devotee
can sanctify the place and family of his birth so extraordinarily, then
what to speak of how completely the Lord can sanctify the place and
family in which He chooses to take His birth.
The Lord's
birth on the face of the earth is certainly very mysterious,
and therefore it is difficult for ordinary men to believe in His birth.
How can the all-powerful Lord take birth, seemingly like an ordinary
man? The matter is explained in the Bhagavad-gita (4.6),
where the Lord says,
ajo 'pi sann avyayatma bhutanam ishvaro
'pi san
prakritim svam adhisthaya sambhavamy atma-mayaya
"Although I am unborn and My transcendental
body never deteriorates, and although I am the Lord of all living
entities, by My transcendental potency I still appear in every
millennium in My original transcendental form."
From the shastra we learn that the Lord takes birth not only in
the family of human beings but also in the families of demigods,
aquatics, animals, and so on. One may argue that an ordinary living
being is eternal and unborn like the Lord and also takes birth in
different species of life, and so there is no difference between the
Lord and an ordinary living being. The difference is, however, that
while an ordinary living being changes his body when he transmigrates
from one species of life to another, the Lord never changes His body:
He appears in His original body, without any change. Also, while there
is a vast difference between the ordinary living entity and his body,
there is no difference between the Lord and His body because He is pure
spirit. In other words, there is no distinction between His body and
His soul.
The word
avyayatma in the above verse from the Bhagavad-gita
clearly indicates that the Lord's body is not made of material
elements. He is all spirit. Birth and death apply only to the material
body. The body of the ordinary living being is made of material
elements and is therefore subject to birth and death. But the Lord's
body, being all spiritual and thus eternal, neither takes birth nor
dies. Nor can the Lord be forced to take birth in some particular
family due to His past deeds, as an ordinary living being is.
The Lord is
the supreme controller of the material elements, and being
endless and beginningless, He exists in all times—past, present, and
future. And because He is absolute, He has nothing to do with vice and
virtue. In other words, for Him "vices" and "virtues" are one and the
same; otherwise the Lord would not be the Absolute Truth.
Since the
Lord appears by His internal potency, His incarnations in
different species of life are not the creation of the external potency,
Maya. Therefore those who think that the Supreme Lord appears in
different forms by accepting a body made of material elements are
wrong; their vision is imperfect because they do not understand how the
Lord's internal potency works. The Vedas inquire, Where
does the Supreme Lord stand? And the reply is immediately given: He
stands on His internal potency. So the conclusion is that although the
Lord may seem to assume a material body when He takes birth, like an
ordinary being, in fact He does not, for there is no difference between
Him and His body. Thus He remains the Absolute Truth in all His
appearances in different species of life.
In other
words, the living being and the Supreme Lord appear in this
material world under different circumstances. One can easily understand
these different circumstances if one understands how the Lord's
different potencies work. As explained before, the Lord has three kinds
of potency, namely, internal, marginal, and external. We have wide
experience of the external, or material, potency, but we generally fail
to inquire about the actions and reactions of the other two potencies.
A simple example will help us understand how the Lord's potencies work.
Consider three identities: God, a man, and a doll. The doll consists of
material energy, the man is a combination of material and spiritual
energy, and God consists wholly of spiritual energy. The doll is all
matter, internally and externally. Man is externally matter but
internally spirit. And God is all spirit, both internally and
externally. As the doll is all matter, so God is all spirit. But the
man is half spirit and half matter.
Thus the body
of God and the body of a living being are differently
constituted. Because the Lord's body is pure spirit, it never
deteriorates, and therefore He is called avyayatma. His body is
absolute, beginningless, unborn, and eternal, while the material body
of the living being is relative and therefore temporary—it undergoes
birth and death. The living being himself, of course, is eternal, and
if He so desires he can realize his eternality by merging into the body
of the Absolute Truth or being reinstated in his constitutional
position as an eternal servant of the Lord. If he does not do so, then
his eternality is still maintained, but he remains ignorant of it.
The
conclusion is that the Personality of Godhead appears in His
original body, without any change, and this is made possible by His
inconceivable potency. We should always remember that nothing is
impossible for the omnipotent Lord. If He so desires, He can transform
material energy into spiritual energy. Indeed, if he so desires He can
bring the entire spiritual nature within the material nature, without
the spiritual nature being affected by the material modes in any way.
The Lord's
different potencies remain tightly under His control. In
fact, the Lord actually has only one potency—namely, the internal
potency—which He employs for different purposes. The situation is
similar to how one uses electricity. The same electricity can be used
for both heating and cooling. Such contradictory results are due to the
expert handling of a technician. In the same way, by His supreme will
the Lord employs His one internal potency to accomplish many different
purposes. That is the information we get from the shrutis (Shvetashvatara
Upanishad 6.8): parasya shaktir vividhaiva shruyate
[
Chaitanya-charitamrita Madhya 13.65, purport].
The present
verse of the Mukunda-mala-stotra states that
the color of the Lord's body is blackish, like that of a new cloud.
Also, His body is very soft. Softness of the body is a sign of a great
personality. The shastras state that the following bodily
features indicate a great personality: a reddish luster in seven
places—the eyes, the palms, the soles, the palate, the lips, the
tongue, and the nails; broadness in three places—the waist, the
forehead, and the chest; shortness in three places—the neck, the
thighs, and the genitals; deepness in three places—the voice, the
intelligence, and the navel; highness in five places—the nose, the
arms, the ears, the forehead, and the thighs; and fineness in five
places—the skin, the hair on the head, the bodily hair, the teeth, and
the fingertips. A
The Brahma-samhita
confirms that the color the Lord's body is blackish, like that of a new
cloud. But this blackish color is so beautiful that it surpasses the
beauty of millions of Cupids. So this blackish color does not
correspond to any blackish color in the material world.
Such descriptions of the Lord's
body are not imaginary; rather, they
are the statements of those who have seen the Lord with their
supernatural vision. This supernatural vision is bestowed upon devotees
like Brahma and upon those who follow the footsteps of pure devotees
like him. But upstarts and unbelievers cannot have any access to this
transcendental vision, for they lack the required submission to the
will of the Lord.