In the cattle-village of Vrindavana there lived a cowherd named Damodara who could not read a single word. While the learned men in the nearby town argued about the scriptures, Damodara spent his days exactly as his father had: walking the cows out to graze at sunrise, sitting under a tree at noon, bringing them home in the golden dust of evening.

He had no learning. But he had something else. All day, as he walked behind the slow brown backs of the cattle, he kept Krishna in his heart. Not as a hard lesson to be studied — as a friend he loved. He would whisper to him while the cows drank at the river. He would offer him, in his mind, the first ripe figs before he ate any himself. When the evening flute floated across the fields, his eyes filled, every single time, as though he had heard it for the first time.

One evening, sitting under his tree while the cows rested, Damodara was suddenly very still. Something opened inside him. He could not have explained it in words, because he had no fancy words. But all at once he understood — clearly, calmly, the way you suddenly understand a riddle you've puzzled over for years — what all those learned men were straining to reach. He saw that the one he loved was the source of everything, and that the same Self lived in the cows, and the river, and the figs, and his own quiet heart.

He had not gone looking for this understanding. He could not have read his way to it. It had simply been given.

For that is what Krishna promises here. To the ones who stay close to him and love him truly, he does not wait to be deserved. He gives, out of his own kindness, the inner light of understanding — buddhi-yoga — and by that light the loving heart finds the way home. The scholars climbed toward the truth on ladders of words. The cowherd was lifted to it on the strength of his love.

The next morning Damodara took the cows out as always. But now he walked as one who knew where the path led.