Chapter 11 · Verse 37

Arjuna's hymn flowed on, and as he sang, his eyes searched the great blazing form for something he could recognise. And there, far up in the light, seated upon a lotus that grew from the depths of the vision, he saw a figure he had heard of in every temple story.

Brahma. The four-faced creator. The one the priests called the maker of all worlds, the grandfather of every living thing.

But here was the astonishing part. Brahma was not at the top of the vision. Brahma was inside it — small within the vast form, his lotus rooted in Krishna's own being, his four faces turned upward in worship.

Arjuna had grown up thinking the creator was the highest of all. Now he saw the creator himself bowing.

"How could they not bow to you?" Arjuna sang, his folded hands trembling with wonder. "O Great Soul — you are greater even than Brahma. Brahma made the worlds, but you made Brahma. You are the first maker, the one before the first. How could anyone refuse to honour you?"

He looked deeper into the form, and words tumbled out, each one reaching for something too large to hold. "Endless One — I cannot find your edge. Lord of all the gods — they live inside you. Home of every world — the whole universe rests in you the way a sleeping child rests in its mother's arms."

And then Arjuna said the strangest, truest thing of all. "You are the imperishable — the one thing that never breaks, never wears away, never ends. You are everything that exists. And you are everything that does not yet exist. And somehow you are even beyond both of those, beyond being and not-being, in a place words cannot follow."

He fell silent for a moment, his mind spinning. He had asked to see Krishna's form, never guessing it would turn the whole world upside down. The maker was not the highest. The friend holding his chariot reins was.