In Gokul the butter was churned fresh each morning, and by evening it had a way of disappearing. The mothers hung their pots from the rafters, out of reach of any child; the pots were emptied all the same. They made a rope ladder of their own children, they said, one boy standing on another, and the smallest and darkest of them always at the top with his hand in the pot and his face already smeared.

They came in a delegation to Yashoda to complain, and Krishna stood beside his mother with butter on his chin and denied everything, so charmingly that the complaining mothers found themselves laughing instead. Once, when she tied him to a heavy grinding mortar to keep him still, he dragged it between two arjuna trees until they fell, and two cursed sons of Kubera were released from those trunks and stood free.

And once, when the other boys ran to Yashoda saying that Krishna had eaten mud, she opened his mouth to scold him and saw inside it the sun and the moon, the oceans, the mountains, all the worlds turning; and she shut her eyes, and when she opened them there was only her son, and she picked him up and carried him inside.

The Moral

The butter thief is the tradition’s gentlest doctrine. God, it says, does not only arrive as thunder and law; he arrives as a child who steals what is sweetest and cannot be stayed angry at. Yashoda, who was given a glimpse of the whole universe in his mouth, chose to keep loving him as her boy rather than worship him as the infinite. That choice is bhakti itself: to hold the vast as something near, and dear, and yours.

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