He vanishes. They look for him. They ask the trees, which does not work.
And then a group of grown women in a forest at night begin acting out his childhood, casting themselves in every part.
"One pretended to be Putana, while another pretended to be Krishna and sucked at her breast. One pretended to be a child and cried, while kicking another who was pretending to be the cart. One acted as the daitya and carried away another, who was enacting the role of the infant Krishna."1
It goes on. Someone kills Vatsa. Someone kills Baka. Someone calls in the cows. Someone plays the flute while the others praise her.
And then the line the episode is named for:
"One placed her hand on another one's shoulder and walked. With her mind on him, she said, 'I am Krishna. Behold my graceful gait.'"1
Not I love him. Not I remember him. I am Krishna. Look at how I walk.
Go through the roster and something becomes visible.
Pūtanā at the breast. The cart. The daitya carrying off the infant. Vatsa. Baka. The serpent underfoot. The forest fire. The storm and the lifted hill.
Every single one is an episode in which he saved somebody. They do not re-enact the flute-playing idylls or the games in the pasture. They re-enact the rescues.
And they take his side of them:
"One sought to raise her upper garment with her hand and said, 'Do not be scared of the storm and the rain. I have arranged for you to be saved.'"1
"Another said, 'O gopas! Look at this fierce forest conflagration. Quickly close your eyes. I will easily arrange for your safety.'"1
⚑ The women who have just lost their protector spend the night performing the protector, reassuring each other in his voice, in scenes where the danger is imaginary and the rescue is theirs to give.
There is a strange one at the end of the list:
"One tied another to a mortar with a garland of flowers. The one who had been tied covered her beautiful eyes with her hands and pretended to be afraid."1
The mortar-binding is Yaśodā's episode, from Volume 2 — the rope that stays two fingers short, God tied up by a woman and staying tied.
So the last thing they enact is not a rescue. It is the one scene in the corpus where he is helpless and held, and the woman playing him covers her eyes and plays frightened.
⚠ The volume does not mark this as different from the others, and no claim is made here that it intends anything by the placement. What can be said is that the sequence runs through eight scenes of him saving people and ends with the scene of him being bound, played for fear.
The doctrinal reading available for this is identification, and the text seems to invite it: "They took themselves to be him", "the bodies of those beloved ones became like images of their beloved", "Those women told each other, 'I am him.'"
But look at what is actually described. Nothing internal happens. There is no absorption, no vision, no dissolution of the self into the object. What happens is gait, voice, gesture, casting, dialogue — the mechanics of playing a part.
"They were so immersed in him that the bodies of those beloved ones became like images of their beloved, in moving, smiling, glancing, speaking and other things."1
Moving, smiling, glancing, speaking. Four channels, all external.
⚑ This is identity achieved by doing rather than by becoming, and it is a distinct route from anything the Eleventh Skandha will later specify. None of the eleven modes of worship at 11(11) is act him out.
At 10(87) the Vedas certify that the state reached by yogis was also reached by those who "constantly remembered" him with hostility, and by women whose minds were attached to him. And at 10(29) the rule is given as five affects — desire, anger, fear, identity, affection — treated identically.
The fourth term in that list is identity, and this chapter is what it looks like.
Pauṇḍraka at 10(66) is the other instance and it is the uncomfortable one: an impostor king assumes every one of Kṛṣṇa's insignia, demands the name, is killed for it, and — "By assuming Hari's form, he himself became immersed in him."
⚑ Fraud and grief produce the same result by the same mechanism, and the volume reports both without noticing the pairing.
Six months after they die, you catch yourself using a phrase that was theirs. Not quoting it. Using it, in your own voice, in a conversation they have nothing to do with.
The team's lead leaves. Nobody is appointed. Within a fortnight two people are doing an impression of him without knowing it — his way of opening a meeting, his particular pause before disagreeing — and the impression is holding the team together better than the vacancy would suggest.
You are missing someone and you find you are looking after somebody else in exactly the way you want to be looked after. You are not being generous. You are running the part because someone has to, and it turns out you know all the lines.
The most informative thing about the enactment is what is absent from it.
They do not pray. They do not meditate — that is what the confined gopīs did, in their rooms, and it liberated them within the hour. They do not perform any rite. They do not wait.
They also do not, at any point, enact themselves. There is no scene in which a gopī plays a gopī. Every role taken is his, or is a role opposite his — Pūtanā, the cart, the daitya, the serpent.
⚑ A group who have lost someone reconstruct the whole world of the loss with the missing figure supplied and themselves deleted. The one who says I am Krishna has not comforted herself with a memory of him; she has removed the person who is suffering from the scene entirely.
It should be said plainly that the enactment does not work.
The chapter ends with them exhausted, the moonlight failing, the forest going dark:
"They entered the forest, as far as the moonlight would illuminate it. However, noticing that it was being enveloped in darkness, the women withdrew… They remembered neither themselves, nor their homes."1
They return to the riverbank and sing, and the singing becomes the Gopī-gīta, which is an accusation.
The performance sustained them for a night and delivered nothing. The volume gives it several hundred words of loving detail and then lets it fail.
The strongest support is the specificity of the casting. Nine or ten distinct roles, assigned, with dialogue quoted. A text gesturing at they were beside themselves does not stage a production.
The tension, preserved. "I am him" is the volume's most literal statement of identity with God, and it is spoken by women in a state of loss, in a scene the text presents as a symptom. The volume does not tell us whether this is a high attainment or a breakdown, and it uses the word "Maddened" of them two paragraphs earlier.
A second tension, and it is the sharper one. The same mechanism at 10(66) belongs to a fraud who is killed for it and absorbed anyway. Grief and imposture are not distinguished by the text at the level of mechanism, and any page that treats the gopīs' identification as exemplary has to hold Pauṇḍraka in the other hand.
Open question. The enactment ends on the mortar-binding, the one scene of his helplessness, played for fear. Whether the ordering is meaningful is not determinable from the chapter — and the mortar episode itself is in Volume 2, outside the range read here. No claim is made about how that volume frames it.
Against The Gopīs as Supreme Bhaktas, this chapter supplies the behaviour that material usually describes in terms of bhāva. What the volume actually prints is not an interior state but a night of theatre — and theatre with a specific repertoire, all of it rescue scenes, and a specific casting rule, none of it themselves.
Against The Women Who Never Got Out of the House, the contrast is exact and belongs to the same chapter-pair. Confronted with separation, the confined women closed their eyes and meditated, and were free within the hour. The attending women opened their eyes and performed, and were still grieving decades later.
⚑ Two responses to the same absence, one internal and one external, with opposite outcomes — and the volume never sets them against each other.
Grief Work and Creative Mourning — Freud's requirement that a loss be actively grieved, through reviewing, remembering and pining, one step at a time; and his finding in Mourning and Melancholia that when this work is refused or short-circuited the result is depression.
The gopīs' night is the alternative Freud named and did not recommend. In melancholia the lost object is not relinquished — the ego takes it in and becomes it, and the loss is converted into an alteration of the self. I am Krishna. Behold my graceful gait.
⚑ What neither field gives alone: the identification is happening here in a group, and it is being cast rather than suffered. Freud's melancholic is alone and does not know it is happening; the identification is silent and shows up as self-reproach. These women announce it, distribute the roles, and coordinate — one plays him, another plays Pūtanā, and they know which is which. That is a version of melancholic identification with the crucial feature reversed: it is public and it is shared, which means it can be corrected by the others in a way a private one cannot. And the volume's own outcome supports the distinction. It does not produce depression. It produces the Gopī-gīta — a collective accusation delivered to the object's face, which is closer to what Freud thought healthy mourning required than to melancholia. The group is what converts the identification back into address.
Secure Base as Psychological Container — Bowlby's secure base as a nervous-system state rather than a place: the felt sense that someone more capable is present and watching for threat. When the regulating presence goes, exploration becomes recklessness, and the page's case is Alexander's army fragmenting into competing nodes the moment the base disappears.
Vraja loses its regulating presence at the top of 10(30), and it does not fragment. It does something the attachment literature does not predict: the members take turns being the base.
Do not be scared of the storm. I have arranged for you to be saved. Close your eyes. I will easily arrange for your safety. Those are secure-base utterances, spoken by people who need one, to people who need one, about dangers that are not there.
⚑ The insight: a group that has lost its regulating figure can manufacture the regulation by distributing the role, and it works — for one night. The Diadochi could not do this because Alexander's function was command, which cannot be shared without becoming a rivalry. Kṛṣṇa's function here is reassurance, which can be — and the gopīs discover it can be performed by anyone who knows the lines. What the chapter then supplies is the limit case the theory needs: the manufactured base does not survive the moonlight failing. It has no independent access to safety, only to the language of safety, and when the dark comes the women withdraw. A distributed secure base is real regulation and it is uncollateralised.
Sharpest implication. Deprived of him, they do not remember him — they operate him, and the roles they choose are all the ones in which he saves someone, and the person they never cast is themselves. The volume's most literal statement of identity with God is spoken in a forest at night by a woman describing her own walk, and the text calls the state maddened in the same breath.
Generative questions.