He has come back. They have him seated on their own upper garments on the sand. And before anything else happens, they put a question to him — politely, as a general enquiry about human types, which is the only way you can ask a god why he left:
"Some show favours to those who love them, others act in a contrary way. But there are those who do not do either. Please explain this to us properly."1
It is a question about him, dressed as a question about categories. He answers the categories.
One — the reciprocators. People who love those who love them.
"Those who reciprocate each other's love do it for their own selfish reasons. It has nothing to do with affection or dharma. It is selfishness and nothing else."1
Note the severity. Not lesser. Not a beginning. Mutual love is classified as selfishness with no admixture — it is a trade, and trades are conducted for the trader's benefit.
Two — the unrequited lovers. People who love those who do not love them back.
"Those who love those who do not love them back are truly compassionate. They are like parents. O slender-waisted ones! That kind of affection and dharma is without blemish."
Parents, because the small child gives nothing back. This class is the only one that gets "without blemish."
Three — those who love nobody. And this is where the taxonomy stops behaving.
"There are some who do not love those who love them, not to speak of those who do not love them. They are satisfied in their own atmans, have accomplished all their desires, are ungrateful, or hate their superiors."
Look at that third class again. It has four members and they do not belong together.
Satisfied in their own ātmans. Have accomplished all their desires. Those are descriptions of the liberated.
Ungrateful. Hate their superiors. Those are descriptions of the worst people in the volume.
One category, four inhabitants, two of them perfected and two of them contemptible — sorted by behaviour rather than by state, because from outside they are indistinguishable. The self-sufficient and the ingrate both fail to love you back.
And then:
"O friends! Even when I am loved by living beings, I do not love them back. That is because I wish to urge their propensities to love me."1
⚑ He places himself in the third class on purpose, in a sentence that names the withholding as a technique with a stated objective. Not I am beyond reciprocation. I do not love you back in order to make you love me more.
The justification comes with an image, and it is a bleak one:
"When a person who is poor obtains some riches and that is destroyed, he can think of nothing else and know nothing else."1
That is the mechanism, stated plainly. Give a person who has nothing something, then remove it, and their attention becomes total and involuntary.
He is not describing devotion. He is describing what loss does to a mind that has no reserves, and he is offering it as the reason for the vanishing at the top of 10(29).
⚠ Note the analogy runs on poverty. The technique works because the recipient has nothing else — which is the condition the gopīs are in only because they abandoned everything at the sound of the flute, nine chapters and four verses ago.
And then, in the same speech, the turn:
"For my sake, you have given up the commonly held views on the Vedas and your own relatives and have followed me… Even if I possess the lifespan of the gods, I cannot pay you back. You have loved me after severing the bonds of the household, which are so very difficult to give up. May that virtuous deed be rewarded."1
Two chapters earlier they said he obtained them "without paying a price" and asked whether killing them was murder.
Here he concedes the accounting entirely. He agrees a price is owed, states that it exceeds what a divine lifespan could discharge, and closes by wishing their deed rewarded — by someone unspecified, since he has just said he cannot do it.
⚑ The debt is acknowledged, revalued upward, and left open. That is not a settlement; it is a statement that no settlement exists.
You reply to every message immediately for a year and then, without deciding to, you start taking a day. Nothing was strategic. But you notice the replies you get now are longer.
Somebody explains to you, honestly and without apology, that they hold back because holding back is what keeps people close. You believe them. You are still there a year later, which is the difficult part.
You are told you have given more than can be repaid. It sounds like the highest compliment available and it takes a while to hear the other thing in it: an account has been declared permanently open, and you are the one carrying the balance.
Watch what the structure does that a two-part answer could not.
If the classes were reciprocators and non-reciprocators, he would be in the second with the ungrateful, and the speech would be a confession. If they were good lovers and bad lovers, the gopīs would be in the first and the question would be answered flatteringly and the episode would be over.
The three-part version does something else. It demotes mutual love to selfishness, which removes the frame the gopīs might have used to complain — you cannot claim an unpaid debt of reciprocation once reciprocation has been classified as trade. It elevates unrequited love to blamelessness, which is where the gopīs now find themselves standing. And it puts him in a third class whose membership is deliberately mixed, so that his non-response is compatible with perfection without being demonstrably distinct from ingratitude.
⚑ The taxonomy is arranged so that the position he occupies cannot be evaluated from outside, and the position the gopīs occupy is the only one described as without blemish. They have been told they are the best possible thing and that what they wanted from him was selfishness.
The speech is a theory of why he withholds. It is not a response to what they said.
They accused him of taking them without payment, of deception, of abandoning women in the night. He does not address the deception. He does not address the abandonment as a wrong. He reclassifies it as pedagogy and moves to the debt.
And the class assignment does not fit the facts of 10(33), which is the very next thing that happens. He does not withhold at the rāsa; he multiplies himself so that each woman has him individually. The withholding is a phase, not a policy, and the speech presents it as a policy.
The strongest support is the poor-man analogy. A text constructing a devotional justification does not reach for destitution and total loss to explain God's behaviour. It is an unflattering image, chosen by the speaker about himself.
The tension, preserved. Mutual love is "selfishness and nothing else." Eleven chapters later at 11(2) the volume grades devotees on how they treat other people, and at 11(11) it specifies eleven modes of worship that assume real relations. A flat condemnation of reciprocal affection sits unqualified inside a book that spends thirty chapters on relational practice.
A second tension. He says he cannot pay them back and wishes their deed rewarded. The volume never says by whom, and the gopīs are still unrewarded in narrative terms at 10(47), 10(65) and 10(82).
Open question. The third class holds the liberated and the ungrateful together. Does the volume ever supply a test that would separate them from outside? The 11(2) grading on treatment of others is the closest candidate and it is fifty chapters away in a different Skandha, and it is not offered as an answer to this.
Set against The Only Thing Anyone Has Ever Loved, the two speeches are the volume's twin reductions of affection and they do not agree. At 10(14) Śuka argues that everything is loved because it belongs to the self, and then rescues devotion by identifying Kṛṣṇa as that self — the selfishness is not a problem because the object is correct.
Here Kṛṣṇa condemns reciprocal love as selfishness without that rescue, and the class he praises instead is the one that loves without return. ⚑ 10(14) says love is self-love correctly aimed. 10(32) says love that gets anything back is corrupt. Both are reductions, both are the volume's, and the second withdraws the escape the first supplied.
Against The Love Song With a Charge In It, this speech is the nearest thing to a reply the gopīs ever get, and reading them in sequence shows how little of the charge it touches. They alleged acquisition without payment; he agrees and declares the debt unpayable. They alleged deception; he does not mention it.
Intermittent Reinforcement and Control Dynamics — reward delivered some of the time, on an unpredictable ratio, produces engagement that is intense and extremely resistant to extinction. The gambler keeps pulling long after the payouts stop justifying it.
Kṛṣṇa's account of his own method is the schedule described from the operator's side, in his own words, with the objective stated: I do not love them back… because I wish to urge their propensities to love me. Presence, then absence, then presence — and the poor-man analogy is a precise description of what the withdrawal phase does to a mind with no alternatives.
⚑ What neither field gives alone: the schedule is here delivered by an operator who simultaneously certifies that the subject's resulting state is the best one available. The behavioural literature can describe the mechanism and can measure resistance to extinction; it cannot pronounce on whether the resulting attachment is good, and its implicit verdict is that it is pathological — the gambler is trapped. This text runs the identical schedule and rules that the people caught in it are "truly compassionate… without blemish."
That is not a disagreement about mechanism. It is a disagreement about whether extinction-resistance is a harm, and it is decidable only by whether the object is worth an unextinguishable attachment. The Purāṇa's answer is that he is; the slot machine's is that it is not. What the pairing exposes is that this is the entire question, and that nothing in the mechanism itself can settle it — which is exactly why the volume has to spend the surrounding sixty chapters arguing about who he is rather than about what he did.
Reciprocity Obligation: Creating Debt Through False Generosity — give something small, let the reciprocity norm generate an obligation, cash the obligation for something large.
The debt statement runs that norm backwards and it is worth being precise about how. He does not create an obligation in them. He accepts an unpayable one himself — they gave up household, relatives and the Vedic view, and he states that a god's lifespan could not cover it.
⚑ The insight: an acknowledged unpayable debt binds the creditor, not the debtor. The manipulation model assumes the obligated party is the one held — you owe, therefore you comply. But a debt that both parties agree cannot be discharged does not obligate the debtor to any specific act; it obligates the creditor to remain in relation, because the only thing an uncloseable account can do is continue. The gopīs cannot be paid off and therefore cannot be dismissed. That is why the concession costs him nothing and is not a manipulation in the ordinary sense — and it is also why they are still owed at 10(82), decades later, which is the arrangement working exactly as described.
Sharpest implication. He names withholding as a method, gives the mechanism, chooses an analogy about destitution to explain it, and files himself in a category that also contains the ungrateful — then concedes a debt he says a divine lifespan could not repay and wishes it settled by nobody in particular. The gopīs asked why he left. They were told the leaving was for their benefit, that what they wanted back would have been selfishness, and that they are owed more than can be paid.
Generative questions.