Passage 7

Tap any word for its meaning.

In plain words

He does not look to see whether what is offered is something good or something bad. God looks only at purity of mind. Because He is supremely holy, in His sight all is holy! Nothing in Īśvara's creation is bad. The fault is in our own vision, and nowhere else; there is no fault in creation. The dung the devotee threw saying Kṛṣṇārpaṇam reached Kṛṣṇa! The village elders went to the devotee and rebuked her sharply: ‘Every day you fling dung in Kṛṣṇa's face; you are a very wicked woman!’ But they did not have the sense to wonder how the dung she threw in front of her house was falling on the face of Kṛṣṇa in the temple. Viveka and discernment had come to nothing. They kept their eyes only on the dung; they could not imagine that this was some śakti, Bhakti, or else rakti, anurakti. They seized the devotee, her husband, her parents-in-law, all of them, and took them away. She: ‘Alas! Would I throw dung on my Kṛṣṇa? I would never commit an offence against my Kṛṣṇa. I would give up even my life, but would I stoop to such wickedness?’ she said. Then the elders said, ‘From tomorrow, do not throw dung there.’ Under pressure from her parents-in-law and her husband, she agreed to it with great difficulty. From the day the people all stood in the way of her wish, the doors of the Kṛṣṇa temple closed. However hard they tried, they would not open. The village elders recognised their offence, went to the devotee and begged her, ‘Forgive our fault.’ At once the temple doors opened. What concerns devotees is understood only by devotees, not by others; Bhārata became a land of tapas only because many such experiences kept happening.

The offering of the self

Mīrā, rapt in Bhakti, was absorbed in Kṛṣṇa! She asked her husband to have a temple built for Kṛṣṇa. He had a fine temple built of marble. She was always in the Kṛṣṇa temple, drinking the nectar of Bhakti for Kṛṣṇa with bhajans and kīrtans, lost in rapture.