The Serving Woman's Son

In a former age, long before he was the sage the worlds know, Nārada was born the son of a serving woman in a household of brahmins who taught the Veda, the ancient sacred knowledge of the brahmins. While he was still a small boy, some yogins came to stay with them through the rainy season, and he was set to wait on them. Though they looked on all alike, those sages were kind to him: he was a child with no restlessness in him, self-controlled, not attached to his toys, obedient, attentive, and quiet.

Once, with the brahmins' leave, he ate what was left on their plates, food made holy by such men, and his faults fell away. Living like that, his mind became clean, and a love for their way of life was born in him. Day after day, by their kindness, he heard them sing the stories of Kṛṣṇa, and listening with trust, step by step, he came to love the one whom it is a joy to hear about. Once that love had come his understanding never slipped again. So through the rains and the autumn, hearing at every service the spotless fame of Hari sung by those sages, devotion rose in him and carried away the dust and darkness of the mind.

When the sages were leaving, they saw the boy so attached to them, so humble, so trusting and so self-controlled, and out of pity they taught him the most secret knowledge, the one the Lord himself had given. By it he came to know how the Lord's māyā works, his power that brings forth the world and bewilders those who live in it, and how men come to the Lord: that the cure for the threefold suffering of the world, the pain that comes from one's own body and mind, from other creatures, and from the powers above, is to offer every action to the Lord. The very thing that made a person ill, when it is given to him as medicine, cures him; so actions bind a man in the round of birth, but the same actions, offered to the Supreme, undo the bond.