The rāsalīlā, “the dance game,” the circular dance that is echoed in every other dance, couldn’t get started. Each of the gopīs wanted to be nearest to Kṛṣṇa. They were all trying to get close enough to color his skin with the saffron paste smeared on their breasts. That way they would have managed, even if only for a few seconds, to have left a trace of themselves on him. A cluster of shawls, bodices, and slender, glistening chests closed him in on every side. Then in order to get the dance going, Kṛṣṇa decided to multiply himself. He resorted to his knowledge of mirrors and reflection. In the circle, between each gopī and the next, another Kṛṣṇa appeared, holding them by the hand and looking alternately at one, then the other, as though following the steps of the dance, though each gopī was convinced that he was there for her alone. The yellow cloth wrapped around his loins was always the same, but the color of the skin varied, from dark blue to hyacinth. These were the many Kṛṣṇa, while the one Kṛṣṇa remained in the center of the circle, where the gopīs could see nothing at all.
Is the love of Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā, or of Kṛṣṇa and the gopīs for that matter, svakīyā (legitimate, conjugal) or parakīyā (illegitimate, adulterous)? It’s a theological question which cleaves the centuries like a flaming sword and over which scholars have argued vehemently and rancorously. In 1717 they hastened in their scores to the court of Nawāb Ja‘far Khān to confute the positions of their enemies. They came from all over Bengal and Orissa, but likewise from Vārāṇasī and Vikrampur. They debated the matter for six months, to the point of total exhaustion. Pale and haggard, they argued over the greater or lesser intensity of Kṛṣṇa’s erotic games with Rādhā, and their celestial consequences: if the līlā that briefly occurs at Vṛndāvana is no more than a feeble replica of the one perennially performed in the celestial Vṛndāvana, does that then mean that adulterous love is sovereign in the sky as on earth and offers itself as a model even to the gods? And must what is a model for the gods by that very token be one for men too?
Then there were other questions, less lofty perhaps, but just as thorny. If the sixteen thousand gopīs were all married, what went on in their homes at night while they were dancing the rāsalīlā with Kṛṣṇa? How was it that those sixteen thousand husbands never complained — perhaps never even noticed their wives’ absence? Would one have to subscribe to the theory according to which sixteen thousand gopī simulacra stayed calm and quiet in their legitimate beds while the bodies of the real gopīs wrapped themselves like parasites around Kṛṣṇa.
The controversy was violent in the extreme, and over those months of debate at least six centuries of war were echoed. In the end the disciples who upheld svakīyā conceded defeat. They underwrote a document in which they accepted as correct the doctrine they had always abhorred. But what were the decisive arguments that sealed the triumphant sovereignty of the illegitimate? parakīyā is that which brings the metaphysical element in love to the point of incandescence. And what is that element? Separation. Never is the “flavor” (rasa) of “separation” (viraha) so intense as in illegitimate passion. Furthermore: whatever is parakīyā is denied the permanence of possession. It is a state in which one can only occasionally be possessed. This corresponds to the essence of every relationship with Kṛṣṇa. Finally: the woman who abandons herself to a love that is parakīyā risks more than other women. To violate the rules of conjugal order is to deny this world’s bonds and abandon oneself to what calls to us from beyond the world. Such love does not seek to bear fruit, and it never will. Whatever seeks to bear fruit will consume itself in that fruit. While that which disregards every fruit is inexhaustible. This is pure preman, liquid, diffuse “love,” unsatisfied by the obsessive arrow of kāma, “desire,” but absorbing it into itself and keeping it circulating there, the way Kṛṣṇa’s seed continues to circulate in his body without ever bursting forth. He who follows kāma wants nothing better than for the arrow to strike its one target, pleasure. But he who follows a love that is parakīyā must always take his pleasure mingled with fear, indeed with a twofold fear: the fear of separation and the fear of punishment. Both weigh on him, constantly, surrounding every sensual delight with a livid and thrilling aura. Yet it is only that twofold fear which gains us entry to the “sweetness” (mādhurya) which is Kṛṣṇa’s ultimate nature, the trait revealed when a lover’s being has, little by little and ever so slowly, been stripped of all its clothes. She who reaches that point will feel Kṛṣṇa’s hand grip her wrist, as though to help her place her foot on the stones of a stream before launching herself into him on the other bank. Thus did the theologians and ascetics set off on their ways, once more having accepted a doctrine whose very name boasted a flagrant and glorious contradiction: the parakīyādharma, the “law of the illegitimate.”
“Heart thief and butter thief,” Kṛṣṇa was called. Or again, “thief of the heart’s butter.” But when his favorite, Rādhā, doubts him and demands to hear every one of his names, she doubts each of them, for they could each refer to someone else, except one, that is “butter thief.” It is the only epithet that identifies Kṛṣṇa beyond all doubt. Even when he was exploring Yaśodā’s kitchen on all fours, the little boy was drawn to those terra-cotta jars and their inebriating, creamy contents. Soon Yaśodā decided to keep the jars hanging in the air so that Kṛṣṇa couldn’t get them. But nothing was beyond his reach. He climbed on beams and windows. Sometimes Yaśodā would catch him with his hands in the butter. “I’m chasing off the ants,” Kṛṣṇa would say at once. Butter was the element through which he communicated with other creatures, with all women, with his mother, with Rādhā, with the gopīs.
Kṛṣṇa means “Black,” “Obscure.” The first creature the word was used to refer to was the antelope, who was also the first among creatures. It was in the black pelt of a skinned antelope that the loins of the sacrificer were wrapped. And sacrifice is the perennial second act, the act that extracts an essence from the first, an articulation that then allows us, through the third act — ordinary life — to move on to every other.
As a lover Kṛṣṇa did not look black but blue, purplish, or sometimes even lighter: mauve. Often his skin resembled the big bluish stain on Śiva’s neck where the ocean’s poison had concentrated, the stain his partners loved to lick. When he fought and cut off heads, Kṛṣṇs might go back to being black again. Then a yellow fabric would arch up from behind his shoulders and, like the whites of his eyes, gleam out against the dark.