Arjuna had thought he was beginning to understand the vision. Then it
grew larger still, and he understood how little he had grasped.
He looked once more for the edges of the form, and once more found none.
No beginning where it started. No end where it stopped. No middle to mark
the centre. And from this endless body radiated a strength that made the
armies on the field below, all those famous warriors, all those mighty
kings, look like toy soldiers carved from wood.
Arjuna's gaze travelled up toward the great face. And there he stopped,
his heart turning over.
For the two eyes of that vast countenance were not eyes as men have eyes.
One eye was the moon — the very moon Arjuna had watched rise a thousand
nights, cool and silver, lighting the world while it slept. The other eye
was the sun — the same sun that blazed each morning over the mountains and
woke the birds. The two great lights of the sky, the lamps by which all
living things saw, were simply the eyes in this enormous face, looking
down upon the worlds.
And the mouth — Arjuna's breath stilled — the mouth was fire. Not a torch,
not a hearth, but a blazing furnace, the sacred fire into which the whole
world's offerings are poured, roaring and bright.
Then Arjuna felt it: heat. Not from the sun above him, but from the form
itself. By its own light, by its own burning power, this immense being was
warming and scorching the entire universe, the way the noonday sun beats
down on a wide and shadeless plain. Every world, every star, every
creature lived inside that heat.
Arjuna pressed his hands together. "You have no beginning, no middle, no
end," he said. "Your power and Your arms are without number. The moon and
the sun are Your eyes, and Your mouth is a blaze of fire. And with Your own
radiance, O Lord, You set this whole universe aglow."
He had asked the sky itself to look back at him — and now it was.
