Chapter 11 · Verse 30

Arjuna had thought he understood fire. He had seen torches and cooking flames, sacrificial altars and forest blazes. But what he saw now was not fire as anyone knew it. It was fire that had no outside.

Krishna's cosmic body was swallowing the worlds. Great flaming mouths opened in every direction: above, below, to the left and right, in front and behind. And from all of them poured a light so fierce that Arjuna could feel it on his skin even though he had not moved. The light came at him from places where there should have been only empty sky.

"Lelihyase grasamānaḥ," he whispered. "You are licking up the worlds." The huge mouths moved the way a flame's tongue flickers along a log, gathering everything in, on every side at once.

He had spent his whole life thinking the world was a stage that Krishna stood inside of, the way a man stands inside a room. Now he saw it the other way around. The world was not a room with Krishna in it. Krishna was the light, and the world floated inside Him like a single spark inside a great furnace. The rays were not shining onto things; the things were made of the rays.

Arjuna lifted a hand to shield his eyes, but it made no difference. There was no shadow to step into. The fierce brightness reached behind his hand, behind his closed eyelids, behind his thoughts. Everywhere he turned his inner gaze, the same scorching glory was already there, filling it.

"Your fierce rays scorch the whole universe, O Vishnu," he said, naming Him by the word that means the one who spreads through everything. He had always called his friend by familiar names. Now he understood why this one fit. Vishnu was not in a place. Vishnu was every place. And the light that filled every place was both the most beautiful and the most overwhelming thing Arjuna had ever known.