Text 25
śrī-śuka uvāca
itīdṛśena bhāvena
kṛṣṇe yogeśvareśvare
kriyamāṇena mādhavyo
lebhire paramāṁ gatim
śrī-śukaḥ uvāca — Śukadeva Gosvāmī said; iti — speaking thus; īdṛśena — with such; bhāvena — ecstatic love; kṛṣṇe — for Kṛṣṇa; yoga-īśvara — of masters of yoga; īśvare — the master; kriyamāṇena — behaving; mādhavyaḥ — the wives of Lord Mādhava; lebhire — they attained; paramām — ultimate; gatim — the goal.
Śukadeva Gosvāmī said: By thus speaking and acting with such ecstatic love for Lord Kṛṣṇa, the master of all masters of mystic yoga, His loving wives attained the ultimate goal of life.
According to Ācārya Śrī Jīva Gosvāmī, here Śukadeva Gosvāmī uses the present tense of the word kriyamāṇena to indicate that the Lord’s queens attained His eternal abode immediately, without delay. By this insight the ācārya helps refute the false notion that after Lord Kṛṣṇa’s departure from this world, some primitive cowherds kidnapped His queens while they were under the protection of Arjuna. In fact, as the self-realized Vaiṣṇava commentators elsewhere explain, Lord Kṛṣṇa Himself appeared in the guise of the thieves who abducted the queens. For further information on this subject, see Śrīla Prabhupāda’s purport to Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 1.15.20.
Śrīla Viśvanātha Cakravartī remarks that the supreme goal attained by these exalted women was not the liberation of the impersonal yogīs but the perfect state of prema-bhakti, pure loving devotion. Indeed, since they were already imbued with divine love of God from the very beginning, they possessed transcendental bodies of eternity, knowledge and bliss, in which they were fully able to relish the pleasure of reciprocating with the Supreme Lord in his most intimate, sweet pastimes. Specifically, in the opinion of Śrīla Viśvanātha Cakravartī, their love of God matured into the ecstasy of madness in pure love (bhāvonmada), just as the gopīs’ love did when Kṛṣṇa disappeared from their midst during the rāsa dance. At that time the gopīs experienced the full development of ecstatic madness, which they expressed in their inquiries from the various creatures of the forest and in such words as kṛṣṇo ’haṁ paśyata gatim: “I am Kṛṣṇa! Just see how gracefully I move!” (Bhāg. 10.30.19) Similarly, the vilāsa, or flourishing transformation, of the ecstatic love of Lord Dvārakādhīśa’s principal queens has produced the prema-vaicitrya symptoms they have exhibited here.