The Rasa Lila -- What Krishna's Dance with the Gopis Means

The Rasa Lila is told in five chapters of the tenth book of the Bhagavata Purana (10.29-33), known together as the Rasa Panchadhyayi. On a night in autumn, when the jasmine was in flower and the full moon rose red over the forest, Krishna played his flute. The women of Vraja heard it and left whatever they were doing -- milking, cooking, feeding their children, attending their husbands -- and ran to him in the forest.

Krishna, the text says, first tested them: he told them to go home to their families and their duties. They refused; they had come because they could not stay away. He danced with them -- and then, when they grew proud of his attention, he vanished. The gopis searched the forest for him, sang the song of longing that is the Gopi Gita, and when he reappeared, the Rasa began: a great circle dance in which Krishna, by his yogic power, stood between every two gopis, each feeling that he was beside her alone.

The Bhagavata is not naive about how this sounds. At the end of the story, King Parikshit, to whom the whole Purana is being told, asks the obvious question: how could the Lord, who came to uphold dharma, dance at night with other men's wives? The sage Shuka's answer has shaped every later reading. The powerful and the free, he says, are not stained by what would bind others, as fire is not polluted by what it burns; but ordinary people must never imitate this, even in thought -- whoever does so out of foolishness destroys himself, like one who drinks poison because Shiva did. The text adds that the gopis' husbands, under the spell of yogamaya, did not even notice that they were gone, finding them at their sides all night.

The tradition then points to the opening words. The Lord "took recourse to his yogamaya": this is not a story of desire but of divine play, lila, in which God gives himself to those who love him without reserve. The gopis are held up as the highest devotees precisely because they gave up everything -- reputation, duty, home -- for him alone.

The last verse of the Rasa Panchadhyayi turns the expected warning upside down. Hearing this story with faith, it says, does not inflame desire; it cures it -- "the sickness of the heart". For the commentators, that is the clearest sign of what the Rasa is: a picture of the soul's longing for God, using the most intense human love as its language, and pointing beyond it.

The Rasa Lila became central to the Krishna traditions of Vraja and Bengal and to a whole culture of performance. In Vrindavan, troupes still stage it as raslila; in Manipur, the Ras Lila is the summit of the classical dance tradition; and Sharad Purnima, the full moon of Ashvin, is kept in many temples as the night of the Rasa, with kheer left out in the moonlight.