The listening room

The bansuri is a side-blown flute cut from a single piece of bamboo — no keys, no reed, no moving parts. Six or seven finger-holes and a blowing hole, and everything else is breath and the player's fingers. It is among the oldest instruments on the subcontinent and one of the simplest objects that can still be called an instrument at all.

Its Sanskrit names are worth knowing because they turn up as Krishna's own: venu, murali, vamsha. He is Venugopala and Murlidhar — the cowherd with the flute, the one who holds the murali. In images the flute is how you recognise him before you notice anything else.

This is worth saying plainly, because the flute is so bound to his image that people assume it runs through everything. It does not. The Krishna of the flute belongs mostly to the Vrindavan cycle — the childhood and the cowherds — which is told at length in the Bhagavata Purana and in centuries of poetry and painting, not in the Mahabharata.

The Krishna of this library is the other one: the counsellor, the envoy, the charioteer who will not pick up a weapon but who talks a devastated man back into acting. The flute is not in his hands here. That is part of why a page like this one exists — the music carries an aspect of him the 62 teachings never show.

A gloss often given by teachers and poets, rather than stated by any text: the flute sounds because it is hollow. It has nothing of its own to say, and that is precisely what lets the breath passing through it become music.

It is not scripture and this site will not pretend otherwise. But it sits close to something the Gita does argue at length — that acting well has more to do with getting yourself out of the way than with asserting yourself — and it is a good thing to be holding while you listen.