Krishna's Last Teaching to Uddhava - Before the End

The city was burning. The Yadavas, cursed by the sages, were killing each other with iron clubs that grew from the sea grass.

Krishna sat apart, watching.

Uddhava found him there, weeping.

Uddhava: "How can you sit so calmly? Our friends are dying! Our family is ending! Everything we built—"

Krishna: "Is exactly as it was meant to be. Gandhari's curse is fulfilled. What rises must fall. What is built must crumble. This is not tragedy—this is completion."

Uddhava: "But you could stop it. You could—"

Krishna: "I could prolong it. That's different from stopping. Sit, Uddhava. I have something to tell you. Something for the ages after I'm gone."

Uddhava: "After you're gone?"

Krishna: "My time ends soon. This avatar's work is complete. The war was won, the demons were defeated, the age has turned. Now I return to where I came from."

Uddhava: "Don't. Please. Stay."

Krishna: "If I stayed forever, would you learn to stand alone? The purpose of a teacher is to become unnecessary. If you need me beside you to remember what I taught, I taught badly."

Uddhava: "Then teach me now. One last time."

Krishna smiled.

Krishna: "The essence of everything is this: you are not the body. Not the mind. Not the emotions. You are the awareness in which body, mind, and emotions appear. All the yoga, all the rituals, all the scriptures—they point to this one fact."

Uddhava: "I've heard this before."

Krishna: "Hearing is not knowing. Knowing is not being. Right now, feel what you are. Not your grief—what watches the grief. Not your fear—what notices the fear. That which is watching... that is you. That never dies."

Uddhava: "But when you're gone—"

Krishna: "I am never gone. The form of Krishna will dissolve. The awareness that animated Krishna will remain—because it is the same awareness that animates you. We are not separate. We never were. The teacher and the student are one consciousness pretending to be two so that learning can happen."

Uddhava: "Will I see you again?"

Krishna: "You're seeing me now. You will always see me—in the sun, in the moon, in every face, in every moment of clarity. The world is my body, Uddhava. How can you not see me?"

Uddhava wept harder.

Uddhava: "I know. It's not the same. The warmth of this hand, the sound of this voice—you'll miss them. That's human. That's right. Miss me. Grieve me. And then continue. Teach what I taught. Live what I lived. Be my echo until you become your own sound."

Krishna: "I don't know if I can."

Uddhava: "You can because you must. And you must because no one else will remember correctly. The others will make me a god—distant, unreachable, to be worshipped rather than understood. You will remember me as a friend. As someone who walked with you, laughed with you, was confused with you sometimes."

Krishna: "Were you ever confused?"

Krishna: "Of course. This human form had human limitations. I had to figure things out, make mistakes, learn. The divinity was there, but it worked through a human vehicle. Don't let them make me perfect, Uddhava. Perfect is useless. Imperfect-and-trying is what actually helps people."

Uddhava: "I'll remember."

Krishna: "Then I've given you everything. The rest is practice."

Krishna began walking away—toward the forest, toward the hunter's arrow, toward the end that awaited.

Uddhava: "Krishna!"

He turned.

Krishna: "Thank you. For everything."

Krishna smiled—the last time Uddhava would see that smile in this form.

Krishna: "Thank yourself. You did the work. I just pointed."

He disappeared into the forest.

Uddhava sat among the ruins of everything he had known.

And found, to his amazement, that Krishna was right.

The awareness remained.

The teacher was gone, but the teaching stayed.

And that, perhaps, was the final lesson:

Presence doesn't require presence.

Love doesn't require form.

And the divine, once recognized, can never truly be lost.