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gopi

गोपी gopī

The cowherd women of Vraja whose love for Krishna, expressed in the raslila dance, the Bhagavata frames as the soul's longing for God.

Where this term appears

  • Who is Krishna? Deities

    On autumn nights Krishna plays his flute, and the gopis , the cowherd women of Vraja, leave their homes and husbands to come to him, and he dances with them by the Yamuna, multiplying himself so that each belie…

  • What is Shaktipat? Lineages

    In the winter of 1937, in a small house on the outskirts of Jammu, Gopi Krishna experienced an awakening he had neither sought nor prepared for.

  • Reading the Tilaka: Forehead Marks Explained Deities

    The Vaishnava urdhva-pundra is drawn in cooling pale clays and sandalwood paste, gopi-chandana among them, clay said to come from sacred ponds, and in the soft yellow of sandal that calms rather than warns.

  • The Book of the Lord Treatise

    …lage from a storm, the youth whose flute calls the cowherd women, the gopis , out into the autumn night for the circling dance of divine love, the rasa-lila .

  • The Burning and the Colours Treatise

    So he did, and the gopis with her, and the playful smearing of colour at Braj , at Mathura and Vrindavan where Krishna grew up, became the heart of the festival.

  • The Sleeping Serpent Treatise

    …n the twentieth century the most famous first-person account, that of Gopi Krishna, who published in 1967, described an awakening that brought years of physical torment and near-collapse before it stabilised, a…

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