Arjuna had asked to see. He had begged for it, in fact — "Show me Your true form," he had said, sure that he was ready. Now the seeing had come, and it was nothing like he had imagined.

The form filled everything. He turned his head to find an edge and could not. Wherever he looked there were faces — thousands of them, calm and fierce and laughing and grave, all at once. There were eyes beyond counting, each one a small sun. Arms reached out in every direction, holding weapons, holding flowers, holding worlds. Legs like pillars vanished into the deep below. And the mouths — the great gleaming mouths, rimmed with rows of fangs — opened and closed like the breathing of something older than time.

A human heart is made to hold human-sized things. A friend's face. A chariot. A river you can swim across. But this was the whole universe wearing a single body, and Arjuna's heart strained against it the way your eyes strain when you try to look straight at the sun.

He looked down at the gods and beings he had seen a moment before, the Rudras and Adityas and all the bright crowds of heaven. They were not only amazed now. They were trembling, swaying like trees in a great wind, overwhelmed by the very thing they had come to worship.

"If even they are shaking," Arjuna thought, "then I need not pretend to be braver than the gods."

So he said it plainly, the way an honest person says a hard true thing. "O mighty-armed Krishna — seeing this immense form of countless mouths and eyes and arms, with its rows of terrible fangs, all the worlds are trembling. And I am trembling too."

There was no shame in his voice. To be small before something vast is not weakness. It is the beginning of understanding how vast it really is.