The cosmic light still blazed before Arjuna, but his trembling had begun to settle into something quieter, a deep, kneeling awe.

He had spent his whole life looking up to great people. He thought of his grandfather Bhishma, tall and white-haired, who had taught him how a warrior keeps his word. He thought of Drona, his teacher, whose hands had guided his own small fingers on the bow when he was a boy. He thought of kings and sages and mountains and rivers, all the things that had once seemed huge to him.

And now he saw the One from whom every one of those great things had come.

"You are the father," Arjuna whispered, gazing into the endless form. "Not my father only, or one family's father, but the father of the whole world. Everything that walks and flies and swims, and everything that stands rooted and still: the trees, the hills, the patient stones. All of it comes from you."

He looked at the countless faces shining above him, every one of them old beyond counting.

"You are the teacher behind all teachers. Drona taught me; but who taught the first teacher? You did. You are the guru even the gurus bow to, weightier than the weightiest, more honoured than all the honoured ones together."

Arjuna pressed his hands together. He searched the three worlds in his mind — the earth below, the heavens above, the realms between — looking for anyone, anywhere, who might stand beside this Lord as an equal.

He found no one.

"There is no one like you," he said. "Not equal to you, so how could there ever be anyone greater? Your power has no twin, no rival, no match in all that is. O Lord of measureless might, now I understand: the great ones I worshipped were only small lamps. You are the sun they were lit from."