There was once a poor cowherd named Sudama — not the famous one, but a quiet man with cracked feet and a kind face — who loved Krishna with his whole heart and had almost nothing else.

He owned no temple to build, no gold to give, no great deeds to offer. But he knew the teaching, the precious one, and he had a gift for telling it so that children understood. So every evening, under the old banyan tree, he gathered the village young ones and the tired farmers and told them, in simple words full of love, how the Lord lives in every heart and asks only that we turn toward Him.

One night, troubled, Sudama looked up at the stars and spoke to Krishna in his thoughts. "Lord, I am nobody. The kings give You jewelled crowns. The priests give You rivers of milk and rice. The sages give You years of fierce penance. What can a barefoot cowherd give You that would matter at all?"

And in the deep quiet of his own heart, he felt an answer rise, warm as sunlight.

"You give Me the dearest thing of all," it seemed to say. "When you take My teaching and gently place it in another heart, when you help even one frightened person find their way home to Me — there is no one among all people who does anything dearer to Me than that. The crowns and the milk and the penance are sweet. But you, Sudama, you carry My love to others. And so there will never be anyone on this whole earth more beloved to Me than you."

Sudama wept under the stars, not from sorrow but from a joy too large for his small chest. He had thought himself the least of the Lord's people.

The next evening he went back to the banyan tree, and the children came running, and he told the old true story once more. But now his voice trembled with a new sweetness — for he knew, at last, that in giving love away, he had become the dearest of all.