148
Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam
[Canto 3, Ch. 4]
closing;  sva-kulam —own family;  sphītam —excessively numerous;  tyakṣyan —for disappearing;  deham —the universal form;  acinta-yat —thought to Himself.
TRANSLATION
Śukadeva Gosvāmī  replied: My dear King, the cursing of the brāhmaṇas was only a plea, but the actual fact is the supreme desire of the Lord. He wanted to disappear from the face of the earth after dispatching His excessively numerous family members. He thought to Himself as follows:
PURPORT
In this verse the word  tyakṣyan  is very significant in relation to Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa's leaving His body. Since He is the eternal form of existence, knowledge and bliss, His body and His Self are identical. Therefore how is it possible that He would leave His body and then disappear from the vision of the world? There is a great controversy amongst the nondevotees or Māyāvādīs about the mysterious disappearance of the Lord, and the doubts of those men with a poor fund of knowledge have been very elaborately cleared by Śrīla Jīva Gosvāmī in his  Kṛṣṇa-sandarbha .
According to  Brahma-saṁhitā , the Lord has many forms. It is stated therein that the Lord has innumerable forms, and when He appears within the vision of the living entities, as Lord Kṛṣṇa actually appeared, all such forms amalgamate with Him. Besides all these infallible forms, He has His universal form, as manifested before Arjuna on the Battlefield of Kurukṣetra. Here in this verse the word  sphītam  is also used, which indicates that He left His gigantic universal form called the  virāṭa-rūpa , not His primeval, eternal form, because there is hardly any possibility of His changing His form of  sac-cid-ānanda . This simple understanding is at once realized by the devotees of the Lord, but those who are nondevotees, who perform hardly any devotional service to the Lord, either do not understand this simple fact or purposely raise a controversy to defeat the eternity of the transcendental body of the Lord. This is due to the defect called the cheating propensity of the imperfect living entities.
By practical experience also, it is seen, up to the present day, that the Lord's transcendental form is worshiped by devotees in different temples, and all the devotees of the Lord factually realize that the form of the Deity in the temple is nondifferent from the form of the Lord. This inconceivable performance of the internal potency of the Lord is described in  Bhagavad-gītā :  nāhaṁ prakāśaḥ sarvasya yogamāyā-samāvṛtaḥ . (Bg. 7.25) The Lord reserves the right of not being exposed to everyone. In the