Krishna

• 1. Introduction

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  Krishna is worshipped both as the eighth avatar of Vishnu and as the Supreme God in his own right. His skin is painted black, dark, or blue, and the name itself comes from a Sanskrit word meaning black, dark, or dark blue. The same word names the Krishna Paksha, the waning phase of the moon, with its adjective meaning darkening. Hindus mark his birthday on Krishna Janmashtami, a date that falls in late August or early September. He is the God of Love, revered for compassion, protection, and tenderness. Yet Krishna is not one fixed picture. The texts show him as an infant eating butter, a young boy playing a flute, a handsome youth beside Radha, and a charioteer counseling the warrior Arjuna. How did a deity with so many faces come together. What ancient cults and tribes fused into the figure now worshipped across India and beyond. And how did a man struck down by a hunter's arrow come to be called God Himself.

• 2. Names And Many Faces

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  Govinda means chief herdsman, one of the names that follows Krishna everywhere. Keev means prankster, Gopala means protector of the go, where go can signify either soul or cows, and Mohan means enchanter. As a name of Vishnu, Krishna appears as the 57th name in the Vishnu Sahasranama. Certain of his names carry regional weight. Jagannatha, tied to the Jagannath Temple at Puri, is a popular incarnation of Krishna in Odisha and nearby parts of eastern India. His iconography matches these many roles. He is often shown wearing a peacock-feather wreath or crown and playing the bansuri, the Indian flute, standing with one leg bent in the Tribhanga posture. Cows or a calf may accompany him, marking the divine herdsman Govinda. Other icons show him as Bala Krishna the child, a toddler crawling, or an innocent child stealing butter, earning the name Makkan Chor. One striking image places him as a cosmic infant sucking his toe while floating on a banyan leaf during the Pralaya, the cosmic dissolution witnessed by the sage Markandeya.

• 3. An Amalgamation Of Gods

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  Vasudeva was a hero-god of the Vrishni tribe, and he is the earliest attested layer of what became Krishna. His worship appears in the writings of Panini from the 5th to 6th century BCE, and in epigraphy from the 2nd century BCE. At some point the Vrishnis fused with the Yadava tribe, whose own hero-god was named Krishna. Vasudeva and Krishna merged into a single deity, and that deity began to be identified with Vishnu in the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita. Around the 4th century CE, a third tradition joined the others: the cult of Gopala-Krishna of the Abhiras, the protector of cattle. The result was a figure layered from ancient Bhagavatism, the cult of Gopala, of Krishna Govinda the cow-finding Krishna, of Balakrishna the baby Krishna, and of Krishna Gopivallabha, Krishna the lover. The deity Krishna-Vasudeva, Krishna the son of Vasudeva, is one of the earliest forms of worship in Krishnaism and Vaishnavism.

• 4. Stones That Remember

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  Around 180 BCE, the Indo-Greek king Agathocles issued coinage, discovered at Ai-Khanoum in Afghanistan, bearing images now read as Vaishnava. One figure appears as Samkarshana-Balarama carrying a gada mace and a plow. The other appears as Vasudeva-Krishna holding the shankha conch and the sudarshana chakra wheel. The Heliodorus Pillar, a stone column with a Brahmi inscription, was found at Besnagar in Madhya Pradesh and dated to between 125 and 100 BCE. It was raised by Heliodorus, an Indo-Greek ambassador of the king Antialcidas to the Indian king Kasiputra Bhagabhadra, as a private dedication to Vasudeva. The inscription calls it a Garuda pillar and quotes a verse from chapter 11.7 of the Mahabharata, naming three virtues that lead to immortality: self-temperance, generosity, and vigilance. When archaeologists fully excavated the site in the 1960s, they uncovered the brick foundations of a much larger elliptical temple complex with a sanctum, mandapas, and seven more pillars. A Mora stone slab from the Mathura-Vrindavan site, dated to the 1st century CE, names the five Vrishni heroes: Samkarshana, Vasudeva, Pradyumna, Aniruddha, and Samba.

• 5. Echoes In Ancient Texts

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  The Chandogya Upanishad, in verse III.xvii.6, mentions Krishna as Krishnaya Devakiputraya, a student of the sage Ghora of the Angirasa family. The phrase means to Krishna the son of Devaki, and scholars such as Max Muller saw it as a possible source of later Krishna lore. The doubt is real, since the verse may have been interpolated, or this Krishna may differ from the deity. Yaska's Nirukta, an etymological treatise from around the 6th century BCE, refers to the Shyamantaka jewel held by Akrura, a motif from a well-known Puranic story about Krishna. Megasthenes, a Greek ambassador to the court of Chandragupta Maurya near the end of the 4th century BCE, wrote of a tribe called the Sourasenoi who worshipped Herakles. According to Edwin Bryant, Herakles is likely a Greek echo of Hari-Krishna, Methora of Mathura, Kleisobora of Krishnapura, and the river Jobares of the Jamuna. The Bhagavata Purana later gathered the fullest telling. It runs to twelve books and 332 chapters, with between 16,000 and 18,000 verses. Its tenth book, roughly 4,000 verses, is devoted to Krishna and has been the most studied part of the entire text.

• 6. Childhood Of Butter And Flutes

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  In a prison in Mathura, Krishna was born to Devaki and Vasudeva. Fortune tellers had warned Devaki's brother, the tyrant Kamsa, that her eighth child would kill him, so Kamsa set out to kill every child she bore. When Krishna was born, the jailers fell into deep sleep and the prison doors opened. Vasudeva carried the infant across the Yamuna, exchanged him for Yashoda's daughter, and returned with the girl. The exchanged baby revealed herself as the goddess Yogamaya, warned Kamsa that his killer was already born, and vanished. Krishna grew up with his foster parents Nanda and Yashoda near modern Mathura, alongside his siblings Balarama and Subhadra. The boy became a cow-herder and a prankster, nicknamed Makhan Chor the butter thief. The texts say he lifted the Govardhana hill to shield the people of Vrindavana from devastating rains and floods. He played his flute and the gopis, the milkmaids, came at once to the banks of the Yamuna to sing and dance. These love stories are the Rasa lila, romanticized in the poetry of Jayadeva, author of the Gita Govinda. In Maharashtra, devotees still mimic his butter theft by building human pyramids to break clay handis hung high in the air.

• 7. Charioteer And Counsel

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  Krishna returned to Mathura and killed his uncle Kamsa, then reinstated Kamsa's father Ugrasena as king of the Yadavas. He led the Yadavas to the newly built city of Dwaraka and befriended Arjuna and the other Pandava princes of the Kuru kingdom. The Bhagavata Purana names eight wives of Krishna in sequence: Rukmini, Satyabhama, Jambavati, Kalindi, Mitravinda, Nagnajiti, Bhadra, and Lakshmana. In the Kurukshetra War he served as Arjuna's charioteer, on the condition that he would personally raise no weapon. Seeing his own family arrayed against him, Arjuna lost his will to fight and said he would rather put down his bow, the Gandiva. Krishna then spoke to him about the impermanence of matter, the permanence of the soul, duty, and the paths of yoga toward liberation. This discourse is the Bhagavad Gita, 700 verses across 18 chapters within the sixth book of the Mahabharata. According to Friedhelm Hardy, the teachings of the Gita can be considered the first Krishnaite system of theology.

• 8. The Hunter's Arrow

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  Gandhari lost all hundred of her sons in the Kurukshetra War, and her grief turned to a curse. When Krishna came to offer condolences, she told him, Thou were indifferent to the Kurus and the Pandavas whilst they slew each other. Therefore, O Govinda, thou shalt be the slayer of thy own kinsmen. The curse came true when a fight broke out among the Yadavas at a festival and they killed one another. A hunter named Jara, mistaking the sleeping Krishna for a deer, shot an arrow into his foot and fatally wounded him. Krishna forgave Jara and died. The pilgrimage site of Bhalka in Gujarat marks where he is believed to have died, also called Dehotsarga, which Diana L. Eck notes means the place where Krishna gave up his body. The versions of his story diverge sharply here. The Harivamsa, told in a realistic style as the life of a poor herder, ends on a triumphal note rather than with his death. Centuries later, the worship of Krishna reached the West when Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada travelled from West Bengal to New York City and founded ISKCON in 1966, and a 1969 recording of the Hare Krishna mantra by the London Radha Krishna Temple, produced by George Harrison, reached the top twenty on the UK charts.