Krishna

Mathura at midnight, deep in the rains. The prison walls are damp, the guards are asleep, and Devaki’s eighth child has just been born. Outside, the Yamuna is in flood; inside, Vasudeva’s hands are shaking. The Bhagavata tells the birth in 10.3, “at midnight, when the darkness stood thickest and the whole world lay listening,” and the child comes with four arms, holding a conch, a discus, a mace and a lotus. Devaki asks him to draw that form in and be her ordinary son, and he does. The irons slide from Vasudeva’s wrists and door after bolted door swings back. He carries the boy out in a winnowing basket under Shesha’s hoods, the Yamuna stands off on either hand no higher than his thighs, and in Gokul he lays his son beside the sleeping Yashoda and lifts her newborn daughter. Back in the cell he bends and closes the irons around his own ankles.

Vrindavan follows, one danger after another. In 10.6 Putana walks into Gokul as a young woman with poison in her breast, lifts the infant from his cradle, and nurses him. He draws, and with the milk come the poison and then her life; she falls at the edge of Vraja vast as a hill, and the smoke of her pyre carries the fragrance of agarwood, for 10.6.35 grants her the destiny of the saintly. In 10.16 Kaliya, a hundred and one hoods, has boiled one pool of the Yamuna black. Krishna leaps from the kadamba, springs onto the hoods and dances, a beat on every hood, until the venom pours out with the serpent’s blood. The wives rise from the pool with their children and ask only for his life, and he is sent home to Ramanaka with his whole family. And when Indra looses seven days of world-ending rain, a boy of seven, 10.26.3, holds Govardhan up on one hand for seven days without stirring a step, as though, in the Bhagavata’s image at 10.25.19, he had tipped a monsoon mushroom over his head. Afterward Indra comes alone and bends until his crown touches the boy’s feet.

Then the night of the Rasa, 10.29 to 33, flute and full moon, when the gopis leave hearth and doorway and come. Each holds all of him, the way every jar of water under the one moon holds the entire moon. Then a thought crosses their minds, “surely we stand above every other woman ever born,” and between one heartbeat and the next he is gone. The same test returns in Rukmini’s letter, seven verses, 10.52.37 to 43: “I have taken you for my husband, and I have already given myself to you.” Krishna laughs, and the road the messenger walked for days runs backward under his wheels in a single night. And it returns in Sudama’s bundle, 10.80 to 81, four handfuls of flattened rice in a torn rag that the friend is too ashamed to bring out. Krishna pulls it from under his arm and eats a handful: “This much is enough to satisfy me, and through me the whole world.” Sudama asks for nothing and walks home to find palaces where his hut had been.

From the flute to the Sudarshana

In Vyasa’s Mahabharata this same Krishna comes in another guise. The flute has become the reins, and Vrindavan has become Kurukshetra. Before the war Yudhishthira says at Upaplavya that he will make peace for five villages, Avisthala, Vrikasthala, Makandi, Varanavata and any fifth, and Krishna rides to Hastinapura himself to ask for them. Duryodhana answers that he will not yield a needle’s point of land, and outside the hall four men, Duryodhana, Karna, Shakuni and Duhshasana, resolve to seize the envoy. Krishna, told of it, says to the blind king, “I give all your sons my permission.” Then he laughs, and with the laugh, in section 131 of Ganguli’s Udyoga, gods the size of a thumb pour out of his body, Brahma on his forehead, Rudra on his breast. The kings shut their eyes; Bhishma, Drona, Vidura and Sanjaya are given the sight to look. He draws the form in and drives to Kunti’s house. The war is not turned aside.

Then comes the dawn in the Bhishma Parva when Arjuna has the chariot driven out between the two armies and says, “Gandiva is slipping from my hand.” There the dialogue is born that the world calls the Bhagavad Gita, and one line of it, 2.47, has been loosening knots ever since: “Your claim is to the work alone, never to its fruit.” Before the war Krishna had given his word to carry no weapon and only to drive. On the third day, Ganguli’s section 59, he watches Arjuna fight gently while Bhishma spends himself on the Pandava ranks, and he cannot hold still under it. He lets the reins fall, comes down with the discus turning on his right arm, and walks at Bhishma on foot. “Come, Krishna, come,” the old man says. “Throw me down off this excellent chariot by force.” Arjuna runs after him, gets his arms around the moving legs, and at the tenth step stops him: “I swear to you by my sons and by my own brothers that I will not withdraw from the acts I have pledged myself to.” Krishna climbs back and blows Panchajanya. On the ninth day he comes down again with nothing in his hands but a whip, and is stopped again.

The end comes in the Mausala Parva, thirty-six years after the battle, at Prabhasa. The Yadavas have gone there on pilgrimage with their wine, and every blade of eraka grass a man tears up in anger becomes an iron club in his hand, until the clans have cut one another down. Balarama sits in yoga, and a white naga leaves his mouth for the sea. Krishna sits on the bare earth and lies down in yoga. A hunter named Jara, looking for deer, takes him for one and shoots, and the arrow goes in at the heel, section 4 of Ganguli’s Mausala. Jara touches his feet in fear, and Krishna comforts him, rises, and fills the whole sky with his splendor. The one who had been everyone’s charioteer leaves with no army and no conch. Birth behind locked doors, departure on bare ground.

His path

Kamsa’s fear and the birth of Krishna · The night the locks fall open on their own, and a father closing his own irons on the way back.

The serpent Kaliya · A boy on a kadamba branch over black water, a hundred and one hoods, and a beat on every hood.

Govardhan · A hill held up on one hand for seven days, and Indra’s crown bent to a boy’s feet.

The Rasa Lila · The autumn full moon, every gopi holding all of him, and the circle empty between one heartbeat and the next.

Sudama’s journey · Four handfuls of flattened rice in a torn rag, and Rukmini catching his hand at the second mouthful.

Krishna becomes the envoy of peace · Five villages named at Upaplavya, four men plotting outside the hall, and gods pouring out of a laugh.

The moment of the Gita · A chariot halted between two armies, Gandiva slipping from Arjuna’s hand, and the answer that still answers.

Krishna steps down from the chariot · The discus turning on his arm, Bhishma’s welcome, and Arjuna holding his legs at the tenth step.

Krishna’s return to his own abode · The bare earth at Prabhasa, a hunter’s arrow at the heel, and the sky filling with light.

The Bhagavad Gita · All eighteen chapters of the dialogue, in a sitting of their own, to be read slowly.

The charioteer’s lesson

What stands out across Krishna’s stories is the seat he chooses at Kurukshetra, at the reins with the weapons wrapped. The one who could do anything keeps the direction of the chariot in his own hands and lets the duty of the strike belong to the man behind him. There is a whole teaching in that seat for anyone who decides for others: the greatest power on the field sets the chariot’s direction and stays in the dust. The second lesson is about fear. The size of a danger never sets the size of Krishna’s answer; Govardhan is a mushroom to him and Kaliya a neighbor who has to move house. The third is about loyalty. The pledge to carry no weapon he lets slip twice, and twice Arjuna has to hold his legs, because a larger promise stood behind it, sworn to Draupadi at Upaplavya: the Himalaya may move and the sky fall before his word fails. And a bond kept without any asking, like Sudama’s bundle, brings him down the steps of Dwarka to the door. Rule, rank and standing are all three means in his world. The end is single, and he names it to Arjuna at the close of the Gita, in 18.66: take refuge in me alone, and do not grieve.