Krishna

Mathura at midnight. The prison walls are damp, the guards have sunk deep into sleep, and Devaki’s eighth child has just been born. Outside, the Yamuna is in flood; inside, Vasudeva’s hands are shaking; and then the thing happens that no watch can hold back, and the locks fall open on their own. On this site the Bhagavatam tells this story in the very voice of Shukadeva, the voice that answers Parikshit on the bank of the Ganga: “Where the dark is at its most dense, that is exactly where he comes down in secret, unseen by every eye.” No palace, no festival, a birth among chains. The whole story of Krishna stands on this one inversion: where the fear runs deepest, the deepest trust comes down.

Look through the eye of the Bhagavatam and one and the same pattern shows itself again and again in every play of Vrindavan: the larger the danger, the simpler the answer. Putana arrives carrying poison and hands over her own life along with the milk. When Kaliya’s hood turns the Yamuna to poison, that cowherd boy dances on the hood, sparing its life and breaking only its pride, and then sends the serpent away with its whole family. And when Indra sends down seven days of world-ending rain, that same seven-year-old boy holds Govardhan up on one hand, and as the page of the site puts it, “as though someone had simply raised an umbrella against the falling water.” Seven days, and the elbow never bent, and on his face the same butter-thief’s smile. This is the nature of power in the Bhagavatam: it never lets anyone else feel its weight.

Then there is that night of the Rasa, when the flute sounds and the gopis leave home and doorway and come. The Bhagavatam calls it the deepest metaphor of bhakti, devotion, in which every gopi feels that Krishna is with her alone. And the moment pride wakes in the mind, he vanishes. For anyone who begins to think herself special, Krishna is absent; for anyone who drowns in the calling, he is present on every side. The same test appears later in Rukmini’s letter, on whose seven verses he sends the chariot racing, and in that bundle of Sudama’s, whose fistful of flattened rice he eats as though it were the treasure of all three worlds. The friend asked for nothing, and received what asking can never bring.

From the flute to the Sudarshana

In Vyasa’s Mahabharata this same Krishna appears in another guise. The flute in his hands has become the reins, and the Vrindavan before him has become Kurukshetra. Before the war he goes himself to Hastinapura as a messenger of peace, asks for five villages, and even after he is insulted in the full assembly he knocks at every door of settlement down to the very end. When Duryodhana moves to seize and bind him, he shows his universal form, his vishvarupa, and even then the war cannot be turned aside. This defeat of Krishna’s is worth reading, because it tells us that the one who is capable of everything still does not seize the choices of others.

Then comes the dawn when Arjuna’s bow slips from his hand between the two armies. There, on a single chariot halted between the two oceans, the dialogue is born that the world calls the Bhagavad Gita. Your claim is to the action alone, never to its fruit: this one line has been loosening the knot of every tangled mind from that day to this. And in this same war comes the moment when Krishna, seeing the Pandava army burn under Bhishma’s arrows, forgets his own vow, drops the reins, takes up the discus, and leaps down from the chariot, and Arjuna, catching him at the tenth step, barely manages to hold him back. The promise to raise no weapon was about to break, because a greater promise stood behind it, that he would never let the Pandavas be destroyed. In Krishna’s world even a rule is smaller than love.

And the end comes in the Mausala Parva of the Mahabharata, in the forest of Prabhasa. The Yadavas have already cut one another down, Dwarka is counting its final hours, and as Krishna lies under a pipal tree, a hunter named Jara mistakes the sole of his foot for a deer and looses an arrow into it. The one who had been everyone’s charioteer goes back alone, in silence, with no army and no blast of the conch. Birth among the guards, departure in solitude. The whole of the life between went into loosening the knots of others.

His path

Kansa’s fear and the birth of Krishna · The night the locks fell open on their own, and the Yamuna made way for small feet.

The serpent Kaliya · A boy dancing on a poisoned hood, who offers direction in place of punishment.

Govardhan · A one-handed umbrella under seven days of world-ending rain, and Indra’s pride brought low.

The Rasa Lila · That night of the flute, in which whoever drowned in it found Krishna on every side, and whoever thought himself special lost sight of him.

Sudama’s journey · A fistful of flattened rice, a bowed head, and the scale of friendship on which all that wealth weighed light.

Krishna becomes the envoy of peace · The demand for five villages, the universal form in the full assembly, and the last attempt at a settlement.

The moment of the Gita · A chariot halted between two armies, Arjuna’s despair, and the answer that is still an answer today.

Krishna steps down from the chariot · His own vow breaking before Bhishma, because love turned out to be greater than the promise.

Krishna’s return to his own abode · The shade of a pipal, the hunter’s arrow, and the charioteer’s silent farewell.

The Bhagavad Gita · That whole dialogue of eighteen chapters, in its own separate sitting, to be read slowly.

The charioteer’s lesson

What stops us most as we read Krishna is that at Kurukshetra he took up the reins and left the weapons untouched. The one who could do anything chose for himself the role in which the direction stayed in his hands, while the duty and the credit for the strike belonged to another. For those who make decisions a whole teaching hides in this: the greatest power is the one that sets the chariot’s direction and keeps to the dust itself, behind the figure everyone watches at the front. The second lesson is about fear. Krishna never measures a danger by the size of the danger; Govardhan is an umbrella to him and Kaliya a neighbor who has lost his way. And the third is about loyalty: a promise that cannot protect love, Krishna lets break, and a bond that is honored without any asking, like Sudama’s bundle, he comes running to the door for. Rule, rank, and standing are all three means in his world; the end is only one, the one he spoke to Arjuna: do your work without fear, we will see to the rest.