For the good of the world Shri Krishna, with Baladeva beside him through all of it, had killed daityas past counting and the wicked kings who loaded the earth. At the end, with Arjuna at his side, he had brought down eighteen akshauhinis of fighting men, and the weight the earth had carried for so long came off her. One task remained, and no ally could share it: the withdrawal of his own clan, the Yadu house he had been born into. This too he brought about, and a curse spoken by Brahmins served as the pretext. Then he left Dwarka, gave up his human body, and with his amsha, Balarama and Pradyumna and the rest of what he had put forth of himself, entered his own abode, the abode of Vishnu’s maya. Maitreya wanted the whole of it. How did Janardana destroy his clan under the cover of a Brahmins’ curse, and how did he leave his human body? Parashara told him.
The Sages’ Curse
One day at the great tirtha of Pindaraka some of the young Yadava princes came upon the great munis Vishvamitra, Kanva, and Narada. The boys were drunk on their own youth, and what was already going to happen pushed them from behind. They dressed Samba, Jambavati’s son, in a woman’s clothes and ornaments and led him before the munis, bowed very low, made their voices very humble, and asked, “This woman longs for a son. Tell us what she will bear.” These were men who saw by divine knowledge, and the boys had tried to fool them with a costume. Anger rose in them, and they spoke. “She will bear a pestle unlike anything in this world, the cause of the destruction of all the Yadavas, and by it your whole clan will be torn out of the world by the root.”
The boys went to Raja Ugrasena and set the whole thing before him exactly as it had happened, and out of Samba’s belly came an iron pestle. Ugrasena had it ground to powder, and the boys carried the powder to the sea and threw it in, and along that shore a thick growth of eraka reeds sprang up from it. One sliver of the iron had survived the grinding, shaped like the head of a lance; it too was thrown into the sea, and a fish swallowed it. Fishermen took the fish in their net, and when its belly was cut open a hunter named Jara took the fragment away with him. Bhagavan Madhusudana knew every step of this exactly, from the costume to the fish, and he had no wish to undo what the vidhata had already willed.
The Omens of Dwarka and the Journey to Prabhasa
At that time the gods sent Vayu. He came to Shri Krishna in private, bowed, and said, “The gods have sent me as their messenger. Hear the word Indra sends you, and with him the Vasus, the Ashvini Kumaras, the Rudras, the Adityas, the Maruts, and the Sadhyas. More than a hundred years have passed since you came down at the gods’ urging, with them, to relieve the earth of her burden. You have killed the wicked daityas and the burden is lifted; so let the gods in svarga have your protection again. More than a hundred years, and now, if it pleases you, come to svarga. And the gods say this too: if it pleases you to stay here, stay. It is a servant’s dharma to state the duty at its proper hour.” Bhagavan answered him. “I know everything you say, and so I have already begun the destruction of the Yadavas. Until these Yadavas are gone the earth’s burden is not lightened; within seven nights I will do it. Jarasandha and the other kings who weighed on the earth have been killed, and these Yadu boys are no less than they were. The land of Dwarka that I once asked of the sea I will give back to the sea, destroy the Yadavas, and come to svarga. Let Indra and the gods count it as done: with Sankarshana I have already left the human body and reached them. Tell the gods I will lift this last great burden from the earth and come to protect the deva-loka.” The messenger of the gods bowed, and went by the divine course back to the king of the gods.
In Dwarka, day and night, great portents of ruin began to show, in the sky, on the earth, and in the air between. Bhagavan looked at them and said to the Yadavas, “Look at these terrible disturbances. Come, let us go quickly to Prabhasa-kshetra and pacify them.” Uddhava, the best of the Yadavas and the great bhagavata among them, bowed to Shri Hari and said, “It seems to me that you mean now to destroy this clan, for the signs of its destruction are showing everywhere. Command me. What should I do?” Bhagavan said, “Uddhava, go now, by the divine course my grace has opened to you, to the holy Badarikashrama on Gandhamadana mountain, the abode of Nara and Narayana. On this earth there is no holier place. There, with your mind fixed on me, you will attain siddhi by my grace. I too, when I have destroyed this clan, will go to svarga. When I leave, the sea will drown all of Dwarka; only my dwelling it will spare, out of fear of me, and in that dwelling I reside always, wishing the good of my devotees.” Uddhava bowed and went at once, as Keshava had told him, to the tapovana of Nara and Narayana.
The Destruction of the Yadavas at Prabhasa
Then all the Yadavas mounted swift chariots and came with Krishna and Balarama to Prabhasa-kshetra. There the Yadavas of the Kukura, Andhaka, and Vrishni lines sat down to a great drinking and a great meal, and it was Vasudeva’s own prompting that seated them. As they drank a dispute started, and a fire of strife like the fire at the end of an age flared up among them, fed with harsh words. Maitreya stopped the telling here. Eating their own food, he asked, what could these Yadavas have found to quarrel over, in words or in blows? Parashara told him: whose food was good. My food is pure; yours is not fit to eat. Out of that they fell to arguing, and from arguing to blows. Daiva drove them. Their eyes went red with anger and they struck at one another with weapons, and when the weapons were spent they seized the eraka reeds growing near at hand.
In their hands the reeds were like vajra, and with those thunderbolts they fought that terrible fight: Krishna’s own sons Pradyumna and Samba, Kritavarma, Satyaki, Aniruddha, Prithu, Viprithu, Charuvarma, Charuka, Akrura, and the rest of the Yadavas, each striking the other down. When Shri Hari tried to stop them they took him for the helper of the other side, let his words go past them, and went on killing one another. Then Krishna too, angered, took up a fistful of reeds to kill them, and in his fist it became an iron pestle, and with that pestle he began to strike down every Yadava who had turned aggressor, while all the others came on and finished one another. Then his chariot, Jaitra, drawn by its own horses, went off along the middle path of the sea while Daruka stood watching, and his conch, his chakra, his gada, the Sharnga bow, the quiver, and the sword circled Shri Hari once in reverence and went away by the path of the sun. In a moment no Yadava was left alive except the great Krishna and his charioteer Daruka.
Balarama and Krishna Return to Their Own Abode
Walking about there, the two of them saw Shri Balarama seated at the root of a tree, and a great serpent coming out of his mouth. Hooded and immense, it came out and moved toward the sea, with the Siddhas and the Nagas worshiping it as it went, and the sea came forward to meet it with arghya, as a host comes to the door for a guest; the best of the Nagas honored it, and it entered the sea. Krishna watched Balarama go in that form, and then turned to Daruka. “Go and tell all of this to Ugrasena and Vasudeva: Balabhadra’s departure, the destruction of the Yadavas, and that I too, established in yoga, will leave this body. Tell Ahuka and all the people of Dwarka that the sea will now drown the whole city; so let all of you wait only for Arjuna to come, and when Arjuna leaves, let no one stay in Dwarka. Wherever that son of Kunti goes, let them all go. And tell Arjuna from me: protect my family as your strength allows. You yourself take the people of Dwarka and go with Arjuna. After us, Vajra will be king of the Yadu line.” Daruka bowed again and again, walked round him many times over, and went as he had been told. He reached Dwarka, told everything that had happened, brought Arjuna there, and had Vajra consecrated king.
Here Bhagavan Krishna placed within his own self the Parabrahman that is Vasudeva by nature and pervades every being, and meditated on it; and then, in play, that Purushottama merged his mind into the Paramatman in which no manifold thing remains, and stood in the fourth state, turiya. To honor a word the Brahmin Durvasa had once spoken, he sat in yoga with one foot laid across his knee. At that time the hunter named Jara came by, the one who had fitted the lance-shaped sliver left over from the pestle to the tip of his arrow. From far off he saw the sole of that foot, shaped to his eye like a deer, and pierced it with the iron. Then he came up, and saw a four-armed man. He fell at the feet and said again and again, “Be pleased, be pleased. I did this wrong without knowing, taking you for a deer. Forgive me. I am burning with my sin. Protect me.” Bhagavan said, “Have no fear at all. By my grace, go now to svarga, the place of the gods.” As the words ended a vimana arrived, and the hunter mounted it and went up to svarga by Bhagavan’s grace. When he had gone, Bhagavan Krishna merged his self in Vishnu, imperishable, beyond thought, Vasudeva by nature, stainless, unborn, deathless, beyond measure, the self of all that is, Brahman itself; he passed beyond the threefold course of the gunas, and left this human body.
Dwarka Beneath the Waters and the Crowning of Parikshit
Arjuna had the bodies of Rama, Krishna, and the other chief Yadavas searched out, and he performed their funeral rites one by one, in order. The eight chief queens of Krishna, Rukmini at their head, embraced Hari’s body and entered the fire. The sati Revati embraced Balarama’s body and entered the blazing fire, and the flames came to her cool, for the joy of his limbs against hers. When the news reached them, Ugrasena, Vasudeva, Devaki, and Rohini entered the fire as well. Arjuna completed the rites for the dead, took Vajra and the other kinsfolk, and came out of Dwarka, and he went slowly, guarding with great care the thousands of Krishna’s wives who had left the city with him, and Vajra, and the rest. On the day Krishna left the mortal world the Sudharma hall and the Parijata tree went back to svarga, and on that same day the mighty Kali, dark of body, came down and settled on the earth. Then the sea drowned the emptied Dwarka. Only Krishna’s dwelling it did not drown, and to this day the sea cannot cover it, because Keshava dwells there always; that place, full of Bhagavan’s glory, destroys every sin, and a man has only to set eyes on it to be freed of them all. Arjuna settled the people of Dwarka in the Panchanada country, rich in grain and wealth.
On the way a strange thing happened. The Abhira robbers of that country saw a lone bowman leading women whose husbands were dead, and greed rose in them, and those arrogant, wicked men took counsel together. “Look, this one archer walks past us and takes these helpless women. Shame on our strength and our manhood. He killed Bhishma and Drona and Jayadratha and Karna and it has gone to his head; he does not yet know the strength of village men. He sees the staves in our hands and this fool with a bow scorns us all. What are our arms for?” So thousands of them fell upon the helpless people of Dwarka with staves and clods of earth. Arjuna rebuked them, calling them sinners, and laughed as he did it. “If you do not wish to die, turn back even now.” They paid no heed, and took all of Krishna’s wealth, and the women’s own wealth, in front of him. The hero Arjuna went to string his imperishable Gandiva for the fight, and could not. With great difficulty he forced the cord on, and it went slack again in his hands, and however hard he thought, his astras would not come back to him. In fury he rained arrows on them, and the arrows of the Gandiva’s wielder went through skin and no further; his power was ebbing, and the inexhaustible arrows Agni had given him ran out, spent on Ahiras. Then Arjuna understood that every king he had ever conquered with his arrows, he had conquered by Krishna’s power alone. While he watched, the Ahiras dragged off the best of those women, and some fled wherever they could. When the arrows were done Dhananjaya struck with the tip of his bow, and the robbers only laughed the harder at the blows. Before Arjuna’s eyes those mlecchas carried off all the women of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas. Then Arjuna, who had never lost, wept aloud in his grief, and said that Bhagavan had deceived him. The same bow, he said, the same weapons, the same chariot, the same horses, and all of it undone at a stroke, like a gift given to a man who does not know the Veda. Daiva is strong; without the great Krishna it has handed victory to the weak and low Ahiras. “These are my same arms, the same fist, the same ground I stood on, and I am the same Arjuna; and without the holy Krishna all of it is worthless today. My being Arjuna and Bhima’s being Bhima were by Krishna’s grace alone. Without him the base Abhiras have beaten me, the best of maharathis.”
He went on to his capital, Indraprastha, and there consecrated Vajra, the son of the Yadus, as king. Then Phalguna went to find Vyasa, who was living in the forest, bowed humbly to the great muni, and stayed a long time at his feet. Vyasa looked at him. “Why are you so lusterless today?” The muni went through the causes a man can lose his light by, one after another. Had he walked in the dust raised by sheep, or killed a Brahmin, or had some firm hope broken under him? Had he refused a man who came asking for a marriage for the sake of offspring, or gone to a forbidden woman? Had he eaten sweets alone without giving to Brahmins, or taken a miser’s wealth? Had the wind of a winnowing fan touched him, had his eye ailed, had someone struck him? Had water off someone’s nails fallen on him, or water splashed from a pot? Or had he been beaten in battle by a lesser man? “Why are you so lusterless?” Partha drew a long breath and said, “Listen,” and told Vyasa the whole of his defeat as it had happened. Hari, he said, who had been their only strength, their luster, their valor, their power, their wealth and their beauty, had left them and gone. That one who could do anything, who used to speak with them laughing, as a friend: without him they were figures of straw. Purushottama, who was the living essence of his astras, his arrows, his Gandiva, had gone. Govinda, under whose glance shri and victory and fortune and rise had never once left them, had gone. The one by whose power Bhishma, Drona, Karna, Duryodhana, and the other heroes had been burned up had left the earth, and it was no longer only Arjuna; the whole earth looked to him stripped of youth and shri and beauty without that bearer of the chakra. By his power the great rathis had burned in Arjuna like moths in a fire, and without him Arjuna was beaten today by cowherds. By his power the Gandiva was famous through the three worlds, and without him the Ahiras’ staves held it in contempt. The thousands of Bhagavan’s women he had been carrying home with all his care, the robbers had taken by the force of their staves; men with sticks for weapons had overcome his strength and carried off Krishna’s whole household. “That I am lusterless is no wonder. The wonder is that I am sunk in the mud of insult from base men, and still shamelessly alive.” Vyasa said, “Your shame is needless. You should not grieve. Know this to be the course of Kala in all beings.” Kala alone, he told him, was the cause of the rise and fall of every creature, and a man who knew victory and defeat to lie under Kala could stand steady. Rivers, seas, mountains, the whole earth, gods, men, beasts, trees, and the things that crawl: Kala made them all and Kala would unmake them, and a man who knew the whole world to be of Kala’s nature could be at peace. Everything Arjuna had said of Krishna’s greatness was true, and the truth went further: the lotus-eyed Bhagavan Krishna was Kala himself. He had come down to the mortal world to relieve the earth of her burden, when the earth, crushed under it, had gone to the assembly of the gods; for that work Janardana had taken birth in the form of Kala, and now all the wicked kings were slain and the work was done, and the whole clan of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas was withdrawn, and nothing remained for that lord to do on earth. So, his work done, Bhagavan had gone as he willed. The God of gods creates at the beginning of creation, maintains in the time of maintenance, and destroys at the end, and the destroying was what he had now done. So Arjuna should not grieve at his defeat, for in the time of a man’s rise he does the deeds that earn him praise, and when Arjuna alone had killed Bhishma and Drona and Karna in battle, had that not been their defeat by a lesser man, through the course of Kala? As he had humbled them by Vishnu’s power, so he had now to be humbled by robbers. That lord of the world enters bodies and maintains the world, and at the end he destroys every being. When Arjuna’s fortune rose, Janardana was his helper; at its end, Keshava’s kind glance had fallen on his opponents. Who would have believed that Arjuna would kill all the Kauravas, with Bhishma the son of Ganga among them? And who would believe that he would lose to Abhiras? “This is only the lila of Hari, the self of all: that you alone destroyed the Kauravas, and then were beaten by Ahiras.”
Then Vyasa turned to the women carried off by the robbers, over whom Arjuna grieved, and told him the secret of it as it had happened. Long ago the Brahmin Ashtavakra had stood many years in water, praising the eternal Brahman. The gods had just conquered the daityas and there was a great festival on the peak of Meru, and on their way to it Rambha and Tilottama and devanganas by the hundreds and thousands saw the muni, his matted hair heavy on him, sunk to the throat in the water, and bowed humbly and praised him, and as his pleasure grew they praised him the more. “I am pleased with you,” Ashtavakra said. “Ask of me what you wish; however rare the thing, I will give it.” Rambha, Tilottama, and the other apsaras the Vedas know by name said, “With you pleased, what is there we have not obtained?” The others said, “If you are pleased with us, then we wish to have Purushottama himself for a husband.” “So it shall be,” said the muni, and came up out of the water, and as he rose they saw his body, ugly, bent in eight places. They hid their laughter and it showed through, and the muni, angered, cursed them. “You looked at my ugly form and laughed and insulted me. So I give you this curse: by my grace you will have Shri Purushottama for a husband, and by my curse you will fall into the hands of robbers.” They pleased him again, and he said, “After that you will go back to svarga, to Indra’s world.” So by the curse of the muni Ashtavakra those women of heaven, having had Shri Krishna for a husband, fell into the hands of robbers. “Do not grieve in the least,” Vyasa said, “for the lord of all has himself withdrawn the whole Yadu clan, and your own end is near; that is why the lord of all has withdrawn your strength, your luster, your valor, and your greatness. What is born, its death is certain; what rises, its fall is certain; union ends in parting, and accumulation ends in loss. Knowing this, the wise feel no grief at loss and no joy at gain, and others, imitating their conduct, come to behave the same. So, knowing this, leave the whole kingdom, with your brothers, and go to the forest for tapas. Go now and tell Dharmaraja Yudhishthira all I have said, and see that you and your brothers are on the road to the forest the day after tomorrow.” Arjuna came back and told Yudhishthira and Bhimasena and the twins, Nakula and Sahadeva, everything he had seen and lived through. The Pandavas heard Vyasa’s message from him, placed Parikshit on the throne, and went to the forest themselves.
The Srimad Bhagavatam, too, remembers the end of the Yadus. Such were the lilas Bhagavan Vasudeva performed, born in the Yadu clan, and Parashara had now told Maitreya all of them in full. Whoever keeps hearing this story of Krishna is freed of all his sins and goes, at the end, to the world of Vishnu.
Source: Vishnu Purana (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)