Krishna: The Many Faces of a God

In the cowherd villages along the Yamuna, the stories tell of a small boy with a pot of stolen butter in his hands and a look on his face that dares his mother to be angry. She ties him to a grinding stone. He drags it between two trees until they topple. Neighbours arrive to complain that he has been raiding their butter again, and somehow they leave charmed rather than furious.

This is Krishna as millions first meet him: the makhan chor, the butter thief of Vrindavan, mischief wearing a divine grin.

Turn a few pages and he is someone else. He is the flute player whose music pulls women out of their homes at night to dance in a forest. Turn again and he is a king, a diplomat, a battlefield strategist. Turn once more and he is standing between two armies, speaking words that Hindus have treated as scripture for two thousand years.

Few figures in world religion hold so many faces at once. Hindu tradition does not treat these as contradictions to be resolved. It holds them all in one dark-skinned, smiling god.

One god, counted eighth

In the standard list of Vishnu’s ten descents into the world, the dashavatara, Krishna is counted the eighth, coming after Rama and before the Buddha. That is the framing most people learn, and it places him among the great avatars sent, in tradition, to set the world right when it tilts toward chaos.

Traditions differ on the fine print. Some lists put Krishna’s elder brother Balarama in that eighth slot instead. And in the devotional world of the Bhagavata Purana, Krishna is not merely one avatar among ten. He is svayam bhagavan, the source from whom the avatars themselves come, God in full rather than a portion. However he is counted, the reverence is the same. Hundreds of millions worship him as the supreme.

Born in a prison cell

The stories begin with a prophecy and a frightened king.

In tradition, Krishna is born in Mathura, on the Yamuna, to Devaki and her husband Vasudeva. Devaki’s brother is Kamsa, the city’s tyrant, and a warning has reached him that his sister’s eighth child will be his death. So Kamsa locks the couple away and kills their children one by one as they are born.

When the eighth child arrives, the accounts say the prison guards fall asleep and the chains drop open of their own accord. Vasudeva carries the newborn out into a stormy night and across the flooded Yamuna, which parts to let him pass. He reaches the cowherd settlement of Gokul and exchanges his son for a baby girl born the same night to Yashoda and Nanda, then returns to the cell. Kamsa, cheated, never knows the child he fears is growing up among herdsmen a short ride away.

So Krishna is a god raised in secret, a prince brought up as a cowherd’s son. That double life sits under everything that follows.

The butter thief and the hill

Around Gokul and Vrindavan, Krishna’s childhood becomes one of the most beloved bodies of story in India.

He steals butter and curds, breaks the pots the milkmaids carry, and slips away laughing. He subdues a poison serpent coiled in the river. As a young man he plays a flute whose sound, the stories tell, no one in the pastures can resist.

One episode carries a quiet argument inside it. The villagers prepare their yearly offering to Indra, king of the gods and bringer of rain. Krishna persuades them to honour instead the hill and the cattle that actually feed them. Indra, insulted, sends a storm to drown the village. Krishna lifts the whole of Mount Govardhan on one finger and holds it over his people like an umbrella for seven days, until Indra gives way and bows. A boy shelters an entire village from the wrath of a god, and an older order yields to a newer one.

The lover and the longing

Then there is the Krishna the poets could never leave alone.

On autumn nights, the stories tell, the sound of his flute drew the gopis, the cowherd women, out to the forest to dance with him in a great circle called the Rasa Lila. In the telling, each woman feels Krishna is dancing with her alone, because he multiplies himself to be present with every one of them at once.

Dearest among them is Radha. She barely appears in the earliest texts and grows, over later centuries, into one of the most cherished figures in the whole tradition. Devotional poets came to read the ache of the gopis for an absent Krishna as the very model of the soul’s longing for God. What reads on the surface as a love story is received, in that light, as a map of devotion. The love is worshipped, not merely told.

The prince who came back

Krishna does not stay in the pastures.

Grown, he returns to Mathura, faces Kamsa in his own arena, and kills the uncle who had tried to murder him as an infant. The cowherd boy turns out to be exactly the death the prophecy promised.

What follows carries him from village legend into the politics of kingdoms. Under pressure from Kamsa’s vengeful allies, the tradition says Krishna leads his people west to the coast of Gujarat and founds the fortified island city of Dwarka, where he rules as king. The barefoot child of Gokul becomes a monarch with a capital of his own.

The charioteer at Kurukshetra

The last and largest of his faces belongs to the Mahabharata, the epic of a war between two branches of one royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas.

Krishna is tied to both sides by kinship, and he refuses to take up arms for either. Instead he offers each a choice: his entire army, or himself alone and unarmed. Arjuna, the great Pandava archer, chooses Krishna. And so a god becomes a charioteer, holding the reins for a mortal friend.

At the field of Kurukshetra, with the two armies drawn up and the conch shells sounded, Arjuna looks across at his cousins, his teachers, and his elders, and he cannot do it. He lowers his bow and says he would rather die than kill his own kin for a kingdom.

What Krishna says to him next is the Bhagavad Gita.

The song on the battlefield

The Gita, “the Song of the Lord,” is a dialogue of some seven hundred verses set into the Mahabharata, spread across eighteen chapters. It is among the most read and most translated texts Hinduism has produced, and people who will never fight a battle have carried it for centuries as a guide to living.

Arjuna’s crisis is a moral one, and the Gita meets it there. Krishna teaches that the true self is not the body and cannot be slain, and that Arjuna’s despair, however tender, comes from failing to see clearly.

From there the teaching opens outward. The Gita teaches dharma, the duty a person owes to their place in the world, and holds that abandoning that duty out of fear is no virtue. It teaches action without grasping at the fruit of it, doing what is right and releasing the outcome rather than being ruled by hope and dread. And it teaches bhakti, loving devotion to God, as a path open to anyone of any station, standing beside the older paths of knowledge and of works.

Near the climax, Arjuna asks to see who his charioteer truly is. Krishna grants him divine sight, and the friend at the reins expands into the Vishvarupa, the universal form, worlds and beings and all of time blazing at once in a single body. Overwhelmed, Arjuna begs the familiar Krishna to return. The infinite folds back into the friend.

Why so many faces

The stories of Krishna reach us through many texts. The Mahabharata carries the warrior and the counsellor. The Harivamsa, an appendix to that epic, and later the Vishnu Purana and the Bhagavata Purana fill in the childhood, the butter and the flute and the dance. Traditions differ over the details, and devotees have debated them lovingly for a very long time.

Even his death is told without grandeur. In the epic’s account, years after the war, a hunter named Jara mistakes Krishna’s resting foot for a deer and lets an arrow fly. The god who lifted a mountain leaves the world through a simple error, and Dwarka, the stories say, is swallowed by the sea soon after.

On Janmashtami, his birthday, temples across India and far beyond fill through the night to mark the hour he was born in that prison cell. Some who come are drawn to the child, some to the lover, some to the teacher of the Gita.

That is the quiet wonder of Krishna. He is thief and lover, king and strategist, dear friend and the whole universe wearing a human face. Many traditions ask a devotee to fix on one image of the divine and hold to it. This one offers a great many, and tells you they are all the same smile.