Krishna Avatar

At a Glance

• Central figures: Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu; Kansa, the tyrannical ruler of Mathura; Devaki and Vasudeva, Krishna’s imprisoned parents; Arjuna, the Pandava warrior whom Krishna guides at Kurukshetra.
• Setting: Ancient India, from the city of Mathura and the village of Gokul to the battlefield of Kurukshetra and the kingdom of Dwarka; the story draws from the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Puranic tradition.
• The turn: When the Kurukshetra War begins and Arjuna freezes at the sight of his kinsmen arrayed against him, Krishna - serving as his charioteer - delivers the teaching that becomes the Bhagavad Gita.
• The outcome: The Pandavas win the Kurukshetra War; Kansa is killed and Mathura liberated; Krishna’s teachings on dharma, karma, and bhakti are established as enduring guidance.
• The legacy: The Bhagavad Gita, delivered on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, remains one of the most studied philosophical and devotional texts in the world.

Kansa knew the prophecy and acted on it immediately. He threw his sister Devaki and her husband Vasudeva into prison and killed their children, one after another, the moment each was born. Six children died that way. The seventh, Balarama, was transferred by divine intervention to another womb before Kansa could reach him. The eighth was Krishna.

On the night of that eighth birth, the prison guards collapsed into sleep. The iron doors swung open without a hand touching them. Vasudeva lifted the infant and walked out into a storm, waded across the flooding Yamuna River with the child held above his head, and reached the village of Gokul before dawn. He placed Krishna in the house of a cowherd named Nanda, whose wife Yashoda had just given birth to a daughter. Then he walked back across the river and returned to his cell. When Kansa came in the morning and snatched up the newborn, the infant slipped from his hands, rose into the air, and disappeared - warning him that the one destined to end him was already alive somewhere in the world.

The Demoness Putana and the Butter Thief of Gokul

Kansa sent Putana to find the child. She traveled as a beautiful nurse, moving from village to village, offering her breast to infants - her milk was poisoned. She found Krishna in Nanda’s house and lifted him herself. Krishna nursed, and kept nursing, drawing out not milk but life. Putana’s body, enormous in its true form, fell dead across the village. The villagers needed axes to clear away the wreckage.

The child who killed Putana also stole butter from every house in Gokul, blamed other children, broke the pots Yashoda had hung from the rafters to keep them out of his reach, and laughed when he was caught. Yashoda once cornered him and demanded he open his mouth to prove he hadn’t eaten dirt. He opened it. She saw inside: the entire universe, every world and every star. She blinked. He was just her son again, grinning, the butter still on his hands.

Govardhana Hill

The people of Gokul had always made offerings to Indra at the onset of the rains. Krishna persuaded them to stop. Indra, he argued, gave rain to every land, not because he was worshipped but because it was the nature of clouds to rain. The mountain Govardhana fed them directly, sheltered their cattle, gave them water and pasture. Honor what actually provides for you.

Indra did not take this well. He sent rains that came down for seven days without stopping, flood-rains that would have swallowed the village entire. Krishna lifted Mount Govardhana on one finger and held it overhead like an umbrella while every person and animal in Gokul sheltered beneath it. After seven days, Indra withdrew the storm and came down himself to acknowledge what he had seen.

The Ras Leela and the Call of the Flute

Krishna played the flute in the forests of Vrindavan, and the gopis - the cowherd women - left whatever they were doing and came. The divine dance they performed together, the ras leela, went on through a single night that stretched, by the logic of maya, across an entire cosmic age. Radha, first among the gopis, is the one the devotional poets always name when they want to describe the soul’s longing for the divine. The flute itself - the sound that made people stop walking in the middle of roads - became in that tradition the image of a call that the soul cannot refuse.

The End of Kansa

When Krishna and Balarama were old enough, they traveled to Mathura for a festival. Kansa had arranged it as a trap, filling the arena with champions ordered to kill them. Each champion failed. Krishna crossed the arena and reached the throne. He grabbed Kansa by the hair, dragged him down from his seat, and killed him. Devaki and Vasudeva, still held in their prison after all those years, were freed. The kingdom of Mathura was released from the reign it had endured since before Krishna’s birth.

The Bhagavad Gita at Kurukshetra

The war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas had been coming for decades. When it finally arrived, both sides lined up at Kurukshetra and Krishna drove Arjuna’s chariot to the center of the field so Arjuna could survey what he was facing. He saw his cousins, his teachers, his grandfather Bhishma. He put down his bow.

He could not do it. He told Krishna he would rather die than kill his own family, and he sat down in the chariot and could not move.

What followed was the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna spoke at length - about the nature of the atman, which is not killed when the body dies; about dharma and what it requires of a warrior at the moment of battle; about karma yoga, acting without attachment to results; about bhakti, devotion that burns away the ego. He showed Arjuna his universal form, the vishvarupa, every mouth and every eye and every sun and every destruction at once - a vision so overwhelming that Arjuna begged him to take it back and return to being simply Krishna. Arjuna picked up his bow.

Dwarka and the Hunter’s Arrow

After the Pandavas’ victory, Krishna returned to Dwarka, the city he had built in the western sea. He ruled there for years, but a curse had been spoken against the Yadava dynasty - his own clan - and he knew what it meant. The Yadavas eventually destroyed themselves in a drunken brawl, exactly as the curse had foretold.

In his final days, Krishna withdrew into the forest and sat alone in meditation. A hunter named Jara - the name means “old age” - mistook the sole of Krishna’s foot for the ear of a deer and shot it with an arrow. The wound was slight. Krishna told Jara he had done nothing wrong and sent him away. Then he left his body where it was, and was gone.