The Hindus (82 page)

KRISHNA (AND THE WOMEN WHO LOVED HIM)

Major changes were beginning to be made in the worship of Krishna at this time. When we meet Krishna in the
Mahabharata,
he is already an adult; the
Harivamsha,
the appendix to the
Mahabharata,
composed a century or two after it (c. 450 CE), gives him a childhood. This childhood may have been derived, in the early centuries CE, from popular, vernacular, non-Brahminical stories about a village boy who lived among the cowherd people,
¹¹
a far cry from the powerful prince Krishna of the
Mahabharata.
In a stroke of genius, the
Harivamsha
put the two mythologies together, the
Mahabharata
story of the prince and the folk/vernacular stories of a cowherd child, by bridging them with a third story, a variant of the story that Freud called the family romance,
¹²
the myth of a boy of noble blood who is raised by animals, or by the herders of animals, until he grows up and finds his real parents.
^ip
The family romance is a ready-made, off-the-rack story right at hand to be picked up and used when there is a sudden need to plug a gaping hole, to construct a childhood for a god who has appeared only as an adult in earlier texts. Once the join was made, the
Harivamsha
quickly absorbed the cowherd mythology and developed it in its own ways. Krishna in the
Mahabharata
was already a double figure, a god pretending to be a prince, but now he was doubly doubled: a god pretending to be a prince pretending to be a cowherd. This opened up the way to the worship of the child Krishna and a theology of the hidden god, revealed through a series of charming miracles that puzzle all but the reader who is in the know.

The
Harivamsha
tells the story of Krishna’s birth into his double life:

Krishna’s birth is doubled in yet another way, by the simultaneous birth of Sleep as Kali and the daughter of Devaki as the daughter of Yashoda. The worship of the goddess Kali, a new, specifically Hindu element injected into the basic formula, signals the beginning of a new prominence of women in the worship of Krishna, starting in this text, where Devaki, in a manner reminiscent of Draupadi, harasses her husband, Vasudeva, and forces him to stop saying, “It is all fated,” and to do something to save her baby. Indeed bhakti texts generally challenge the more fatalistic construction of karma, believing that people’s actions in their current lives can produce good or bad fortune
in this life
and that devotion to the gods, in particular, pays off in this lifetime
¹⁴
as well as in the next.

The
Harivamsha
makes Krishna’s foster mother, Yashoda, a major character, as does the tenth book of the
Bhagavata Purana,
which bears the imprint of the bhakti wind blowing from the south and develops in glorious detail the other mothers of Krishna, the Gopis or cowherd women, who become his foster mothers and cluster around him in adoration. There are also negative foster mothers: The infant Krishna kills (among many ogres and ogresses) the ogress Putana, who tries to poison him with the milk from her breasts but is killed instead when he sucks out her life’s breath with her milk .
¹⁵

The
Bhagavata
also domesticates the myth of looking into the mouth of god (Krishna), which, in the
Gita,
reveals to Arjuna the unbearable image of doomsday. In the Purana, Yashoda looks into the mouth of her toddler Krishna and sees in it the universe and herself (as Brahma sees the universe and himself in Vishnu), a vision that she finds unbearable, just as Arjuna did. In both cases, Krishna grants, in his infinite love, the boon that Arjuna and Yashoda will forget the vision.
¹⁶

When passion, even religious passion, is the game, the erotic is always a heavy hitter. Krishna in the
Mahabharata
is a prince with many wives, sixteen thousand by some counts, though he had his favorites.
^ir
The Puranas depict Krishna as a handsome young man who dances with the many Gopis, the wives of the cowherd men. In the great circle dance in the moonlight (
rasa-lila
), he doubles himself again and again so that each Gopi thinks that Krishna is with her. Similarly, the Gopis double themselves, leaving shadow images of themselves in bed with their unsuspecting husbands. The Gopis are both his mothers and his lovers; the Puranas tend to blur the distinction between the love of Krishna’s mothers (“calf love” [
vatsalya
]) and the love of his lovers (“honey-sweet love” [
madhurya
]).
¹⁷
Here is yet another example of the astounding Hindu ability to combine ideas that other religions might feel constrained to choose between or at least to keep separate.

In later Puranas, one Gopi in particular is the lover of Krishna: Radha, who is virtually unknown to the Sanskrit mythology of Krishna until the seventh century and does not become important to the devotional community until the sixteenth century,
¹⁸
when bhakti has feminized sectarianism and made women more important. The story of Krishna and Radha inspired the Sanskrit
Gita Govinda,
“The Song of [Krishna] the Cowherd,” by Jayadeva, the court poet of the Bengali King Laksmanasena (c. 1179-1209), an important text for Vaishnava worshipers. Jayadeva’s Radha is powerful; Krishna bends down before her and puts her feet on his head. The romance of the two adulterous lovers may owe something to the Persian romances that were becoming known in India through the Muslim presence at this time, in some Sufi sects.
¹⁹

In the
Bhagavata Purana,
Krishna would disappear from the circle dance from time to time, and the Gopis searched for him in an exquisite agony of longing, the great Indian theme of love and separation (
viraha
), here in the familiar bhakti mode of longing for the absent god (the
deus absconditus
or
otiosus
). But in the later Puranas, often under Tantric influences, it was Radha alone with whom the worshiper, male or female, identified. As a Gopi, Radha was also one of Krishna’s foster mothers, a role that she does not entirely abandon when she becomes his lover. In the
Brahmavaivarta Purana,
probably composed in Bengal in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, the mature Radha is put in charge of the infant Krishna, to her intense annoyance; suddenly he turns into a gorgeous young man, with whom she makes love joyously for many days—until he turns back again into a demanding, and wet, infant.
²⁰

Images from the life of Rama are represented at the Dashavatara temple at Deogarh, though in general there is little evidence of Rama worship in temples at that time (the Gupta period), nor, in dramatic contrast with Krishna, is Rama’s story elaborated upon to any significant degree in the early Puranas. But Valmiki’s
Ramayana
was not only still widely read in Sanskrit at the time of the later Puranas (800-1500 CE) but was now beginning to be translated into the vernacular literatures, as well as retold in other Sanskrit texts. The
Mahabharata, Harivamsha, Vishnu Purana,
and several other Puranas omit the fire ordeal of Sita entirely,
²¹
but the fifteenth-century
Adhyatma-Ramayana
used it to exculpate Sita not only from being present in Ravana’s home but from the weakness of asking Rama to capture the golden deer for her. This illusory deer, however, may have inspired the
Adhyatma-Ramayana
to create the illusory Sita who now desires the deer:

Ravana captures the illusory Sita, and Rama then pretends to grieve for Sita, pretends to fight to get her back, and lies to his brother Lakshmana, who genuinely grieves for Sita. Sita herself is never subjected to an ordeal at all; after Ravana has been killed and the false Sita brought back and accused, the illusory Sita enters the fire and vanishes forever, while the real Sita emerges and remains with Rama. Thus the text quells the uneasiness that the reader (or hearer) may well share with Rama at the thought of Sita’s living in Ravana’s house for so long: Rama never intended or needed to test Sita (since he knew she wasn’t in Ravana’s house at all) but had the shadow Sita enter the fire merely in order to bring the real Sita back from the fire, to make her visible again. The shadow Sita protects the real Sita from the trauma of life with Rama as well as with Ravana.

But Rama seems to forget what he has done; he grieves terribly for Sita and orders the shadow Sita into the fire as if she were real. The illusory Sita is part of the greater illusion that Rama, as a great god, is now in charge of; he is play-acting (through his
lila,
his artistic game) the whole time anyway, so why not playact his grief for Sita? Probably in order to maintain the power of the narrative, the author has Rama seem to forget about the shadow at crucial moments; only when the gods come and remind him of his divinity (as they do in the Valmiki text) does Fire (incarnate as the god Agni) return Sita to Rama, remarking, “You made this illusory Sita in order to destroy Ravana. Now he is dead, and that Sita has disappeared.”
²³
And whereas Sita’s desire for the deer in the Valmiki text proves that she can’t recognize a substitute deer, in this text she gets a substitute who can’t recognize the substitute deer, while Ravana can’t recognize the substitute Sita.

The
Brahmavaivarta Purana
develops the idea of the subjectivity of the surrogate Sita, who goes on to have a life of her own as Draupadi, of all people:

Fire gives the shadow Sita a sexual future as Draupadi, who, like the shadow Sita, is born of a fire;
²⁵
indeed it may have been the shared theme of birth from fire that attracted Draupadi from her own epic into Sita’s story in the other epic, as if Lady Macbeth somehow popped up as a character in
King Lear.

THE BUDDHA

The Buddha avatar is mentioned in of the
Mahabharata:
²⁶
“At the beginning of the Kali Age, Vishnu will become the Buddha, son of Shuddhodana, and he will preach in the Magadha dialect. All men will become bald, like him, and wear the ocher robe, and priests will cease to offer oblations or recite the Veda.”
²⁷
The precise historical detail of preaching in Magadhi, together with the reference to the name of the Buddha’s father as it appears in the Pali canon (and in later lists of historical Hindu dynasties
²⁸
), lulls us into a false sense of historical reality—until it gets to the crucial point: “Those who sought refuge with Vishnu [as Buddha] were deluded.” The myth of Vishnu’s incarnation as the Buddha is established in full detail in the
Vishnu Purana,
represented on the sixth- to seventh-century Dashavatara temple at Deogarh and mentioned in a seventh-century Pallava inscription
²⁹
and an eighth-century Tamil inscription.
³⁰

The Buddha avatar was not originally, as it might seem at first glance and is often advertised as being, a genuine attempt to assimilate the teachings of the Buddha into Hinduism (though this was certainly done in many other ways). On the contrary, although Vishnu as Buddha expresses the anti-Vedic sentiments that Hindus (rightly) attribute to Buddhists, Jainas, Materialists, and other heretics, he does this in order to destroy the antigods by teaching them an evil doctrine, Buddhism, on the second alliance principle that the gods cannot destroy a virtuous person unless they first corrupt him: