Krishna
கண்ணன் कृष्ण
Also Govinda, Gopala, Vasudeva, Murari, Kanna, Guruvayurappan, Ranchhod.
Vaishnava
Who this is
Krishna is the eighth avataram and the one the tradition loves rather than obeys. He is three people at once and the devotional schools each take one: the butter thief of Gokul, the cowherd of Vrindavan whom the gopis follow, and the charioteer at Kurukshetra who speaks the Bhagavad Gita. He is the only major deity whose childhood is as much worshipped as his adulthood, and the only one whose mischief is part of the devotion. The Gita he speaks is the one text of the tradition that is read by people of every school and of none.
How to recognise them
Dark or blue, with a peacock feather in the hair, a yellow silk dhoti, standing cross legged with the flute at his lips under a tree, with cows and gopis around him. As the child he crawls with a ball of butter in his fist. At Guruvayur and Udupi he is the child; at Dwarka and Puri he is the king. The Gita form shows him at the reins of Arjuna’s chariot.
Family and companions
Son of Vasudeva and Devaki, raised by Nanda and Yashoda in Gokul. Brother of Balarama and of Subhadra. Radha is his beloved in the Braj tradition and is not his wife; Rukmini and Satyabhama are his queens, with eight principal and many more. Cousin of the Pandavas and Arjuna’s charioteer.
How they are worshipped
Janmashtami in Bhadrapada; Wednesday and Thursday; Ekadasi as Vishnu.
Janmashtami at midnight in Bhadrapada is his birth, kept with a fast broken when the hour comes. The cradle is hung and the child rocked. Butter, milk, curd and seedai are offered. The Gita is read on Gita Jayanti, and the Hare Krishna mahamantra is the practice of the Gaudiya schools. Tulasi is his leaf, as it is Vishnu’s.
The stories
As they are told, with the disagreements left in
The hill held up on a finger
The cowherds of Vrindavan kept an annual sacrifice to Indra for the rain. Krishna told them to worship the hill Govardhan instead, which actually fed their cattle, and they did. Indra, insulted, sent a storm to drown them. Krishna lifted the hill on the little finger of his left hand and held it for seven days while the whole village and its cattle sheltered under it. Govardhan Puja the day after Diwali is that story, with a hill of food built and offered. The tradition reads it as a god arguing against sacrifice to a god.
The butter and the mothers
He stole butter from every house in Gokul and was caught constantly. Yashoda once tried to tie him to a mortar and found the rope always a finger short however much she added, until she gave up and he let himself be bound, which is the name Damodara, bound at the belly. Another time the children told her he had eaten mud; she opened his mouth to look and saw the whole universe in it, and then forgot, because a mother who remembered could not go on being his mother. The telling keeps both the ordinary and the vast in the same breath on purpose.
The chariot at Kurukshetra
Arjuna, seeing his own teachers and cousins drawn up against him, put down his bow and said he would not fight. Krishna, holding the reins, answered him for seven hundred verses, and that is the Bhagavad Gita. He takes no side in the fighting and carries no weapon, having given his army to the other side and kept only himself. What he argues is not that the war is good but that withdrawal is also an act, and that the work in front of a person is to be done without owning its results.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- Tamil Nadu
- Kept as Kannan, with the Gokulashtami kolam of small feet drawn from the door to the shrine as though the child had walked in, and seedai and murukku offered.
- Kerala
- Guruvayur is the great shrine and he is Guruvayurappan, worshipped as the child, with the tulabharam and the thulasi garland.
- North India
- Braj, the country of Mathura and Vrindavan, is his own, and Holi there runs for days with the Lathmar Holi at Barsana.
- Bengal
- The Gaudiya tradition of Chaitanya puts Radha beside him and sings rather than offers, and Dol Jatra in Phalgun is the swing festival.
- Gujarat
- Dwarka is where he reigned as king, and the Ranchhodrai of Dakor and the garba of Navaratri belong to the same devotion.
Their days
Every one of these has a page of its own
Where to see them
From the temple directory
- Guruvayur Sri Krishna Temple Guruvayur, Thrissur, Kerala
- Sri Krishna Matha, Udupi Udupi, Karnataka
- Dwarkadhish Temple Dwarka, Devbhumi Dwarka, Gujarat
- Shrinathji Temple, Nathdwara Nathdwara, Rajsamand, Rajasthan
- Sri Krishna Janmabhoomi, Mathura Mathura, Uttar Pradesh
- Banke Bihari Temple, Vrindavan Vrindavan, Mathura, Uttar Pradesh
- Ambalappuzha Sree Krishna Temple Ambalappuzha, Alappuzha, Kerala
What is said
From the mantra library
In the almanac
Their nakshatras