Yet another current is now beginning to stir men's minds, and it is one that is also destined to a great future. It starts from Kṛishṇa.
The teaching of the Upanishads, that all being is the One Brahma and that Brahma is the same as the individual soul, has busied many men, not only Brahmans but also Kshatriyas, noblemen of the warrior order. Some even say that it arose among the Kshatriyas; and at any rate it is likely that they, being less obsessed with the forms of ritual than the Brahmans and therefore able to think more directly and clearly, have helped the Brahmans in their discussions to clear their minds of ritual symbolism, and to realise more definitely the philosophic ideas which hitherto they had seen only dimly typified in their ceremonies.
Kṛishṇa was one of these Kshatriyas. He belonged to the Sātvata or Vṛishṇi tribe, living in or near the ancient city of Mathurā. Sometimes in early writings he is styled Kṛishṇa Dēvakīputra, Kṛishṇa Dēvakī's son, because his mother's name was Dēvakī; sometimes again he is called Kṛishṇa Vāsudēva, or simply Vāsudēva, which is a patronymic said to be derived from the name of his father Vasudēva. In later times we shall find a whole cycle of legend gathering round him, in which doubtless there is a kernel of fact. Omitting the miraculous elements in these tales, we may say that the outline of the Kṛishṇa-legend is as follows: Kṛishṇa's father Vasudēva and his mother Dēvakī were grievously wronged by Dēvakī's cousin Kaṃsa, who usurped the royal power in Mathurā and endeavoured to slay Kṛishṇa in his infancy; but the child escaped, and on growing to manhood killed Kaṃsa. But Kaṃsa had made alliance with Jarāsandha king of Magadha, who now threatened Kṛishṇa; so Kṛishṇa prudently retired from Mathurā and led a colony of his tribesmen to Dvārakā, on the western coast in Kathiawar, where he founded a new State. There seems to be no valid reason for doubting these statements. Sober history does not reject a tale because it is embroidered with myth and fiction.
Now this man Kṛishṇa in the midst of his stirring life of war and government found time and taste also for the things that are of the spirit. He talked with men learned in the Upanishads about Brahma and the soul and the worship of God; and apparently he set up a little Established Church of his own, in which was combined something of the idealism of the Upanishads with the worship of a supreme God of grace and perhaps too a kind of religious discipline, about which we shall say more later on. It must be confessed that we know sadly little about his actual doctrine from first hand. All that we hear about it is a short chapter in the Chhāndōgya Upanishad (iii. 17), where the Brahman Ghōra Āṅgirasa gives a sermon to Kṛishṇa, in which he compares the phases of human life to stages in the dīkshā or ceremony of consecration, and the moral virtues that should accompany them to the dakshiṇā or honorarium paid to the officiating priests, and he concludes by exhorting his hearer to realise that the Brahma is imperishable, unfailing, and spiritual, and quoting two verses from the Ṛig-vēda speaking of the Sun as typifying the supreme bliss to which the enlightened soul arises. This does not tell us very much, and moreover we should remember that here our author, being an Aupanishada, is more interested in what Ghōra preached to Kṛishṇa than in what Kṛishṇa accepted from Ghōra's teaching. But we shall find centuries later in the Bhagavad-gītā, the greatest textbook of the religion of Kṛishṇa, some distant echoes of this paragraph of the Chhāndōgya.
The beginnings of the religion of Kṛishṇa are thus very uncertain. But as we travel down the ages we find it growing and spreading. We see Kṛishṇa himself regarded as a half-divine hero and teacher, and worshipped under the name of Bhagavān, "the Lord," in association with other half-divine heroes. We see him becoming identified with old gods, and finally rising to the rank of the Supreme Deity whose worship he had himself taught in his lifetime, the Brahma of the philosophers and the Most High God of the theists. As has happened many a time, the teacher has become the God of his Church.
FOOTNOTES
[18] For the original mortality of the gods see TS. VII. iv. 2, 1, ŚB. X. iv. 33 f., XI. i. 2, 12, ii. 3, 6; for their primitive non-differentiation, TS. VI. vi. 8, 2, ŚB. IV. v. 4, 1-4.
[19] Cf. e.g. KB. III. 4 & 6, VI. 2-9, and Āp. ŚS. VI. xiv. 11-13.