Historical Krishna - Part 5

Here comes the tales of some extra ordinary feats of the baby Krishna. Some of them are corroborated in the Mahabharata in the Sabha Parva by Sishupala who was disparaging the achievements of Sri Krishna. Mahabharata in its present form misses some sections of the interchange between Bhisma and Shishupala during the Rajasuya sacrifice. Bhisma was perhaps recounting the exploits of Sri Krishna in order to justify his receiving the arghya and Shishupala countered them in his own style. The first exploit is that of killing of Putana. Putana was sent by Kamsa to kill suspected babies by poisoning. According to Vishnu Purana she was a child killer. According to Harivamsa she was the nurse of Kamsa, while Bhagavatam shows her as a demon or an ogre. Bankim Chandra thinks Putana was a bird. He cites the exchange between Shishupala and Bhisma where Shishupala dismisses Krishna’s feats esp. that of killing of a vulture as a child. Also Putana in Sanskrit means a bird. Dhirendra Paul while considering the possibility of Putana being a bird tends to think that it was a child killing disease that affected Krishna and he survived as Putana according to Sushrusha is a disease. But in one of the statements of Sishupala, he accuses Krishna of being the killer of a woman. And there is no other woman recorded anywhere that Krishna killed apart from Putana. So we are inclined to believe that killing a bird or battling a disease are mere conjectures and the collective memory of people would not have remembered the incident had it been a recovery from a deadly disease or the killing of a vulture. So Putana was a woman and possibly she was out to kill Krishna and baby Krishna overpowered her – not impossible for a person of extra ordinary power because such power manifests very early, even as a baby. Whether Krishna killed Putana or she was accidentally killed by her own poison is a matter of conjecture, but the fact remains that a hired assassin paid for her transgressions through her life. Bhagavatam however states that by the very act of getting killed in the hands of the Lord and by nursing the Lord even with the intention of killing Him Putana achieved great merit and all her sins got washed away and she ascended to the heaven.

Next in the fray was another hired assassin, Shakatasura. Once again this incident is corroborated by Shisupala’s statement in Sabhaparva where he says that what greatness is there in breaking an old wooden cart! So there was a cart that was broken, whether an asura got into its wheels and was killed in the process or not we do not know. In any event it was a display of superhuman power because it is impossible for an infant to break a cart by simply kicking at it. Or it may be entirely an accident, people may think that the cart came down under the weight of the luggage that was there. Whatever it may be, the child was unhurt and the Gopas took it as a grace of the Lord. Then comes the famous incident of Trinavarta. This did not find any mention in the Mahabharata. A demon called Trinavarta in the form of a whirlwind carried baby Krishna away while the gopas watched helplessly and was ultimately killed. Dhirendra Nath Paul thinks it was a vulture who carried Krishna away in its talons. This is unlikely because the very name avarta suggests it to be a whirlwind, so Bhagavatam is possibly right. An all destroying whirlwind caught the baby but the baby again escaped unhurt – may be because of the superhuman prowess or may be by divine grace. The whirlwind eventually lost its momentum and the people imagined that a great asura who was behind the wind had been killed. Whatever it may be, it is not an impossibility, nor a myth.

Then comes the incident of Yamalarjuna. Srikrishna as a baby was chastised by Yasoda for being naughty and was tied by ropes to a churning rod. That’s how Sri Krishna came to acquire the name Damodara. Now while Yasoda had gone away the little Krishna, displaying another superhuman feat dragged the heavy churning rod and went to the lawn where there were two trees side by side with a narrow gap in between. While going through the gap forcefully the twin trees were uprooted or broken and two Yakshas – Manigriva and Nalakuvera were freed of their curse and they eulogized the Lord in the form of Krishna before vanishing. This is the version of Srimad Bhagavatam. While it may seem an impossible feat to uproot two full grown trees by a toddler, Arjuna trees are not big trees, so a big churning rod made of stone can damage them severely if not uproot them completely. And we have already admitted that this baby had superhuman power, much more than ordinary babies would have. So while the story of bound yakshas may have been provided for the sake of glorifying the redeeming power of the Lord and may or may not be true, the Yamalarjuna incident of is not entirely an impossible event. Esp. because of the fact that this was the event which forced the Gopas to leave Gokula and settle in what they perceived a much safer Vrindavan for Krishna. So this was a milestone. And we shall presently see that Krishna and Balarama were both known for their super human strength. Balarama infact derived his name from the strength or Bala he possessed. Even though scholars like Bankim Chandra have dismissed all miraculous events associated with Krishna’s like, we need to understand that what we perceive as miracles are possibly universal laws acting in a different way through a different medium. Also Patanjali Yoga sutra says that a Yogi who has achieved the perfection, the highest aim, has complete control over the elements and hence has the ability to do almost anything except creation and destruction. In Mahabharata Krishna everywhere is referred to as Yogeswara or the master of the science of Yoga. It may be hard to believe for scholars or intellectuals but powers do exist. The collective memory of Krishna’s feat may have been distorted through folklore and over time but there is some essence behind it. We see in Mahabharata the adult Krishna performing remarkable feats which can be done only by people having special gifts. In every story of great teachers we see that special power manifested in some way or the other but always for the benefit of mankind, never for selfish gains. We know the firsthand account in Swami Vivekananda New Discoveries by Sister Gargi of how Swami Vivekananda was locked in a room by Francis Legett only to reappear in the drawing room in person, and when the locked room was open the people were astonished to find him meditating. Similar incidents are there in the biography of Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Chaitanya, Jesus Christ and even Lord Buddha, although both Ramakrishna and Buddha hated miracle mongering. Sri Ramakrishna said, “Mathurbabu had not served me devotedly without a reason, the divine mother had shown him many weird things through me” – one of them being the incident of the red and white hibiscus blooming on the same tree. Vivekananda also mentioned about his exhibiting some powers in America in order to win over the skeptics in America.