Question
Why is the Hindu avatar Krishna so popular?
Answer
Therein lies a very complex historical tale. A major clue is in this popular verse:
Sounds strange, doesn't it? What's a verse like this doing in the world's most determinedly polytheistic religion? Why such an overweening, demanding personal God? This sounds like a better description of Jesus or Mohammad or the Buddha.
Some History
The key clue is in the following: Krishna as a deity grew increasingly popular after the first century AD, contemporaneously with figures like Jesus and the Buddha. The Bhagavad Gita is probably a fairly late addition to the Mahabharata (for reasons we will get to). As compositions based on revelations go, the Gita is not particularly unique. But it grew way more popular than similar ones like the Ashtavakra Gita (which I actually find more interesting). Why?
Krishna got another major boost with the Bhakti reform movement in the early second millennium AD, soon after Islam began taking over the subcontinent, driving out Buddhism and attracting converts both by sword and through the appeal of its egalitarian principles. That should remind you of other such reform movements around that time, including the Christian Protestant revolution and the rise of conservatism in Islam following the decline of the Abbassid Caliphate.
Here's what happened. Hinduism has seen four distinct phases, which correspond to entirely different religions in the Abrahamic tradition.
The Early Vedic phase (up to about 800 BC) is full of now-unimportant gods like Varuna (rain), Indra (thunder) and so forth, and powerful human seer-sages (the rishis) who were kinda their equal. The Later Vedic (or Epic) phase, when the Mahabharata and Ramayana began to be written down, extending from about 800 BC to about 100 AD saw the rise of the Brahma-Vishnu-Siva trinity, who were gradually viewed as much more powerful than the human rishis.
As the early kingdoms (the mahajanapadas) and republics (such as the Vrijji confederacy) gave way to the first large kingdoms like Magadha, and urbanization took root, two things happened. First, Buddhism rose as an urban religion, and Hinduism itself began to transform in two ways. First, the classical schools of philosophy began building a completely abstract tradition on top of Vedic commentary and retreated into a cryptic, scholastic tradition impenetrable to the masses (that's where all the philosophy comes from).
And on the other hand, the epics began to take their final form. Remember, these were primarily oral traditions that grew syncretically along with the empirization of the subcontinent. More local traditions and gods began to be absorbed into the narratives. The narratives themselves were incorporated into the older traditions of Vedic gods via detailed embedding of the human characters into mythology. The late stage Mahabharata had tons of new opening material added, basically reframing every human character as an incarnation of some deity or the other.
Sidebar on the Dasavatara
A little sidebar is in order here.
Now the actual events of the Mahabharata, to the extent that they correspond to reality, probably happened around 1000-700 BC, though some bits are undoubtedly much older. Magadha was still a minor kingdom. Krishna was a Yadava prince who probably (like the Buddha) had revelations that marked him as a Messiah figure. The details are forgotten, but in the grand syncretic feature creep of Hindusim, he was incorporated into the pantheon as the 8th incarnation of Vishnu in the dasavatara. Rather revealingly, there was a controversial attempt to insert the Buddha into the dasavatara at the 9th position, just after Krishna, and just before Kalki -- the yet to appear redeemer-destroyer. Buddha is accepted as #9 in some tellings, and in other tellings, rejected in others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das...
The dasavatara goes like so: fish, tortoise, boar, man-lion, dwarf, great warrior-sage (Parasurama), Rama, Krishna, Buddha (controversial) and Kalki. The first four look like a folk-evolutionary theory (these were common in mythology long before Darwin), followed by two legendary figures whose stories are half-divine. The list starts to look like human history with Parasurama, who clearly represents the historical archetype of reclusive forest-dwelling sages who composed the Vedic scriptures (these lineages continue to this day; my family is supposed to have descended from the Vedic sage Kausika for instance). At that point, with Rama, real history starts to enter the picture.
So Krishna stands at the cusp between legend and history. There is some controversy about whether the Ramayana or Mahabharata is older, but ignoring that somewhat meaningless question (both kinda grew like fungi over a millennium), in a purely literary sense, the Mahabharata is more human, and therefore more recent, since the canon got less divine and more human over time.
The Pattern
Let's step back and map this story to the Western tradition:
Krishna goes neck to neck with Rama in the early part of Phase III, but the final stabilization of the Bhagavad Gita in the early first millennium starts to shift the game in Krishna's favor. Through the Gupta empire and the Middle Ages, until the rise of Islam, this Messianic religion, like the Catholic Church, grows increasingly powerful.
The shock of Islam triggers ideas of reform based on a much more personal, direct relationship with god.
And here, Krishna leaves everybody else, including Rama, in the dust.
Though the Krishna mythology is quite old (it is mainly in the Bhagavat Purana), it only reached its mature, written form by about 1000 AD.
Unlike Rama, the main competition, a rather goody-two-shoes, dull and dutiful god-incarnation, who represents kingly virtues and imperial gravitas (hence the term Ram-Rajya, reign-of-Ram, as a synonym for good governance), Krishna in the Bhagavat Purana is a strange mix of mischievous child, playful, flirtatious cowherd, questing hero and eventually a ruler who acts more like a subcontinental statesman (like Bismarck in Europe) rather than regent of a single state.
In other words, he's a lot more human than Rama, and represents wisdom more than divine virtue.
So the general pattern to note here is that a tribal religion gives way to an imperial religion, which gives way to a Messianic religion and finally a personal religion.
Due to the continuity of the Hindu tradition, rather than new religions serving each phase, you have different pieces rising and falling in popularity. The Krishna stock grew with other Messianic traditions in the early first Millennium.
So the same explanation should apply for the popularity of all these figures: Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad. They seem to have appeared in that particular order, over the course of a 1000 years, but represent the same dynamic, and crucially, really got going in popularity around 1000 AD.
The characteristics of all four are that they are fairly historicist, personal figures, who demand or command a kind of personal allegiance that older gods and prophets (ranging from the Old Testament Jehovah and Apollo to Indra and Varuna) do not. In the reform stage, you see the emergence of a kind of mystic element to the worship. The Bhakti movement was contemporaneous with the rise of Sufism. In Europe, you get mystic figures like Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) who are very similar to figures like Meera (1498-1547) in the Bhakti movement.
Crucially, important elements like a "second coming" for Jesus and the world-destroying Kalki (and the Maitreya Buddha) start to recede. Everything reduces to a direct, personal relationship, with mystical overtones, and free of institutional context, with a single personality. Even Islam, which does not approve of humanizing the prophet, saw the rise of Sufi saints as objects of personal relationships.
So Why...?
Humans make up gods to suit the times.
Krishna was born at the dawn of large empires, when kings became too distant and impersonal to serve as god-figures. Though he was a king, that's an unimportant part of the Krishna legend, unlike Rama, for whom kingship is a central feature of the story. The old tribal pantheon of gods became irrelevant to the new realities of an agrarian world dominated by the affairs of distant capital cities which were still capable of sending out armies to interfere in local affairs.
People wanted a reassuring simplicity to live by. Not a pantheon of a 1000 gods mirroring tribal warfare dynamics in the heavens, and not some idealized emperor-king. Hence that verse I started with. One god, one hymn, one scripture, one duty.
And around 1000 AD, as religious institutions grew oppressive, he was reinvented by the Bhakti movement as a different kind of god, a god of individualism.
ekam sastram devaki-putra-gitam
eko devo devaki-putra eva
eko mantras tasya namani yani
karmapy ekam tasya devasya seva
There is but one scripture, the song of Devaki's son
There is but one god, the one son of Devaki
There is but one hymn, the chanting of his name
There is but one duty, the service of your god
Sounds strange, doesn't it? What's a verse like this doing in the world's most determinedly polytheistic religion? Why such an overweening, demanding personal God? This sounds like a better description of Jesus or Mohammad or the Buddha.
Some History
The key clue is in the following: Krishna as a deity grew increasingly popular after the first century AD, contemporaneously with figures like Jesus and the Buddha. The Bhagavad Gita is probably a fairly late addition to the Mahabharata (for reasons we will get to). As compositions based on revelations go, the Gita is not particularly unique. But it grew way more popular than similar ones like the Ashtavakra Gita (which I actually find more interesting). Why?
Krishna got another major boost with the Bhakti reform movement in the early second millennium AD, soon after Islam began taking over the subcontinent, driving out Buddhism and attracting converts both by sword and through the appeal of its egalitarian principles. That should remind you of other such reform movements around that time, including the Christian Protestant revolution and the rise of conservatism in Islam following the decline of the Abbassid Caliphate.
Here's what happened. Hinduism has seen four distinct phases, which correspond to entirely different religions in the Abrahamic tradition.
The Early Vedic phase (up to about 800 BC) is full of now-unimportant gods like Varuna (rain), Indra (thunder) and so forth, and powerful human seer-sages (the rishis) who were kinda their equal. The Later Vedic (or Epic) phase, when the Mahabharata and Ramayana began to be written down, extending from about 800 BC to about 100 AD saw the rise of the Brahma-Vishnu-Siva trinity, who were gradually viewed as much more powerful than the human rishis.
As the early kingdoms (the mahajanapadas) and republics (such as the Vrijji confederacy) gave way to the first large kingdoms like Magadha, and urbanization took root, two things happened. First, Buddhism rose as an urban religion, and Hinduism itself began to transform in two ways. First, the classical schools of philosophy began building a completely abstract tradition on top of Vedic commentary and retreated into a cryptic, scholastic tradition impenetrable to the masses (that's where all the philosophy comes from).
And on the other hand, the epics began to take their final form. Remember, these were primarily oral traditions that grew syncretically along with the empirization of the subcontinent. More local traditions and gods began to be absorbed into the narratives. The narratives themselves were incorporated into the older traditions of Vedic gods via detailed embedding of the human characters into mythology. The late stage Mahabharata had tons of new opening material added, basically reframing every human character as an incarnation of some deity or the other.
Sidebar on the Dasavatara
A little sidebar is in order here.
Now the actual events of the Mahabharata, to the extent that they correspond to reality, probably happened around 1000-700 BC, though some bits are undoubtedly much older. Magadha was still a minor kingdom. Krishna was a Yadava prince who probably (like the Buddha) had revelations that marked him as a Messiah figure. The details are forgotten, but in the grand syncretic feature creep of Hindusim, he was incorporated into the pantheon as the 8th incarnation of Vishnu in the dasavatara. Rather revealingly, there was a controversial attempt to insert the Buddha into the dasavatara at the 9th position, just after Krishna, and just before Kalki -- the yet to appear redeemer-destroyer. Buddha is accepted as #9 in some tellings, and in other tellings, rejected in others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das...
The dasavatara goes like so: fish, tortoise, boar, man-lion, dwarf, great warrior-sage (Parasurama), Rama, Krishna, Buddha (controversial) and Kalki. The first four look like a folk-evolutionary theory (these were common in mythology long before Darwin), followed by two legendary figures whose stories are half-divine. The list starts to look like human history with Parasurama, who clearly represents the historical archetype of reclusive forest-dwelling sages who composed the Vedic scriptures (these lineages continue to this day; my family is supposed to have descended from the Vedic sage Kausika for instance). At that point, with Rama, real history starts to enter the picture.
So Krishna stands at the cusp between legend and history. There is some controversy about whether the Ramayana or Mahabharata is older, but ignoring that somewhat meaningless question (both kinda grew like fungi over a millennium), in a purely literary sense, the Mahabharata is more human, and therefore more recent, since the canon got less divine and more human over time.
The Pattern
Let's step back and map this story to the Western tradition:
- Judaism/Old Testament = Early Vedic (pre-urban, till 800 BC)
- Greco-Roman religion = Later Vedic (urbanizing/empirizing, 800 BC -- 100 AD)
- Messianic (Jesus to Mohammad) = bifurcation of a popular religion based on the epics (rather than the vedas) and a scholastic tradition.
- Reform tradition (Protestant/post-Abassid) = Bhakti tradition
Krishna goes neck to neck with Rama in the early part of Phase III, but the final stabilization of the Bhagavad Gita in the early first millennium starts to shift the game in Krishna's favor. Through the Gupta empire and the Middle Ages, until the rise of Islam, this Messianic religion, like the Catholic Church, grows increasingly powerful.
The shock of Islam triggers ideas of reform based on a much more personal, direct relationship with god.
And here, Krishna leaves everybody else, including Rama, in the dust.
Though the Krishna mythology is quite old (it is mainly in the Bhagavat Purana), it only reached its mature, written form by about 1000 AD.
Unlike Rama, the main competition, a rather goody-two-shoes, dull and dutiful god-incarnation, who represents kingly virtues and imperial gravitas (hence the term Ram-Rajya, reign-of-Ram, as a synonym for good governance), Krishna in the Bhagavat Purana is a strange mix of mischievous child, playful, flirtatious cowherd, questing hero and eventually a ruler who acts more like a subcontinental statesman (like Bismarck in Europe) rather than regent of a single state.
In other words, he's a lot more human than Rama, and represents wisdom more than divine virtue.
So the general pattern to note here is that a tribal religion gives way to an imperial religion, which gives way to a Messianic religion and finally a personal religion.
Due to the continuity of the Hindu tradition, rather than new religions serving each phase, you have different pieces rising and falling in popularity. The Krishna stock grew with other Messianic traditions in the early first Millennium.
So the same explanation should apply for the popularity of all these figures: Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad. They seem to have appeared in that particular order, over the course of a 1000 years, but represent the same dynamic, and crucially, really got going in popularity around 1000 AD.
The characteristics of all four are that they are fairly historicist, personal figures, who demand or command a kind of personal allegiance that older gods and prophets (ranging from the Old Testament Jehovah and Apollo to Indra and Varuna) do not. In the reform stage, you see the emergence of a kind of mystic element to the worship. The Bhakti movement was contemporaneous with the rise of Sufism. In Europe, you get mystic figures like Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) who are very similar to figures like Meera (1498-1547) in the Bhakti movement.
Crucially, important elements like a "second coming" for Jesus and the world-destroying Kalki (and the Maitreya Buddha) start to recede. Everything reduces to a direct, personal relationship, with mystical overtones, and free of institutional context, with a single personality. Even Islam, which does not approve of humanizing the prophet, saw the rise of Sufi saints as objects of personal relationships.
So Why...?
Humans make up gods to suit the times.
Krishna was born at the dawn of large empires, when kings became too distant and impersonal to serve as god-figures. Though he was a king, that's an unimportant part of the Krishna legend, unlike Rama, for whom kingship is a central feature of the story. The old tribal pantheon of gods became irrelevant to the new realities of an agrarian world dominated by the affairs of distant capital cities which were still capable of sending out armies to interfere in local affairs.
People wanted a reassuring simplicity to live by. Not a pantheon of a 1000 gods mirroring tribal warfare dynamics in the heavens, and not some idealized emperor-king. Hence that verse I started with. One god, one hymn, one scripture, one duty.
And around 1000 AD, as religious institutions grew oppressive, he was reinvented by the Bhakti movement as a different kind of god, a god of individualism.