Krishna’s Lineage
Krishna’s Lineage
The Harivamsha of Vyāsa’s Mahābhārata
Translated from the Sanskrit by
SIMON BRODBECK
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for Victoria and Llewellyn
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Ancient Indian Scene
The Framework of Characters
Krishna in the Pāndava Story
Overview of the Harivamsha
The Text and the Translation
Further Reading
Map
THE BOOK OF KRISHNA’S LINEAGE
Creation and Cosmology
1.The First Creation
2.Daksha’s Creation
3.The Creation of Beings
4.The Installation of the Sovereigns
5.The Birth of Prithu
6.The Milking of the Earth
7.The Eras of the Fourteen Manus
The Solar Lineage
8.The Birth of the Gods
9.The Offspring of Vivasvat Āditya
10.The Offspring of Vivasvat Āditya Continued
The Duties to the Ancestors
11.Bhīshma and Shantanu
12.The Origin of the Ancestors
13.The Seven Kinds of Ancestors
14.Yoga Lost and Regained
15.Bhīshma and Ugrāyudha
16.The Killing of the Guru’s Cow
17.The Cursing of the Birds
18.King Brahmadatta and the Brahmins
19.The Special Verse
The Lunar Lineage
20.The Birth of Soma
21.Indra’s Expulsion and Restoration
22.The Story of Yayāti
23.The Offspring of the Five
24.The Triple Lineage of Vrishni
25.The Birth of the Dark One
26.The Offspring of Jyāmagha
27.The Lineage of the Kukuras
28.The False Suspicion against Krishna
29.The Displaying of the Syamantaka Jewel
The Gods and the Demons
30.Janamejaya’s Question
31.Overview of Vishnu’s Manifestations
32.Vishnu’s Promise
33.The Army of the Demons
34.The Army of the Gods
35.The Origin of the Aurva Fire
36.Enter Kālanemi
37.The Power of Kālanemi
38.The Killing of Kālanemi
The Divine Plan
39.Description of Brahmā’s Heaven
40.Vishnu Asleep and Awake
41.Brahmā Describes the Earth’s Burden
42.The Speech of the Earth
43.The Gods Descend into their Characters
44.Nārada Reports from Mathurā
45.Vishnu’s Descent
THE BOOK OF VISHNU
The Killing of Kamsa
46.Nārada Visits Kamsa
47.The Arrangement with the Goddess Sleep
48.The Birth of Lord Krishna
49.The Journey to the Cattle Station
50.The Killing of Pūtanā
51.The Wrecking of the Two Arjuna Trees
52.Wolves Appear
53.The Move to Vrindāvana
54.Description of the Monsoon
55.The Discovery of Kāliya’s Pool
56.The Curbing of Kāliya
57.The Killing of Dhenuka
58.The Killing of Pralamba
59.Description of Autumn
60.The Mountain Festival
61.The Lifting of Mount Govardhana
62.Govinda’s Consecration
63.Playing with the Cowgirls
64.The Killing of Arishta
65.Kamsa Sends Akrūra to Fetch Krishna
66.Andhaka’s Response
67.The Killing of Keshin
68.Akrūra’s Arrival
69.The Sorrow of Krishna’s Parents
70.What Akrūra Saw in the World of the Snakes
71.The Breaking of the Bow
72.Kamsa Briefs the Wrestlers
73.Kamsa’s Story
74.The Killing of Kuvalayāpīda
75.The Killing of Chānūra
76.The Killing of Kamsa
77.Kamsa’s Women Weep
78.Kamsa’s Funeral and Ugrasena’s Consecration
The Move to Dvārakā
79.The Fetching of the Guru’s Son
80.Mathurā Besieged
81.Battle against Jarāsandha
82.Jarāsandha’s Escape
83.Rāma Drags the Yamunā
84.Departure for Dvārakā
85.The Killing of Kālayavana
86.The Building of Dvārakā
Adventures in the South
87.Rukminī’s Abduction
88.Rukminī’s Wedding
89.The Killing of Rukmin
90.The Greatness of Baladeva
The Naraka Episode
91.The Killing of Naraka
92.The Return of the Earrings
93.Description of Dvārakā
94.Arrival at Dvārakā
95.Entry into the Assembly Hall
96.Nārada Lists Krishna’s Deeds
97.Krishna’s Deeds Continued
The Greatness of Krishna
98.Narration of the Vrishni Lineage
99.The Killing of Shambara
100.The Story of the Blessed One
101.The Theft of the Brahmin’s Sons
102.Arjuna’s Attempt to Save the Brahmin’s Son
103.The Retrieval of the Brahmin’s Sons
104.The Greatness of Krishna
105.Vaishampāyana Lists Krishna’s Deeds
The Battle against Bāna
106.Kumbhānda’s Deliberations
107.The Rape of Ushā
108.Aniruddha Imprisoned in Arrows
109.The Vrishnis Consult
110.Fights with Fires, Fiends, and Fever
111.Fever Departs
112.The Battle against Bāna
113.Return to Dvārakā
THE BOOK OF THE FUTURE
114.Janamejaya’s Descendants
115.Janamejaya and Vyāsa
116.The End of the Kali Age
117.The End of the Kali Age Continued
118.The Removal of Shatakratu’s Stain
Genealogical Appendix
From the Seven Seers to Daksha’s Daughters (Hv 1–3)
Dharma’s Wives (Hv 3)
Kashyapa’s Wives (Hv 3)
Solar Lineage (Hv 8
–10)
Lunar Lineages: Yayāti and Sons (Hv 20–23)
Janamejaya’s Ancestry from Pūru to Ajamīdha (Hv 23)
Janamejaya’s Lineage from Ajamīdha (Hv 23, 114)
Brahmadatta’s Lineage (Hv 11–19)
Krishna’s Paternal Ancestry (Hv 23–25)
Krishna’s Maternal Ancestry (Hv 26–28)
Krishna and Sons (Hv 88, 98)
Index of Names
Acknowledgments
It gives me great pleasure to record my thanks to many different people who have facilitated this translation in so many ways. Thanks to Will Johnson, who was my partner on this project before his retirement, and who has been helpful and charming throughout. For their encouragement and support thanks also to my other colleagues at Cardiff University, in particular James Hegarty, Josef Lössl, Max Deeg, and Mansur Ali, and to my old colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, John and Mary Brockington and Paul Dundas, and also to André Couture, Alf Hiltebeitel, and Adam Bowles, and thanks to the latter also for visiting Mathurā and Vrindāvana with me in January 2012. For reading and commenting on parts of early drafts, thanks to Chris Austin, Greg Bailey, Carole Satyamurti, McComas Taylor, and Christophe Vielle, and thanks to the latter also for sending me Dutt’s old translation. For advice on specific points, thanks to Muktak Aklujkar, James McHugh, Valerie Roebuck, and Sven Sellmer. For reading bits of the Sanskrit with me, thanks to Michael Delicate, Tim Negus, Molly Robinson, Rebecca Shortland, and David Utton. Thanks to the British Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the translation project from 2011 until 2014, and to Rebecca Blackwell for helping to secure the funding. Thanks to the team of scholars coordinated by Peter Schreiner, for transliterating Vaidya’s edition. Thanks to various audiences in Bangkok, Bristol, Cardiff, Dubrovnik, London, and Manchester, for listening and responding to various presentations about this translation project. For publication assistance, thanks to Cynthia Read, Salma Ismaiel, and Richa Jobin. Last but not least, thanks to my families old and new, and particularly to Victoria and Llewellyn, for all their love and support.
Introduction
The Ancient Indian Scene
The Sanskrit Harivamsha (‘Lineage of Hari’) is a stunning compendium of Hindu mythology and a treasure house of stories about Krishna, an incarnation of the great god Vishnu. Many of these Krishna stories were developed and expanded in later Hindu and Jain texts, but the Harivamsha contains what are probably the earliest surviving versions.
The Harivamsha is set in an ancient Indian world of story, where kings inherit, found, and develop realms and protect the populations that support them. The kings are assisted by armies generally led by their close relatives, members of the kshatriya class of warrior-aristocrats, who have a monopoly on the use of physical force. The kings are also assisted by members of the brahmin class, who teach and advise them, and who officiate at the rituals in which the kings interact with their populations and their gods.
The business of the brahmins is contained in the Veda, a collection of texts associated with particular priestly functions and preserved by the lineages that discharged those functions. The Veda is said to be primordial, and to have been revealed piecemeal to individual seers. It contains verses, chants, formulae, and spells, associated respectively with the ritual offices of invocatory priest, chanting priest, operating priest, and supervising priest. The Vedic collections in these genres are the oldest surviving Sanskrit texts—oldest of all is the Rigveda of the invocatory priest—and they were passed down precisely by the brahmins’ oral tradition long before the development of writing. The rituals at which these texts were used included a variety of grand royal and more-or-less public ritual festivals, many of them calendrical, as well as other rituals sponsored or hosted by specific clans, guilds, or households, and also rituals that took place within households. These rituals, in their various forms, acted as social and economic glue. The basic form of the ritual involves a transaction with the gods, a hosting and a feeding of the gods with a sacrificial animal (vegetarian options are also available) in return for their favour and continued good jurisdiction in their various operative domains. This aspect of the ritual centres upon the ritual fire, the god Agni, who transports the various offerings aloft to the gods when they are cast into him accompanied by the correct utterances. But the ritual also involves feeding the human and, in particular, the brahmin guests, who must be carefully chosen. In economic terms, it is not just feeding but also funding, for no ritual is complete without the gifts given at its conclusion to the officiating brahmins and to other attending brahmins. Thus the king, advised by his brahmin ministers, controls taxation and spending.
The king and his courtiers are the paragons of high culture. And what culture! The classical Indian model of the good life operates under three spheres of interest: propriety (dharma), profit (artha), and pleasure (kāma). These are said to be mutually supportive, and each has its own surviving textbooks, respectively the texts on law and etiquette (the Dharmasūtras and Dharmashāstras, most famously the Manusmriti), the text on government and policy (the Arthashāstra of Kautilya), and the text on pleasure (the Kāmasūtra of Vātsyāyana). The Kāmasūtra focuses on sexual pleasure, but the remit of pleasure also includes the pleasure produced by any and all delectable consumables, including the dramatic and fine arts.
The texts on law and etiquette are referred to in the abstract as the Shāstras, and together with the Vedas they are the basic authorities on proper behaviour. The interest in propriety is in a special category because propriety affects the hereafter. By the time of the Harivamsha, the Indian theory of rebirth according to karma was in place, and so one’s deeds and misdeeds, in a general moral sense and in relation to the paradigmatic functions of one’s gender and social class, are taken to determine one’s heavenly or infernal destination after death and also the circumstances of one’s subsequent rebirth on earth. But in terms of its long-range power, the interest in propriety was dwarfed by a fourth and transcendental interest, the interest in release from the world of rebirth and suffering altogether (moksha). This interest is explored in the last layer of Vedic literature, the Upanishads, which (as well as discussing various mundane matters) treat of the relation between the immortal self, the cosmos, and the power behind the cosmos. A range of other developments occurred in parallel with the Upanishadic texts, focused on release from rebirth. These included the sānkhya and yoga traditions—which are generally contained within the Vedic brahminical tradition along with their root texts the Sānkhya Kārikā of Īshvarakrishna and the Yogasūtra of Patanjali—as well as a panoply of non-Vedic traditions, including Buddhism and Jainism.
In the images of their respective founders, Shākyamuni the Buddha and Mahāvīra the Jina, both Buddhism and Jainism enshrined the image of the heroic male renouncer, who turns his back on society, family, and worldly power in the attempt to make this his last birth. This was as good as rejecting the Vedic brahminical tradition, whose interest had always been in maintaining and nurturing the world for the general mundane benefit of its inhabitants.
Within the Vedic tradition, two developments occurred in the face of this renunciatory critique. One was the idea of several separate life stages, so that a period of responsible and productive householdership would be followed by a retirement in which to concentrate on higher matters. The other, presented in the Bhagavad-Gītā of the Mahābhārata (and more relevant to kshatriyas, who might be killed in duty), was a method for maintaining and discharging one’s proper function in the world and at the same time being spiritually detached and generating no further karma, facilitating the soul’s release from further embodiment. Krishna is the teacher of this method in the Bhagavad-Gītā and also its paradigmatic exemplar, and his example is fleshed out in particular in the Harivamsha, which tells of his lineage, birth, and performance of great deeds for the benefit of the world and the gods, as a divine hero and as a family man. The story of Krishna can be seen as a response to the story of the Buddh
a.1
Many of the narratively significant personal religious practices in the Harivamsha are the various periods of voluntary austerity that characters undergo. In some cases these constitute preparations for a ritual performance, but usually they are freestanding regimes in which the focused display of endurance and self-control results in the acquisition of special powers or rewards. This is typically presented in terms of a character performing austerities in honour of a particular deity, who is then pleased and rewards the ascetic by granting his or her wishes. In the case of demons, this tends to lead to arrogance, corruption, misbehaviour, and the consequent need for the offender to be curbed.
The scenario of the Harivamsha is patriarchal and androcentric, as are the events it narrates. The text presents an assertion of patrilineal ideology, a class system essentially based on birth, and a good deal of unpleasant cultural snobbery aimed at diverse groups that are depicted as foreign or indigenous savages. The idea of rebirth according to karma operates within that scenario, whereby all types of female and most types of male birth are considered inferior, putting almost everyone at a disadvantage with respect to the discourse. Much of the masculinity on display is exciting but toxic, but the fact that some of the acting males are gods or demons in disguise lends an element of interest to the drama.
As far as history is concerned, some aspects of the Harivamsha’s world of story are no doubt based on it, but it is hard to know exactly which ones or to what degree, and perhaps the text does not expect us to know. There is a wealth of possible wondering on this subject. The Shakas could be Scythians, and the Yavanas could be Greeks. The power of Magadha in the text could reflect the power of Magadha before and/or during the Mauryan Empire. The brahmin army-commander mentioned at Harivamsha 115.40 could be Pushyamitra Shunga, who killed the last Mauryan emperor in 185 bce. There is evidently some relation between the Harivamsha and the beautiful artistic artefacts depicting Krishna and Baladeva that were produced in the Mathurā region in the first few centuries ce. And a Mount Govardhana and a town of Vrindāvana both exist near Mathurā today.
The Framework of Characters
There are about as many characters in the Harivamsha as there are stars in the sky. Many of them are nicely introduced in the text, but they come thick and fast, so a bird’s-eye view is given here. God Brahmā, the creator and governor of the cosmos, is Grandfather to them all.
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