The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The myths agree that an extraordinary capacity is required to face and survive such experience. The infancies abound in anecdotes of precocious strength, cleverness, and wisdom. Herakles strangled a serpent sent against his cradle by the goddess Hera. Maui of Polynesia snared and slowed the sun — to give his mother time to cook her meals. Abraham, as we have seen, arrived at the knowledge of the One God. Jesus confounded the wise men. The baby Buddha had been left one day beneath the shade of a tree; his nurses suddenly noted that the shadow had not moved all afternoon and that the child was sitting fixed in a yogic trance.

The feats of the beloved Hindu savior, Kṛṣṇa, during his infant exile among the cowherds of Gokula and Brindaban, constitute a lively cycle. A certain goblin named Pūtanā came in the shape of a beautiful woman, but with poison in her breasts. She entered the house of Yasoda, the foster mother of the child, and made herself very friendly, presently taking the baby in her lap to give it suck. But Kṛṣṇa drew so hard that he sucked away her life, and she fell dead, reassuming her huge and hideous form. When the foul corpse was cremated, however, it emitted a sweet fragrance; for the divine infant had given the demoness salvation when he had drunk her milk.

Kṛṣṇa was a mischievous little boy. He liked to spirit away the pots of curds when the milkmaids were asleep. He was forever climbing to eat and spill things placed out of his reach on the high shelves. The girls would call him Butter-thief and complain to Yasoda; but he could always invent a story. One afternoon when he was playing in the yard, his foster parent was warned that he was eating clay. She arrived with a switch, but he had wiped his lips, and denied all knowledge of the matter. She opened the dirty mouth to see, but when she peered inside beheld the whole universe, the “Three Worlds.” She thought: “How silly I am to imagine that my son could be the Lord of the Three Worlds.” Then all was veiled from her again, and the moment passed immediately from her mind. She fondled the little boy and took him home.

The herding folk were accustomed to pay worship to the god Indra, the Hindu counterpart of Zeus, king of heaven and lord of rain. One day when they had made their offering, the lad Kṛṣṇa said to them: “Indra is no supreme deity, though he be king in heaven; he is afraid of the titans. Furthermore, the rain and prosperity for which you are praying depend on the sun, which draws up the waters and makes them fall again. What can Indra do? Whatever comes to pass is determined by the laws of nature and the spirit.” Then he turned their attention to the nearby woods, streams, and hills, and especially to Mount Govardhan, as more worthy of their honor than the remote master of the air. And so they offered flowers and fruits and sweetmeats to the mountain.

Kṛṣṇa himself assumed a second form: he took the form of a mountain god and received the offerings of the people, meanwhile remaining in his earlier shape among them, paying worship to the mountain king. The god received the offerings and ate them up.

Figure 71. Kṛṣṇa Holding Mount Govardhan (color on paper, India, c. a.d. 1790)

The sense of Kṛṣṇa’s advice to do worship to the mountain rather than the king of the gods, which to the Western reader may seem strange, is that the Way of Devotion (bhakti mārga) must begin with things known and loved by the devotee, not remote, unimaginable conceptions. Since the Godhead is immanent in all, He will make Himself known through any object profoundly regarded. Furthermore, it is the Godhead within the devotee that makes it possible for him to discover Godhead in the world without. This mystery is illustrated in Kṛṣṇa’s double presence during the act of worship.

Indra was enraged, and sent for the king of the clouds, whom he commanded to pour rain over the people until all should be swept away. A flight of storm clouds drew over the district and began to discharge a deluge; it seemed the end of the world was at hand. But the lad Kṛṣṇa filled Mount Govardhan with the heat of his inexhaustible energy, lifted it with his little finger, and bid the people take shelter beneath. The rain struck the mountain, hissed, and evaporated. The torrent fell seven days, but not a drop touched the community of herdsmen.

Then the god realized that the opponent must be an incarnation of the Primal Being. When Kṛṣṇa went out next day to graze the cows, playing music on his flute, the King of Heaven came down on his great white elephant, Airāvata, fell on his face at the feet of the smiling lad, and made submission.^[9]