Krishna

Morning in the village of Vrindavan. The smell of fresh butter drifts out from clay pots standing on the doorsteps. Somewhere nearby, a blue-skinned boy rises on tiptoe and stretches out his hand, taking the thing he loves best in the world.

That boy is Krishna.

According to the Bhagavata Purana, an ancient Hindu scripture, he is the eighth incarnation of the god Vishnu.

But in Vrindavan he is only the son of Yashoda and Nanda, two ordinary people who raise cattle beside the Yamuna River. And what the whole village knows about him, before anything else, is that he is wild about butter.

People call him Makhan Chor, which means "the butter thief."

In Hindu legend, the young Krishna often slips into the neighbors' houses, takes their jars of butter, and shares it with his friends and with the troop of monkeys around the village.

When the mothers catch him and complain to his own mother, Yashoda, he only looks straight into her eyes, his smile sparkling. No one can truly stay angry with him for long.

In the afternoon he sits down by the Yamuna. And he plays the flute.

His flute is called the Bansuri, and it is one of the most famous images in the Bhagavata Purana. When its sound rises over the riverbank, the whole village of Vrindavan seems to stop.

The cows stop grazing. The people carrying water set down their shoulder poles. The gopi women hear the flute and step out of their doors, not knowing they are walking.

The circle dance under the moon, called Rasa Lila, begins in the same way, from the sound of a single flute by the river.

A blue boy sits beneath a tree. The music flows out like river water, and a whole village follows the sound toward the bank, shimmering in the moonlight.

But the most beautiful story of Krishna in Vrindavan is the one where the boy lifts a mountain.

The Bhagavata Purana says that every year the people of Vrindavan used to make offerings to Indra, the god of rain and thunder, to ask for good rain.

One year the boy Krishna tells his father and the villagers to stop making offerings to Indra. They should make offerings instead to Mount Govardhan, the mountain that shelters the village from the wind, where the cows graze every day.

Mount Govardhan, he says, is your true friend.

The villagers listen to the blue boy.

Indra is furious. And he sends rain.

It is not ordinary rain. It rains for seven days without a pause, as if the sky wanted to wipe away the small village that dared to withhold its offerings. The water rises. Thunder cracks. The people of Vrindavan have no time to run.

Then the blue boy steps forward.

He puts his little finger under Mount Govardhan. And he lifts the mountain.

A mountain, on the little finger of a boy.

For seven days he stands like that. The people, the cattle, the whole village crowd together under the roof of stone he holds in his hand. No one gets wet. No one is hurt.

On the seventh day the rain stops. And the boy sets the mountain down, as gently as he would put down a leaf.

Of all the legends about Krishna, this is the one people retell most often.

Not because the boy defeats Indra. But because he chooses to stand in the middle of the storm, using himself as a roof, so that the people he loves can be at peace.

There is one more image of Krishna that many people in Vietnam have come across, perhaps without realizing it.

When Krishna grows up, he becomes the close friend and charioteer of the warrior Arjuna. At the moment when Arjuna hesitates before the greatest choice of his life, Krishna talks with him.

He does not give orders. He only talks. About duty, about action, about a soul that does not die.

That conversation was written down as the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most famous philosophical and spiritual texts in the world.

In Vietnam, the Bhagavad Gita was translated under the title Chí Tôn Ca. The first printing was issued by the Quảng Hoá publishing house in 1972.

And the Gita begins with a friend sitting close beside Arjuna, speaking plainly.

According to the Bhagavata Purana, people believe that the sound of Krishna's flute can still be heard somewhere. Not in Vrindavan.

But wherever a child is ready to lift something very heavy, just so the one he loves can stand in the shade.

The flute is still playing. Beside some river, as the afternoon slowly turns to evening.