Who is Krishna?

A Greek diplomat stood before a stone column in the heart of India and declared himself a worshipper of a god who was not his own.

The year was around 113 BCE. The man’s name was Heliodorus.

The god was Vasudeva, the deity later generations would know as Krishna.

That column still stands near Vidisha, in Madhya Pradesh, weathered and broken at the top, locally called Khamba Baba. Its inscription is one of the hardest facts in the entire history of Krishna worship, and it sits in a strange place on the timeline. The stories most people love about Krishna, the butter-thief child, the flute in the moonlight, the dance with the cowherd women, the love of Radha, are not on that pillar. They would not be written down in full for centuries. The evidence and the affection point to different layers of the same figure, and the honest way to meet Krishna is to take the layers one at a time.

This is an attempt to assemble him from the record: the warrior-statesman of the great epic, the god on a foreigner’s pillar, and the cowherd-lover of the latest and most beloved layer. Throughout, we will keep to what the texts and the stones actually say, and flag where they fall silent.

A name in an old Upanishad

The trail begins, faintly, in a forest of speculation.

In the Chandogya Upanishad, one of the older Upanishads and part of the early philosophical literature, there is a passage (3.17.6) in which a sage named Ghora Angirasa instructs a pupil called Krishna Devakiputra, “Krishna, the son of Devaki.” Krishna’s mother in later story is also named Devaki. The teaching Ghora gives concerns sacrifice understood inwardly, a turn toward the symbolic that the Bhagavad Gita would later make its own.

It is tempting to draw a straight line. Some scholars have. The historian H.C. Raychaudhuri argued that this Krishna and the Krishna of the epic are one, partly because the inward, ethical drift of Ghora’s teaching resembles the Gita. Others disagreed. S.N. Tadapatrikar held that the Upanishadic Krishna was simply a different man with a common name. Bimanbehari Majumdar pointed out that the text does not even clearly state Krishna was Ghora’s disciple, and that the discipleship reading owes much to the later commentator Shankara.

The passage cannot bear the weight of certainty. It is one name, in one verse, with one matching maternal name, in a literature full of recurring names. We note it and move on. The Krishna of hymns and full Vedic ritual is not in the four Vedas.

The grammarian and the Greeks

The ground firms up in the centuries that follow, and it firms up from two unexpected directions: a grammarian and a series of foreigners.

Panini, the great Sanskrit grammarian conventionally placed around the 5th to 4th century BCE, composed a rule (Ashtadhyayi 4.3.98) that forms a word for a devotee of Vasudeva and Arjuna. The presence of the rule means the names were current enough to need a grammatical form. Scholars argue over whether the term it uses, bhakti, already carried its later religious charge of loving devotion or meant something plainer like attachment. Panini’s own later commentator Patanjali, writing around the 2nd century BCE, read Vasudeva here as an object of worship. The grammarian gives us the name in circulation; he does not give us a theology.

Then come the Greeks, and they are more vivid.

Megasthenes served as a Seleucid ambassador to the Mauryan court around 300 BCE. His book, the Indica, survives only in fragments quoted by later writers like Arrian and Strabo. In those fragments he describes an Indian people he calls the Sourasenoi, who especially worship a god he equates with the Greek Herakles, in a land with two great cities, Methora and Kleisobora, on a river he names the Jobares.

The Greek habit was to translate foreign gods into their own pantheon. Read through that habit, the identifications are close to transparent. The Sourasenoi are the Shurasenas, the clan whose territory was around Mathura, the Yadava lineage to which Krishna belongs in the epics. Methora is Mathura, Krishna’s birthplace. The river Jobares is plausibly the Yamuna. The “Herakles” worshipped there, a mighty hero-god of that exact region, is most economically read as Krishna. Edwin Bryant, surveying the evidence, treats the identification as a serious and widely held reading, with the usual scholarly caveat that a Greek interpreting a foreign cult is not a precise witness.

So before the common era we have a god worshipped around Mathura, a clan name, a birthplace, a grammarian’s word for his devotees. What we still lack is the god speaking in his own voice. That arrives on stone.

The pillar at Besnagar

The Heliodorus pillar is the single most-cited piece of physical evidence for early Krishna worship, and it deserves its fame.

It is a sandstone column, roughly six and a half meters tall, raised at Besnagar, ancient Vidisha, around 113 BCE. Alexander Cunningham identified it in 1877. Its Brahmi inscription, in Prakrit, records that the column is a Garuda-dhvaja, a standard topped with Garuda, the eagle mount associated with Vishnu and Vasudeva, and that it was set up by Heliodorus, son of Dion, an envoy of the Indo-Greek king Antialkidas of Taxila to the court of the Shunga ruler Bhagabhadra.

The crucial word is what Heliodorus calls himself. He is a Bhagavata, a devotee of Vasudeva, whom the inscription names Deva deva, the god of gods.

Sit with what that means. A Greek diplomat, raised in another religious world, publicly professed the worship of Vasudeva and paid for a monument to him. People do not convert to fringe cults at the level of state diplomacy. For the cult to attract and absorb a foreign ambassador, it had to be established, respectable, and confident of its supreme deity. The pillar is not the beginning of Vasudeva worship. It is a snapshot of a tradition already mature.

A 2019 study by Elizabeth Cecil and Peter Bisschop situates the column within a larger temple complex, with further column pits nearby, which only sharpens the picture of an organized devotional site.

And here is the forensic tension at the center of Krishna’s story. The pillar shows us Vasudeva the supreme god, the Deva deva. It says nothing about a flute. Nothing about stolen butter. Nothing about Vrindavana or a beloved named Radha. The Krishna the world adores is, in 113 BCE, not yet on the record.

The statesman on the battlefield

When the literary Krishna finally steps forward at length, he is not a child and not a lover. He is a man of consequence in a war.

The Mahabharata, the vast Sanskrit epic whose layers accumulated across centuries on either side of the common era, gives Krishna as a prince of the Yadavas, ally and cousin of the five Pandava brothers, a tactician, a diplomat, and a king. He negotiates. He breaks deadlocks. He chooses, in the climactic war, to serve as the charioteer of the warrior Arjuna rather than to fight himself.

It is from that chariot, in the pause before battle, that he speaks the Bhagavad Gita.

We do not retell the Gita here; it has its own article, and it deserves it. What matters for Krishna’s portrait is the role he plays in it. Faced with Arjuna’s collapse of will, Krishna moves from counsel to revelation. He speaks of duty, of action without grasping at its fruits, of devotion. And he discloses himself as the divine ground of all things. In the eleventh chapter he grants Arjuna the sight of his cosmic form, vishvarupa, terrifying and total.

Telang’s public-domain translation in the Sacred Books of the East renders Krishna’s claim on devotion plainly. In the ninth chapter he says of his worshippers, “ananyas chintayanto mam,” those who, “meditating on me without any other thought,” are sustained by him. The Sanskrit ananya is “no other,” chintayantah is “thinking on,” mam is “me.” The verse is the seed of the whole later world of bhakti, loving devotion to a personal God, that would flower around Krishna.

This is the second face. The teacher of Kurukshetra, God speaking from a chariot. It is the face on which much of Krishna’s claim to be God in person rests.

The first full life

For all his weight in the epic, the Mahabharata’s Krishna arrives without a childhood. The epic assumes him; it does not narrate his birth and boyhood at length.

That gap was filled by the Harivamsha, an appendix to the Mahabharata composed in the early centuries CE. For the first time the life is told as a whole: the tyrant Kamsa of Mathura, the prophecy that Devaki’s child would kill him, the infant smuggled across the Yamuna to safety among cowherds, the boyhood deeds, the eventual return to slay the tyrant.

The Harivamsha is the hinge. Before it, Krishna is a hero and a god. After it, he has a story that begins at birth. The cowherd setting, the world of Vraja, enters the written tradition here. The fullest and most beloved telling, though, was still to come.

The cowherd of Vrindavana

The Bhagavata Purana, composed in its received form around the 9th or 10th century CE, most likely in the south, is the text that made Krishna the figure the world now pictures.

Its tenth book, Book 10, is the longest and most loved. Here is the Krishna of devotion in full color. The infant who is hidden among the cowherds of Vrindavana. The toddler who steals butter and is bound to a grinding mortar by his foster-mother, the Damodara episode. The child who, scolded for eating earth, opens his mouth so his mother can check and shows her the entire universe inside it. The boy who lifts Mount Govardhana on one finger to shelter the cowherds from a storm sent by Indra.

And then the raslila, the dance. On autumn nights Krishna plays his flute, and the gopis, the cowherd women of Vraja, leave their homes and husbands to come to him, and he dances with them by the Yamuna, multiplying himself so that each believes he dances with her alone. The Bhagavata frames this as the soul’s love for God so total that it overflows every other bond, and not as scandal.

This is the third face, and it is the one that conquered popular devotion. The flute, the peacock feather, the dark-blue cowherd among the trees. The Alvars, the Tamil poet-saints of roughly the 6th to 9th centuries CE, sang this Krishna in ecstatic verse and helped carry bhakti across the south. Later teachers, above all Chaitanya in 16th-century Bengal, built whole movements on him.

It is also, on the evidence, the latest layer. The Krishna of stone, the Deva deva of 113 BCE, was attested more than a thousand years before the Bhagavata Purana set down the moonlit dance.

The latecomer who became the beloved

One figure central to Krishna in popular imagination is later still, and her lateness is one of the quiet surprises of the record.

Radha, today named in the same breath as Krishna, is not in the Mahabharata. She is not in the Harivamsha. She is not even in the Bhagavata Purana, the text that gives us Vrindavana and the gopis and the dance. The unnamed gopis are there; the named beloved is not.

There are scattered hints in earlier material, a possible Radha in stray verses of the old Prakrit anthology Gatha Saptasati, references in some Puranic strata of uncertain date. But her decisive arrival is the 12th century CE, in Jayadeva’s Sanskrit lyric the Gita Govinda, the “Song of the Cowherd.” There Radha becomes Krishna’s beloved in full, their union and separation rendered with an intensity that made the poem one of the most influential devotional works in the language. After Jayadeva she is everywhere, until it becomes hard to imagine the tradition without her.

The pattern that runs through Krishna’s whole history is sharpest here. The most attested layer is the oldest and least sentimental: a supreme god on a diplomat’s pillar. The most beloved layer is the youngest: a child, a flute, a dance, and finally a name, Radha, that the earliest texts never speak.

One god, or God himself

There remains the question the texts themselves argue about. Is Krishna a form of Vishnu, or is he the source of which Vishnu is a form?

The classical answer, in the Vishnu Purana and across much Vaishnava thought, is that Krishna is an avatara, a “descent” of Vishnu, one in the standard list of ten that includes the fish, the boar, Rama, and others. By this reckoning Krishna is God come down, but God is Vishnu.

The Bhagavata Purana presses further. In a single half-line that whole schools of theology rest upon (1.3.28), it lists the various incarnations and then declares: ete chamsha-kalah pumsah krishnas tu bhagavan svayam. The phrase amsha-kalah means “portions and partial portions”; pumsah is “of the Supreme Person”; and krishnas tu bhagavan svayam is “but Krishna is God himself, in person.” The verse inverts the hierarchy. The others are fragments. Krishna is the whole.

Gaudiya Vaishnavism, the tradition flowing from Chaitanya, makes this verse a cornerstone, holding Krishna to be svayam bhagavan, the original Godhead, with Vishnu as his expansion. Other schools read it more modestly. The tradition has not settled the matter into a single creed, and it does not need to. The dispute is itself part of who Krishna is in Sanatana Dharma: the figure around whom the highest claim a Hindu text can make about a personal God was actually made.

What the record holds

Strip the question to its bones and three things stand.

A man behind the god is beyond proof; no inscription names him, and the historian must say so. The worship of his divine form is firmly attested by the 2nd century BCE, in a grammarian’s rule, a Greek’s account, and above all a Greek devotee’s pillar. And the stories the world loves most, the butter and the flute and the dance and the beloved Radha, are the youngest growth on the oldest root.

He arrives in the record as the god of gods on weathered stone. He arrives in the heart as a child with a flute.

The evidence and the love have never quite agreed on where to begin, and perhaps that is the truest thing the record has to say about him.