s mother
Devaki were grievously wronged by Devaki's cousin Kamsa, who usurped
the royal power in Mathura and endeavoured to slay Krishna in his
infancy; but the child escaped, and on growing to manhood killed
Kamsa. But Kamsa had made alliance with Jarasandha king of Magadha,
who now threatened Krishna; so Krishna prudently retired from Mathura
and led a colony of his tribesmen to Dvaraka, on the western coast in
Kathiawar, where he founded a new State. There seems to be no valid
reason for doubting these statements. Sober history does not reject a
tale because it is embroidered with myth and fiction.

Now this man Krishna in the midst of his stirring life of war and
government found time and taste also for the things that are of the
spirit. He talked with men learned in the Upanishads about Brahma and
the soul and the worship of God; and apparently he set up a little
Established Church of his own, in which was combined something of the
idealism of the Upanishads with the worship of a supreme God of grace
and perhaps too a kind of religious discipline, about which we shall
say more later on. It must be confessed that we know sadly little
about his actual doctrine from first hand. All that we hear about it
is a short chapter in the Chhandogya Upanishad (iii. 17), where the
Brahman Ghora Angirasa gives a sermon to Krishna, in which he compares
the phases of human life to stages in the _diksha_ or ceremony of
consecration, and the moral virtues that should accompany them to the
_dakshina_ or honorarium paid to the officiating priests, and he
concludes by exhorting his hearer to realise that the Brahma is
imperishable, unfailing, and spiritual, and quoting two verses from
the Rig-veda speaking of the Sun as typifying the supreme bliss to
which the enlightened soul arises. This does not tell us very much,
and moreover we should remember that here our author, being an
Aupanishada, is more interested in what Ghora preached to Krishna than
in what Krishna accepted from Ghora's teaching. But we shall find
centuries later in the Bhagavad-gita, the greatest textbook of the
religion of Krishna, some distant echoes of this paragraph of the
Chhandogya.

The beginnings of the religion of Krishna are thus very uncertain. But
as we travel down the ages we find it growing and spreading. We see
Krishna himself regarded as a half-divine hero and teacher, and
worshipped under the name of _Bhagavan_, "the Lord," in association
with other