on the coast of
Gujarat. He became king of the Yadavas and continued his mission of
clearing the earth of tyrants and monsters. In the struggle between
the Pandavas and the sons of Dhritarashtra he championed the cause
of the former, and after the conclusion of the war retired to Dvaraka.
Internecine conflict broke out among the Yadavas and annihilated the
race. Krishna himself withdrew to the forest and was killed by a
hunter called Jaras (old age) who shot him supposing him to be a deer.

In the Mahabharata and several Puranas this bare outline is distended
with a plethora of miraculous incident remarkable even in Indian
literature, and almost all possible forms of divine and human activity
are attributed to this many-sided figure. We may indeed suspect that
his personality is dual even in the simplest form of the legend for
the scene changes from Mathura to Dvaraka, and his character is not
quite the same in the two regions. It is probable that an ancient
military hero of the west has been combined with a deity or perhaps
more than one deity. The pile of story, sentiment and theology which
ages have heaped up round Krishna's name, represents him in three
principal aspects. Firstly, he is a warrior who destroys the powers of
evil. Secondly, he is associated with love in all its forms, ranging
from amorous sport to the love of God in the most spiritual and
mystical sense. Thirdly, he is not only a deity, but he actually
becomes God in the European and also in the pantheistic acceptation of
the word, and is the centre of a philosophic theology.

The first of these aspects is clearly the oldest and it is here, if
anywhere, that we may hope to find some fragments of history. But the
embellishments of poets and story-tellers have been so many that we
can only point to features which may indicate a substratum of fact.
In the legend, Krishna assists the Pandavas against the Kauravas.
Now many think that the Pandavas represent a second and later
immigration of Aryans into India, composed of tribes who had halted in
the Himalayas and perhaps acquired some of the customs of the
inhabitants, including polyandry, for the five Pandavas had one wife
in common between them. Also, the meaning of the name Krishna,
black, suggests that he was a chief of some non-Aryan tribe. It is,
therefore, possible that one source of the Krishna myth is that a
body of invading Aryans, described in the legend as the Pandavas,
who had not exactly t