Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/12

 2 The Legends of Krishna.

At the last census each person was asked to name the god which he usually worshipped ; but this does not exclude the possibility that he may worship more than one. On the contrary, it is certain that to meet the varying needs of his life he combines the belief in his personal god with that of others, few or many. The basis of his belief is animistic, but he supplements this form of worship by the casual or periodical veneration of one or several of the members of the official pantheon. When we find, then, that five and a half millions of people in the Panjab and North-Western Provinces professed devotion to Krishna, we may assume that a very much larger number revere him as a member of the class of deities which are known generally as Vaish- nava, or grouped round the personality of Vishnu.

This is not the place or time to discuss in detail the historical development of the cult; but a few words must be said on this point as an introduction to the consideration of his legends, which is the special subject of this paper.

He is, to begin with, a comparatively new god, that is to say, he does not appear in the Vedas. We first hear of Krishna, son of Devaki, in the Chhandogya Upanishad, one of the supplements to the Sama Veda, which are clearly later than the Sanhitas or Brahmanas, and in their present recension embody the views of that school of philosophical Brahmanism which is of course separated by a long in- terval from that of the nature worship embodied in the earlier hymns. Krishna is here only a scholar, eager in the pursuit of knowledge, and perhaps a member of the military caste.^ Passing on to the Epic period, in the Mahabharata, which was probably composed between the time of the Greek traveller Megasthenes (306 — 295 B.C.) and the second half of the first century of our era,^ we find that Krishna occupies a higher place, but still his divinity is not fully assured. Rama and Krishna are here at once gods

' Weber, History of hidian Litcratitre, 7 1. - Ibid., 186.