Who Krishna is
Krishna is the god people know as a child. He is the baby smuggled out of a prison on the night of his birth, the toddler tied to a mortar for stealing butter, the boy who swallowed a forest fire and danced on the hoods of a serpent in the Yamuna. He grows into the cowherd whose flute draws the women of Vrindavan out of their houses at night, and into the young man who holds a mountain up on one finger for a week to keep the rain off his village.
Then he leaves Vrindavan and does not come back. He kills his uncle Kamsa, becomes a king at Dwarka on the western sea, marries, fights, and drives Arjuna's chariot at Kurukshetra. On that battlefield, before the fighting begins, he speaks the Bhagavad Gita, and tells his friend that he is the whole of everything, and comes down whenever the world goes wrong.
For the Bhagavata Purana he is Vishnu's eighth avatar, and more than that: the one who is God himself, of whom all the other avatars are portions. Many Vaishnavas hold the same, and some, the followers of Chaitanya, Vallabha and Nimbarka, worship him alone, with Radha beside him.
He is dark, like a rain cloud, with a peacock feather in his hair, a flute at his lips and yellow silk round his waist. He stands with one ankle crossed over the other. Most of all he is someone people love, as a son, as a friend, as a lover, as a master, and the poets of every Indian language have sung to him in all of those voices.
He lives in a hundred temples under other names: Jagannath at Puri, Vitthal at Pandharpur, Shrinathji at Nathdwara, Guruvayurappan in Kerala, the child at Udupi, Banke Bihari at Vrindavan, Dwarkadhish on the sea.
Whenever right declines and wrong rises, I bring myself forth: the Bhagavad Gita, 4.7.
