Devalok
Local story · 1 telling · South India

Kanakadasa's window at Udupi

Madhva finds the Krishna image in a lump of clay; the low-caste singer Kanakadasa, barred from the temple, sees the god turn west through a crack that became the Kanakana Kindi.

Who is in it

Places: Udupi, Dwarka

The story, beat by beat

  1. Madhvacharya calms a storm at sea and the grateful captain gives him a lump of gopichandana clay.
  2. Inside is an image of the child Krishna, which tradition links to Dwarka; Madhva installs it at Udupi.
  3. Centuries later the singer Kanakadasa, of a herding caste, is kept out of the temple.
  4. He sings to Krishna from behind the back wall.
  5. The image turns to face west, toward him, and a crack opens in the wall.
  6. Vadiraja Tirtha widens the crack into a window, the Kanakana Kindi, through which all now see the god.

devotion caste exclusion turning image window

How it is told, place by place

Base telling · Temple tradition

Udupi Krishna Matha tradition

South India · Udupi, Karnataka Vaishnava

Udupi's Krishna arrived by sea. Madhvacharya, walking the shore in the thirteenth century, stilled a storm for a ship in trouble, and among the ballast the captain gave him was a block of sacred clay in which the philosopher found a figure of the boy Krishna holding a churning rod, said to have come from Dwarka. He set it up at Udupi and founded eight monasteries to serve it in turn. The story everyone tells, though, is of Kanakadasa, the sixteenth-century poet-saint of a cowherd caste who was refused entry. He stood at the back of the temple and sang, and the image, they say, turned round to face him, the wall splitting so that he could see it. Vadiraja Tirtha made the split into a proper window, and to this day the god is seen through Kanakadasa's window and the nine-holed screen beside it rather than from the front. The story was written down by the missionary Hermann Mögling in the 1860s, two centuries after the saint.

Udupi Sri Krishna Matha — Wikipedia

Sources: Udupi Sri Krishna Matha — Wikipedia

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