The Childhood of Kṛṣṇa: Some Psychoanalytic Observations

Author(s): J. L. Masson
Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1974), pp. 454-
459
Published by: American Oriental Society
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 THE CHILDHOOD OF KRSNA: SOME PSYCHOANALYTIC OBSERVATIONS*

J. L. M3ASSON
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

A reading of the earliest text to deal with the Krsna legend, the Harivam.sa, incites
one's curiosity as to the underlying psychological realities embedded in the tales of Krsna's
childhood. Based on the essential work of Freud and recent work in classical psycho-
analysis, certain themes of universal occurrence (fantasies about one's childhood and
about one's family, narcissism and the defence mechanism of projection) can be discerned
in these early myths of Krsna's personal life. Brief comments on some of the internal
dilemmas are offered as part of a larger work on the childhood of Krsna.

rdmo ndma babhiiva hum tad abald siteti hum tau pitur
vdcd paicavatitate viharatas tam aharad rdvanah
nidrdrtham jananikathdm iti harer hunkdratah Srnvatah
saumitre kva dhanur dhanur dhanur iti vyagrd girah
pantu vah (Krsoakarndmrta, II. 71).
"Krsna's mother was telling him fairy tales to put
him to sleep. He was dreamily responding with quiet
"hmms."
'Once upon a time, my child, there was a man called
Rama.'
'Hmm.'
'He had a wife called SIta.'
'Hmm.'
'RSma's father banished them to the Paficavati forest,
where
The demon Ravana kidnapped SIta.'
Suddenly Rama thundered:
'Laksman, my bow, my bow, my bow '
May these strange words protect you."
THE APPLICATION OF PSYCHOANALYSISto ancient
myths, an endeavor which fascinated Freud and
* The application of psychoanalytic understanding to the
classical texts of the Sanskrit tradition is a rather new,
and admittedly hazardous undertaking. For those in-
terested in a more detailed application, see my "Fratri-
cide and the Monkeys: Psychoanalytic Observations on
an Episode in the Vailmikiramayanam" to appear in a
subsequent issue of this journal. For a critique of the
psychohistorical method when divorced from its Freudian
base, see my "India and the Unconscious-Erik Erikson
on Gandhi." International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
Vol. 55, Part II, 1974. For a more general overview of
some of the issues, see my "Sex and Yoga: Psychoanalysis
and the Indian Religious Experience," Journal of Indian
Philosophy, Vol. II, No. 3-4, 1974.
the early analysts1 (including the sober Abraham2)
has proven less successful than has psychoanalysis
as a therapy.3 I think one reason may be that
the more one studies a text, the more one's in-
terest and energy begin to be soaked up by the
pre-psychological problems of the subject. It is
often said that until we have critically edited texts,
1 See Jacob A. Arlow: "Ego Psychology and the Study
of Mythology." Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, 9: 371-393 (1961). Evidence of the great
interest the early analysts showed in topics of literature
and mythology is graphically illustrated in the Minutes
of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society of which two volumes
have appeared, edited by H. Nunberg and P. Federn,
New York: International Universities Press, 1962.
2 Karl Abraham: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis.
2 Vols. Trans. by D. Bryan and A. Strachey. New York:
Basic Books, 1957.
3 In the body of this paper I have compared myths
rather loosely with dreams. This lack of precision would
not have been tolerated by Freud. For, while Freud
was not at all reluctant to "analyse," often with great
brilliance, literary works (see his charming piece on
"Jensen's 'Gradiva'," Standard Edition, Vol. 9: London:
The Hogarth Press, 1959), he was less than enthusiastic
about "interpreting" dreams outside of an analysis. Thus,
he is reported to have written to Andre Breton, in response
to the latter's invitation to Freud that he make a contri-
bution to a work containing 50 dreams (Les Vases com-
municants which was dedicated to Freud !): ". . . a mere
collection of dreams without the dreamers' associations,
without the knowledge of the circumstances in which
they occurred, tells me nothing, and I can hardly imagine
what it could tell anyone." See Frederick B. Davis:
"Three Letters from Sigmund Freud to Andre Breton,"
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Assoc. Vol. 21
(1973), p. 128.

454

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 MASSON: The Childhood of KTrsna
careful translations, serious and detailed studies
of the external matter of a myth and historically
exhaustive accounts of the extant literature, spec-
ulation concerning the deeper significance of a
legend is premature. It is certainly distressing to
observe the generalizations that certain scholars
are willing to make about Sanskrit aesthetics or
Indian philosophy, for example, when they them-
selves know so little of the language and the back-
ground of the works they profess to explain. This
is even more true of Indian religions where we
find zealous students of "comparative" religion
willing to make wild judgments about Hinduism
on the basis of a superficial "philosophical" reading
of the Bhagavadgitd or Upanisads, texts from
which they learn the little they know of the language.
It does seem true that the more one learns about
any subject dealing with India's past, the less
certain one becomes about its meaning. This lack
of certainty creates a peculiar defensive speciali-
zation: "If I cannot know for certain, then I will
occupy myself with the textual problems; here is
something I can know for certain."
In reading the HarivanSuaOwith my graduate
seminar at the University of Toronto last year,
I found that many questions remained unanswered
that pressed for solution: The HarivamiSa is beyond
doubt the earliest text dealing with the Krsna
legend, but just how early is it5? It certainly
seems to presuppose an earlier legend: were these
earlier sources oral, or texts now lost ?6 To what
extent did the Visnupurdna and the Bhdgavata-
4 All references are to the critical edition
by P. L.
Vaidya. Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona,
1969, Vol. I: Text.
5 See A. B. Keith: "The Child Krsna." Journcl
of the
Royal Asiatic Society, 1908, pp. 169-175 and JRAS,
1907, p. 681. My own guess is that the text is not likely
to be later than the second or third century A.D., and
could be as old as the first century, B.c. I make this
judgment purely on the basis of the language and style
of the text. It is almost certainly not as late as Kennedy
and others thought at the beginning of the century
(namely, the sixth century, A.D.).
6 I suspect that the texts were oral. If one
compares
the H V with a text like the Ndtyasdstra, it becomes
clear why: the Ng reveals, often quite openly, that it is
based on an earlier written tradition: quotations and
references abound. (See my: Aesthetic Rapture: Poona,
Deccan College, 1970). Of course, it is in the nature of
the NS to reveal its sources, whereas a text like the H V
need not do so since it is not a .sastra, but only a kavya)
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455
purana draw upon the Harivamsa ? Were the ad-
ditions (especially of the latter) founded upon an
earlier tradition? Can we do anything more than
speculate about the relationship between the two
Krsnas, one the shrewd advisor to the Pandavas
in the Bharata war, and the other the beloved
child-hero of the forests in Vrndavana ? If the two
seem so far removed from one another, is this
merely a modern prejudice, or does it correspond
to chronological and sectarian reality? Further-
more, the text of the Harivaimsa is not entirely
simple: many problems arose in our reading and
there are a number of passages, the meaning of
which is by no means clear, at least to me. Nila-
kantha's is the only printed commentary7 and it
was of limited assistance. I cannot pretend that
I have satisfactory answers to these questions;
and yet, in spite of the incompleteness of our
knowledge, I found myself wondering more and
more about the psychological roots of much of
what I was reading. Parts of the story read like
an account of a dream, or an obscure and private
fantasy in which the details often give a glimpse
of something behind them, some meaning which
holds a secret promise of comprehension, but which
does not yield itself to immediate understanding.
Let me state right away that I do not believe
there can be one "meaning" to the Krsna myth,
nor that psychoanalysis provides the only meaning-
ful or useful theory as to the deeper inner needs
that produced the myth. A Marxian analysis
would be difficult, but very rewarding, as we can
begin to see in Kosambi's study.8 A literary ap-
proach is, of course, fruitful, as Ingalls9 has shown
for Krsna, and Goldman'0 for the Bhargava myths
in general. Singer" has edited a work where clas-
sical Indology is finely wedded with anthropolo-
7 P. L. Vaidya, the editor of the cr. ed. of the H V,
kindly informs me that there exists another commentary
on the text, in the BORI in Poona, but it is late, and on
the whole only a copy of Nilakantha.
8 "Social and Economic Aspects of the Bhagavadgitd,"
In Myth and Reality by Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi.
Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1962.
9 Daniel H. H.
Ingalls: "The Harivamsa as a mahaka-
vya." In Mlllanges d'Indianisme a la Memoire de L.
Renou. Paris: Editions E. de Boccard, 1968, pp. 381-394.
10 Robert P. Goldman, unpublished Ph.D. thesis,
University of Pennsylvania, 1972.
11 Milton Singer, ed. Krishna:
Myths, Rites, and At-
titudes. (With a Foreword by D. H. H. Ingalls). Hono-
lulu: East-West Center Press, 1966.
456 Journal of the American Oriental Society 94.4 (1974)
gical studies. Levi-Strauss, with whose general
approach I find myself in little sympathy, at least
forces us to consider just what material should be
included in the study (as in his famous pronounce-
ment that the study of a myth should include all
its variants-an enormous undertaking in the case
of the Krsna myth).12
I have chosen the Krsna myth because it seems
to me a particularly enchanting one; one that
satisfies aesthetic needs as well as psychological
curiosity.13 If I failed to discover the "latent"
buried content to this dream-like story, at least
I could be pleased by the beauty inherent in the
language that describes Krsna's deeds. If, for
example, the hidden significance of the rasa dance
in the autumn nights in the forest did not become
clear (it did not), I will, nonetheless, have read a
poem of great loveliness. I am convinced that
reading the Rdamyana has provided for generations
of Indians the same satisfactions: here was a text
as charming to some as it was sacred to others,
and for many, it was both. After all, it was
inanandavardhana,14 already in the ninth century,
who pointed out that reading the Rmadyana pro-
vided first of all a satisfying aesthetic experience
centering around loss, sadness, and compassion
(karunarasa). I feel that ancient Indians (as do
Indians today), read the Harivarmsa as much for
its literary beauty as for its recreation of a world
of inner harmony. But here I am anticipating
my psychoanalytic comments.
12 I am not
myself competent to look at the old Maithili
works of Vidyapati, and the old Bengali poems of Candi-
das. Mrs. Himani Banerji has been kind enough to trans-
late certain episodes from the Caitanyabhdvata which are
enough to convince me that the material in the regional
languages is very important, and that, especially if one
wishes to trace the often quite pathological transform-
ations of the early legends, it is essential that this material
be drawn upon.
13 Irsna's childhood is decidedly different from the
European enfances in the Chansons de Geste (see Italo
Siciliano: Les Chansons de Geste et l'epopee. Biblioteca
di Studi Francesi. Torino: Societa Editrice Internazio-
nale, 1968.) The Krsna myths are also differentfromthe
equally absorbing yet to me, less satisfying myths of
giva (see Wendy-Doniger O'Flaherty: "Asceticism &
Sexuality in the Mythology of giva." History of Religions,
Vol. 8, No. 4, and Vol. 9, No. 1, May and Aug., 1969).
14 See my gdntarasa and Abhinavagupta's Philosophy
of Aesthetics. Poona: BhandarkarOriental Research In-
stitute, 1969.
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In the confines of a short paper, I cannot sub-
ject any single element of the Krsnacarita to the
detailed enquiry required: a single dream, after
all, can often involve weeks of analytic work for
the patient and the analyst, resembling, to some
extent, the kind of literary criticism we engage
in when we read a difficult Sanskrit text closely.
Therefore, I will only share with you certain of
my own observations concerning the larger out-
lines of the psychology embedded in the Harivam-
sd, and state some of the more general cravings I
believe the Krsna myth fulfills. It is true that
I am arguing on the basis of my own feelings on
reading this text. They could be quite different
from those of an ancient Indian, but somehow I
suspect that people have not changed that much
over the centuries, and that my own responses,
at least to some degree, will give me some clues
as to what others may have felt.
I will make very brief and very incomplete
observations on four aspects of the Krsna myth:
1. Krsna and Memory: the Happy Childhood;
2. Krsna and the Gopis: the Narcissistic Personal-
ity; 3. Krsna and his Bandhubandhavas: the
Family Romance; 4. Krsna and the Demons:
Psychic Projection.
1. KRSNA AND MEMORY: THE HIAPPY CHILDHOOD.
It is a common fantasy of adults who suffer that
as small children they were blissfully happy. We
know, thanks to Freud, that a three-year-old
child has as many conflicts as an adult, many of
them having to do with love (libido) and hate
(aggression), the two basic innate drives in all
people, child or adult. But there does seem to
have been a time for most children, say in the
first three months of their life, before they are
fully differentiated from their mother, when they
feel almost no difference between themselves and
their environment, when they are at one and
at peace with the external world because it is felt
to exist in them, for they are in a state of constant
gratification.15 Nobody can "remember" such a
time, for recall is too intimately tied in with
verbalization, and conscious memory does not
begin before the acquisition of language.l6 But,
15 See Margaret S. Mahler: On Human Symbiosis and
the Vicissitudes of Individuation. New York: Int. Univ.
Press, 1968.
16 See Paul Schilder: Medical Psychology. Trans. and
Ed. by David Rapaport. New York: Int. Univ. Press,
1953 (orig. German ed., 1923).
 MASSON: The Childhood of K.rs.na
long before this developmental hurdle, there exist
somatic memories, memories that the body retains
and which can influence our feelings in years to
come without ever becoming conscious.l7 Lewin18
has shown, for example, how in many dreams there
appears a blank screen, and detailed clinical work
has suggested that this blank screen may be a
pictorial somatic memory of the mother's breast.
Isakower19 has worked further in this area and
has shown quite convincingly that many patients
in analysis experience curious feelings in the pro-
cess of falling asleep ("hypnagogic phenomena")
that seem related to this "dream-screen."20 It
seems to me possible that the world the poet
creates in the Harivamlsd in the idyllic surroundings
of Vridavana is just such a world of contentment
and physical gratification. This is how he de-
scribes the forest:
riiyate hi vanam ramyam paryaptatrnasamstaram
ndmnd vrndavanam nama svdduvrksaphalodakam
ajhillikanthakavanam sarvair vanagunair yutam
kadambapadapaprdyam yamundtirasamgritam
snigdhalitdnilavanam sarvartunilaya.m ubham
gopindm sukhasamcaram cdrucitravandntaram
"One hears much about a beautiful forest, covered in
a thick carpet of grass, it is called Vrndavana, where
there is sweet water, and trees, and fruit."
"It is a forest without thorns and without crickets,
with all beautiful things in it and many Kadamba
trees running right down to the Yamuna river."
"It is a beautiful forest in all seasons, with cool and
pleasant breezes. The women can wander about hap-
pily there, and there are innumerable lovely woods
with an immense variety [of shapes and colors]."21
The emphasis throughout the Harivamsa is on
cows and their flowing milk,22 on green pastures,
on mothers with boundless and unconditional af-
fection for their children, on peaceful activities.
Krsna says to his brother when he wants to move
out of the confines of a city:
17 See Otto Fenichel: The Psychoanalytic
Theory of
Neurosis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1945, p. 321.
18 B. D. Lewin:
"Sleep, the Mouth and the Dream
Screen." Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 15 (1946): 419-434.
19 0. Isakower: "A Contribution to the Pathopsycho-
logy of Phenomean Associated with Falling Asleep."
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 19, 1938.
20 See G. Heilbrunn: "Fusion of the Dream Screen and
the Isakower Phenomenon." Psychoanalytic
Quarterly,
22, 1953.
21 HV. 52.21-23.
22 Cf. H V.53.31.
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457
na dudrabandhavarana na grhaksetrinas tathd
pra?astd vai vraja like yatha vai cakracdrinah
"The wonderful people of Vraja are famous through
the world for not being fettered by doorsand houses and
walls and cultivated fields. They are the free people 1"23
I remember thinking many times how "en-
chanting" in the full sense of the word, such a
country was, how engaging the description. It
is not surprising that the later tradition calls
Vrndavana a state of mind, a manorajya, available
to everyone in fantasy. It is a world where all
is in harmony, and were the little child is king.
Not surprising that in later poems the Gopis vie
with one another to feed Krsna from their breasts;
he has nothing but good mothers around him.
The author (Divakaradatta) of the poem preserved
in the mediaeval Saduktikarnamrta seems to me
to have understood that this same blissful state
also implies a shortly to be enacted sexual life,
for we find that it is not long before the little
Krsna takes a strong sexual pleasure in the love
and affection he receives:
adharam adhare kanthe kantham sacatudrgor drsdv
alikam alike krtvd gopijanena sasambhramam
sibur iti rudan krsno vaksahsthale nihito 'cirdn
nibhrtapulakah smerah pdydt smardlasavigrahah
"Lip to lip. Neck to neck. Mischievous eye to eye.
Forehead to forehead. The Gopis excitedly placed the
crying Krsna to their breasts: 'He is only a child' they
said. But a moment later his hair stood on end with
sexual delight. May the smiling Krsna, his body heavy
with sexual love, protect you."24
2. KRSNA AND THE GOPIS: THE NARCISSISTIC PER-
SONALITY.
Many people, when stress and anxieties become
too much to handle, find themselves turning back
to earlier moments of satisfaction and relative
psychic calm. One of the positions to which adults
frequently regress is that of narcissistic gratifica-
tion, to a time when the existence of other people
hardly impinged on their self-absorption. In his
classic paper on this subject, written in 1914.
Freud speaks of how parents who have long aban-
doned their own infantile narcissism, revive it to
a certain extent in their attitude towards their
own children. The description would very well
23 HV. 52.18.
24 From the Saduktikarndmrta of grldharadasa.
Critical
Edition by Sures Chandra Banerji. Calcutta: Firma K.
Mukhopadhyay, 1965, verse 254 (of the Krsnasaigavam),
p. 69.
458 Journal of the American Oriental Society 91.4 (1974)

fit the unknown author(s) of the Harivamsa: In later myths, Krsna is represented with 16,000
"They are under a compulsion to ascribe every wives; a patent narcissistic fantasy.
perfection to the child-which sober observation
would find no occasion to do-and to conceal and ?. KRSNA AND HIS BANDHUBANDHAVAS: TITE FAMILY
ROMANCE.
forget all his shortcomings. (Incidentally, the
denial of sexuality in children is connected with Once again we are concerned with a regression,
this.) Moreover, they are inclined to suspend in this time to an imaginative activity often engaged
the child's favour the operation of all the cultural in by children in an attempt to free themselves
acquisitions which their own narcissism has been from their parents. "Family romances" is the
forced to respect, and to renew on his behalf the title of a four-page article first published by Freud
claims to privileges which were long ago given in 1909 in the work of his pupil Otto Rank, Myth
up by themselves. The child shall have a better of the Birth of the Hero.29 These few pages have
time than his parents; he shall not be subject to exercised an extraordinary influence on the sub-
the necessities which they have recognized as
sequent development of psychoanalytic thought.
paramount in life. Illness, death, renunciation of "If we examine in detail the commonest of these
enjoyment, restrictions on his own will, shall not imaginative romances, the replacement of both
touch him; the laws of nature and of society shall
parents or of the father alone by grander people,
be abrogated in his favour; he shall once more, we find that these new and aristocratic parents
really be the centre and core of creation-'His are equipped with attributes that are derived
Majesty the Baby' as we once fancied ourselves."25 entirely from real recollections of the actual and
In recent times a still greater interest has been humble ones; so that in fact the child is not getting
shown in narcissism, culminating in the fine study rid of his father but exalting him. Indeed, the
by Kohut26. One of the observations that Iohut whole effort at replacing the real father by a
and others27 make about the narcissistic personality
superior one is only an expression of the child's
is that he is unable to be satisfied with a single
longing for the happy, vanished days when his
love-object: his grasp is unending. Already in father seemed to him the noblest and strongest
the Hariva.msa we read of the rasa dance, in which of men and his mother the dearest and loveliest
Krsna makes love to all of the women present: of women." (op. cit., p. 240). The Sterbas30 have
tds tamrpayodharottdnair urobhih samapidayan shown how Beethoven, when rumours were current
bhrdmitdksais ca vadanair niriksante vardagandh. about Frederick the Great of Prussia being his
ta vdryamdnah pitrbhir bhrdtrbhir mdtrbhis tathd real father, refused to stem the rumours. Clearly,
krsnanmgopdngand rdtrau mrgayanti ratipriydhl he was not averse to having this obviously untrue
tds tu paktiktrtdh sarva ramayanti manoramam belief circulated. Almost all of the Indian myths
gdyantyahl krsnacaritarn dvamdvado gopakanyakdh of "heroes" or sages include such a family romance:
"The girls pressed up close against him with their high the Buddha, the Mahavira, etc. Krsna is no dif-
firm breasts and their thighs, and with their whole ferent. It is, of course, to be expected that the
face, the eyes rolling in ecstasy, they gazed at him. admirers of a tribal hero, Krsna, would ascribe
Though prevented by their fathers and brothers and to him an exalted and secret family. But the
mothers, as well, the women of the Gopas, intent on Hariva,nSa carries this much further. For not
making love, searched for Krsna in the dead of night. only is Krsna the son of a high nobleman, Vasu-
They all formed a circle around Krsna and satisfied deva, but eventually he is a god himself, Visnu.
that beautiful boy, singing of his deeds in pairs."-8 The identification is as old as the third century,
25 S. Freud: "OnNarcissism:An Introduction." Stand- B.C., (Taittiriya Aranyaka, X.1.6),31 and is repeated
in the HarivamSa, contrary to the belief of some
ard Edition, Vol. 14, p. 90-91. London: The Hogarth
scholars. Not only he, but other members of his
Press, 1957.
26 H. Kohut: The Analysis of the Self. Monograph family, as well, turn out to be gods.
Series of the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 4. New
York: Int. Univ. Press, 1971. 29 Standard Edition, Vol. 9, p. 237.
27 See The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Salome. 30 See Editha and Richard Sterba. "Beethoven and
Trans. by Stanley A. Leavy. London: The Hogarth his Nephew: A Psychoanalytic Study of their Relationship."
Press, 1965. Trans. by Willard R. Trask. New York: Pantheon, 1954.
28 HV. 63.23-25. 31 Keith, op. cit., p. 171.

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 MASSON:
For the Harivaima his brother Samkarsana is
none other than the eternal serpent Sesa (or Anan-
ta) (HV., ch. 58), and Arjuna, his cousin, is the
son of Indra. The later tradition elaborates still
further, and, in the Bengali tradition,32 Radha is
considered sometimes as Laksmi, as expected,
and sometimes even as Devil The Gopis them-
selves are thought of as Apsaras, and Yagoda and
Nanda are, of course, exalted. To any psycholo-
gical sounding, India will always offer yet another
deeper level, and so we hear in the Caitanyacari-
tm?rta and the Caitanyabhagavata that Caitanya
and his main disciples are only reincarnations of
the Gopis I
4. KRSNA AND THE DEMONS: PSYCHIC PROJECTION.
One of the defense mechanisms described in the
early analytic literature33 is projection. This refers
to the fact that one is sometimes dimly aware of
unacceptable feelings in oneself, feelings that one
refuses to acknowledge: such feelings are then
projected outward, and are ascribed to something
or someone else in the environment. I had the
feeling in reading of the many demons that Krsna
kills, that they were all aspects of that part of
himself he most feared or disliked. Putana is
obviously a representation of the child's concep-
tion of the bad mother, the mother with poisoned
milk. To create such a demoness externally is to
protect one's inner feelings about one's own mother
by denying ambivalent feelings. It is not sur-
prising that many of these figures of fear are ani-
mals (Kaliya and Dhenuka) to represent Krsna's
own "animal" nature.
Observations of children's play34 reveals very
similar games in which the child destroys some-
thing in effigy that he does not wish to acknow-
ledge in himself. Once again, then, one can think
of these episodes as if they were free-associations,
phantasies, or fragments from a dream. I am
reminded of the story of the man who asked Freud
32 See S. K. De: Early History of the Vaisnava Faith
and Movement in Bengal. Calcutta: 2nd ed., K. L.
Mukhopadhyaya,1961 (1st ed., 1942.)
33 Freud mentions this defense as early as 1911, in the
Schreber case (Standard Edition 12). See also Anna
Freud: The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. London:
The Hogarth Press, 1936. Also: Robert P. Knight:
"Introjection, Projection, and Identification." Psycho-
analytic Quarterly,9, 1940.
34 See Anna Freud: Research at the Hampstead Child-
Therapy Clinic and Other Papers. New York: Int. Univ.
Press, 1969.
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The Childhood of Krsna 459
whether one could be held responsible for the con-
tent of one's dreams. Freud's response was: "Whom
else would you hold responsible ?" Rather striking
confirmation of this theory is found in the text
of the Harivamnsa itself. Chapter 52, the Vrka-
darsanarm, describes a rather odd incident that,
curiously enough, as far as I know, is dropped
from later accounts. When Krsna decides that
the Gopas must leave the town they are in, to
settle in Vrndavana, he convinces them of the
necessity of the move by projecting wolves from
his own body:
ghords cintayatas tasya svataniiruhajds tadd
vinispetur bhayakardh sarvata!lh ataso vrkdc! (verse 30)
"On all sides and by hundreds terrifying horrible
wolves came out of the hairs on his body as he was
concentrating."
CONCLUSION
In writing on Dostoievsky,35 Freud made his fa-
mous comment that: "Before the problem of the
creative artist, analysis must, alas, lay down its
arms." Similarly, I feel that there are areas of
the Krsna myth that seem to yield up their
treasures not to psychoanalysis, but only to adbhu-
tarasa. I am referring to that lovely moment in
the Bhdgavata, the full impact of which I ex-
perienced when I heard Krsnasanikara gastri in
Baroda, late one evening, recite this verse:
ndham bhaksitavun amba sarve mithyabhiSansinall
yadi satyagiras tarhi, samaksa.n pasya me mukham.
What then happened has become part of the
heritage of India, repeated in many superb verses,
humble before this mystery, from which I choose
an anonymous one from the Saduktikarndmrta
to end my paper:
krsnenddya gatena rantumanasd mrdbhaksitd svecchayd
satyamkrsnaka evamahamusali mithydmbapasydnanam
vyddehiti viddrite sisumukhe drstvd samastam jagad
mdta yasya jagdmavismayapadampdydt sa vah kesavali
"Krsna went, bent on mischief, and ate mud to his
heart's content."
"Is that true Krsna?"
"Who told you so?"
"Musali."
"It's a lie mother, Look at my mouth."
"Open it."
And when the little boy opened his mouth his mother
saw the whole world inside of it.
"Mayhe whose motherwas lost in wonder, protect you."
35 "Doestoevsky and
parricide." Standard Editionz,
Vol. 21: pp. 5-59.