Krishna Passes Away

The wheel of time turned on toward the dawn of the dark age, the Kali Yuga; and in Dvārakā the Yādavas, Krishna's own clan, intoxicated by power and prosperity and the security of his presence, had degenerated into arrogance and vanity. And an old curse of the sages came due: for some mischievous Yādava youths had once mockingly dressed a prince as a pregnant woman and asked the sages to foretell the child's sex, and the offended sages had foretold that she would bear an iron mace that would destroy the clan. And so it came to pass.

The prince brought forth an iron mace; and though the terrified Yādavas ground it to powder and cast it into the sea, fate could not be escaped, for the powder washed ashore and grew into a crop of sharp rushes. And years later, at a drunken festival by the sea, a quarrel broke out among the Yādavas, and they snatched up the rushes, which turned to iron maces in their hands, and fell upon one another, and slaughtered their whole clan to the last, in a single drunken night.

And Krishna, seeing the destruction of his own lineage, and knowing that his work on earth was now complete, withdrew to a quiet forest, and reclined beneath a tree, and drew his consciousness inward. And a hunter named Jara, seeing from a distance the Lord's reddish foot and mistaking it for the eye of a deer, loosed an arrow that pierced it.

And coming near, the hunter saw whom he had struck, and wept in terror; but Krishna blessed him, and forgave him, and by his own supreme free will cast off his mortal body and returned to his eternal, blemishless abode. And with the passing of Krishna, the light went out of the world, and the dark age, the Kali Yuga, truly began.

There is a great and deliberate quietness in the manner of Krishna's passing, and it is worth feeling. He who had been the charioteer of the war, the speaker of the Gītā, the mover of the whole vast story, the Supreme Lord himself in human form, laid down his body at the last in a lonely forest, struck by a hunter's stray arrow, without splendour, without ceremony, quietly.

For his human descent, like Rāma's before him, ended as it had to end, with the laying-down of the human form and the return to the eternal source, the divine work accomplished and the divine actor withdrawing from the stage. And his passing, and the ruin of his clan, marked the end of an age; for with the Lord's departure from the earth, the world entered its long twilight, and the story that had begun in the golden ancestral cosmos moved into the shadow of the age of decline.