Ask ten Hindus who Krishna is and you will get ten answers that do not contradict each other. For a grandmother in Gujarat he is the toddler with butter on his cheeks whom she rocks in a cradle every morning. For a singer in Vrindavan he is the dark lover with the flute. For a lawyer in Mumbai with a Gita in her desk drawer he is the voice that tells Arjuna to stand up and act.
The story of his birth in Kamsa's prison and the midnight crossing of the Yamuna is told in its own article. This one begins the next morning, in a cowherd's house in Gokul, and follows him to the end.
The child of Gokul and Vrindavan
Krishna grew up as the son of Nanda, chief of the cowherds, and his wife Yashoda. The childhood stories in the tenth book of the Bhagavata Purana are the most tender in Hindu scripture. He steals butter from pots hung out of reach and shares it with the monkeys. He eats mud, and when Yashoda prises his mouth open she sees the whole universe inside it, and then forgets, because a mother cannot live with that knowledge. She ties him to a grinding mortar as punishment, and the name Damodara, he whose belly is bound with a rope, is cherished for exactly that: God lets himself be tied up by love.
Two episodes from these years carry the most teaching. The serpent Kaliya had poisoned a stretch of the Yamuna so badly that birds fell dead flying over it. Krishna leapt in, rose up on the serpent's many hoods and danced on them until Kaliya was exhausted. He did not kill him; at the pleading of the serpent's wives he sent him away. The poison in the river of life is subdued, not destroyed, and it is subdued by a dance.
Then there is Govardhan. The cowherds were preparing their yearly sacrifice to Indra, god of rain, and Krishna asked why they worshipped a distant king of heaven when the hill in front of them fed their cows. They worshipped the hill instead. Indra sent seven days of storm, and Krishna lifted Govardhan on his little finger and held it as an umbrella over the village. The day after Diwali, Hindus still build a small hill of food, the Annakut, in memory of it. The meaning is simple and radical: the divine sides with what is near and nourishing over what is grand and proud.
The flute and the gopis
As a youth Krishna played the flute in the forests of Vrindavan, and the gopis, the cowherd women, left their cooking and their homes when they heard it. On an autumn full moon he danced the rasa lila with them, multiplying himself so that each woman felt he danced with her alone. When pride crept in, when they began to feel they had earned him, he vanished, and the forest filled with their searching and their songs.
The tradition has always read this as the soul's longing for God rather than a love affair; the Bhagavata itself says that those who hear the rasa with faith are freed from desire, not inflamed by it. Radha, barely named in the earliest tellings but in later poetry the very image of the soul in love, is worshipped beside him across the north as the one who loved most completely.
The deepest lesson comes from what happened next. Krishna left Vrindavan for Mathura and never came back. Years later he sent his friend Uddhava with a message of philosophy for the gopis. They answered that they could not do yoga or meditation; all they knew was that they loved Krishna and he was gone. Uddhava returned humbled. Viraha, love in separation, is honoured in bhakti as higher than love in union, because it asks for nothing.
Mathura and Dwarka
Kamsa had never stopped hunting the child prophesied to kill him. He invited Krishna and his brother Balarama to a wrestling festival at Mathura, planning to have them trampled by an elephant at the gate and crushed in the arena. The elephant died, the wrestlers died, and Krishna leapt into the royal box and threw Kamsa to the ground. He freed his birth parents, Vasudeva and Devaki, and then did something kings do not do: he placed Kamsa's father Ugrasena back on the throne and declined it himself.
When Kamsa's father-in-law Jarasandha attacked Mathura again and again, Krishna moved his whole people to a new city at Dwarka on the western coast rather than let the war grind on. Gujaratis call him Ranchhod, the one who left the battlefield, and say it with affection. Retreat is not dishonour when it protects the people.
At Dwarka he married Rukmini, who had written begging to be rescued from a forced marriage, and in time eight principal queens. He governed the city, though Ugrasena remained its nominal king, built alliances and fought wars. This is the Krishna of statecraft, the counsellor who understood power.
Into this palace one day walked Sudama, his classmate from the sage Sandipani's school, now a poor brahmin in a torn cloth carrying a bundle of flattened rice his wife had begged from a neighbour. Krishna ran to him, washed his feet, sat him on his own couch and ate the rice with delight. Sudama went home too shy to have asked for anything, and found his hut replaced by a mansion. In the Gita Krishna says it himself:
A leaf, a flower, a fruit, water: whoever offers these to me with devotion, that offering of love from a pure heart I accept. (Bhagavad Gita 9.26)
Friend of Arjuna and voice of the Gita
Krishna's cousins the Pandavas drew him into the Mahabharata. When Draupadi's sari was pulled in the Kaurava court, it was Krishna's name she called. When war threatened, he went himself as peace envoy and asked only for five villages; Duryodhana refused even that. Before the battle both sides came to him for help. Duryodhana chose Krishna's army. Arjuna chose Krishna alone, unarmed, as his charioteer.
On the first morning Arjuna looked across at his teachers and cousins and dropped his bow. What Krishna said to him is the Bhagavad Gita, seven hundred verses in which a God who never lifts a weapon teaches the whole of Hindu thought: act without clinging to results, see the one Self in all beings, offer every action as worship, and in the end:
Abandon all forms of dharma and take refuge in me alone. I shall free you from all sin; do not grieve. (Bhagavad Gita 18.66)
Midway, Arjuna asked to see Krishna's true form and saw the universe born and devoured in one blazing body. He begged to see his gentle friend again, and the Gita's compassion lies in that request being granted.
The departure
After the war Gandhari, who had lost all hundred sons, cursed Krishna that his own clan would destroy itself. Thirty-six years later the Yadavas, drunk at a festival, fell to fighting with reeds that turned to iron clubs in their hands, and killed one another. Krishna withdrew into the forest and sat beneath a tree. A hunter named Jara saw his foot through the leaves, mistook it for a deer, and shot. Krishna blessed the man and left the body. The sea took Dwarka. Tradition says the Kali Yuga began at the moment he departed.
Three faces of one God
The tradition speaks of three ways Krishna shows himself. In Vrindavan he is lila, divine play, the child and the beloved. In Mathura and Dwarka he is dharma, the one who protects and governs. On the battlefield he is the teacher, and the Gita is the scripture most Hindus own. Devotees approach him through whichever relationship fits them: Yashoda's tenderness, the gopis' longing, Arjuna's friendship, Sudama's trust. Surdas sang of the child, Meera of the lover, and Gandhi read the Gita daily. In Nathdwara he is the boy holding up Govardhan; in Pandharpur he is Vitthal standing on a brick; in Guruvayur and Udupi he is a small child with a churning rod.
Bringing it home
You do not need to choose. If you have a child, see Krishna in the mess and the mischief, and keep a little cradle for Bal Gopal. If you are lonely, let the gopis' songs tell you that longing itself is prayer. If you are stuck in a hard decision, read the second chapter of the Gita slowly, and ask what your duty is if you let go of the result. And whatever you have, however small, offer it like Sudama's handful of rice. He has told us what he accepts.