in the story.  Even the sermon at first sight seems at variance with his actions as a councillor—­his repeated recourse to treachery ill consorting with the paramountcy of duty.  In point of fact, such a conflict can be easily reconciled for if God is supreme, he is above and beyond morals.  He can act in any way he pleases and yet, as God, can expect and receive the highest reverence.  God, in fact, is superior to ethics.  And this viewpoint is, in fact, to prove a basic assumption in later versions of the story.  Here it is sufficient to note that while the Mahabharata describes these two contrasting modes of behaviour, no attempt is made to face the exact issue.  Krishna as God has been introduced rather than explained and we are left with the feeling that much more than has been recorded remains to be said.

This feeling may well have dogged the writers who put the Mahabharata into its present shape for, a little later, possibly during the sixth century A.D., an appendix was added.  This appendix was called the Harivansa or Genealogy of Krishna[10] and in it were provided all those details so manifestly wanting in the epic itself.  The exact nature of Krishna is explained—­the circumstances of his birth, his youth and childhood, the whole being welded into a coherent scheme.  In this story Krishna the feudal magnate takes a natural place but there is no longer any contradiction between his character as a prince and his character as God.  He is, above all, an incarnation of Vishnu and his immediate purpose is to vanquish a particular tyrant and hearten the righteous.  This viewpoint is maintained in the Vishnu Purana, another text of about the sixth century and is developed and illustrated in the tenth and eleventh books of the Bhagavata Purana.  It is this latter text—­a vast compendium of perhaps the ninth or tenth century—­which affords the fullest account in literature of Krishna’s story.

[Footnote 3:  Note 3.]

[Footnote 4:  Note 4.]

[Footnote 5:  A.L.  Basham, The Wonder that was India, 245.]

[Footnote 6:  Mahabharata, Adi Parva, Section 224 (Roy, I, 615-16).]

[Footnote 7:  C. Isherwood and S. Prabhavananda, The Song of God, Bhagavad-Gita, 86-7.]

[Footnote 8:  Plate 2.]

[Footnote 9:  Note 5.]

[Footnote 10:  Note 6.]

III

THE BHAGAVATA PURANA:  THE COWHERD

(i) Birth and Early Adventures

The Bhagavata Purana is couched in the form of a dialogue between a sage and a king.  The king is the successor of the Pandavas but is doomed to die within a week for having by accident insulted a holy ascetic.  To ensure his salvation, he spends the week listening to the Bhagavata Purana and concentrating his mind on Krishna whom he declares to be his helper.[11]