The story

The end had been decided long before it came. At the start of the eleventh book the Bhagavatam gives the reason. Krishna saw that the earth's burden was not fully lifted while his own clan remained: the Yadus, swollen with power and pride, could be defeated by no outside force, because he himself protected them. Only they could end themselves, the way bamboo rubbing against bamboo kindles the fire that burns the grove. A brahmana's curse had set it moving, and an iron pestle, ground to powder and thrown into the sea, had washed up on the shore as reeds.

When omens filled Dvaraka, Krishna sent the women, the children and the old to Shankhoddhara and led the men to Prabhasa, a holy shore on the sea. There they bathed, made offerings, and gave gifts to brahmanas. Then, their judgement clouded by fate, they drank a strong wine called maireya. The drink turned their talk to insults and the insults into a fight. They fought with bows, swords and maces until their weapons were spent, and then they pulled up the reeds growing on the shore, the reeds that had grown from the pestle, and in their hands the reeds struck like thunderbolts. Kin killed kin: fathers and sons, brothers, uncles and nephews, friends. The text names the forces at work plainly: the brahmanas' curse, Krishna's own maya, and a rivalry among the Yadus that burned through them like the fire in the bamboo.

Balarama went to the shore, sat in yoga, and left the human world. Krishna sat down beneath a pipal tree. He had taken his four-armed form, radiant, dressed in yellow, with one foot resting on the other thigh.

A hunter named Jara had made an arrowhead from the one lump of the pestle that had not been ground down; a fish had swallowed it and the hunter had found it. From a distance he saw the reddish foot among the leaves, took it for a deer, and shot. Then he came closer and saw whom he had hit. He fell at Krishna's feet in terror and begged to be punished for what he had done. Krishna told him not to be afraid and to get up: what had happened was what he himself wished. He sent Jara to heaven, the world of the righteous, and the hunter walked around him in reverence and went, carried by a celestial chariot.

Daruka, the charioteer, came searching for his master and found him under the tree. As Daruka watched, Krishna's chariot rose into the sky with its horses and its Garuda banner, and his weapons followed it. Krishna gave Daruka a last errand. Go to Dvaraka, he said, and tell our people what has happened here; tell them to leave with Arjuna for Indraprastha, because the sea will take the city.

Then Krishna entered his own abode. Brahma, Shiva and the other gods had gathered to watch, and flowers fell from the sky. The Bhagavatam takes care to say that he did not burn his body in the fire of yoga, as yogis do when they leave the world; he went with it. Those watching could no more trace his path than people on the ground can follow lightning leaving a cloud. The text adds a caution: birth and death in him are like an actor's performance, a display of his maya, not things that happen to him.

Daruka carried the news to Dvaraka. Vasudeva, Devaki and Rohini, overcome by grief, gave up their lives. Krishna's queens entered the fire with their minds fixed on him. Arjuna performed the rites for the dead, and the sea swallowed Dvaraka, all of it except the Lord's own house, where, the text says, he is always present. Arjuna led the survivors to Indraprastha and installed Vajra, Krishna's great-grandson, as king.

The Bhagavatam tells all this in two short chapters and does not linger. The whole long account of Krishna's life has been leading here, and the book refuses to make a spectacle of it. Elsewhere it marks what the hour meant: on the day Krishna left the world, the Kali age entered it. What remains is the teaching he gave Uddhava, and the stories of his life, which the twelfth book will offer as enough for the age that follows.

Who appears, and what it shows

• Krishna — Not one avatar among many but 'the Lord himself' (1.3.28) — and the tenth book spends ninety chapters on his single life.
• Theme: Time and dissolution

Keep reading

• The Uddhava Gita — Skandha 11, adhyayas 6; 10-29 — Krishna's last and longest teaching, given to a friend who asks only to go with him when he leaves the world.
• The Kali age foretold — Skandha 12, adhyayas 1-3 — Shuka describes an age when wealth decides virtue and a thread decides caste — and names the one great gift it holds.

Questions to explore

• Why did Krishna allow his own clan to destroy itself?
• What did Krishna say to the hunter Jara?
• When does the Bhagavatam say the Kali age began?