HINDUS in Guyana celebrated Shri Krishna Janam-ashthami on Sunday, August 17, which marked the incarnation or ‘birth’ anniversary of the Hindu Avatara Lord Krishna. The day is primarily observed with massive congregational worship and reading of the scriptures and the teachings of Lord Krishna.

Hinduism has, from ancient times, held strongly a belief in the reality of the Avatara; that is, the descent into form, the revelation of the Godhead in humanity. God descends so that man may ascend. It is the coming down of the Absolute Spirit into the frame of the finite body to lead the way for the re-establishment of spirituality, righteousness or Dharma.

Krishna himself revealed, “When-
ever there is a decline in righteousness and an upsurge in unrighteousness, then I body Myself forth. For the protection of the virtuous, for the extirpation of evil, and for re-establishing Dharma on a firm footing, I come from age to age.” (Bhagavad Geeta 4:7-8).

The Avatara is, however, not limited to the bodily frame It has assumed. It is always Its true Being. Krishna was no exception. The Avatara is the living example of what man ought to strive to be — to go beyond the confines of the body unto the imperishable spirit of the universe — God.

Writing on Krishna and the nature of the Avatara, the celebrated Sri Aurobindo explained: “All existence is a manifestation of God, because He is the only existence and nothing can be, except as either a real figuring or else a figment of that one reality. Therefore, every conscious being is in part or in some way a descent of the Infinite into the apparent finiteness of name and form.

But it is a veiled manifestation, and there is a gradation between the supreme being of the Divine and the consciousness shrouded partly or wholly by ignorance of self in the finite. The conscious embodied soul is the spark of the Divine fire, and that soul in man opens out to self-knowledge as it develops out of ignorance of self into self-being.

The Divine also, pouring Itself into the forms of the cosmic existence, is revealed ordinarily in an efflorescence of its powers; in energies and magnitudes of its knowledge, love, joy, developed force of being; in degrees and faces of its Divinity.

But when the Divine Consciousness and Power, taking upon Itself the human form and the human mode of action, possesses it not only by powers and magnitudes, by degrees and outward faces of itself, but out of its eternal self-knowledge; when the Unborn knows itself and acts in the frame of the mental being and the appearance of birth, that is the height of the conditioned manifestation. It is the full and conscious descent of the Godhead, it is the Avatara.

This Avatara Krishna revealed His Divine nature and achieved the purpose of the Avatara when He dwelled upon earth over 5000 years ago. Particularly, His revelation took the form of that gospel and philosophical scripture, the Bhagavad Geeta in which He, being the Divine teacher, showed the way to divinity using His disciple as the representation of man.

Sri Aurobindo, in his essays on the Gita, made it so much more lucid when he wrote: “The Teacher is God himself descended into humanity; the disciple is the first, as we might say in modern language, the representative man of his age, closest friend and chosen instrument of the Avatar; his protagonist in an immense work and struggle the secret purpose of which is unknown to the actors in it, known only to the incarnate God-head, who guides it all from behind the veil of His unfathomable mind of knowledge; the occasion is the violent crisis of that work and struggle at the moment when the anguish and moral difficulty and blind violence of its apparent movements forces itself with the shock of a visible revelation on the mind of its representative man, and raises the whole question of the meaning of God in the world, and the goal and drift and sense of human life and conduct”.

The life of Krishna, His teachings and Himself, the living example of His teachings, have without exaggeration been, and will surely continue to be, a force of insurmountable influence upon Hindus — both the ordinary and intellectual, and also the philosophers of both East and West, for His influence is one that is positive, potent and ever pervasive.

Of Krishna, His life and teachings, Swami Vivekananda stated as a tribute to Him: “He was the most wonderful Sannyasin and the most wonderful householder in one; He had the most wonderful, among the Rajas, power and was at the same time living in the midst of the most wonderful renunciation.

Krishna, the preacher of the Geeta, was all His life the embodiment of the Geeta. He was the great illustration of non-attachment; a great landmark in the history of religion; the ideal of love for love’s sake, work for work’s sake, duty for duty’s sake; and it for the first time fell from the lips of the greatest Incarnation, Krishna, and for the first time in the history of humanity, on the soil of India.

He was the first heart large enough to see truth in all. In Krishna we find two ideas supreme; the first is the harmony of different ideas, and the second is non-attachment. He does not need anything; He does not want anything. He works for work’s sake. He is the most rounded man I know of, wonderfully developed, equally in brain and heart and hand. Every moment of His is alive with activity. Five thousand years have passed and He has influenced millions and millions. My regard for Him is for His perfect sanity. No cobwebs in His brain, no superstition. He knows the use of everything”.

PANDIT CHARRANLALL NANDALALL
Sanatan Vaidic Dharma Pandits’ Sabha, Region 3