Page:Hindu Gods and Heroes.djvu/70

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68
BRĀHMAṆAS AND UPANISHADS

Kṛishṇa prudently retired from Mathurā and led a colony of his tribesmen to Dvārakā, on the western coast in Kathiawar, where he founded a new State. There seems to be no valid reason for doubting these statements. Sober history does not reject a tale because it is embroidered with myth and fiction.

Now this man Kṛishṇa in the midst of his stirring life of war and government found time and taste also for the things that are of the spirit. He talked with men learned in the Upanishads about Brahma and the soul and the worship of God; and apparently he set up a little Established Church of his own, in which was combined something of the idealism of the Upanishads with the worship of a supreme God of grace and perhaps too a kind of religious discipline, about which we shall say more later on. It must be confessed that we know sadly little about his actual doctrine from first hand. All that we hear about it is a short chapter in the Chhāndōgya Upanishad (iii. 17), where the Brahman Ghōra Āṅgirasa gives a sermon to Kṛishṇa, in which he compares the phases of human life to stages in the dīkshā or ceremony of consecration, and the moral virtues that should accompany them to the dakshiṇā or honorarium paid to the officiating priests, and he concludes by exhorting his hearer to realise that the Brahma is imperishable, unfailing, and spiritual, and quoting two verses from