17 Nov 2019
Swami replied: Rāma represents the path to God, whereas Krishna is the goal or God Himself. In fact, Rāma is also God, but only in the background since He hid His divinity and behaved like a human being. Similarly, for a long period of His life, Krishna also represented the path to God. Other than the stealing of butter and the dancing with the Gopikās in Bṛndāvanam, He too behaved like Rāma after leaving Bṛndāvanam. One should not misunderstand this and think that He got reformed and left His bad habits back in Bṛndāvanam! The correct understaning is that He completed His special work in Bṛndāvanam, which was the main purpose of His Incarnation. As Rāma, God had promised the sages that they would be born as the Gopikās and that He would be born as Krishna. He had said that in that birth, He would complete the main work of liberating the sages. Hence, He completed this promised work first, as soon as He incarnated as Krishna. His actions in Bṛndāvanam were related to the path of nivṛtti, in which He gave final salvation to the devoted sages, after duly testing them. He tested whether they could overcome their fascination for worldly bonds, when God competed with those worldly bonds.
After completing this important work of nivṛtti, He never returned to Bṛndāvanam and only lived outside in the world to do the general work related to pravṛtti, as Rāma did. Hence, you will never find Krishna having repeated the sort of actions that He did in Bṛndāvanam, anywhere else or at any other time in His life, after leaving Bṛndāvanam. Once you understand those actions done in the initial part of His life as His tests for nivṛtti-devotees, you will find the rest of Krishna’s life to be exactly like that of Rāma. The latter part of Krishna’s life, like the entire life of Rāma, was only meant for guiding pravṛtti-devotees. Nivṛtti was limited only to the Gopikās and there were no other devotees of that climax level of nivṛtti to repeat such actions. Everybody is attracted to Krishna and wishes to follow His actions in Bṛndāvanam even though they are not God! No one is even of the level of the Gopikās, who were so attracted to God that all their worldly bonds had naturally dropped off due to their extreme devotion to God. Before criticizing Krishna, we must always realize that we are not of the level of Krishna or even of the level of the Gopikās. Every human being is to follow what Rāma practiced throughout His life (pravṛtti), the pravṛtti-part of what Krishna said in the Gita and what Krishna followed in His life after leaving Bṛndāvanam (pravṛtti). Krishna is to be mainly viewed as the Preacher, while Rāma is to be viewed as the practical Demonstrator of pravṛtti. It takes only a little time to explain a theory and hence, Krishna lived only for 125 years. He was 89 years old at the end of the Mahabharata and He lived another 36 years in Dvāraka, thereafter. Rāma showed every concept of pravṛtti in practice, which took a very long time and hence, Rāma lived for 11,000 years (Daśavarṣa sahasrāṇi, Daśavarṣa śatānica...)!
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