Krishna Is Not Christ

I. The Shala

The first time I felt the love of God, I did not believe in God, and the song was in a language I could not speak.

It was 2011, in a yoga studio in Santa Monica called the Bhakti Yoga Shala. I had come in behind a friend named Angelo, whom I'd met serving at a Vipassana retreat out in Twentynine Palms, ten days of cooking for meditators in the desert. Angelo had a gentleness about him that I would have followed anywhere, and did. What I saw, the first night, I mostly did not like. A room full of people sitting on the floor, singing verses I couldn't understand, over and over, to a small wheezing organ and a drum and a pair of tiny cymbals. The words meant nothing to me. The tunes went nowhere I recognized. If you had asked me to defend what was happening on any grounds I then respected, I could not have.

But the people were happy. Not performing happy. Happy, in a way I had almost no category for: a room of adults with their eyes closed and their faces open, singing nonsense with their whole chests. I had spent my life around very smart, very unhappy people, and I could not account for this. So I came back. I told myself it was for Angelo, and then I told myself it was to figure out what they were on, and then I stopped telling myself anything and just came, week after week, to sit in the corner and be near it. "Just to be in their energy," is how I'd have put it then, a little embarrassed. I did not sing.

Then, after a few weeks, singing along by now with the nonsense I still couldn't translate, something moved. Something opened in my chest that I had no name for and no theory to hold, and the only word I could find for it, then and for a long time after, was healing: as though a pressure I hadn't known I was carrying had been, for the length of a song, set down. I was not high. I had not decided anything. I had not been argued into a single proposition. Something in me had come loose and turned, the way a plant turns, toward a light I could not have pointed to.

So I kept going back. For the next couple of years I drove out to Bhakti Fest in Joshua Tree, a desert gathering of chanters that people go to the way they go to Burning Man to decompress. Out there I got to chant with Krishna Das, who is about as close as that world has to a rock star, a man who left a band to go be with his teacher in India and came back with a good part of the American kirtan tradition on his shoulders.¹ I bought a harmonium, the little wheezing organ, and taught myself the chants off his online course, sitting on my floor at home, pumping the bellows with one hand and finding the notes with the other. The whole of this essay hangs on what was happening to me in that period, and there is only one plain way to say it. I was in love, and I could not explain why.

I still can't, fully. But Jesus found me this year, which is not where a story like that is supposed to end up, and it has left me with a question I can't put down. What was that? What was I doing on my floor with a harmonium, weeping a little over syllables I didn't understand, addressed to a God I would have told you at the time I did not believe in? And why, when I finally met the God I'd denied, did I recognize Them by the same feeling? You may already have an answer ready. Two crowds do: the one that wants Krishna and Christ to turn out to be the same, and the one that needs them to have nothing to do with each other. This essay is going to disappoint both of you. They are not the same. And they have everything to do with each other. What lies between them has a name, and the name is the thing I want to get right.

II. Bhakti

The thing that opened in me on that floor has a name, and a whole science built around it. The name is bhakti, loving devotion, and the tradition those chants come from, the Gaudiya Vaishnavism of Bengal, is a school of the love of God as sophisticated as any I have found.² I did not know that then. I thought I had wandered into a nice hippie thing. I had wandered into an ocean, at the shallow end.

Here is the claim that ocean makes, and why it matters to anyone who follows Jesus. There are, very roughly, two ways the world's contemplatives have said you close the distance between yourself and God. One is by knowing: by seeing through the illusion of your separate self until what's left is the one undivided awareness that was always there, the drop remembering it is the sea. That is the road of the great non-dualists, and I walked it in The Novelist DM. The other is by loving: not by dissolving the distance between the lover and the Beloved but by crossing it, on the bridge of devotion. The tradition on my harmonium was emphatic that this second road is the higher one. Bhakti is that road. Its whole premise is that God is not finally an it to be merged into but a You to be adored, that the deepest thing in the universe is not an ocean of impersonal consciousness but a face that loves you back.

This is exactly where a lazy syncretism goes wrong. "It's all one," people say, waving a hand, as though every mystic everywhere were saying the same thing and the differences were local costume. But the bhakti tradition is built, precisely, against the "it's all one" of the pure non-dualists. Its central and almost untranslatable doctrine is achintya-bheda-abheda, "inconceivable oneness-and-difference": the insistence that the soul is at once one with God and forever distinct from God, because without the distinction there is no love.³ A drop that becomes the ocean cannot love the ocean. It's gone. The whole art of bhakti is to come close enough to burn and stay a self who can adore. When I sat on my floor in love with something I couldn't name, I was not trying to disappear into it. I was trying to get nearer to a Someone. I just didn't have the word Someone yet.

III. The Name Is Not the Same

Say the two words out loud. Krishna. Christ. The ear leans in: the same hard opening consonants, the same short bright vowel, very nearly the same sound. It feels like a clue. There is a whole devotional literature that treats it as one. The founder of the Hare Krishna movement made the case in a much-quoted piece whose title is its thesis, "Krishna, or Christ, the name is the same," and argued that Christos is simply the Greek for Krishna, that "Krishna" and a Sanskrit form Kṛṣṭa and "Christ" all name the one all-attractive God, so that a Christian at prayer and a devotee at chant are, without knowing it, calling the same name.⁴ It is a beautiful thought. I understand why a person in love with both would want it to be true.

It isn't. Christ is the Greek Christós, "the anointed one," from the verb chríō, to smear or anoint with oil; it is the Greek translation of the Hebrew mashiach, Messiah, the king anointed for God's purpose. Its whole meaning lives in the world of oil and kingship and covenant. Krishna is the Sanskrit kṛṣṇa, which means "dark," "black," "dark-blue," the color of the god's skin, of a storm cloud, of the deep, extended by devotees to mean "the all-attractive one." The two words come from different branches of the language tree and descend from unrelated roots. One means anointed and the other means dark. There is no line of borrowing from either to the other. The resonance in the ear is a coincidence, a genuinely striking one, and nothing more. The ear is not a linguist.

You should hold me to this, because the move I am not making here is the whole credibility of the move I am. If I needed the names to be secretly the same to get you from the shala to the cross, you should trust nothing that follows; I'd have started by fudging the evidence. An argument that leans on a false etymology has told you, in its first step, that it will accept a pretty coincidence in place of a real reason, and once it's done that once you can't know where else it has. So I would rather give the coincidence back. The connection was never in the names. Names are the most external thing a religion has, the paint on the outside. What drew me on my floor, and what I am claiming has genuinely to do with Christ, is further in than a syllable, and the only way to reach it is to stop listening to the sound of the words and go look at what the words were doing.

IV. One Devotion, Two Rivers

So go look. Set the names aside and put the two devotions side by side, not the theologies yet, just the love, and what you find is not a coincidence of sound but a coincidence of shape, and that one is not a coincidence at all.

Jesus, asked point-blank for the whole of the law in a sentence, gave an answer a bhakti teacher could have given. Thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.⁵ Not obey with all your strength. Not believe with all your mind. Love. The first and greatest commandment in the tradition I'd dismissed as a rulebook is a commandment to do the one thing you cannot command, to fall for God with the whole of yourself, which is the exact program of the harmonium. Whatever else the shala was teaching me, it was teaching me that, teaching my heart the motion before I knew the whole of who it was for. When I finally read the commandment as an adult it did not read as a rule. It read as a description of something I already knew how to feel.

The people who have noticed this most carefully are worth more than my noticing. There is a whole scholarly literature comparing the two devotional worlds, some of it written by devotees of Krishna reaching honestly toward Christ. One of them, a Gaudiya scholar, framed his book as a dialogue between an aging Hindu monk and an aging Jesuit, boyhood friends, meeting at the confluence of the sacred rivers to argue out what they share and where they part, and he was too honest a thinker to pretend the traditions collapse into one: he grants real and permanent differences even as he traces the one devotion under both.⁶ It runs the other way too. There are Indian Christians who worship Christ in the forms of bhakti, the same chanting, the same ecstatic call-and-response, the same postures of the surrendered heart, aimed now at Jesus, and it works, because the devotional grammar turns out to be portable.⁷ The vessel was built to carry the love of God. It does not much care whose name is on the label. It carries.

The generosity runs in a direction, and the direction convicts me before it convicts anyone else. The teachers I learned those chants from honor Jesus. In that world He is spoken of warmly and without anxiety, a pure lover of God, a son of God, a soul so full of devotion that God shines through Him undimmed.⁸ They have no trouble making room for Him at the table. Plenty of Christians cannot return the favor; they cannot say a generous word about a devout Hindu without reaching for the word idolatry. I am in no position to throw that stone from a height, because the one I used to throw was bigger. I was raised an atheist, in a house and a city where the devout were understood to be simple people who needed a comforting story, and I had written the whole believing world off sight unseen, Christians and chanters alike, filed together under the same condescending heading. The room full of happy singers in Santa Monica was the first evidence I ever met that the filing was wrong: here was devotion that was intelligent, and joyful, and plainly doing something real. So when I meet a frightened Christian who cannot grant that the fire down the road is fire, I do not meet a stranger. I meet my old certainty in a mirror, the same narrow ruling run the other direction. A tradition sure of the love at its center can afford to recognize that love wherever it flares up. Only fear has to insist that everyone else's fire is fake, and the atheist's fear does it exactly as well as the believer's.

V. The Cat and the Monkey

The deepest thing the two traditions share is not that they both say "love God." Lots of traditions say that. It is that they both ran, independently, into the same problem inside the love, and had, almost word for word, the same argument about it.

The problem is this. If the whole of religion is to love God with everything you have, and you cannot manufacture love by trying (you can't; a commanded feeling is not the feeling), then how does anyone ever get there? If my heart is turned the wrong way, no amount of my own effort can be trusted to turn it, because the effort is mine, issuing from the same crooked self, and a self cannot lift itself by its own hand. Sooner or later the honest lover of God stops trying to climb and falls at God's feet and says: I can't do this. Do it in me. That falling has a name in the Sanskrit tradition, prapatti, or sharanagati, "taking refuge," total self-surrender, and its great theologian, Ramanuja, taught something you will find eerily familiar if you were raised on Paul: that we cannot win our way to God by our own works, that liberation is finally God's grace and not our achievement, and that the surrender is the one thing left for us to do.⁹ Nine hundred years ago, in Tamil country, a Hindu sage was preaching something very close to grace.

And then the tradition split over very nearly the question the Reformation would later split the Western church over. Once you say salvation is by God's grace and not our effort, you have to ask: is there anything at all left for us to do? Does grace do everything, or does grace need our cooperation? The school of Ramanuja divided in two, and the two are remembered by two images I have not found the equal of anywhere in theology. There is the way of the cat, marjara-nyaya, and the way of the monkey, markata-nyaya. Watch a mother cat move her kitten: the kitten does nothing, hangs limp, and is carried by the scruff wholly at the mother's initiative. Watch a mother monkey move her baby: the baby must cling to her body, do its own small part, hold on. One school said the soul is the kitten. Grace is everything; we are carried; we contribute nothing but our helplessness. The other said the soul is the baby monkey. Grace does the carrying, but we must hold on; our surrender is real and necessary work.¹⁰

It is the same fight, in its essentials, as the one between grace alone and grace-and-cooperation that has run through Christianity for five hundred years. The kitten is very nearly Luther's helpless sinner carried by sheer unmerited grace, and the monkey very nearly the older Catholic insistence that grace enables a real human yes. You are about to say the two traditions could not possibly have touched, which would make this a miracle of convergence, and I would like to say it too. It's false. There were Syriac Christians on the Malabar coast for centuries before Rāmānuja, a church at Kollam endowed by royal grant in the ninth century, and Rāmānuja taught in Tamil country. Contact was available. What has never been produced is evidence of borrowing. Nobody has traced the cat and the monkey back to a catechism, and the Vaishnava split is some two centuries older than the Reformation it rhymes with, so the obvious direction of influence runs the wrong way in time. The claim that survives is the smaller and better one: not that the parallel is impossible to explain by contact, but that everyone who went looking for the contact came back empty-handed. And the rhyme with sola gratia is an analogy I am drawing, not a lineage anyone has traced. Two traditions hit the same reef and had the same argument, down to the same two positions. That is not a coincidence of sound. That is two explorers on opposite sides of the earth sending back the same map of the same country, which is the best evidence we are likely to get that the country is really there. The heart's situation before God has a true shape. Both traditions found its contours, down to the crack that splits them.

VI. But Krishna Was Never Crucified

By now you have both arms crossed, whichever side you came in from, and you are right to. It would be very easy, having come this far, to slide the last inch into the thing I promised at the start I would not do: melt the two down into one warm devotional feeling and call the differences decoration. The differences are as sharp as they look, and the sharpest of them is the whole reason I am a follower of Jesus and not a bhakti yogi with a harmonium, which by every measure of temperament I should have remained.

Christians and Vaishnava both speak of God "coming down" into the world, incarnation, avatara, and the parallel is genuine, but press on it and it splits. Krishna is one descent among many; the Gita has him say he comes "age after age," whenever righteousness fails, an endlessly repeatable rescue.¹¹ The Christian claim is the scandalous opposite: one man, one time, unrepeatable, God poured without remainder into a single Galilean life and a single death under a particular Roman governor. And the bodies differ at the root. In much Vaishnava theology the form the god takes is not ordinary flesh at all but a transcendental body, pure being-consciousness-bliss, fully real, the tradition insists, but real in a different order of being than meat and bone, and never subject to their indignities.¹² Christianity plants its flag on the other claim entirely: that God took actual flesh, the kind that gets tired and bleeds and dies, true God and true man with nothing faked.

Then there is the difference that is not one difference among others but the hinge the whole thing turns on. Krishna is never crucified. There is no cross at the center of bhakti, because there is nothing the god needs to do there. Krishna descends to set the world right and, his work done, departs; his descents are victories.¹³ The Christian God descends to be tortured to death, and stakes everything on the claim that this, the failure, the scream, the grave, is not an interruption of the rescue but is the rescue: that God's answer to the horror of the world was not to explain it from a safe height or to descend in glory and fix it, but to climb inside the worst of it and take it into Himself. This is not a difference of emphasis you can smooth over. A devotion organized around a God who wins and a devotion organized around a God who bleeds are, at the last, pointed at two different things, and the scholar who has compared the two most rigorously concludes that many of the popular parallels get thin exactly where you press hardest.¹⁴ The cross has no twin in Vrindavan. When I say the two traditions have everything to do with each other, I am not saying they arrive at the same place. They don't.

VII. The Instrument Was Already Tuned

Not that Krishna turned out to be Christ under another name. The names are a coincidence, the theologies genuinely part, and the cross stands alone. What I am saying is that the harmonium was tuning an instrument, and I would not learn for years what the instrument was for. A harmonium is not something you tune. The reeds are cut and set where it is made; what you learn on your floor is the bellows and the fingering, and the pitch was decided before the thing ever reached you.

Because this is how it went. Fifteen years after the shala, my marriage had ended and I had moved across the country to New York to start over, and a life taken down to the studs will finally make you look at what you had spent your whole life being too smart to look at. On a Thursday I was hunting for an apartment on a small island in the East River, walking north and going into every lobby I passed to ask for the leasing agent, and I passed a small stone chapel and wandered in. Nobody was there. I found a public safety officer in the basement and asked if I could see the pastor. She said no one was in, and I could come back on Sunday. I signed a lease that day, moved in on the Saturday, and on Sunday, in a snowstorm, I came back. The rest of that week I told in Flow. I stood in a service I only half understood, and they began to sing. And the thing happened. The same thing. The pressure set down, the plant turning toward the light, the chest coming open around something I had no argument for: the identical motion I had first felt on the floor of a yoga studio in Santa Monica, addressed now to a name I had spent my adult life refusing. I knew it the way you know a face. I had felt this before. I had spent years feeling it. What I had never had, until that morning, was anyone to feel it toward whom I now knew was actually, literally there.

There's a cheap version of this I refuse. The cheap version says: you see, it was Jesus all along, the Krishna business was just Him in disguise, wasting your time until you grew up. I don't believe that, and I think it slanders something holy. The love I felt in the shala was real love, of the real God, offered in a real tradition that has been carrying it faithfully for centuries, and it healed me in ways I can name. It was not a decoy. It was not a mistake I was being patient with. It was a genuine education of the heart, conducted by teachers who knew what they were doing, in a school built for exactly this. What it was not was the end of the road. It taught me how to love God. It could not, by itself, tell me the whole of who the God is that had come looking for me, and when They told me, in the only language my heart had ever been able to hear, which was song, the heart was ready. The instrument was already tuned. Krishna did not turn out to be Christ, but bhakti turned out to be the door, and the door opened onto the cross.

VIII. The Confluence

The scholar I mentioned set his whole book at a sangam, a confluence, the place where two rivers run together. India has a famous one, at Prayaga, where the pale Ganges meets the dark Yamuna, and pilgrims come to bathe where the waters join; the tradition holds that a third river meets them there too, the Saraswati, which no one can see.¹⁵ Here is what happens when two rivers meet. They do not mix. For a long way past the meeting they run side by side in one bed, the pale water and the dark water, each keeping its color, with a seam down the middle that you can see from the bank and photograph from the air. The mixing happens downstream, slowly, by turbulence, and there is no line where it is finished; somewhere far enough down you can no longer say which water you are standing in, and nobody marks that place. The place people mark is the seam. That is where the pilgrims bathe: not downstream where the colors are gone, but at the meeting, where both are still visible, standing in two rivers at once. And the third river, the one that cannot be seen, is said to be there too, under both, and the pilgrims count it.

I have been standing at the seam for this whole essay. The water that first taught me to love God, in a language I couldn't speak, to a God I didn't believe in, and the water that finally carried me home run for a long way in the same bed. I can see the line between them. I have spent seven sections tracing it, and I am not going to tell you it isn't there, or that my old teachers were Christians who hadn't heard the news, or that the years of chanting were a detour on the way to the real thing. The cross stands up in the current like something you'd run a boat aground on, and nothing downstream dissolves it. But the current that moved on my floor with a harmonium in my hands and the current that moved in a chapel on the East River is one current, going one direction, and it was going there the whole time. You rarely know where a river is headed, standing in it. I only knew I was in love, and could not say why.

The first time I felt the love of God, I did not believe in God, and the song was in a language I could not speak. Now I believe, and the songs are in English, and I know the words. It is the same feeling. I still can't entirely say why.

Krishna Das (b. Jeffrey Kagel, 1947) is the best-known Western exponent of kirtan, call-and-response devotional chanting; he spent years in India with the guru Neem Karoli Baba before recording and touring in the U.S. Not to be confused with Kaustubha Das or Raghunath Das, two teachers who appear later — the honorific das ("servant") is common to all three and to most initiated devotees. ↩
Bhakti (Sanskrit, "devotion, participation," from the root bhaj, "to share in, to belong to"); the Bhagavad Gita and the later Narada Bhakti Sutra are its classic scriptural charters. Gaudiya Vaishnavism is the devotional tradition of Krishna-worship founded in 16th-century Bengal in the wake of the saint Chaitanya Mahaprabhu; the modern Hare Krishna movement (ISKCON) is its best-known offshoot, and the chants I learned descend from it. ↩
Achintya-bheda-abheda — "inconceivable difference-and-non-difference" — the signature doctrine of Chaitanya's Gaudiya school: the living being is simultaneously identical with and distinct from God, a paradox held (the tradition insists) beyond the reach of reason, achintya. It is the deliberate refusal of the strict non-dualism (advaita) of Śaṅkara. ↩
A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, "Kṛṣṇa, or Christ — The Name Is the Same" — a 1974 conversation with the Benedictine monk Emmanuel Jungclaussen, later published in Back to Godhead. Prabhupada's chain runs Christos → Kṛṣṭa → Kṛṣṇa: "Christos is the Greek version of the word Kṛṣṇa," and Kṛṣṭa "is a Sanskrit word meaning 'attraction,'" so that "Christ," "Kṛṣṭa," and "Kṛṣṇa" all "address the same… Supreme Personality of Godhead." This is devotional folk etymology, not historical linguistics: Christós < chríō, "to anoint" (rendering Heb. māšîaḥ); kṛṣṇa, primarily "dark," with "all-attractive" a secondary devotional gloss. Notably, the serious scholars in this lineage do not rest their case here (see the note on Rosen at §IV). ↩
Mark 12:30 (KJV; cf. the Shema, Deuteronomy 6:5, which Jesus is quoting). ↩
Steven J. Rosen (Satyaraja Dasa), Christ and Krishna: Where the Jordan Meets the Ganges (New York: FOLK Books, 2011) — structured as a dialogue between a Gaudiya sannyasi and a Jesuit. Rosen argues a devotion common to both while explicitly refusing a flat "all religions are one"; he privileges the Vaishnava scriptures even as he honors the Christian. In honesty, his weakest pages lean on the claim that Jesus studied in India (the "lost years" / Bhavishya Purana material), which mainstream scholarship regards as legend and late interpolation; I decline that argument the same way I declined the etymology, and for the same reason. ↩
On "Christ-centered bhakti," see Nadya Pohran, "Christ-Centered Bhakti: A Literary and Ethnographic Study of Worship," Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies 32 (2019); and, separately, the volume Kristu Bhakti and Krishna Bhakti: A Christian–Hindu Dialogue Contributing to Comparative Theology. The point drawn here is modest and descriptive: the devotional forms of bhakti demonstrably carry over to the worship of Jesus. ↩
The generous Vaishnava estimate of Jesus — a pure devotee, an empowered teacher of love-of-God — is the standard framing of contemporary teachers in this lineage, among them Kaustubha Das and Raghunath, whose podcast Wisdom of the Sages applies bhakti philosophy to daily life. ↩
Prapatti / śaraṇāgati ("taking refuge, self-surrender"), systematized in the Śrī Vaishnava tradition of Rāmānuja (11th–12th c.); his Śaraṇāgati Gadyam is a classic statement. Rāmānuja holds that the soul cannot attain liberation by its own effort and depends on the Lord's grace — a genuine (not merely verbal) parallel to Christian grace. ↩
The mārjāra-nyāya ("cat principle," the Tenkalai / southern school) and markaṭa-nyāya ("monkey principle," the Vadakalai / northern school) name the post- Rāmānuja division over whether grace is wholly unmerited (the kitten, carried) or requires the soul's cooperative effort (the monkey, clinging). See Srilata Raman, Self-Surrender (Prapatti) to God in Shrivaishnavism: Tamil Cats or Sanskrit Monkeys? (Routledge, 2007). The mapping onto the Christian sola gratia / synergism debate is my own, and the body says so. ↩
Bhagavad Gita 4.7–8: "Whenever there is a decline of dharma… I manifest myself. For the protection of the good and the destruction of the wicked… I come into being age after age" (sambhavāmi yuge yuge). ↩
The doctrine that the avatāra's form is sac-cid-ānanda (being-consciousness- bliss) and not a created, material body — so that Krishna's form is transcendental rather than ordinary flesh — is standard in Gaudiya theology and stands in real tension with the Christian insistence on true material humanity (the hypostatic union). ↩
Note also the Gaudiya inversion of the usual hierarchy: where classical schemas make Krishna one avatāra of Vishnu, Gaudiya Vaishnavism holds Krishna to be Svayam Bhagavān, God Himself, the source of whom Vishnu is an expansion (Bhāgavata Purāṇa 1.3.28, kṛṣṇas tu bhagavān svayam). ↩
See Steven Tsoukalas, Krsna and Christ: Body-Divine Relation in the Thought of Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and Classical Christian Orthodoxy (Paternoster, 2006; repr. Wipf & Stock, 2011), whose careful comparison concludes that many popularly held similarities between avatāra and incarnation are superficial once the underlying ontologies are examined. I take the point and keep the difference. ↩
The Triveni Sangam at Prayāga (Allahabad), where the Gaṅgā and the Yamunā visibly meet — differently colored, and slow to mix — joined, by tradition, by the invisible Sarasvatī. The image of the confluence, and the meeting of Jordan and Ganges, is borrowed with thanks from Rosen's title (see the Rosen note above). ↩