The Divine Thief: Krishna and the Butter

Among all the stories told about Krishna, few are loved as much as the ones in which he is simply a small child in a village of cowherds, stealing butter. Devotees call him Mākhan Chor or Navanīta-cora, “the butter thief,” and the image of a dark little boy caught with butter on his face appears in countless songs, paintings and household shrines. Behind the comedy sits a story with a surprisingly serious point: the most famous episode ends with his foster-mother Yashoda trying to tie him up, and finding that she cannot, until he lets her. The theology of the butter theft is, on examination, quite sophisticated. But most people come to it through the picture first, and that is a good place to start.

Where the story comes from

The fullest classical telling is in the tenth book of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the Sanskrit text that narrates Krishna’s life in the greatest detail and is the central scripture for many Krishna devotees. The complaints of the village women about stolen butter come in chapter 8 of that book, and the binding of Krishna by Yashoda in chapter 9. The episode is also retold in later devotional poetry in many Indian languages; the Hindi poet Surdas, for example, is known for songs in which the child Krishna protests to his mother that he never touched the butter. Details vary from one retelling to another, and popular versions often blend the separate episodes into a single story.

Who is who

• Krishna — revered as a full descent (avatāra) of the god Vishnu. He was born in a prison in Mathura and carried away the same night to safety.
• Yashoda and Nanda — the cowherd couple who raised him as their own son. Yashoda is the mother in every butter story.
• Gokul (Gokula) and Vraja — the pastoral settlement on the banks of the Yamuna river where Krishna spent his early childhood.
• Gopīs — the women of the cowherd community. In these stories they are the neighbours whose butter keeps disappearing.

Why butter mattered

In Gokul, the cowherd community’s whole economy was built on dairy. Families kept herds of cows and turned their milk into yoghurt, butter and ghee. The freshest, richest butter was stored in clay pots hung from the rafters in rope slings, high enough to be out of reach of children and animals. It was a practical arrangement.

It didn’t work on Krishna.

The complaints

The women of Gokul would come home to find their butter pots emptied. The method of access depended on what was available. In the tellings, Krishna and his friends pile up mortars and seats to climb on, make holes in the hanging pots, or simply find their way in when no one is looking. What butter he did not eat himself, he shared with the other cowherd boys and even fed to the monkeys. Everyone knew who the culprit was.

So the women went to Yashoda. The Bhāgavata gives them a long, half-exasperated, half-affectionate list of his misdeeds. Yet while they complained, Krishna stood by his mother looking so innocent and frightened that Yashoda could only smile, and she did not have the heart to scold him. Not because she was foolish, but because there was something about the child that made anger hard to hold on to.

Later tradition enjoys this scene enormously. In poems and songs the boy denies everything with wide, lotus-like eyes and an air of complete bewilderment, as though the word “steal” could hardly apply to someone to whom, in the devotee’s view, everything already belongs.

The broken pot

The story of the rope begins on a different day. Yashoda was churning butter herself, singing about her son’s deeds, when Krishna came to her wanting to be fed. She took him in her lap and nursed him. Then the milk she had left heating on the stove began to boil over, and she put him down and hurried off to save it.

Krishna was not pleased to be set aside. In a temper he broke the churning pot with a stone, went into another room, climbed onto an upturned wooden mortar and began helping himself to butter from a hanging pot, handing some to a monkey. When Yashoda came back she found broken clay, spilt yoghurt and no child. She went looking and found him perched on the mortar, glancing around like a thief afraid of being caught.

This time she picked up a stick. Krishna jumped down and ran; she ran after him. When she finally caught the crying, frightened little boy, she threw away the stick and decided instead to tie him up for a while so he could not cause more trouble.

The rope

She meant to tie him to a heavy wooden mortar (ulūkhala, the vessel used for pounding grain). She took a rope and passed it around her son’s waist.

It was two fingers too short.

She fetched more rope and tied it on. It was still two fingers too short.

She brought every rope in the house and knotted them all together into a length that should have gone around anything. Two fingers too short.

The other women gathered, laughing. Yashoda kept trying. She was working hard by now, sweating, the flowers slipping from her hair, determined to finish what she had started. And Krishna stood before her with an expression that devotional poetry and painting return to again and again: the look of someone who was allowing all this to happen, taking part in the game by choice rather than being caught.

Then, as the Bhāgavata makes explicit, he saw his mother’s exhaustion. He saw the effort and the exasperation, and under it, the love that had been there from the morning she woke to find him beside her. He saw that what she truly wanted was to keep him within the circle of her care, and that the rope was only the form that wish was taking.

He let the rope reach. He allowed himself to be tied.

Dāmodara: “the one with a cord around his belly”

From this moment Krishna has the name Dāmodara, from dāma, a cord or rope, and udara, the belly. It is one of the most beloved of all his names, and this is one of the most beloved stories in the tradition. Not the serpent dance or the lifting of the mountain or the teaching on the battlefield, but this: the divine allowing itself to be bound by love.

The Bhāgavata itself comments on the scene, remarking that even great gods and sages do not win the Lord’s grace as easily as this cowherd woman did. The story does not end there. Tied to the mortar, the little boy crawled off and dragged it between two tall trees growing close together. The mortar wedged, the trees crashed down, and out of them stepped two celestial beings, Nalakūbara and Maṇigrīva, who had been cursed to stand as trees until Krishna freed them. That sequel is told in the next chapter of the same book.

What the story is often taken to mean

Devotional teachers draw several lessons from the binding, and they are best understood as interpretations handed down within the tradition rather than as a single fixed meaning.

• The infinite can be held only by love. No rope can bind what has no limit. What the story says, quietly, is that love — practical, tired, sweating-in-the-midday-sun love — can bring the infinite to be willing to be held. Not compulsion. Willingness.
• The “two fingers.” A popular reading within the bhakti (devotional) schools takes the gap as the space between two things: the devotee’s own sincere effort, and the Lord’s grace. Both, it is said, are needed; effort alone always falls just short.
• Intimacy over awe. Yashoda does not treat her son as a god. She scolds him, chases him and ties him up. Bhakti teachers often say this kind of love, which sees a child who steals butter and means to discipline him, is held in higher regard in the story than worship from a respectful distance. She is tired of losing her butter and loves her child absolutely, and never imagines those two things are in conflict, because they are not.
• The thief of hearts. Many devotees read the stolen butter as a picture of what Krishna really takes: the softest, most carefully kept part of a person, the heart.

The story in worship and festivals

The butter theft is woven into the celebration of Krishna’s birth, Janmāṣṭamī. In many places, especially in Maharashtra, young people form human pyramids to break a pot of curd or butter hung high above the street, a custom known as dahi handi that recalls the cowherd boys helping Krishna reach the pots.

The name Dāmodara is especially honoured in the month of Kārttika, which many Vaishnava communities call the Dāmodara month; hymns to the bound child are sung and small lamps are offered to him. Images of the crawling child holding a ball of butter, often called Bāla Krishna or Laddu Gopāl, are among the most common forms of Krishna kept in homes.

Read on AdiVeda

• Govinda Damodara Stotram — a devotional hymn built around the names Govinda and Dāmodara.
• Nandakumārāṣṭakam — eight verses to Krishna as the son of Nanda.
• Born at Midnight: Krishna Comes Into the World — how the baby reached Gokul in the first place.
• The Hill on a Fingertip: Krishna and Govardhan — another tale of Krishna’s childhood among the cowherds.
• Krishna texts on AdiVeda — hymns, prayers and readings gathered in one place.