An Outline of the Religious Literature of India c7.s3.26

c7.s3.26

§ 50. One of the chief problems of this period is the rise of the god Kṛṣṇa, who seems to have had as one of his epithets the title Vāsudeva. Some scholars believe that in the original *Mahābhārata* he was a man and only a man,¹ and that he was deified at a rather later date. Others affirm that he is always a god in the *Mahābhārata*.² Of these some suppose that he was originally a vegetation-spirit, others that he was a sun-god. It is certainly clear that he was already a god of some sort in the fourth century B.C.; for in Pāṇini’s grammar³ Vāsudeva and Arjuna appear as a pair of divinities. Megasthenes, a Greek ambassador at the court of Chandragupta about 300 B.C., has a sentence which seems to mean that Kṛṣṇa was worshipped at Mathurā and Kṛṣṇapur. In the *Mahānārāyaṇa Upanishad*,⁴ which is probably not later than the third century B.C., there is a litany in which the title Vāsudeva is used as an epithet of Viṣṇu, which seems to mean that Kṛṣṇa was already in some sense identified with Viṣṇu. Finally, in the *Mahābhāshya*⁵ of Patañjali, which was probably written about 150 B.C., Vāsudeva is spoken of as a divinity.