The king who slept through ages, and woke when Krishna ran into his cave

Into the cave

The foreign warlord ran into the mouth of the cave, panting, sword drawn. He had chased the unarmed man for miles, up goat-paths and across ridges, certain he was about to kill the most famous king in the world.

Inside, the cave was dim. A long flat stone lay in the middle. On it stretched a body, tall, broad-shouldered, asleep under a yellow blanket. The warlord saw it and decided: this is Krishna, finally cornered, pretending to sleep. He kicked the figure hard.

The body on the stone stirred for the first time in ages. The blanket fell back. Eyes opened.

The eyes fell on the warlord standing over him.

In one breath he was a man. In the next he was ash on the cave floor.

The king who had been promised

His name was Mucukunda. To understand why his glance burned a stranger to ash, you have to go back, far back, before Krishna had been born.

Mucukunda had been a king of the old style, wide-shouldered and plain-spoken, a man who did not lose battles and did not boast of winning them. In his time the devas were losing a long war against the asuras. Indra came down and asked him for help. The gods needed a human general, someone outside their ranks whom the asuras would not have anticipated. Mucukunda left his kingdom and went up to fight.

The war did not last weeks. It did not last years. It lasted across vast cycles of cosmic time. Mucukunda fought beside Indra through the rise and fall of suns. He commanded armies of celestial beings. He led charges across plains made of cloud. He grew old in battle, then older, then strangely beyond age, because time on Indra's plain did not move at the speed of human time.

Eventually the war was won. The gods gathered to thank the man who had given them centuries.

The boon he asked for

Indra said to him what kings always say to a faithful servant: Ask whatever you wish.

Mucukunda was tired. The kind of tired that goes past muscle into the marrow. He asked, almost shyly, whether he could go home.

Indra was kind, but he was honest. Mucukunda, while you fought beside us, generations have passed in your land. Your wife is gone. Your sons are gone. Your sons' sons are gone. The lineage you ruled is in its tenth descent. There is no home to return to. The city does not even speak the language you knew.

Mucukunda sat with that for some time. Then he asked the only thing his bones would still allow him to ask for: uninterrupted sleep. Sleep so deep that no army's drums, no servant's lamp, no wife's grief, no son's marriage, no mountain's collapse could rouse him. Let him sleep until the universe found a reason to wake him on its own terms.

Indra granted it. And because the gods know what unconscious sleeping bodies invite, robbers, careless trespassers, idle children, Indra added a clause: Whoever wakes you before your time, let them be reduced to ashes by your first glance.

A cave was found in the mountains near Mathura. The king was laid down on the stone floor. A blanket was spread across him. The centuries themselves concealed the mouth of the cave. He slept.

What the world looked like when he closed his eyes

When the old king closed his eyes, the world had no Krishna in it. Krishna had not yet been born. Mathura was a young city. The poems that would later be sung had not yet been composed.

He slept. Mountains shifted. Rivers changed course. Whole religions rose and were forgotten. Mathura grew, prospered, and one day fell under the rule of a tyrant named Kamsa. A child was born in a prison cell and carried across the river in flood. That child grew, killed the tyrant, freed his parents, and became the king of the Yadavas. He was called Krishna.

Even then the old king slept.

Krishna runs from a war

Krishna's reign in Mathura was short and busy. Kamsa's father-in-law, the powerful king Jarasandha, attacked Mathura seventeen times to avenge his son-in-law. Each time Krishna and his elder brother Balarama drove him back. The eighteenth time, Jarasandha brought a new ally, a foreign warlord named Kalayavana, who came with thirty million soldiers.

Kalayavana had received a boon: no weapon used by any descendant of the lunar dynasty could harm him. Krishna saw the situation immediately. A direct fight would mean his city would burn. So he decided to do the thing kings are not supposed to do. He turned around and ran.

He ran on foot, alone, unarmed, drawing the warlord behind him. Kalayavana, seeing him flee, was delighted. He sent his army to lay siege to Mathura but personally pursued Krishna himself, on foot, sword drawn.

Krishna led him for miles. Up paths that became goat-paths. Across slopes. Into the mountains. Always just out of reach. The warlord shouted insults. Krishna did not turn around. He simply ran, but he ran toward a particular place.

There was a cave in those mountains whose mouth was almost invisible behind a curtain of vines. Krishna ducked through and stepped quietly behind a rock pillar. Kalayavana came in after him. He saw the sleeping body. He kicked it.

The sleeper meets the dark one

Mucukunda sat up slowly. The cave was not familiar. The clothing on the ash on the floor was of a style he had never seen. The light through the cave-mouth was different, somehow younger.

A figure stepped out from behind the pillar. A young man, dark-skinned, with peacock feather in his hair, smiling. Mucukunda had never seen a human like this; the proportions were not quite the proportions of his age. He asked, plainly: Who are you?

Krishna told him. Not just his name. He told him everything. He told the old king how long he had slept. He named the dynasties that had risen and fallen. He told him of Kamsa, of his own birth, of the tyrant just defeated, of the foreign army outside, of the trick by which the sleeper had become the executioner.

Mucukunda listened. At the end, he wept. Lord, I commanded armies for the gods. I won wars no human should have been able to win. And I never once paused to ask: who is the one I am really fighting for? I have spent ages away from the only thing worth knowing.

He bowed. Now I have seen you. I know what every cell in my old body had been waiting for. Tell me what to do.

The instruction

Krishna's instruction is one of the briefest in the Bhagavata. The bad acts you may have committed in your old life and during your long wars are burned away by your seeing me now. Go now to the holy mountain Gandhamadana. Sit there in tapas. In your next birth you will be born again as a brahmin and you will attain me fully. For now, walk slowly. The world outside this cave is not the world you knew, and that is a kindness. It means you do not have to settle the old debts.

Mucukunda rose. He walked out of the cave into the light of an age he did not recognize. The army outside, leaderless, dispersed. The mountain absorbed him back into its quiet, this time on his own terms, awake, walking, free.

Krishna doubled back. By another path he returned to Mathura, where his army had held. Jarasandha had withdrawn. The eighteenth war was over.

The miracle had been arranged ages earlier, by Indra, when he granted Mucukunda exactly the sleep and exactly the curse that would, eons later, become useful. The old soldier walked in tired. The Lord himself was the one waiting on the other side.