Batik Paintings of Lord Krishna

"...Krishna was physically irresistibly appealing... In the embrace of Krishna, the gopis, maddened with desire, found refuge...Often the colorful legends surrounding his amorous adventures with female friends prove to be of supreme inspiration to artists…"

"Lord Krishna...is now for centuries the most cherished theme of arts in India... Unlike Lord Vishnu, who he incarnates, Krishna is...an entity beyond time, without end and without beginning... He has been represented in visual arts... but no...form could ever define him... Forms decompose, erode and are subject to transition, Krishna is not... He exists in what he creates, yet is always beyond it. Thus, all are his forms and yet he is beyond them all... This defines Lord Krishna related art vision and the entire creative endeavor, which always fell short of its theme…"

"Wordsworth... said: \'Heaven lies about us in our infancy.\'... as an infant and a child, Krishna is approachable... He can be approached with the intimacy with which a parent approaches a child... Such a god invites man to dispense with cumbersome formality and come to him openly, delighting in him intimately... Krishna\'s incarnation represents the human dimension of the divine... Krishna removes the poison of evil from this world while he joyously feeds on a mother\'s bosom... God as an infant does not govern the world from a majestic throne, but makes the world his playground and even while enjoying himself maintains the cosmic order. A child too seeks only to amuse himself, expressing his essential nature in every action..."

"After having returned the clothes of the unclad maidens bathing in the sacred waters of river Yamuna, Krishna congratulated them for their unflinching devotion towards him and promised that he would sport with them during the forthcoming autumn nights...The gopis\' escape from the shackles of worldly life was not however without event...Truly, Krishna is the ultimate attraction, much like a magnet draws iron files towards it...whatever emotion is directed towards god, it should be intense and continuous...the gopis puffed up with pride and each regarded herself as special...the gopis forgot their agony of separation (viraha), and on physical "contact with him (anga sanga) felt all their desires fulfilled..."

"The intense passion of Mirabai, which sought to model itself on the fervent ardor of the gopis of Vrindavana, suggests that the lord can be worshipped very effectively if the devotee imagines himself to be a woman... Chaitanya\'s mystic-ecstatic form of worship openly encouraged male devotees to imagine themselves in the role of gopis... the female...is the more emotional of the two sexes, and bhakti being a necessarily emotional experience, Chaitanya\'s \'hyper-sentimentality\' found adequate expression in the personality of Radha whose intensity of passion can said to have paralleled Chaitanya\'s own frenzied devotion to the Lord... The Padma Purana says that when the great lord Rama entered the forest named Dandaka, the virtuous sages residing in its wild surroundings desired to engage in lila with the lord. Hence they were all reborn as gopis in Vrindavana, and through physical passion they found liberation from the ocean of existence... Similar descriptions of divine romanticism are found in the mystical literature of other traditions: the Kabbalah speaks of approaching the Absolute with the divine passion of a lover... Indeed, since between lovers there are no secrets, by approaching divinity as a lover we enter into the mystery of god."

"Krishna is realised in love and in his love reveals the supreme good; all fetters break and the loved one unites with him in absolute oneness....In between the period, when he left with Radha and made love with her, the child Krishna grows to such manhood as gives him competence to make love with a far matured woman. It was obviously a mystic magnification, not a growth on the scale of time....In the love-war passes the whole night...."

"One of the travelers was a sadhu (saint). His reaction was opposite to the general one....There is no difference between god and his devotees....In the Mahabharata, Queen Draupadi once asked Krishna why he came so late to prevent her disrobing?....Here we recall Krishna, even though he is the supreme lord of the universe, running helplessly scared of his mother....When Radha woke up she saw him lying near her. From his whole form radiated her name: "Radhe Radhe." She too then fainted in intense ecstasy.....Chanting thus, she would toss one grain of rice into a bowl, and only use rice from that container for her consumption. She truly embodied the ideal of the Gita, where god says: "Whatever you eat, O Arjuna, do it as an offering to me"...."