Śakaṭāsura Vadha and Tṛṇāvarta Vadha

The seventh chapter of the tenth Skanda of the Bhāgavata Mahā Purāṇa tells of two attacks on the infant Kṛshṇa. In the first, an asura named Śakaṭāsura, who had entered a large cart, is destroyed by one kick of the child’s tiny foot. In the second, the whirlwind asura Tṛṇāvarta, sent by Kaṃsa, carries the infant high into the sky. He falls and dies, because Kṛshṇa makes himself too heavy to carry. The same chapter holds the first time Kṛshṇa shows Yaśodā the whole universe inside his mouth.

Śakaṭāsura Vadha

Kṛshṇa was still an infant, only a few months old. Yaśodā arranged a traditional nāmakaraṇa (naming ceremony). The formal secret naming by Garga would come later. On this good day the infant was laid on a bed made under a large cart (śakaṭa), where he could rest while the ceremony went on. An asura named Śakaṭāsura had taken over this cart and was waiting for his moment.

Yaśodā laid the infant there and went to look after the guests and the preparations for the rite. Infant Kṛshṇa, playing as infants do, kicked upward with his tiny feet. The foot that struck the bottom of the cart was no common kick, for the power of Bhagavān Kṛshṇa was in it. The cart burst apart. Its wheels and axle flew in every direction, and the pots and vessels on it smashed on the ground with a great crash. The asura in the cart was destroyed.

The gopas and gopīs came running. They found the cart in pieces and the infant sitting among the wreckage, quite unharmed, reaching up for something to play with. The gopa children who had been standing near said: “We saw it. The baby kicked the cart and it flew apart!” The grown people could not believe this. They thought a calf might have kicked the cart. Yaśodā picked up the infant, performed rites of protection, and fed him.

Tṛṇāvarta Vadha

Some time later Yaśodā was holding infant Kṛshṇa on her lap when she felt the child become suddenly very heavy, as if she were holding a stone. She set him down on the ground for a moment. At that instant a terrible whirlwind rose, with dust, leaves and darkness all around. The wind seized the infant and carried him up into the sky at great speed.

This was Tṛṇāvarta, the whirlwind asura, sent by Kaṃsa. He had the power to become a terrible tornado. He had taken the infant meaning to carry him far up and kill him in the upper air, where no one could stop him.

But when Kṛshṇa had gone so high that the asura’s grip was his only link to the earth, he suddenly made his weight too great to move. Tṛṇāvarta could not fly any further. What he carried was no longer the weight of an infant but something far beyond his strength. He struggled and spun. He could not rise higher and could not let go. Then he crashed down, and his body broke on the rocks below. His corpse was found lying on a great stone, huge in its asura form, still holding the infant. Kṛshṇa sat on the asura’s chest, calm and unharmed.

The gopas and gopīs found them like this and took the infant back with great relief. They did rites of protection for Kṛshṇa once more.

The first vision of the universe in his mouth

Soon after the Tṛṇāvarta episode, when Kṛshṇa was beginning to crawl, Yaśodā saw that he seemed to be eating something from the ground. She came to him and looked into his mouth. What she saw inside was the whole cosmos: all the worlds, all living beings, all of creation, shown inside the small mouth of her infant son. For a moment she felt dizzy, because what she saw was too much for her ordinary mind to hold. Then the yogamāyā (Bhagavān Kṛshṇa’s power of illusion) covered her mind again, and she saw her child once more as only her child.

Sources

• Bhāgavata Mahā Purāṇa, 10th Skanda, Chapter 7