Udupi Sri Krishna Matha

This is the seat of Dvaita Vedanta, and the hearth of the Kannada Dasa Sahitya that grew up around it. The Bala Krishna is small, cut from saligrama stone, and he faces west — which is not how he was installed; Madhvacharya's own Tantrasara Sangraha places the vigraha facing east.

He turned for Kanakadasa. Born Veera Nayaka, a Kuruba chieftain of Vijayanagara, he left the field to become a dasa and came to Udupi singing; because of his birth he was not admitted, and kept a hut behind the western wall. Baagilanu teredu seveyanu kodu Hariye, he sang — open the door and grant me your service. The wall cracked; the Lord turned his face west; and Vadiraja Tirtha, chief priest then, did not seal the crack but widened it into a window. That is the Kanakana Kindi, and the custom it began has never lapsed: every devotee, of whatever birth, takes darshan through it — the inner Navagraha Kindi, silver-plated and pierced with nine holes, and the outer arch carrying the saint's name. What was once a wall of exclusion is now the only door there is.

The other thing Udupi is known for is fed, not seen: the Bhojana Shaala serves anna-daana daily to all who come, the noon prasada is called Anna Brahma, and the Shivalli Brahmins who cooked for Krishna here gave their kitchen's name to Udupi cuisine. Every second year the Paryaya Mahotsava hands the worship on — the ascending swami walks in before dawn, receives the Akshaya Patra, the sattuga and the keys, and takes the Sarvajna Peetha for his two years. And at Janmashtami the town keeps the child: a clay Krishna borne in the golden chariot down Ratha Beedi the day after, pots of curd and butter slung above the street for the Vittla Pindi, and tiger-dancers going before him.

Udupi is a temple town on the karavali, the coastal strip of Karnataka between the Ghats and the sea, and its name is read as the lord of the stars — the moon. The Anantheshwara shrine beside it is older by centuries, and it was there, tradition holds, that a Shivalli boy named Vasudeva had his early learning. He became Madhvacharya, who taught Tattvavada — the darshana afterwards known as Dvaita Vedanta — and who in the thirteenth century consecrated Krishna at Udupi and set eight mathas around him to keep the worship.

How the image came is told by the mathas themselves. A ship out of Dwarka carried as ballast a great lump of gopichandana, the sacred clay; within it lay a vigraha of Krishna. Off Malpe the vessel met a storm, and the Acharya, waving his robe from the shore, brought it safely in; the grateful captain gave him the lump. He washed the clay away in the tank now called the Madhva Sarovara and set the child in the sanctum — an image, the mathas say, five thousand years old, of Krishna standing with churning rod and rope.

The turns of worship were short at first, some two months apiece; in the sixteenth century Vadiraja Tirtha of the Sodhe Matha lengthened them to two years, so a swami might work here and still travel to teach.

No tall gopura rises over the sanctum here; the Krishna Matha is built like a living ashram. Before the sanctum lie the Chandrashala and the open Rajangana, and behind it, in the western wall, the Kanakana Kindi. The Madhva Sarovara lies alongside, a lamp-lit mandapa in its water. Around them stand the houses of the eight mathas, and on Ratha Beedi — Car Street — the great festival chariots. Anantheshwara, raised by the Alupas over a thousand years ago, and Chandramouleshwara stand beside the matha; by custom the pilgrim goes to them first.