Kṛṣṇa’s Final Word: Examining Bojiafan song, a Chinese Hindu Scripture

In 2009, a woman surnamed Li began distributing a scripture in northeast China, which she claims was revealed to her by Kṛṣṇa. Titled Bojiafan song (Ode of the Bhagavān)—a clear play on Bhagavad-gītā (Ch.: Bojiafan ge)—the work presents itself as Kṛṣṇa’s final word and offers a cosmogony, cosmography, and detailed ontology. It also warns against environmental degradation and prophesizes a magnificent future for China once it adopts Hinduism. The present paper argues the following about this truly unique religious text: (1) that its emergence is in keeping with what historian Vincent Goossaert calls China’s “revelatory ecology,” (2) that it evidences specifically Daoist understandings of scripture, and (3) that its production and circulation appear to mark the start of a largely internal or “one-sided” dialogue between Chinese and Hinduism akin to the one Buddhologist Robert Sharf indicates has been occurring among Chinese and Buddhism now for hundreds of years.