What happens to the demons killed by Kṛṣṇa?
When demons become powerful enough to defeat the demigods and challenge the universal order, Krsna comes personally to fight them. It may sound like some kind of Abrahamic thing, but it is not so.
Krsna kills many demons in his pastimes. In fact, he says in the Bhagavad-gītā:
“Whenever and wherever there is a decline in religious practice, O descendant of Bharata, and a predominant rise of irreligion – at that time I descend Myself. To deliver the pious and to annihilate the miscreants, as well as to reestablish the principles of religion, I Myself appear, millennium after millennium.” (Bg 4.7-8)
When demons become powerful enough to defeat the demigods and challenge the universal order, Krsna comes personally in one of His incarnations to fight them. At first, it may sound like some kind of Abrahamic thing, God as the delivery of punishment, but it’s actually not so.
In the same way the propensity for fighting is present in each one of us, it is also present in Krsna. When a powerful warrior desires to fight with someone, he will not challenge a small boy from the street; he will want to fight the most powerful challenger he can find. Similarly, when Krsna desires to fight, he fights only with the most powerful demons.
There is, however, a difference between what happens when Krsna fights and when we fight. If a normal person fights and kills someone, he just causes suffering. It’s not really possible to kill anyone since the soul is immortal, but one can kill the gross body and thus cause suffering to the soul, which has to transmigrate to a new body, leaving behind all his family members, friends, and possessions. Our killing doesn’t result in any kind of benefit; on the contrary, it just causes suffering for the other person and also for ourselves, since we have to suffer the karmic reactions later.
However, when Krsna kills a demon, something completely different happens. Instead of just killing the physical body, Krsna purifies the soul, destroying the layers of material contamination that surround it. The soul is originally pure. What makes one act as a cruel demon is a combination of false ego, material mind, and material intelligence that operate under the influence of the three modes. It’s just like if one drinks or uses drugs. The influence of these substances will make him do things he would not normally do in good conscience, but as soon as the intoxicating effect finishes, he will go back to his original consciousness. Similarly, when Krsna kills a demon, he removes all these artificial contaminations, making the soul go back to its original pure state.
Freed from all material contamination, the soul attains liberation and can thus go to the impersonal brahmajyoti or to the spiritual planets, according to his inclinations. In other words, Krsna gives the demons that become powerful enough to fight Him the same perfection that yogis and transcendentalists have to work very hard to attain.
It’s mentioned that there are two ways to become free from material contamination: to become a devotee, yogi, or transcendentalist and attain perfection in the discipline one is practicing, or to become a big demon and be killed by Krsna. Naturally, to become such an important demon is not so easy, but this just shows how everyone who comes into contact with Krsna in one way or another becomes purified.
Krsna is so compassionate that anyone who approaches Him, be it as a devotee or even as a demon who desires to kill Him, is benefited. The great demoness Putana came to Krsna when he was playing as a child in the house of Mother Yaśodā and Nanda Maharaja with the purpose of killing Him with poison, but after being killed by Krsna, she became one of the assistants of Mother Yośodā in Goloka.
If even one who approaches Krsna as an enemy can attain such perfection, what to say about the ones who approach Him with a sincere feeling?
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