203 The Nectar of Devotion

Sometimes Bhima, the second brother of the Pandavas, is also de-
scribed as dhiroddhata.

Once, while fighting with a demon who was appearing as a deer,
Krsna challenged him in this way: “I have come before you as a
great elephant named Krsna. You must leave the battlefield, accepting
defeat, or else there is death awaiting you.” This challenging spirit of
Krsna’s is not contradictory to His sublime character because, as the
Supreme Being, everything is possible in His character.

There is a nice statement in the Kurma Purana about these contra-
dictory traits of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. It is stated
there that the Supreme Person is neither very fat nor very thin; He is
always transcendental to material qualities, and yet His bodily luster
is blackish. His eyes are reddish, He is all-powerful, and He is equipped
with all different kinds of opulences. Contradictory traits in Krgna’s
person are not at all surprising: one should not consider the charac-
teristics of Krsna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, to be actually
contradictory. One should try to understand the traits of Krsna from
authorities and try to understand how these characteristics are em-
ployed by the supreme will of the Lord.

In the Maha-varaha Purana it is confirmed that the transcendental
bodies of the Supreme Personality of Godhead and His expansions
are all existing eternally. Such bodies are never material and are com-
pletely spiritual and full of knowledge. They are reservoirs of all
transcendental qualities. In the Vaisnava Tantra there is a statement
that the Personality of Godhead and His expanded bodies are always
free from the eighteen kinds of material contaminations,* because
such bodies are always full of knowledge, bliss and eternity.

Regarding all of the above-mentioned statements, it is understood
that the Maha-Visnu is the source of all incarnations in the material
world. But because of His greater extraordinary opulence, we can

* The eighteen kinds of material contaminations mentioned above are described
in the Visnu-yamala Tantra as follows: illusion, fatigue, committing errors, rough-
ness, material lust, restlessness, pride, envy, violence, disgrace, exhaustion, untruth,
anger, hankering, dependence, desire to lord over the universe, seeing duality, and
cheating.
