In Steiner's reading, the cosmic teacher who first inspired the age of self-consciousness, bringing humanity the power to say I, and the culmination of the ancient yoga path.
Krishna in Anthroposophy is the great teacher of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita and, for Rudolf Steiner, the Being who inspired the dawning age of self-consciousness. Krishna gives the soul its first clear hold on the word I. He leads Arjuna off the inherited path of the Vedas and onto yoga, the wisdom won from within. Steiner reads him as the last great teacher of the old initiation, just before the Christ-impulse.
In Steiner's Own Words
How often men ask today, “What is the judgment of true mystic wisdom about this or that?” They want absolute truths, but actually there are no such truths. There are only truths that hold good in certain contexts, that are true in definite circumstances and under definite conditions. Then they are true. This statement, “I am in all beings but they are not in me,” cannot be taken as an abstractly, absolutely true statement. Yet this was spoken out of the deepest wisdom of Krishna at the time when he stood before Arjuna, and its truth is real and immediate, referring to Him Who is the creator of man’s inmost being, of his consciousness of self.
What it Means Today
Steiner approached Krishna as a question in comparative religion rather than as a figure of devotion, and that approach is now carried on at the Goetheanum School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, whose Section for the Humanities has studied the GA 146 cycle alongside Steiner's later 1912 to 1913 lectures on the Gita ever since the school was refounded at the 1923 Christmas Conference. The reading turns on a single distinction. The Bhagavad Gita is a poem, a layered weaving of three older soul-currents that Steiner named Sankhya, Yoga, and Vedanta. Krishna is the Being who speaks through it. To run the two together, the teacher into the text, is to miss what Steiner found most precise: that Krishna marks a turning point in the history of human consciousness. Before him, knowledge of the spirit came as an inheritance, received in the dreamlike clairvoyance the Vedas preserved. Krishna sends Arjuna inward instead, telling him to hold fast to yoga, to the source in his own soul. That inward turn is the first appearance of the self-aware I, the faculty an ordinary person now uses without noticing. For a reader today the value is concrete. It dates the birth of selfhood, places the yoga discipline as its training ground, and shows the ancient path reaching its summit just as the Christ-impulse prepared to carry the I a stage further.
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