Vrishni king, father of the god Krishna
Vasudeva
Vasudeva is the father of the Hindu god Krishna and a king of the Vrishni clan, whose life was dominated by the imprisonment ordered by the tyrant Kamsa. He matters above all for the miraculous birth and escape of his son, one of the best-known episodes in Hindu tradition.
The myth
Vasudeva was the son of King Shurasena and belonged to the Yadava and Vrishni dynasty. His sister Kunti married King Pandu. According to the Harivamsa, he was a partial incarnation of the sage Kashyapa, and his wife Devaki was an incarnation of Aditi. Tradition holds that he never told a lie.
When Devaki married Vasudeva, the sage Narada warned King Kamsa that a son of hers would kill him. Kamsa imprisoned the couple and killed their first children. The seventh, Balarama, was transferred to the womb of Rohini, another of Vasudeva's wives. The eighth, Krishna, appeared in a miraculous way, since the god Vishnu had promised the couple that they would be his parents.
That night the guards fell asleep and the prison doors opened by themselves. Vasudeva carried the child to Gokula, where he left him in place of Nanda's newborn daughter. The serpent Ananta Shesha sheltered the child from the rain with her hoods, and the river Yamuna parted to let him pass. When Kamsa tried to kill the girl, she became the goddess Yogamaya and announced his doom.
After Krishna killed Kamsa, the couple were freed. Vasudeva had a daughter, Subhadra, with Rohini, and she married Arjuna. Later, according to tradition, Vasudeva died after the Yadava fratricidal war, and Krishna and Balarama also perished.
Worship and religion
He receives little worship of his own. In Vaishnava Hinduism devotion is usually directed to his son Krishna rather than to the father.
Ancient sources: The Harivamsa and the Bhagavata Purana mention him, and the Mahabharata, in the Mausala Parva, recounts the end of the Yadavas.