One of the most vivid stories illustrating Balarama's combination of great strength and quick temper, preserved in the Bhagavata Purana, tells how he once wished to bathe and picnic with friends in the waters of the river Yamuna and summoned her to come to where he stood rather than walking down to her banks himself. When the river, personified as a goddess, did not comply quickly enough for his liking, Balarama, intoxicated and irritated, plunged the tip of his plough, his signature weapon, into the riverbank and dragged it toward himself, physically hauling the course of the Yamuna out of its bed and forcing the river to bend and flow to the spot where he stood, terrifying the river goddess into begging his forgiveness, which he eventually grants once she has come as commanded. The episode is told partly for comic effect, showing Balarama's earthy, hard-drinking, quick-tempered character in contrast to his more composed younger brother Krishna, and partly as a demonstration of raw physical power exercised even over the natural order of a sacred river, an act with obvious symbolic resonance for an agricultural deity whose defining weapon, the plough, is the very instrument by which human beings reshape the land and redirect its water for cultivation.
Later traditions and folk etymologies have connected the story to actual, observable shifts in the historical course of the Yamuna river over time, treating Balarama's mythic feat of engineering as a poetic explanation for a genuine hydrological change, though this remains a folk and literary association rather than a claim documented by any independent hydrological or historical record.