CHAPTER 12

VAISHNAVISM

 

 

In Vaishnavism, Vishnu is considered as the supreme God.  It arose as a result of the on going conflict with Saivism where Siva is considered as the God of destruction.   Vishnu comes from a root meaning "to pervade," and he is known as the Pervader.  Thus, Vishnu dwells in everything to defeat the power of destruction. It may be restated as the principle of Life and Death.  Vishnu is the principle of Life, which tries to defeat the principle of Death, which is Shiva.  They are two opposing equal Gods, though the hope of the living lies in Vishnu according to Vaishnavism.  This struggle is eternal in which eventually Siva wins and the cycle starts all over again.

 

 

In the technical terms, these refer to three gunas (properties) of nature viz. Satwa (pulling up), Rajas (fighting) and Tamas (darkness or death) in which Vishnu provides the Satwas aspect of the cosmos.  This dialectical nature of cosmos came to India by the third century AD through the Gnostics of Persia; the greatest proponent of this was Manichean.

 

In order to provide the presence in history Vishnu plays the five forms:

• Avatars – the direct incarnation in a life form
• Cosmic force which is eternally fighting decay and death
• Consciousness of the living, which in nature consciously directs the fight.  Every being is Vishnu in essence
• Vuyha, the direct emanation of the power of Vishnu.  There are many such emanations of godhead such as Vasudeva-Krishna, Samkarsana, Pradymna, Aniruddha etc.
• Immanent God which is all pervading image of God pervading the cosmos as intelligence.

 

None of these concepts is found in the Vedas.  They suddenly appeared in the Indian scene during the first, second and third centuries.  These can therefore be traced to two foreigners who came with a mission to evangelize.  The first was St. Thomas mission and gospel was based on Christian Isa who incarnated into the earth and dwelt among us.  The second was a Persian, the Gnostic Prince Mani.  The duality of god and the on going fight between life and death, emanations and degrees of emanation in various levels and the corresponding variations in the avatar forms definitely belongs to Mani.

 

The Bhagavat Gita is considered to be the main text of the Vaishnavites where Krishna gives advice to Arjuna how to survive in the face of immanent death.  We will be discussing this scripture in detail in a later chapter.  Essentially, it proposes to fight decay and death without regard to personal gain or loss in all possible ways.  The counsel is “Get it done”.

Six of the eighteen Puranas are traditionally considered as Vaishnava text.
Of these the Vishnu Purana is one of the oldest (c. fifth century CE) and most important and the Bhagavata Purana (c. ninth century CE) is an authoritative scripture of Vaishnavism. Seventeen of the Upanishads are regarded as Vaishnava, and there are large numbers of prayers and hymns of great literary and religious appeal that are addressed to Vishnu in his different forms.

 

 

http://philtar.ucsm.ac.uk/encyclopedia/hindu/devot/vaish.html gives an excellent summary of how Vaishnavism grew into the modern form though it misses out the important Christian presence, which gave the basic monotheistic and personal faith as ways of salvation.  The presence of Christianity is usually forgotten because the name was never used in India. Dr. Devakala and Dr. Devanayagam suggest that indeed Saivism and Vaishnavism were simply two denominations of Indian Universal Way.    It was soon swallowed up by Gnostic infiltration all over India except in the Malabar Coast.  Then it was their constant contact with the rest of the world that saved them.  What is important to note in the History as given in the Encyclopedia is that it is an outgrowth of various cults and hero worship forms in the  Pre-Christian period.  With the coming of Thomas into India, the emphasis shifted to Supreme Person of God and Bhakthi towards Him.  This caused a spurge out of the Polytheistic Nature worship into the freedom of personal relation with a Supreme God.  This eventually led to the Six-fold religion known as Hinduism.

 

http://philtar.ucsm.ac.uk/encyclopedia/hindu/devot/vaish.html

 

History

“Vishnu is a solar deity in the Vedas, but the origin of Vaishnavism is not Vedic.

It comes more from the pre-Vedic, non-Aryan Bhakthi, devotional cult.

As Vedism declined, this cult emerged strongly, and was centered on Vasudeva, the deified Vrsni hero.  There is evidence that worship of Vasudeva and not Vishnu came at the beginning of Vaishnavism. This earliest phase was established from the sixth to the fifth centuries BCE at the time of Panini, who in his Astadhyayi explained the word vasudevaka as a bhakta, devotee, of Vasudeva.

 

Another cult, which flourished with the decline of Vedism, was centered on Krishna, the deified tribal hero and religious leader of the Yadavas.

 

The Vrsnis and Yadavas came closer together, resulting in the merging of Vasudeva and Krishna. This was as early as the fourth century BCE according to evidence in Megasthenes and in the Arthasastra of Kautilya.

 

Vasudeva-Krishna liberates the throne of Mathura from his evil kinsman Kamsa, travels to the city of Dvaraka on the Arabian Sea to establish a dynasty, and in the Mahabharata he counsels his cousins the Pandavas in their battle with the Kauravas. This then took sectarian form as the Pancaratra or Bhagavata religion.

 

A tribe of ksatriyas, warriors, called the Satvata, were bhagavatas and were seen by the Greek writer Megasthenes at the end of the fourth century BCE. This sect then combined with the cult of Narayana, a demiurge god-creator who later became one of the names of Vishnu.

Soon after the start of the Common Era, the Abhiras or cowherds of a foreign tribe, contributed Gopala Krishna, the young Krishna, who was adopted by the Abhiras, worked as a cowherd, and flirted with the cowherdesses. Only as a mature young man, did he return to Mathura and slay Kamsa.

The Vasudeva, Krishna, and Gopala cults became integrated through new legends into Greater Krishnaism, the second and most outstanding phase of Vaishnavism.

Being non-Vedic, Krishnaism then started to affiliate with Vedism so that the orthodox would find it acceptable. Vishnu of the Rg Veda was assimilated into Krishnaism and became the supreme God who incarnates whenever necessary to save the world. Krishna became one of the avataras of Vishnu.

In the eighth century, CE the Bhakthi of Vaishnavism came into contact with Shankara's Advaita doctrine of spiritual monism and world-illusion. This philosophy was considered destructive of Bhakthi and important opposition in South India came from Ramanuja in the eleventh century and Madhva in the fifteenth century. Ramanuja stressed Vishnu as Narayana and built on the Bhakthi tradition of the Alvars, poet-saints of South India from the sixth to the ninth centuries (see Shri Vaishnavas).

In North India, there were new Vaishnava movements:

• Nimbarka in the fourteenth century with the cult of Radha, Krishna's favourite cowgirl (see Nimavats);
• Ramananda and the cult of Rama in the same century (see Ramanandis);
• Kabir in the fifteenth century, whose god is Rama (see Kabirpanthis);
•    Vallabha in the sixteenth century with the worship of the boy Krishna and Radha (see Vallabhas); and
• Caitanya in the same century with his worship of the grown-up Krishna and Radha (see Gaudiya Vaishnavas).
•  In the Maratha country poet-saints such as Namdev and Tukaram from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries worshipped Vishnu in the form of Vithoba of Pandharpur (see Vitthalas)