Vaishnava Deities
Vishnu and his world: the preserver, his ten avatars including Rama and Krishna, and the gods and consorts of the Vaishnava stream.
The Vaishnava stream is the largest of the three by adherents, and it turns on a claim the other streams do not make in quite the same way: that the absolute takes form, deliberately and repeatedly, and enters history to be met.
Vishnu is its centre, but most devotion goes to his descents. Rama, whose story became the moral vocabulary of half a continent. Krishna, who is at once the child thief of butter, the charioteer of the Bhagavad Gita, and for the Gaudiya tradition the source of Vishnu rather than his form. Hanuman, whose worship crosses every boundary the streams draw.
These pages take each figure and the theology behind them. Where the Vaishnava schools disagree about the relation between the soul and God, and Ramanuja, Madhva and Chaitanya disagree profoundly, the divergence is named rather than averaged into a single position.