Who is Vishnu?

In the older books of the Rigveda, the hymn collection that the tradition holds to be the oldest of the Vedas and that scholars place around 1500 to 1200 BCE, the gods who command the most verses are Indra the storm-king and Agni the fire. Vishnu is there too. He is addressed in only a handful of complete hymns, and his entire early fame rests on one act repeated across them: he crossed the whole of space in three strides.

That is nearly all the oldest record says of him.

A thousand years and more later, in the Bhagavata Purana and the Vishnu Purana, the same name belongs to the supreme reality of the universe, the source of all the gods, the absolute itself wearing a face. Half of Hindu India would come to address him as God without qualification.

Between those two pictures lies one of the most consequential ascents in the history of religion. How a minor deity of three strides became, for hundreds of millions of people, the supreme being who descends into the world again and again to save it, is a question the texts let us answer with unusual precision, because they argue it out across the centuries in their own words.

The god of three strides

The clearest early portrait is Rigveda 1.154, the hymn the tradition calls the Vishnu Sukta. Griffith’s 1896 translation, long in the public domain, opens it like this:

“I will declare the mighty deeds of Vishnu, of him who measured out the earthly regions, / Who propped the highest place of congregation, thrice setting down his footstep, widely striding.”

Read it slowly. The mighty deed is measurement. Vishnu paces out the world, and “thrice setting down his footstep” is the heart of the matter. The same hymn says that “within whose three wide-extended paces all living creatures have their habitation,” and that he “alone with triple step hath measured this common dwelling-place, long, far extended.” Three steps, and the cosmos has room to exist.

The motif recurs. Rigveda 1.22 says, in Griffith’s rendering, that “thrice his foot he planted” and that Vishnu “made three steps” to establish his decrees. Rigveda 7.99 widens the frame further, telling the god that “men come not nigh thy majesty who growest beyond all bound and measure with thy body.”

The hymns give him epithets that the later tradition never let go of. He is Urukrama, the wide-strider, and Urugaya, the far-going one. Two of the three steps, the tradition came to say, fall within the visible world; the third lands in a place beyond sight, a “highest footstep” where, in Griffith’s words, “springs, close akin to the Wide-Strider, the well of meath,” the well of honey, “in Vishnu’s highest footstep.” That third step, the unreachable one, is the seed of everything that follows. A god who can place a foot beyond the visible cosmos is a god with somewhere else to stand.

Many scholars read the early Vishnu as a solar figure, the three strides tracing the sun’s passage across the sky. The tradition itself, much later, read the three strides as the Vamana avatara, the dwarf who grows to bestride the worlds. The Rigveda does not say that. It says only: three steps, and the third beyond sight. The interpretations belong to readers who came after.

The cosmic person on the waters

The next layer of the record is the Brahmanas, the ritual prose texts that the tradition assigns to roughly 900 to 600 BCE. Here a second name enters that will fuse permanently with Vishnu: Narayana.

The Shatapatha Brahmana, in its thirteenth book, describes the Purushamedha, the great rite of the cosmic person. At 13.6.1, in Eggeling’s translation for the Sacred Books of the East, the figure called Purusha Narayana forms a desire:

“Purusha Narayana desired, ‘Would that I overpassed all beings! would that I alone were everything here.’”

He performs the sacrifice, and “having performed offering therewith, he overpassed all beings, and became everything here.” A being who, through the rite, becomes the whole of existence. The name Narayana is already attached to that totality in a Vedic ritual text. The identification of this cosmic person with Vishnu is not yet explicit in the older Vedic corpus, and the threads were woven together only gradually. By the time of the epics the weaving is complete.

This is the figure later devotion would picture so vividly: Narayana reclining on the coiled serpent Shesha, also called Ananta, the endless one, asleep on the ocean of milk between the dissolution of one universe and the birth of the next, with the goddess Lakshmi at his feet. The Vishnu we will meet in the Puranas is this Narayana. The name the Rigveda gave to a strider and the name the Brahmana gave to a cosmic sacrificer have become one person.

”Age after age”: the doctrine of descent

The hinge of the whole story is a battlefield conversation.

The Bhagavad Gita, the seven-hundred-verse dialogue embedded in the Mahabharata and generally dated by scholars to somewhere around the last few centuries BCE, places its teaching in the mouth of Krishna, who the text reveals to be Vishnu in human form. In its fourth chapter Krishna states the principle that would organize Vaishnava faith for the next two thousand years.

The Sanskrit of 4.7-8 is among the most quoted in all of Hinduism. The lines say that whenever dharma, righteous order, declines and its opposite rises, the Lord brings himself into being; that he comes “for the protection of the good, for the destruction of evildoers, for the firm establishment of dharma”; and that he does this yuge yuge, age after age.

परित्राणाय साधूनां विनाशाय च दुष्कृताम् । धर्मसंस्थापनार्थाय सम्भवामि युगे युगे ॥

paritranaya sadhunam vinashaya cha dushkritam / dharma-samsthapanarthaya sambhavami yuge yuge

Bhagavad Gītā 4.8 #

The last phrase, sambhavami yuge yuge, “I come into being age after age,” is the doctrinal core of avatara, the descent of God into the world. It is worth being exact here. The Gita verses do not use the word avatara itself. They use the verb of coming-into-being. The technical noun avatara, a “descent” from a root meaning to cross down, becomes the standard term only in the later Puranic literature. The idea is in the Gita; the vocabulary that names it is younger than the idea.

The Gita does more than state the principle. In its tenth and eleventh chapters Krishna unveils what he is. He names himself the source within every category of being, and then, at Arjuna’s request, shows his cosmic form, the vishvarupa, in which the warrior sees all worlds and all beings contained in a single overwhelming body. The minor god whose third step landed beyond sight has become the one in whom the whole of existence is held.

How many descents, and which?

If Vishnu descends, the obvious question is how often, and as whom. The tradition’s most famous answer is the dashavatara, the ten descents. The texts give that answer in more than one way.

The familiar ten run as a cascade through deepening forms: Matsya the fish who saves the seeds of life from the flood, Kurma the tortoise who steadies the churning of the ocean, Varaha the boar who lifts the drowned earth on his tusk, Narasimha the man-lion who tears apart a tyrant no man or beast could kill, Vamana the dwarf who paces the worlds in three strides, Parashurama the axe-bearer, Rama the prince of Ayodhya, Krishna the cowherd and counsellor, the Buddha, and Kalki who is still to come at the end of the age. Note the fifth of them. Vamana’s three strides are the Rigveda’s three strides, drawn up into the avatara scheme. The tradition folded its own oldest memory of Vishnu into the list.

But the list is not fixed, and the texts are open about this. The Bhagavata Purana, in its third chapter, enumerates twenty descents, not ten-two, and then says plainly that the avataras of Vishnu are innumerable, like streams flowing from an inexhaustible lake. Different Puranas order the names differently. Some lists place Balarama, Krishna’s elder brother, where others place the Buddha. The Matsya, Garuda, and other Puranas each carry their own versions.

So the honest statement is this. The tradition holds the ten as canonical, and the dashavatara is what most Hindus mean by the avataras of Vishnu. The textual record holds the ten as one list, stabilized comparatively late, among several that the Puranas preserve side by side without embarrassment.

The Buddha’s place in the list is the most contested entry. Several Puranic texts include him among Vishnu’s descents. The reading varies sharply. Some texts cast him as a form Vishnu took to mislead the unworthy away from the Vedas, a framing that scholars connect to the long historical rivalry between Vaishnavism and Buddhism in India. Other traditions honour him without that polemic. And some lists, as noted, simply put Balarama in his place. There is no single position to report, and so we report them all.

The thousand names

One text deserves its own mention, because it is recited daily in Vaishnava homes and temples to this day. The Vishnu Sahasranama, the thousand names of Vishnu, sits within the Mahabharata, in the Anushasana Parva, chapter 149. The frame is a deathbed. The patriarch Bhishma, lying on his bed of arrows after the great war, answers Yudhishthira’s question about the highest object of worship by reciting the thousand names, in the verses running from 14 to 120 of that chapter, in Ganguli’s complete English translation of the 1880s and 1890s.

The names are a theology in miniature. Vishnu is called the pervader, the support of all, the imperishable, the beginning and the middle and the end. To chant them is to rehearse, syllable by syllable, the claim that this one deity is the ground of everything that is.

The Puranas and the supreme God

By the era of the Puranas, the long encyclopaedic texts that scholars date across a wide span from roughly the fourth century CE onward, the ascent is complete. The Vishnu Purana, in Wilson’s 1840 translation, presents Vishnu as the supreme cause, from whom the universe proceeds and into whom it returns. The Bhagavata Purana, the most influential of all Vaishnava scriptures, makes Krishna the very form of the supreme and turns the dry doctrine of descent into a literature of love.

It is here that the developed iconography settles. Vishnu is shown with four arms, each holding an emblem the texts name precisely. The shankha, the conch named Panchajanya, sounds the note of creation. The chakra, the spinning discus named Sudarshana, is the wheel of time and law. The gada, the mace named Kaumodaki, is the power that protects. The padma, the lotus, is the unfolding of the world and the grace that frees it. Around him stand his companions: Lakshmi the goddess of fortune at his side, the eagle Garuda as his mount, the serpent Shesha as his couch on the cosmic waters. His dwelling is Vaikuntha, the place of no hindrance.

The Puranas also gave Vishnu a settled role within the conception of three great functions, in which Brahma creates, Vishnu preserves, and Shiva dissolves. It is worth holding this loosely. The scheme is real and ancient in the texts, but Vaishnava theology does not treat preservation as Vishnu’s limit. In the Vishnu Purana and the Bhagavata Purana, Vishnu is the one who creates, preserves, and dissolves through his own powers. The “preserver” is a role within the system; the supreme being is what the tradition claims he is.

The philosophers of devotion

Two thinkers gave Vaishnava devotion its most rigorous philosophy, and they disagreed about almost everything except that Vishnu is supreme.

Ramanuja, whom tradition dates to 1017-1137 CE, though modern scholars debate the exact years, founded the school of Vishishtadvaita, qualified non-dualism. In his Sri Bhashya, his commentary on the Brahma Sutras translated by Thibaut for the Sacred Books of the East, Ramanuja argued that the absolute is one, and is the personal Lord Vishnu-Narayana, but that individual souls and the material world are real and are the body of that Lord, distinct from him yet wholly dependent on him. The soul is not erased in liberation; it is related, eternally, to God.

Madhva, dated to the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries CE, pushed in the opposite direction and founded Dvaita, dualism. For Madhva the difference between the soul and God is absolute and eternal. God is wholly independent; everything else is wholly dependent; and the gulf between them is never closed.

The two schools mark out a genuine spectrum, and the tradition has never resolved which is correct. We present the positions; we do not adjudicate them. What they share is the assumption that, by their time, needed no argument: that the deity the Rigveda had praised for three strides was the supreme reality of which the philosophers were trying to give an account.

Vishnu and Shiva

A reader new to all this will eventually ask the obvious question. Is Vishnu the highest god, or is Shiva?

The texts do not agree, because the question is sectarian by its nature. The great Vaishnava scriptures declare Vishnu supreme. The great Shaiva scriptures declare Shiva supreme, in language just as absolute. Many Hindus across history have held that the two are forms of one underlying reality, an outlook that found its image in Harihara, the composite deity who is Vishnu on one half of the body and Shiva on the other. To ask the sources to crown a winner is to ask them for something they were never built to give. Supremacy, in this tradition, is a claim each community makes of its own God, and the record preserves the claims side by side.

The long arc

Set the two ends of the story against each other one last time.

At the beginning, a god in a handful of Rigveda hymns, known for measuring the world in three steps, with the third coming to rest somewhere beyond sight. At the end, the supreme being of half of Hindu India, identified with the cosmic person on the waters, the source of the avataras, the one who promises to return age after age, and the absolute itself for the philosophers who tried hardest to think clearly about God.

What carried him across that distance was argument, written down: the Brahmana’s cosmic sacrificer, the Gita’s descending Lord, the Puranas’ supreme cause, the acharyas’ careful metaphysics. No army did this work. Texts did. Each generation pushed the third step a little further beyond sight, until the place where Vishnu’s foot came down was no longer a corner of the sky.

It was everything.