What is Vaishnavism?

Around the year 113 before the Common Era, in a town called Besnagar in central India, near the old city of Vidisha, a foreigner set up a stone column. He was a Greek. His name was Heliodorus, and he had come as the ambassador of Antialkidas, an Indo-Greek king ruling out of Taxila in the far northwest. He was posted to the court of a local king named Bhagabhadra. And this Greek envoy, in the fourteenth year of that king’s reign, raised a pillar topped with the figure of Garuda, the eagle, and had cut into its base a line in Prakrit that names himself a Bhagavata, a devotee, and dedicates the column to Vasudeva, “the god of gods.”

The pillar still stands. Local people call it Khamba Baba and it is worshipped to this day. Its inscription is one of the oldest dated records we have of the worship of the god the tradition would come to call Vishnu.

Now hold that image. A Greek diplomat, more than two thousand years ago, bowing to Vasudeva. And then move forward. In the summer of 1966, in a storefront on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an elderly Bengali monk registered a society whose members would chant that same name in the streets of New York. The name had travelled. It is the story of how it travelled that this article tries to tell.

The god who took three steps

In the oldest layer of the Sanatana Dharma, the Rigveda, Vishnu is a small figure. He is not among the great gods. Indra thunders through hundreds of hymns; Agni the fire receives more than two hundred; Vishnu has only a handful addressed to him alone.

What he has instead is one striking act. Three times he strides across the worlds. The Rigveda returns to it again and again. At RV 1.22.20 the seer sings that the wise ever behold the highest step of Vishnu, “fixed like an eye in heaven.” Hymn 1.154 is given over to the three strides, trini pada, by which he measures out earth, sky, and the unseen realm beyond. That third step, planted in the far distance where no eye follows, is where the later tradition would build its heaven.

He is a minor deity with a cosmic gesture. That is the seed.

The one who wanted to be everything

By the time of the Brahmanas, the dense ritual texts that come after the hymns, a different figure has appeared, and he is anything but minor. His name is Narayana. In the Satapatha Brahmana, in the passage on the great human sacrifice, the Purushamedha, Narayana forms a desire. Julius Eggeling, whose Victorian translation for the Sacred Books of the East remains public and citable, renders the opening of Satapatha 13.6.1.1 like this:

Purusha Narayana desired, “Would that I overpassed all beings! would that I alone were everything here (this universe)!” He beheld this five-days’ sacrificial performance, the Purushamedha, and took it, and performed offering therewith; and having performed offering therewith, he overpassed all beings, and became everything here.

A god who wants to be everything, and becomes it. This is a very different ambition from three quiet strides. The same text elsewhere identifies Narayana with the cosmic Purusha, the primal Person of the famous hymn Rigveda 10.90, whose body is divided to make the worlds. The exact wording of that hymn is hard to pin down across translations, so we hold it loosely, but its force is plain enough. Somewhere in the Vedic period, a strand of thought reaches for a single being who is the source and substance of all that is.

Four names become one

Here is the hard part, and the scholarship has been arguing it for over a century. The Vaishnavism of later India is not the growth of one seed. It is the braiding together of several separate cults, each with its own god, into a single tradition that then reads all of them as one.

R. G. Bhandarkar, in his 1913 survey Vaisnavism, Saivism and Minor Religious Systems, was among the first to lay the strands out. The Indian historian Suvira Jaiswal pressed the analysis further in The Origin and Development of Vaisnavism (1967). Between them, and the work that followed, a rough map emerged. There was the Vedic Vishnu of the three strides. There was Narayana of the Brahmanas and the Purusha hymn. There was Vasudeva-Krishna, a hero-god of the Vrishni clan worshipped in the region around Mathura, whose devotees called themselves Bhagavatas and whose ritual system is the Pancaratra. And there was the cowherd Krishna of pastoral legend. Four figures. Different origins. They fused.

This is where the Greek and his pillar earn their place. The Besnagar inscription is not a myth and not a scripture. It is a dated stone. It tells us that by around 113 BCE the worship of Vasudeva as “god of gods” was established enough, and respectable enough, that a foreign ambassador would publicly declare himself its devotee and mark it with Garuda, the bird who is still Vishnu’s mount. The documentary record and the textual record meet here, at a column in a field.

The hinge in the song

If one text turned this braided cult into a theology that could speak to all of India, it was the Bhagavad Gita, the song set inside the vast war-epic the Mahabharata, composed at some point across the centuries around the turn of the Common Era. In it, Krishna, the charioteer, discloses himself as the supreme God, and gives two teachings that Vaishnavism would build on for the next two thousand years.

The first is the doctrine of the descent, the avatara. Krishna explains why the formless supreme takes birth in the world. Kashinath Trimbak Telang’s public-domain translation gives Gita 4.7 and 4.8:

Whensoever, O descendant of Bharata! piety languishes, and impiety is in the ascendant, I create myself. I am born age after age, for the protection of the good, for the destruction of evil-doers, and the establishment of piety.

This is the charter for the whole idea of the avatar, the descent of God into form, and for the list of ten such descents the tradition would settle on, running from the fish and the tortoise up through Rama and Krishna themselves.

The second teaching is the promise of grace. At the very end of the song, in the verse the tradition calls the charama shloka, the final word, Krishna tells the anguished warrior how to be free. Telang renders Gita 18.66:

Forsaking all duties, come to me as thy sole refuge. I will release thee from all sins. Be not grieved.

Surrender, and be carried. That single verse becomes the doctrinal core of prapatti, self-surrender, which later teachers would raise into a whole path to liberation.

The Tamil detonation

The theology could have stayed dry. It did not, because something happened in the deep south of India that the Sanskrit texts did not predict.

Between roughly the sixth and the ninth centuries, in the Tamil country, twelve poet-saints called the Alvars, “those immersed” in God, sang. They sang in Tamil, not Sanskrit. They sang of longing, of a soul sick with love for an absent lord, in verse as raw as any love poetry. Their hymns were gathered into a corpus of four thousand stanzas, the Nalayira Divya Prabandham, which the southern tradition reveres as a Tamil Veda. J. S. M. Hooper’s 1929 selection, Hymns of the Alvars, preserves the older devotional register. Here is Periyalvar, in Hooper’s rendering, overwhelmed by a vision of the god’s beauty:

Reverence, reverence be unto thee, O thou mighty One, who didst overcome the Mallas, thou like to the sapphire in glory! Infinitely blest be the beauty of thy holy feet for many many years, for thousands of years, for crores of years, for ever!

The scholar Friedhelm Hardy, whose 1983 study Viraha-Bhakti is the standard work on this poetry, made a bold argument about it. He held that this Tamil emotional devotion, the viraha-bhakti of the separated lover, was not a later flowering of the Sanskrit systems. On his reading it came first, or at least ran alongside them, and the great theologians who followed were in part organising a fire the poets had already lit. The claim is contested. It reframes the whole history. The devotion, on Hardy’s telling, precedes the philosophy.

The Alvar hymns were not gentle to everyone. Several of the saints sang sharp verses against Jains, Buddhists, and the followers of Shiva, the rival lord of the Shaiva stream. The poetry is devotional and it is partisan. We can hold both facts at once.

Three metaphysics that cannot agree

When the philosophers did come, they did not produce one Vaishnavism. They produced several, and the differences between them are not decorations. They are disagreements about the deepest question the tradition asks: what, exactly, is the relation between the individual soul and God?

The first great architect was Ramanuja, the Sri Vaishnava teacher traditionally dated to 1017 to 1137, whose lifespan the tradition records as more than a century and which we should read as hagiography rather than record. In his Sri Bhashya, his commentary on the Brahma Sutras, he taught Vishishtadvaita, qualified non-dualism. Reality is one, but it is a one with internal distinction. The souls and the world are real, and they are the body of God, related to him as a body is to the self that animates it. The soul is never simply identical with God, and it never dissolves. Liberation is eternal, loving communion, and it is reached by devotion and by prapatti, surrender to grace.

The second was Madhva, dated 1238 to 1317, and he pushed in the opposite direction, into outright dualism, Dvaita. God and soul are eternally and absolutely distinct, and they stay distinct forever. Madhva went further than any other Vedantin dared. He taught taratamya, a fixed hierarchy of souls, graded by their nature, enjoying different measures of bliss in liberation. And he taught, almost alone in the Indian traditions, that some souls are eternally bound, never to be freed at all. There is no merger here, and for some, no release.

The third stream runs through Bengal. Chaitanya, who lived from 1486 to 1534, inspired the Gaudiya tradition, whose philosophers framed its position as achintya-bheda-abheda, “inconceivable difference and non-difference.” Soul and God are simultaneously one and distinct, and the manner of it exceeds thought. The Gaudiyas also made a striking reversal. Where the other schools treat Krishna as an avatara of Vishnu, the Gaudiyas invert the order. For them Krishna is the original, complete supreme person, and Vishnu is a derivative expansion. They anchor this in Bhagavata Purana 1.3.28, whose Sanskrit ends krishnas tu bhagavan svayam. Rendered afresh, so as to lean on no copyrighted translation: all these forms are portions and fragments of the Person; Krishna, though, is the Lord himself. The most famous English translation of this line is modern and under copyright, so we translate it plainly and note the fact.

Three schools. One God. Three incompatible accounts of the soul that loves him. A fourth teacher, Nimbarka, whose dates are genuinely unsettled and may fall anywhere across several centuries, taught his own dual-non-dualism; a fifth, Vallabha, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, taught Shuddhadvaita, pure non-dualism. The tradition did not resolve into agreement. It resolved into rivers.

The cat and the monkey

Even within Ramanuja’s own Sri Vaishnava lineage, the disagreement did not stop. After him the school split into two, and the split turned on the oldest question of devotion: when God saves a soul, how much does the soul have to do?

One party, the Vadakalai, the “northern” school, whose great voice was the polymath Vedanta Desika, held that grace requires the soul’s own effort. They illustrated it with the baby monkey, which must cling to its mother with its own strength as she leaps. This is markata-nyaya, the way of the monkey.

The other party, the Tenkalai, the “southern” school, whose teacher was Manavala Mamunigal, held that grace alone saves, and the soul need only submit and be carried, contributing nothing. Their image was the kitten, which hangs limp in its mother’s jaws and is carried without effort of its own. This is marjara-nyaya, the way of the cat.

The cat and the monkey. It sounds like a fable. It is one of the sharpest doctrinal fault-lines in the history of Hindu devotion, and it divides Sri Vaishnava temples, teachers, and even the marks worshippers wear on their foreheads, down to the present day. The question of whether the human being helps to save itself, or is simply saved, does not have a settled answer here. It has two.

The street

None of this stayed in the commentaries. Vaishnavism is, in the end, the religion of enormous living crowds.

It is the temple at Tirupati in the southern hills, where the image of Venkateshwara draws pilgrims in numbers that rival any shrine on earth. It is the great temple at Puri on the eastern coast, where each year the deity Jagannath, a form of Krishna, is dragged through the streets on a wooden chariot so vast it gave the English language the word “juggernaut.” It is the daily recitation of the Tamil hymns before the reclining Ranganatha at Srirangam, the antiphonal chant Hooper described, still performed.

And it is that storefront in New York. In 1966, according to the movement’s own records, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, then a man in his seventies newly arrived from Bengal, founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the Gaudiya lineage carried across an ocean. Within a decade its saffron-robed devotees, chanting the names of Krishna, were a fixture of Western cities. The name Vasudeva-Krishna, that a Greek ambassador had cut into a pillar before the Common Era, was being sung on the far side of the world.

A quiet close

Set the whole arc down and the shape of it is strange and plain at once. A minor Vedic god who took three steps became the supreme reality of a great part of the Sanatana Dharma. He gathered four names into one, took his heart from Tamil poets who wept for him, and gave his philosophers a question about the soul that they never agreed on and never dropped.

The god grew. The devotion outran the doctrine. The name is still being sung.