Vishnu

In the Rigveda Vishnu is a minor god: barely one whole hymn belongs to him. What that hymn gives him is the gesture that will be his for ever, the three strides: “I will declare the mighty deeds of Vishnu, of him who measured out the earthly regions… thrice setting down his footstep”, and “within whose three wide-extended paces all living creatures have their habitation” (I, 154). The hymns associate him with the sun, though the text never calls him a solar god, and the collection was composed around 1500-1000 BCE, not before. That he is one of the Adityas, the sons of Aditi, is not in the Rigveda: the Vedic list names Mitra, Aryaman, Bhaga, Varuna, Daksha and Amsha (II, 27). Vishnu enters that list with the Puranas, and the Vishnu Purana (I, 15) puts him first among the twelve sons of Kashyapa and Aditi. The Trimurti (Brahma who creates, Vishnu who preserves and Rudra who destroys) is already formulated in that same Purana (I, 4), comes from the Gupta period and is rooted in the Maitri Upanishad; it was never a cult but a theological scheme, and Brahma never attained the standing of the other two. Vishnu, moreover, is not born: he is. What his literature tells is not his origin but his descents.

The canonical list of ten runs: Matsya the fish, Kurma the tortoise, Varaha the boar, Narasimha the man-lion, Vamana the dwarf, Parashurama, Rama, Krishna, the Buddha and Kalki, who has not yet come. The oldest dated enumeration is not in a book but in a seventh-century inscription in the Adivaraha cave at Mahabalipuram, and there the eighth is not Krishna but Balarama; that place still changes from school to school. Matsya saves the sage Manu from the flood, though in the oldest version, the Mahabharata's, the fish introduces itself saying “I am Brahma”: the attribution to Vishnu is later. Kurma serves as the pivot under Mount Mandara while the ocean is churned, and Varaha lifts on his tusks the earth sunk in the waters (Vishnu Purana I, 9 and I, 4). Narasimha kills Hiranyakashipu (I, 20). Vamana, the dwarf who grows until he covers the world, is the Vedic myth of the three strides turned into an avatar. From Rama and Krishna come the two great poems, and it is Krishna who tells Arjuna: “whenever piety declines and impiety rises, then do I create myself” (Mahabharata, Bhishma Parva XXVIII). Kalki will be born in the village of Sambhala, in the house of the brahmin Vishnuyashas, and will close the Kali Yuga (Vishnu Purana IV, 24); the white horse is a late detail, for the Bhagavata Purana gives him a mount named Devadatta and the colour comes from the Kalki Purana and from iconography.

Lakshmi goes with him in every descent, and the Vishnu Purana says so plainly: when he was the dwarf she was Padma; when he was the Rama of Bhrigu's line she was Dharani; when he was Ramachandra she was Sita; when he was Krishna she was Rukmini; “if he takes a celestial form, she appears as divine; if a mortal, she becomes a mortal too” (I, 9). He rests on Shesha, the thousand-headed serpent the gods call Ananta (II, 5); that this couch floats on an ocean of milk is a later refinement, since the Purana says only “the ocean”. His two most famous temples do not show him alike: at the Padmanabhaswamy of Thiruvananthapuram he reclines on the serpent, while at Tirupati, the most visited shrine in India, he stands. Vaishnavas revere him as the supreme Being and recite the Vishnu Sahasranama, his thousand names. About Diwali one should be exact: the most widespread custom is lighting lamps for Lakshmi; in the north the festival also celebrates Rama's return to Ayodhya, and in the south Krishna's victory over Narakasura. And the Buddha entered the avatar lists between the fifth and eighth centuries with a polemical purpose: the Vishnu Purana itself (III, 17-18) presents him as an illusory form sent out to lead the demons astray. Buddhists never accepted that reading.