The avatars of Vishnu (dashavatara)

The Bhagavad Gita states the principle: whenever righteousness declines and unrighteousness rises, Vishnu takes birth age after age to protect the good, destroy the wicked and re-establish dharma. The Sanskrit word is avatara, a descent.

The standard list of ten, the dashavatara, is not the only one; the Bhagavata Purana gives twenty-two and calls the descents innumerable. The ten in the common sequence are Matsya the fish, who saves the first man and the seeds of life from a flood; Kurma the tortoise, who supports the mountain used to churn the ocean; Varaha the boar, who lifts the earth from the waters; Narasimha the man-lion, who kills a demon protected against death by man or beast, indoors or out, by day or night, and is therefore killed at dusk on a threshold by a creature that is neither; Vamana the dwarf, who asks for three paces of ground and covers the cosmos; Parashurama, the axe-bearing brahmin who destroys a corrupt warrior class; Rama, king of Ayodhya and hero of the Ramayana; Krishna, the most consequential of all; the Buddha, whose inclusion is variously explained; and Kalki, who is still to come, at the end of the present degenerate age, on a white horse.

Some Vaishnava traditions substitute Balarama, Krishna's brother, for the Buddha, and the treatment of the Buddha in the Puranas varies from respectful to polemical, sometimes presenting him as a deliberate deception to lead the unworthy astray. The sequence from aquatic to amphibian to animal to man-beast to human has often been noticed and occasionally pressed into service as a scheme of evolution; this is a modern reading, not a traditional one.

The comparison with the Christian incarnation is unavoidable and is more misleading than helpful, and the differences are worth setting out plainly.

Number. Vishnu descends repeatedly, in every age and by some accounts innumerably. The Christian claim concerns a single event that is not repeated and could not be.

History. The Christian claim is deliberately anchored to a datable person under a named governor, and the tradition holds that if the event did not occur the faith is void. Avatars belong to cosmic time, to ages of vast length, and Hindu traditions have not generally made their salvific value depend on their historicity in the modern sense.

Constitution. An avatar is a form the deity assumes; Vishnu is not exhausted or altered by it, and remains fully himself in his own realm throughout. Christian orthodoxy insists on a permanent union of full divinity and full humanity in one person, and specifically rejected as docetism the view that the humanity was an appearance the divine put on. That rejected view is closer to some accounts of avatara than the accepted one.

Purpose. Avatars restore the moral order, defeat particular adversaries, and teach. Salvation in Christian terms is accomplished by a death and resurrection; nothing in the avatar scheme corresponds to atonement.

Within Vaishnavism the hierarchy is itself disputed. The Gaudiya tradition following Chaitanya reverses the usual order, holding Krishna to be the source of all divinity, svayam bhagavan, with Vishnu as his expansion rather than the other way round. Other schools rank the descents into full, partial and empowered forms. The Bhagavata Purana provides the material for both readings, which is one reason the argument has lasted.