Justify Bhagavatism as the Beginnings of the Bhakti School

One of the earliest religious schools centering upon a personal god who seems to have been originally a human hero was that of the Bhagavatas or the Pancharatras. It was this school which later came to be designated as Vaishnava and became one of the foremost Brahmanical creeds of India. It will be shown later on that the Vedic Aditya-Vishnu had very little to do with it in its early formative stage.

According to the epic and Puranic tradi­tions, the Bhagavatas worshipped Vasudeva Krishna, the Satvata or Vrishni chief and some of his relations. The historicity of Vasudeva Krishna has been doubted by some scholars who explain him as a mythical figure evolved out of a solar deity, a tribal god, or even a vegetation spirit euhemeristically represented in the epics and some of the Piiranas.

These views, however, rest on insufficient data, and other scholars have sug­gested on good grounds that Vasudeva Krishna was a great human hero, who was deified by his followers at an uncertain date, and who became the nucleus of a great Bhakti cult subsequently prevalent through the length and breadth of India.

It is true that innumerable myths of a supernatural character were associated with him in course of time, and these have largely obscured his origin and raised grave doubts about his historicity.

But if we separate all the later adventitious matter from his personality and only take into account the references to him found in comparatively early literature and inscriptions, we can reasonably as­sume that he was a human being who was apotheosised for certain ideal traits in his charac­ter and for his achievements. His case is similar to that of Gautama Buddha who in the early days of Indological research was regarded by some not as a great man but as a god of infinite light.

One of the earliest references to Krishna is to be found in the Chhandogya Upanishad, a major and early prose Upanishad attributable to an age previous to that of the Buddha. In this work he is represented as a pupil of Ghora, a sage of the Angirasa gotra.

Krishna is described here as the son of Devaki (Devakiputra) who learns several precepts concerning the real nature of man’s life from his teacher. That this Krishna is the same as the Vasudeva Krishna of the epics and the Puranas is clear from the fact that both are described as the ‘son of Devaki’. In the Chhan­dogya Upanishad (Book III) some facts are stated about one Mahidasa, son of Itara (Mahidasa

Aitareya) and the next chapter deals with Krishna Devakiputra, and this also appears to demonstrate the original human character of the latter. Some early Buddhist and Jain texts too show that Vasudeva was a man. The Ghata Jataka mentions Vasudeva as belonging to the royal fami­ly of Upper Madhura (Mathura), and though the name of the family is not given, there can be little doubt that it is the Vrishni one.

The Jataka gives us a garbled version of a tradition about him cur­rent among the Buddhists in early times, and rep­resents him and his brothers as the sons of Devagabbha and Upasagara. They were handed over to a man of the name of Andhakavenhu and his wife Nandagopa, an attendant of Devagabbha.

The names of the allied tribes, Andhakas and Vrishnis, and those of Krishna’s mother and foster-father are thus found in this account. The Jain text JJttaradhyayana Sutra also refers in an interesting manner to Vasudeva, also named Kesava, who was a contemporary of Arishtanemi, the twenty-second Jina, both princes of the town of Soriyapura (Sauryapura).

Kesava was the son of Devaki and king Vasudeva, while Arishtanemi was born to king Samudravijaya and Siva. The story narrated in the text is a confused one in which the principal hero is, of course, the Jina Arishtanemi, but Kesava’s (Vasudeva Krishna’s) dynastic association is correctly reported, though the references to Krishna Vasudeva in these pas­sages from the Buddhist and Jain texts are much later in point of date than the Chhandogya Upanishad.

The earliest reference to the deification of the human hero, Vasudeva, however, is found in one of the sutras of Panini’s Ashtadhyayi, in which Vasudeva and Arjuna are mentioned side by side, in connection with the rule for the derivation of the words denoting their devotees. Patanjali in commenting on the former aphorism raises this question and answers it by observing that Vasudeva in this context is not the name of a Kshatriya, but that of the worshipful one, a god.

In one manuscript of the Mahabhashya, R.G. Bhan- darkar found and suggested that here is an un­doubted reference to the god Vasudeva. The story of the fight between Vasudeva and his maternal uncle Kamsa and of the latter’s death at the hands of his nephew is also referred to in the Mahab- hashya, and was the subject of pantomimic perfor­mances in the commentator’s time.

On these occasions the performers formed themselves into two rival groups representing the Vasudevabhak- tas and the Kamsabhaktas, the former overcoming the latter. Patanjali also knew that Vasudeva Krishna was the younger brother of Samkarshana (another name of Baladeva).

Two other epithets of Samkarshana-Baladeva, namely Rama and Rauhineya, as well as another epithet of Vasudeva Krishna, i.e. Kesava, were also known to Patanjali. Thus it is clear that part of the tradition concern­ing Vasudeva Krishna and some of his relations and the clans to which they belonged were well known from the Later Vedic period onwards.

That the worship of Vasudeva was well estab­lished among some sections of Indians is proved by a few passages in the works of Megasthenes, Quintus Curtius, Strabo and other classical writers of ancient times.

Arrian, quoting from Megasthenes’s Indika, says that “Heracles is held in especial esteem by the Sourasenoi, an Indian tribe possessing two large cities, Methora and Cleisobora, the river Jobares flowing through their country. R.G. Bhandarkar long ago iden­tified the Sourasenoi with the Satvatas, and Heracles with Vasudeva.

The two cities of the Sourasenoi are no doubt Mathura and Krish- napura, so intimately associated with the Krishna tradition. The Greek form of the tribal name is evidently derived from the word Surasena, the land of which tribe was located according to the ancient Indian writers round about Mathura. Though the Uttaradhyayana sutra account of Vasudeva is somewhat confused, we may find in the city named Sauryapura a reference to this form of the tribal designation.

The Greek writers had some reason to identify their divine hero Heracles with Vasudeva, for this Indian Heracles, accord­ing to Arrian, had a very numerous progeny of male children born to him by his many wives. Ouintus Curtius records that an image of Hercules (Herakles) was carried in front of the infantry of Porus in his battle with Alexander, and that it acted as the strongest of all incentives to make the soldiers fight well.

To desert the bearers of this image was in itself a disgraceful military offence and the offenders were punishable with death. ‘Hercules’ in this passage has been identified with Krishna, and if Curtius is correct in his statement, Porus and an appreciable section of his soldiers might have been worshippers of Vasudeva Krishna.

The passages quoted above from the early texts, both indigenous and foreign; leave little doubt about the existence of Vasudeva’s cult even some time before Alexander’s invasion of India. Panini’s reference to the worshippers of Vasudeva and Arjuna brings out another interesting point in connection with it.

The epic tradition shows that Nara and Narayana, or for that matter Arjuna and Vasudeva, were great herops as well as sages; the sage-like character of one of them at least may be traced to the Vedic tradition about the Rishi Narayana, the seer of the Purushasukta. Now, hero worship was certainly at the root of the development of the Vasudeva cult, as it was also the basis of some other cults of india, like those of the Buddha and Mahavira.

It can be demonstrated with the help of some early texts and inscriptions that the worship of Vasudeva Krishna and some of his relations as hero-gods (viras) was prevalent some time before and even some time after the tenets of the Bhagavata cult were formulated and systematised.

The worship of the divine heroes (viras) was at first one of the most important features of the cult, and a number of them came to be somewhat stereotyped at one of its early evolutionary stages. Arjuna, who was a Pandava, found no place in this list though it contained the names of Samkarshana or Baladeva, Vasudeva Krishna, Pradyumna, Samba, and Aniruddha, all of whom belonged to the Vrishni clan and were closely related to one another.

Both Samkarshana and Vasudeva were the sons of Vasudeva by different wives (Rohini and Devaki), Pradyumna and Samba were the two sons of Vasudeva, Pradyumna born to Rukmini and Samba to Jambavati, while Aniruddha was the son of Pradyumna. The epic and puranic tradition proves clearly that they were originally human beings who were raised to the position of gods.

The Vayu Purana, one of the oldest of the Puranas, says that the gods who were human by nature (manushyaprakriti) were Samkarshana and the four others just mentioned, and that they were celebrated as the ‘five heroes of the clan’, evident­ly the Vrishni clan. Most of these heroes had none of the cult significance which the aforesaid five Vrishniviras undoubtedly possessed. This is fully borne out by earlier epigraphic data, one of which refers to their images.

The Mora Well inscription of the time of Mahakshatrapa Sodasa (early first century A.D.) refers to the enshrinement in a stone temple by a woman named Tosha, of foreign extraction, of the images of the five holy Vrish­niviras (bhagavatam vrishninam panchaviranam pratima). It will be presently shown that with the exception of Somba, the fourth in this list, they constitute the four primary vyudhas or emanatory forms of the highest god (Para Vasudeva).