To understand the nature of hero worship in the early Bhagavata cult in its relation to the developed tenets, some idea is necessary of the essentials of the latter as adumbrated in a few of the authoritative Pancharatra Samhitas.
The earliest of these treatises seem to have been composed in the first centuries of the Christian era when the bulk of the Mahabharata along with its ‘Narayaniya’ section must have taken its present shape.
The one God Vasudeva, the highest object of worship to a bhagavata, was conceived in his five-fold aspects, para, vyuha, vibhava, an- taryamin, and archa. Para is the highest aspect of the Lord, the next two being his emanatory and incarnatory forms respectively; his antaryamin aspect characterises him as the inner controller of the actions of every individual, the archa form referring to his concrete images regarded by the Pancharatrins as his auspicious bodies (srivigrahas).
Much of this can be traced in the Bhagavadgita which gives the first systematic exposition of the ekantika dharma centring on Krishna Vasudeva. Vasudeva Krishna, the one object of devotion to Arjuna, corresponds to his para aspect while the vibhava and antaryamin aspects are also described in its several sections. But the vyuha concept of the Lord does not seem to have been developed when this work was composed.
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The ideology underlying the vyuhavada mainly centred upon the topic of’ pure creation’ (suddha-srishti), i.e., the creation of the six ideal gunas, namely jnana, aisvarya, sakti, bala, virya and tejas. According to this notion, Lord Vasudeva as the highest god wills his consort Sri Lakshmi in her dual aspects of being and acting (bhuti and kriya) to create the ideal gunas; thus from the Lord’s will (ichchhasakti or the efficient cause), and Lakshmi’s twofold forms (bhutisakti and kriyasak- i.e. the material and instrumental causes) originate the six-fold ideal qualities which are at the root of all creation, pure or subtle and gross or material, in all the later stages.
The gunas or virtues come under two principal groups of three each, the first three (jnana or knowledge, aisvarya or lordship and sakti or potency) forming the first group of visrama bhumayah (stages of rest), and the second three (bala or strength, virya or virility and tejas or splendour), the second group of Sramabliumayah (stages of action).
When the individual qualities of opposite groups pair together as jnana with bala, aisvarya with virya, and sakti with tejas, a further advance is made in the process of creation; they are thus divided into three separate pairs.
Regarded in their totality as well as by pairs, they are materials or instruments of suddha-srishti (the body of the highest god Para Vasudeva, constituting all the gunas), and in the bodies of the three vyuhas, Samkarshana, Pradyumna and Aniruddha, each of the three pairs of qualities are manifest.
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From Para Vasudeva is supposed to emanate Vyuha Vasudeva, who possesses the full measure of all the six qualities (shad-gunyavigraham devam); Samkarshana, Pradyumna and Aniruddha then emanating each one from its immediate predecessor.
Though in each of these three primary emanations, two qualities apiece are pre-eminently manifest, they participate in the four other qualities also, but only in an incipient manner. It should also be noted that in the vyuha doctrine, Vasudeva was invariably given the order of precedence, his elder brother enjoying only a secondary position as an emanatory aspect of his younger brother.
Introduction of Vyuha Doctrine in the cult- the elimination of the worship of Samba: The question may now be asked, at what period was the vyuha worship introduced in the Bhagavata cult? The earliest reference to the vyuha doctrine is found by some scholars in the Brahmasutra but it must be noted that it is only in the commentaries thereupon of Sankaracharya and Ramanuja that the tenet is clearly mentioned.
In Patanjali’s time it may have reached an early formative stage. In any case, Patanjali uses the compound Rama-Kesava in his commentary on Panini; and elsewhere in his Bhashya he describes Krishna as second to Samkarshana. It thus appears that Patanjali was more aware of the worship of the viras than of the vyuhas.
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The extant inscriptions also prove that in the second to the first century B.C., and even as late as the beginning of the first century A.D., Viravada was the more prominent. The Besnagar inscription (c. second century B.C.) of Heliodorus, the ambassador of Antialcidas, the Indo-Greek king of Taxila, to the Sunga king Kasiputra Bhagabhadra of Vidisa, refers only to Devadeva Vasudeva, the chosen god of Heliodorus – a convert to the Bhagavata creed – and makes no mention of other personal deities of the cult.
But the Nagari inscription of King Sar- vatata (also of the same period) tells of his erection of stone walls round the shrines of Samkarshana and Vasudeva. The order in which the two names are placed in the last record probably shows that in this context, they are not two of the Vyuhas, but two of the prominent Vrishni-viras.
The vyuha doctrine may have been only of recent growth in the second century B.C., and thus not stereotyped at that time when the practice of Vira worship was more in vogue. This seems to be borne out by the absence of any reference to it in the Bhagavadgita, a work which comparatively recent scholarship dates in the third to the second century B.C.
This view seems to be further corroborated by the Nanaghat cave inscription of Nayanika, queen of Sri Satakarni, the third in the puranic list of the Satavahana kings. Among the various gods invoked, there occur the names of Samkarshana and in the correct dynastic order.
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The above-mentioned inscriptions of a comparatively early date testify to the existence of the Vasudeva Krishna cult in different parts of India. More evidence of the same kind must have been lost, and had all the inscriptions been extant; they would have presented us with a more complete picture of the wide prevalence of the cult.
The regions of India which were more intimately associated with it were Mathura, the Surasena country and Vidisa in Central India. Several fragmentary inscriptions of the first century B.C. have been discovered at modern Besnagar (ancient Vidisa) in Bhopal, which refer to the excellent temple of the Bhagavat.
The structure thus defined evidently denotes a Vasudeva shrine, and it is presumable that many such temples were in the locality from a period much earlier than the first century B.C. It was evidently in front of one of these that the Yavana duta Heliodorus, himself a bhagavata by faith, erected that noble column, the Garuda-dhvaja.
The Garuda capital of the inscribed columns is missing, but another Garuda- shaped capital of a shaft has been discovered there. Two other crowning pieces of columns, whose shafts are missing, found at the same place, show its association with the Bhagavata cult. These are shaped, one as a tala (fan-palm) and the other as a makara (crocodile), and these tala and makara-dhvajas were undoubtedly dedicated to two of Krishna’s kinsmen (also his emanatory forms).
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Two other massive stone sculptures of the third to the second century B.C., discovered by Cunningham at Besnagar within sixty yards of each other, may be described, one as an image of the goddess Sri Lakshmi intimately associated with the Bhagavata cult, and the other as a banyan capital containing the ashtanidhis over which she was the presiding deity. The traditional association of Mathura with Vasudeva Krishna is well known from early indigenous and foreign texts; archaeological finds also significantly corroborate the fact.
One of the earliest images of Samkarshana (Balarama), now in the Lucknow Museum collection, comes from Mathura and has been dated in the second century B.C. The number of snake hoods of the deity with the drinking vessel and ploughshare in his hands shows his association with the Naga cult as well (Balarama is sometimes regarded as an incarnation of Ananta Naga, a Parshada or companion of Vasudeva Vishnu) and likewise his bucolic character.
It was perhaps this aspect of the god which commended his separate worship to a certain section of people who are described by Kautilya in his Arthashastra as a class of ascetics “with shaved head or braided hair”. More than one inscription of the first century A.D. has been found in the Mathura region, connected with the Vasudeva cult.