FOOTNOTES
[20] See H. Raychaudhuri, Materials for the Study of the Early History of the Vaishnava Sect, p. 27.
[21] It must be admitted that ancient writers give different etymologies of the name: thus, a poet in the Mahābhārata (III. clxxxix. 3) derives it from nārāḥ, "waters," and ayanam, "going," understanding it to mean "one who has the waters for his resting-place"; Manu (I. 10, with Mēdhātithi's commentary), accepting the same etymology, interprets it as "the dwelling-place of all the Naras"; and in the Mahābhārata XII. cccxli. 39, it is also explained as "the dwelling-place of mankind." But these interpretations are plainly artificial concoctions.
[22] RV. X. cxxix. 5, ŚB. VI. i. 1, 1-5. Cf. Charpentier, Suparṇasage, p. 387.
[23] It is obvious that this island lies in a latitude somewhere between that of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, and that the professors who have endeavoured to locate it on the map of Asia have wasted their time.
[24] See Rapson, Ancient India, p. 156 ff., Cambridge Hist. India, i, pp. 521, 558, 625, H. Ray Chaudhuri, Materials for the Study of the Early History of the Vaishnava Sect, p. 59, and Ramaprasad Chanda, Archæology and Vaishnava Tradition in Memoirs of the Archæological Survey of India, No. 5, p. 151 ff., etc.
[25] See R. Chanda, ut supra, p. 152 f.
[26] It is noteworthy that Saṃkarshaṇa is here mentioned first, as is also the case in the Nanaghat inscription of about 100 b.c., which mentions them as descendants of the Moon in a list of various deities. This order may possibly be due to the fact that in ancient legend Saṃkarshaṇa, or Bala-bhadra, is the elder brother of Kṛishṇa Vāsudēva, and it does not entitle us to draw the inference that he ever received equal honour with Vāsudēva. Special devotees of Saṃkarshaṇa are mentioned in the Kauṭilīya, the famous treatise on polity ascribed to Chāṇakya, the minister of Chandra-gupta Maurya, who came to the throne about 320 b.c. (Engl. transl. 1st edn., p. 485). I suspect that in its present form the Kauṭilīya is considerably later than 320 b.c.; but in any case the existence of special votaries of Saṃkarshaṇa is no proof that he ever ranked as equal to Vāsudēva, just as the presence of special worshippers of Arjuna is no proof that Arjuna was ever considered a peer of Vāsudēva. On the Ghasundi inscription see R. Chanda, ut supra, p. 163 ff., etc.; for the Nanaghat inscription, ibidem and Memoirs of the Arch. Survey of India, No. 1, with H. Raychaudhuri's Materials, etc., p. 68 ff.
[27] R. Chanda, ut supra, p. 169 f.
[28] R. Chandra, ut supra, p. 165 f.
[29] Rapson, Catal. of the Coins of the Andhra Dynasty, etc., pp. xliv, lxii, lxix, cxxxiii-cxxxvi, clxii; Indian Antiq., xlvii, p. 85, etc.
[30] I regret that I cannot accept the ingenious hypothesis lately put forward by Rai Saheb Dineshchandra Sen in his Bengali Ramayanas. The story of the Dasaratha-jātaka seems to me to be a garbled and bowdlerised snippet cut off from a possibly pre-Vālmīkian version of the old Rāma-saga; the rest of the theory appears to be quite mistaken.
[31] On this name see above, p. 86.
[32] The student may refer to Sir R. G. Bhandarkar's Vaiṣṇavas and Śaivas (in Bühler's Grundriss, p. 74 ff.,) J. N. Farquhar's Outline of the Relig. Liter. of India, p. 234 f., 298 ff., and my Heart of India, p. 60 ff., for some details on these poets.
[33] See Farquhar, ut supra, p. 323 ff.; Heart of India, p. 49 f., etc.
[34] Those are at Pushkar in Rajputana, Dudahi in Bundelkhand, Khed Brahma in Idar State, and Kodakkal in Malabar.
[35] This idea in germ is already suggested in Maitr. Upan., IV. 5 f., and V. 2.
[36] See Vāsudēvānanda Sarasvatī's Datta-purāṇa and Gaṇēśa Nārāyaṇa Karve's Dattātrēya-sarvasva.
[37] On these figures see Gopinatha Rau, Elements of Hindu Iconography, i. p. 252 ff. The dogs seem to be connected with the Vēdic Saramā, on whom see Charpentier, Die Suparṇasage, p. 91.
[38] See Dineshchandra Sen, Folk-literature of Bengal, p. 99 ff.
CONCLUSION
Can we trace any uniform principle running through the bewildering variety of changes that we have observed?
Consider the changes through which Vishṇu has passed. At the beginning a spirit of vaguely defined personality, he appears successively as a saviour-god, as the mystic saint Nārāyaṇa, as the epic warriors Kṛishṇa and Rāma, as a wanton blue-skinned herd-boy fluting and dancing amidst a crowd of wildly amorous women, and as the noble ideal of God preached by the great Maratha and Rāmānandī votaries, not to mention the many other incarnations that have delighted the Hindu imagination. What does all this mean? It means that the history of a god is mainly moulded by two great factors, the growth of the people's spiritual experience and the character of its religious teachers. As the stream of history rolls on, it fills men's souls with deeper and wider understanding of life. Old conceptions are pondered upon, explored, tested, sometimes rejected, sometimes accepted with a new and profounder content, and thus enlarged they are applied to the old ideals of godhead. When Indian society had organised itself out of tribal chaos and settled down under an established monarchical government, it made Indra the king of the gods, ruling with the same forms and under the same conditions as a human sovereign. When men of finer cast realised that the kingdom of the spirit is higher than earthly royalty, they turned away from Indra and set their souls upon greater conceptions, ideals of vaster spiritual forces, mystic infinitudes. Attracted thus to worships such as those of Śiva and Vishṇu, they filled them with their own visions and imparted to these gods the ideals of their own strivings, making them into Yōgīśvaras, Supreme Mystics. And so the sequence of change has gone on through the generations. Most potently it has been effected by the characters of the preachers and teachers of religion. Almost every teacher who has a personality of his own, whose soul contains thoughts other than those of the common sort, stamps something of his own type upon the ideal of his god which he imparts to his followers, and which may thereby come to be authoritatively recognised as a canonical character of the god. India is peculiarly liable to this transference of personality from the guru to the god whom the guru preaches, because from immemorial times India has regarded the guru as representative of the god, and often deifies him as a permanent phase of the deity. Śaivas declare that in the guru who teaches the way of salvation Śiva himself is manifested: Vaishṇavas tell the same tale, and find a short road to salvation by surrendering their souls to him. We have seen cases of apotheosis of the guru in modern and medieval times; reasoning from the known to the unknown, we may be sure that it took place no less regularly in ancient ages, and brought about most of the surprising changes in the character of gods which we have noticed. Sometimes the gurus have only preached some new features in the characters of their gods; sometimes, as is the Hindu fashion, they have also exhibited in their own persons, their dress and equipment, their original ideas of divinity, as, for example, Lakulīśa with his club; and their sanctity and apotheosis have ratified their innovations in theology and iconology, which have spread abroad as their congregations have grown. Thus the gurus and their congregations have made the history of their deities, recasting the gods ever anew in the mould of man's hopes and strivings and ideals. There is much truth in the saying of the Brāhmaṇas: "In the beginning the gods were mortal."