Where did this new spirit come from? Some have laboured to prove that it had its source in Christianity; others have argued that it was Christianity that was the debtor to India in this respect. Both theories are in the main impossible. This cult of the child Kṛishṇa arose in India, and, with the possible exception of a few obscure tales, it never spread outside the circle of Indian religion. But how and where did it arise? That is a question hard to answer; there is no direct evidence, and we can only balance probabilities. Now what are the probabilities?
The worship of Kṛishṇa as a babe, a boy, and a young man among the herdsfolk of Vraja seems to have no relation with the older form of the religion as set forth in the epic textbooks. It is a new element, imported from without. The most natural conclusion then is that it came from the people who are described in it, some tribe that pastured their herds in the woodlands near Mathurā. Perhaps these herdsfolk were Ābhīras, ancestors of the modern Āhīr tribes. If so, it would be natural that their cult should attract attention; for sometimes Ābhīras counted for something in society, and we even find a short-lived dynasty of Ābhīra kings reigning in Nasik in the third century a.d.[29] Be this as it may, it seems very likely that some pastoral tribe had a cult of a divine child blue or black of hue, and perhaps actually called by them Kṛishṇa or Kaṇha, "Black-man" (observe that henceforth Kṛishṇa is regularly represented with a blue skin), a cult in which gross rustic fantasy had free play; that it came in some circles to be linked on to the epic cycle of Kṛishṇa Vāsudēva; and that some Bhāgavatas, seeing in it latent possibilities, gave it polished literary expression and thereby established it as a part of the Vāsudēva legend. It quickly seized upon the popular imagination and spread like wild-fire over India. For it satisfied many needs. The tenderness of the father and still more of the mother for the little babe, their delight in the sports of childhood, the amorist's pleasure in erotic adventure, and, not by any means least, the joy in the romantic scenery of the haunted woodlands—all these instincts found full play in it, and were sanctified by religion.
II. Rāma
Rāma is the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa, the great epic ascribed to Vālmīki, a poet who in course of time has passed from the realm of history into that of myth, like many other Hindus. The poem, as it has come down to us, contains seven books, which relate the following tale. Daśa-ratha, King of Ayōdhyā (now Ajodhya, near Faizabad), of the dynasty which claimed descent from the Sun-god, had no son, and therefore held the great Aśva-mēdha, or horse-sacrifice, as a result of which he obtained four sons, Rāma by his queen Kauśalyā, Bharata by Kaikēyī, and Lakshmaṇa and Śatrughna by Sumitrā. Rāma, the eldest, was also pre-eminent for strength, bravery, and noble qualities of soul. Visiting in his early youth the court of Janaka, king of Vidēha, Rāma was able to shoot an arrow from Janaka's bow, which no other man could bend, and as a reward he received as wife the princess Sītā, whom Janaka had found in a furrow of his fields and brought up as his own daughter. So far the first book, or Bāla-kāṇḍa. The second book, or Ayōdhyā-kāṇḍa, relates how Queen Kaikēyī induced Daśa-ratha, sorely against his will, to banish Rāma to the forests in order that her son Bharata might succeed to the throne; and the Araṇya-kāṇḍa then describes how Rāma, accompanied by his wife Sītā and his faithful brother Lakshmaṇa, dwelt in the forest for a time, until the demon King Rāvaṇa of Laṅkā, by means of a trick, carried off Sītā to his city. The Kishkindhā-kāṇḍa tells of Rāma's pursuit of Rāvaṇa and his coming to Kishkindhā, the city of Sugrīva, the king of the apes, who joined him as an ally in his expedition; and the Sundara-kāṇḍa describes the march of their armies to Laṅkā, which is identified with Ceylon, and their crossing over the straits. Then comes the Yuddha-kāṇḍa, which narrates the war with Rāvaṇa, his death in battle, the restoration of Sītā, the return of Rāma and Sītā to Ayōdhyā, and the crowning of Rāma in place of Daśa-ratha, who had died of grief during his exile. Finally comes the Uttara-kāṇḍa, which relates that Rāma, hearing some of the people of Ayōdhyā spitefully casting aspersions on the virtue of Sītā during her imprisonment in the palace of Rāvaṇa, gave way to foolish jealousy and banished her to the hermitage of Vālmīki, where she gave birth to twin sons, Kuśa and Lava; when these boys had grown up, Vālmīki taught them the Rāmāyaṇa and sent them to sing it at the court of Rāma, who on hearing it sent for Sītā, who came to him accompanied by Vālmīki, who assured him of her purity; and then Sītā swore to it on oath, calling upon her mother the Earth-goddess to bear witness; and the Earth-goddess received her back into her bosom, leaving Rāma bereaved, until after many days he was translated to heaven.
Such is the tale of Rāma as told in the Vālmīki-rāmāyaṇa—a clean, wholesome story of chivalry, love, and adventure. But clearly the Vālmīki-rāmāyaṇa is not the work of a single hand. We can trace in it at least two strata. Books II.-VI. contain the older stratum; the rest is the addition of a later poet or series of poets, who have also inserted some padding into the earlier books. This older stratum, the nucleus of the epic, gives us a picture of heroic society in India at a very early date, probably not very long after the age of the Upanishads; perhaps we shall not be far wrong if we say it was composed some time before the fourth century b.c. In it Rāma is simply a hero, miraculous in strength and goodness, but nevertheless wholly human; but in the later stratum—Books I. and VII. and the occasional insertions in the other books—conditions are changed, and Rāma appears as a god on earth, a partial incarnation of Vishṇu, exactly as in the Bhagavad-gītā and other later parts of the Mahābhārata the hero Kṛishṇa has become an incarnation of Vishṇu also. The parallel may even be traced further. Kṛishṇa stands to Arjuna in very much the same relation as Rāma to his brother Lakshmaṇa—a greater and a lesser hero, growing into an incarnate god and his chief follower. This is thoroughly in harmony with Hindu ideas, which regularly conceive the teacher as accompanied by his disciple and abhor the notion of a voice crying in the wilderness; indeed we may almost venture to suspect that this symmetry in the epics is not altogether uninfluenced by this ideal. This, however, is a detail: the main point to observe is that Rāma was originally a local hero of the Solar dynasty, a legendary king of Ayōdhyā, and as the Purāṇas give him a full pedigree, there is no good reason to doubt that he really existed "once upon a time." But the story with which he is associated in the Rāmāyaṇa is puzzling. Is it a pure romance? Or is it a glorified version of some real adventures? Or can it be an old tale, perhaps dating from the early dawn of human history, readapted and fitted on to the person of an historical Rāma? The first of these hypotheses seems unlikely, though by no means impossible. The second suggestion has found much favour. Many have believed that the story of the expedition of Rāma and his army of apes to Laṅkā represents a movement of the Aryan invaders from the North towards the South; and this is supported to some extent by Indian tradition, which has located most of the places mentioned in the Rāmāyaṇa, and in particular has identified Laṅkā with Ceylon. In support of this one may point to the Iliad of Homer, which has a somewhat similar theme, the rape and recovery of Helen by the armies of the Achæans, the basis of which is the historical fact of an expedition against Troy and the destruction of that city. But there are serious difficulties in the way of accepting this analogy, the most serious of all being the indubitable fact that there is not a tittle of evidence to show that such an expedition was ever made by the Aryans. True, there were waves of emigration from Aryan centres southward in early times; but those that travelled as far as Ceylon went by sea, either from the coasts of Bengal or Orissa or Bombay. Besides, the expedition of Rāma is obviously fabulous, for his army was composed not of Aryans but of apes. All things considered, there seems to be most plausibility in the third hypothesis[30]. Certainly Rāma was a local hero of Ayōdhyā, and probably he was once a real king; so it is likely enough that an old saga (or sagas) attached itself early to his memory. And as his fame spread abroad, principally on the wings of Vālmīki's poem, the honours of semi-divinity began to be paid to him in many places beyond his native land, and about the beginning of our era he was recognised as an incarnation of Vishṇu sent to establish a reign of righteousness in the world. In Southern India this cult of Rāma, like that of Kṛishṇa, has for the most part remained subordinate to the worship of Vishṇu, though the Vaishṇava church there has from early times recognised the divinity of both of them as embodiments of the Almighty. But its great home is the North, where millions worship Rāma with passionate and all-absorbing love.
III. Some Later Preachers
With all its attractions and success, the new Kṛishṇaism did not everywhere overgrow the older stock upon which it had been engrafted. There were many places in which the early worship of Vishṇu and Vāsudēva remained almost unchanged. The new legends of Kṛishṇa's childhood might indeed be accepted in these centres of conservatism, but they made little difference in the spirit and form of the worship, which continued to follow the ancient order. In some of them the Bhagavad-gītā, Nārāyaṇīya, and other epic doctrinals still remained the standard texts, which theologians connected with the ancient Upanishads and the Brahma-sūtra summarising the latter; in other centres there arose, beginning perhaps about the seventh century a.d., a series of Saṃhitās, or manuals of doctrine and practice for the Pāñcharātra[31] sect, which, though in essentials agreeing with the Nārāyaṇīya, taught a different theory of cosmogony and introduced the worship of the goddess Śrī or Lakshmī, the consort of Vishṇu, as the agency or energy through which the Supreme Being becomes active in finite existence; and in yet other places other texts were followed, such as those of the Vaikhānasa school. This worship of Vishṇu-Vāsudēva on the ancient lines was peculiarly vigorous among the representatives of Aryan culture in the South, who had introduced the cults of Vishṇu and Śiva with the rest of the Aryan pantheon into the midst of Dravidian animism. Hinduism, transplanted into the Dravidian area, has there remained more conservative than anywhere else, and has clung firmly to its ancient traditions. There is nothing of Dravidian origin in the South Indian worship of Vishṇu and Śiva; they are entirely Aryan importations. But they have become thoroughly assimilated in their southern home, and each of them has produced a huge mass of fine devotional literature in the vernaculars. In the Tamil country the church of Vishṇu boasts of the Nāl-āyira-prabandham, a collection of Tamil psalms numbering about 4,000 stanzas composed by twelve poets called Ālvārs, which were collected about 1000 a.d.; and the worship of 'Siva is equally well expressed in the Tiru-muṛai, compiled about the twelfth century, of which one section, the Dēvāram, was put together about the same time as the Nāl-āyira-prabandham. Both the Tiru-muṛai and the Nāl-āyira-prabandham breathe the same spirit of ecstatic devotion as the Bhāgavata-purāṇa; they are the utterances of wandering votaries who travelled from temple to temple and poured forth the passionate raptures of their souls in lyrical praise of their deities. Through these three main channels the stream of devotion spread far and wide through the land. Like most currents of what we call "revivalism," it usually had an erotic side; and the larger temples frequently have attached to them female staffs of attendant votaries and corps de ballet of very easy virtue. But this aspect was far more marked in neo-Kṛishṇaism, which often tends to intense pruriency, than in the other two cults. The Ālvārs pay little regard to the legends of Kṛishṇa, and concentrate their energies upon the worship of Vishṇu as he is represented in the great temples of Srirangam, Conjevaram, Tirupati, and similar sanctuaries.
About the beginning of the ninth century the peaceful course of Vaishṇava religion was rudely disturbed by the preaching of Śaṃkara Āchārya. Śaṃkara, one of the greatest intellects that India has ever produced, was a Brahman of Malabar, and was born about the year 788. Taking his stand upon the Upanishads, Brahma-sūtra, and Bhagavad-gītā, upon which he wrote commentaries, he interpreted them as teaching the doctrine of Advaita, thorough monistic idealism, teaching that the universal Soul, Brahma, is absolutely identical with the individual Soul, the ātmā or Self, that all being is only one, that salvation consists in the identification of these two, and is attained by knowledge, the intuition of their identity, and that the phenomenal universe or manifold of experience is simply an illusion (māyā) conjured up in Brahma by his congenital nature, but really alien to him—in fact, a kind of disease in Brahma. This was not new: it had been taught by some ancient schools of Aupanishadas, and was very like the doctrine of some of the Buddhist idealists; but the vigour and skill with which Śaṃkara propagated his doctrines threatened ruin to orthodox Vaishṇava theologians, and roused them to counter-campaigns. Among the Vaishṇava Brahmans of the South who won laurels in this field was Yāmunāchārya, who lived about 1050, and was the grandson of Nātha Muni, who collected the hymns of the Ālvārs in the Nāl-āyira-prabandham and founded the great school of Vaishṇava theology at Srirangam. In opposition to Śaṃkara's monism, Yāmunāchārya propounded the doctrine of his school, the so-called Viśishṭādvaita, which was preached with still greater skill and success by his famous successor Rāmānuja, who died in 1137. Rāmānuja's greatest works are his commentaries on the Brahma-sūtra and Bhagavad-gītā. In them he expounds with great ability the principles of his school, namely, that God, sentient beings or souls, and insentient matter form three essentially distinct classes of being; that God, who is the same as Brahma, Vishṇu, Nārāyaṇa, or Kṛishṇa, is omnipotent, omnipresent, and possessed of all good qualities; that matter forms the body of souls, and souls form the body of God; that the soul attains salvation as a result of devout and loving meditation upon God, worship of him, and study of the scriptures; and that salvation consists in eternal union of the soul with God, but not in identity with him, as Śaṃkara taught. The scriptures on which Rāmānuja took his stand were mainly the Upanishads, Brahma-sūtra, and Bhagavad-gītā; but he also acknowledged as authoritative the Pāñcharātra Saṃhitās, in spite of their divergences in details of doctrine, and it is from them that his church has derived the worship of Śrī or Lakshmī as consort of Vishṇu, which is a very marked feature of their community and has gained for them the title of Śrī-vaishṇavas. But Rāmānuja was much more than a scholar and a writer of books; he was also a man of action, a "practical mystic." Like Śaṃkara, he organised a body of sannyāsīs or ascetic votaries, into which, however, he admitted only Brahmans, whereas Śaṃkara opened some of the sections of his devotees to non-Brahmans; but on the other hand he was far more liberal than Śaṃkara in the choice of his congregations, for he endeavoured to bring men of the lowest castes, Śūdras and even Pariahs, within the influence of his church, though he kept up the social barrier between them and the higher castes, and he firmly upheld the principle of the Bhagavad-gītā that it is by the performance of religious and social duties of caste, and not by knowledge alone, that salvation is most surely to be won. He established schools and monasteries, reorganised the worship of the temples, usually in accordance with the Pāñcharātra rules, and thus placed his church in a position of such strength in Southern India that its only serious rival is the church of Śiva.
Nimbārka, who probably flourished about the first half of the twelfth century, preached for the cult of Kṛishṇa a doctrine combining monism with dualism, which is followed by a small sect in Northern India. Ānanda-tīrtha or Madhva, in the first three quarters of the thirteenth century, propounded for the same church a theory of thorough dualism, which has found many admirers, chiefly in the Dekkan. Vallabhāchārya, born in 1479, founded a school of Kṛishṇa-worshippers which claims a "pure monism" without the aid of the theory of māyā, or illusion, which is a characteristic of Śaṃkara's monism. This community has become very influential, chiefly in Bombay Presidency; but in recent times it has been under a cloud owing to the scandals arising from a tendency to practise immoral orgies and from the claims of its priesthood, as representing the god, to enjoy the persons and property of their congregations.
Besides these and other schools which were founded on a basis of Sanskrit scholastic philosophy, there have been many popular religious movements, which from the first appealed directly to the heart of the people in their own tongues.