Hinduism's largest sect grew by merging several local gods into Vishnu
In the Rig Veda, Vishnu is a minor sun god who appears in only a handful of hymns. Today his worshippers number about 399 million, the biggest Hindu tradition. The route from footnote to supreme being ran through mergers: tribal heroes and cowherd deities absorbed into one god through the idea of avatars.
Vaishnavism treats Vishnu as the highest being, above every other Hindu deity, and includes branches that put Krishna or Rama at the centre. Its origins are murky and the evidence scanty. The broad picture is that several non-Vedic devotional cults, notably those of Vasudeva-Krishna, Gopala-Krishna and Narayana, took shape between the 7th and 4th centuries BCE and were later linked to the Vedic Vishnu. The avatar doctrine sealed the arrangement by recasting those separate gods as incarnations of one supreme deity.
Scholars reconstruct the mergers differently. R. N. Dandekar describes a cult of Vasudeva, a deified leader of the Vrishni clan, fused with Krishna, hero of the related Yadavas, and later with the cowherd god Gopala-Krishna in the 4th century CE; this larger Krishna tradition then adopted Vishnu to win orthodox acceptance. Jan Gonda thinks Vishnu may always have been more popular than the Vedas suggest, embodying an idea of all-pervading energy. The Bhagavad Gita, argues Friedhelm Hardy, began as a Krishna scripture before being folded into the Mahabharata.
In the south, a collection of Sangam-era Tamil poems published by U. V. Swaminatha Iyer includes seven poems praising Vishnu. The Pallava dynasty backed both Vaishnavism and Shaivism, and was the first of many dynasties to endow the temple of Venkateswara at Tirumala, which became South India's most revered shrine. The teacher Ramanuja is credited with converting the Hoysala king Vishnuvardhana from Jainism, anchoring the faith in Karnataka.
Devotional love for an avatar, most often Krishna, made the tradition a driving force of the Bhakti movement during the 2nd millennium CE. Four medieval philosophical schools interpret it, founded by Ramanuja, Madhvacharya, Nimbarkacharya and Vallabhacharya. Ramananda's 14th-century movement centred on Rama is now the largest monastic group in Asia. The 399 million estimate comes from the World Religion Database for 2020.
Source: Vaishnavism
