Vishnu has over a thousand names and returns as a fish, boar and man-lion
His name means all-pervading, and one ancient grammarian glossed it as the one who enters everywhere. Hindu tradition says whenever chaos threatens, Vishnu comes down in a new form to set the world right. Lists of those forms run from ten to forty-two, and his named epithets top a thousand.
Within the Trimurti, the divine triad that includes Brahma and Shiva, Vishnu is the Preserver, while for his own devotees he is the supreme lord who creates, protects and transforms everything. His consort Lakshmi is his equal partner. A classic peaceful image shows him resting on Shesha, a coiled serpent standing for time, afloat on a primeval ocean of milk. Fearsome depictions exist as well.
Early on he was a modest figure. Only 5 of the Rigveda's 1,028 hymns are devoted to him, far fewer than to Indra or Agni. The scholar Jan Gonda argued he must have mattered more than the texts suggest, perhaps among ordinary people, and his standing climbed from the middle of the first millennium BCE as local gods such as Vasudeva-Krishna and Narayana were absorbed into his identity.
The ten principal avatars, the Dashavatara, follow a rough sequence: fish, tortoise, boar, man-lion and dwarf, then the warrior Parasurama, Rama, Krishna, a disputed ninth slot filled by either the Buddha or Balarama, and finally Kalki, yet to come. Several Puranas give matching versions of the ten, but others count differently: the Bhagavata Purana lists 22 in one canto, and the Manava Purana names 42. Rama and Krishna draw the most worship, and many Vaishnavas treat Krishna as the ultimate source of all gods, Vishnu included.
The names multiply too. The Padma Purana gives 108, and the Vishnu Sahasranama, found in the Mahabharata and the Garuda Purana, lists over a thousand, each naming a quality. In the Tamil south he merged with Mayon, the dark one, praised in Sangam poetry dated between 200 BCE and 500 CE as creator, sustainer and destroyer. As Perumal he is venerated at Tirupati as Venkateshwara and at Srirangam as Ranganathaswamy.
Source: Vishnu
