The Lord and His nature

Avatāra means a coming down. In the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition, which also calls it vibhava, the Lord comes down into the world without ceasing to be what He is, and takes birth in a form that suits the time and the need: the fish, the tortoise, the boar, the man-lion, the dwarf, Paraśurāma, Rāma, Balarāma, Kṛṣṇa and Kalki, who is told of as coming at the end of the present age. These ten are the descents counted most often; the lists differ in places, and the Śrīvaiṣṇava reckoning gives the eighth and ninth places to Balarāma and Kṛṣṇa. The tradition counts lesser descents as well, such as the sage Kapila, the Swan who taught Brahmā, and the twin sages Nara and Nārāyaṇa.

He comes, He Himself says in the Gītā, whenever dharma fails and wrong rises, to protect the good, to put down the wicked and to set dharma firm again. The teachers add that the body He takes is His own, taken by His own will and not made of the matter that binds ordinary beings, and that He comes for those who cannot reach Him by their own strength.

The hymn meets the descents in the deeds its names recall: the Bowman who bent His bow as Rāma, and the Bearer of the great mountain. Some names speak of them outright. He takes the forms of the avatāras and appears in the shape each devotee can love; He shows a clear form to those who love Him, in the descents and in the image in the temple; He dwells in body after body as the inner Self and comes again and again in His descents. The Śrīvaiṣṇava commentary hears whole runs of names as one descent or another, and counts the descent as one of the five ways in which the Lord is known, after His supreme form and the array.

Bhagavān means one who has bhaga: good fortune, glory, excellence in full measure. As a word of honour it is used of gods, saints and revered teachers, and the hymn gives it to the seer Vyāsa too, as a title of reverence; but the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition keeps its fullest sense for the Lord, in whom the excellences are whole and without fault, and calls Him, with love, simply Bhagavān.

The excellences are counted as six: knowledge, strength, lordship, valour, power and splendour. One who has all six, whole and untouched by fault, is Bhagavān, as the Viṣṇu Purāṇa teaches. A second counting in the same Purāṇa gives lordship, valour, glory, Śrī, knowledge and dispassion. The Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition shares the first six among the four arrays, holding all of them full in Vāsudēva. The name in the hymn is explained with them, and the next name, Bhagahā, shows the other side: at the end of an age the glory that creatures held for a while is taken back by the One who lent it.

Parāśara Bhaṭṭar's commentary takes its title from the same word: it is the Mirror of the Qualities of the Bhagavān, the Lord who has them all. The word stands in the Vāsudēva mantra of the meditation verses, 'Salutation to the Lord Vāsudēva', and it introduces the Lord's own reply to Arjuna near the close, 'Śrī Bhagavān said', where Śrī joins the word as a mark of honour.

Brahmā, with a long final vowel, is the four-faced Creator of the worlds. The tradition tells that a lotus rose from the navel of the Lord as He rested on the waters, and that Brahmā was born in it; this is why the hymn calls Him Padmanābha, the Lotus-navelled, and Prapitāmaha, the great-grandfather, since Brahmā is called the grandfather of the worlds. The word is not to be mixed with Brahman, the Supreme Reality, who is the Lord Himself, nor with brahma, the Vēda and austerity: the three are easily mistaken for one another.

The Śrīvaiṣṇava teaching holds Brahmā to be a soul, one of the beings the Lord has made, to whom He gave the great office of shaping the worlds at each beginning, and to whom He gave the Vēdas. The Lord is the inner Self of Brahmā, and so the true Maker. Bhaṭṭar reads the name Brahmakṛt Brahmā in this light: He is the Great One who made Brahmā, the maker of great things. Nammāḻvār sings that the Lord made the four-faced Brahmā so that Brahmā might make all else. The closing verses give Brahmā a voice of his own, in a homage to the Endless One of a thousand forms and a thousand names; the one who made the worlds bows to the One who made him.

Brahman is the Highest Reality, the great one beyond all measure; the word comes from bṛh, to grow, and means that which is great and makes great. In this hymn Brahman is the Lord Himself. Bhīṣma says He is the highest and greatest Brahman; the nyāsa names the supreme Brahman, who is bliss, as the source of the recitation; and the phalaśruti says that the mortal who takes refuge in Vāsudēva goes to the eternal Brahman. In the tradition's understanding, the one who goes there reaches the very One to whom he held.

Three words that sound alike must be kept apart, and the table shows them. The hymn itself plays on the likeness in its seventy-first śloka, where brahma, Brahmā and Brahman stand side by side in the names.

The Śrīvaiṣṇava teachers, with Bhaṭṭar, hear the name Brahma in this way: He is called Brahman because He is great and makes others great. They stress that His greatness is the greatness of His countless good qualities, of His own nature and of all that is His, and that in His mercy He raises those who come to Him.

In the Bhagavad Gītā the body is called the field, kṣētra, and the one who knows it the knower of the field, kṣētrajña. The hymn uses the words twice. Among the Lord's names is Kṣētrajña, the Knower of the field of every body, for He knows every such field and the soul within it as no other can; and near the end the verse on the senses, the mind and the understanding names the body that is the field and the soul that knows it, and says that all of these have Vāsudēva as their inner Self. The Lord says in the Gītā that He too is the Knower of the field, in all fields.

So there are two knowers. The soul knows its own body as its field, and the Lord knows all the fields and all the souls, since He is the Self within them. Bhaṭṭar, reading the name beside those near it, hears the word also in another way, kṣētra as the place where the freed find their joy in Him, and the Knower as the One who knows that place and leads them there.

Guṇa means a quality, and its first sense is a strand of a cord. The hymn meets it in two ways, and they are kept apart. When Bhīṣma says the names are gauṇāni, names that tell of qualities, every name is a guṇa of the Lord: an excellence that belongs to Him by nature, such as His mercy, His power or His truth. The tradition counts these qualities auspicious and without number, and calls Him Bhagavān because He is full in six great ones: knowledge, strength, lordship, valour, power and splendour.

The other sense is the three strands of nature, set out in the table. Everything made of matter, bodies, minds and the world, is woven of sattva, rajas and tamas in some measure, and the strands bind a soul to its life in the world. The names Guṇabhṛt and Nirguṇa speak of both senses at once: He bears the strands of nature and every excellence, yet none of the strands binds or stains Him. Nirguṇa does not mean that He has no qualities, for the auspicious ones are without number in Him; it means that no base quality touches Him.

Parāśara Bhaṭṭar's commentary is named Bhagavad Guṇa Darpaṇam, the Mirror of the Lord's Qualities, and reads the whole thousand as a recital of such qualities. The tradition teaches also that the Lord's own form is made not of the three strands but of pure goodness, unmixed with the other two, so that even when He comes among beings His body is not shaped by them.

Akṣara is what does not fall, the opposite of kṣara, the perishable, which flows, wastes and passes away. In the hymn it is the Lord who remains the same when all else changes. He is Akṣara in the second śloka and the Imperishable again in the fifty-first, where the Perishable stands beside Him: all that changes and passes is His body, and He dwells in it without being worn down.

Bhaṭṭar hears the name Akṣara of the second śloka, with the four names before it, as a reason why the freed choose Him for their goal: a freed soul may enjoy Him for ever, and yet His greatness is never lessened by being enjoyed. The Bhagavad Gītā speaks of the perishable person and the imperishable person, and of the Highest Person above them both; the Śrīvaiṣṇava teachers read the imperishable one as the soul set free, and so the Lord who is above even that is Puruṣōttama.

The word also means a syllable, since a syllable does not perish: the sacred Ōṃ, the one imperishable syllable, names Him, and the hymn calls Him the One whose syllable is plain. A different word, avyaya, 'not spent', also stands in the hymn and is also rendered imperishable.

Arcā is the Lord as He is present in the image that is worshipped in a temple, a shrine or a home. The Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition counts it as one of the five ways in which He is known, and honours it as the form most easily reached: His supreme form lies beyond sight, the array and the descents are no longer before anyone's eyes, and the Indweller cannot be seen, but in the image He stands before all, takes the garland and the offered food, and can be bathed, dressed and served.

The image is not taken for a likeness or a symbol. Once it is consecrated, the tradition holds, the Lord Himself is present in it, having chosen a form of stone or metal so that the humblest and the most learned alike may come near. The Āḻvārs sang chiefly of the Lord in the images of the holy places, and the temples they sang of, the Divya Dēśams, are held among the dearest of His dwellings. The later teachers praise the image as the easiest of all His forms to reach.

The hymn does not name the temple image, but one name speaks of it: the Lord of plain, visible form, who shows a clear form to those who love Him, in the descents and in the image worshipped in the temple, although in Himself He is the Unseen. The Śrīvaiṣṇava commentary also hears His presence in the temples in the order of the names, after the descents.

The Lord within, antaryāmin, is the Lord as He dwells in the heart of every being: the inner ruler who governs from inside, the Self of every self, nearer to each soul than anything else can be. The Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition counts this as one of the five ways in which He is known, the others being His supreme form in the highest abode, the fourfold array, the descents and the image in the temple.

The thought is rooted in the Upaniṣads. A passage of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad takes the earth, the waters, fire, the air, the sun and the quarters in turn, and then every being and the self within it, and says of each that the Lord stands within it, rules it from inside and is not known by it; its refrain is that He is your Self, the inner ruler, the immortal. Because He is within as the Self, the tradition says that the whole world is His body.

The hymn speaks of Him so in many places. He is the Person who dwells in the city of every body as its ruler, the Indweller who is nearest to every soul, the Witness who abides beside each soul as its friend and looks on while the soul tastes the fruit of its deeds, and the Inner Controller who guides each being from within as one who dwells in it, never as a stranger. He abides hidden in the cave of the heart and in the lotus of the heart, where His devotees meditate on Him. The Vāsudēva mantra of the meditation verses says it in one line: the Lord who dwells in all, and in whom all dwell.

In this hymn māyā is the Lord's wonder-working power: the power by which He does what no one else can, makes the worlds, takes the forms He takes, and covers Himself so that those who do not look for Him do not see Him, while He shows Himself to those who love Him. The names that use the word say it plainly: He is of mighty wonder-working power, of many such powers, the Veiled One, and the One who holds all beings in the world's bond by His māyā and binds the hearts of His own to Himself by the sweetness of His qualities.

A reader may know māyā as illusion, the sense it has in some schools of thought. Illusion, deceit and magic are among the meanings the word has gathered, but its oldest use is nearer to art and extraordinary power. The Śrīvaiṣṇava teachers, following Rāmānuja, do not take the world to be unreal: for them māyā names the wonder of the Lord's own power, and what that power makes is real. The Gītā calls this power of His divine, made of the guṇas and hard to cross, and says that those who come to Him alone pass beyond it, which is also what the hymn's name says.

Prakṛti is nature in its first state: the stuff, without awareness, of which bodies, senses, minds and the whole world are made. It is called pradhāna, the chief, and avyakta, the unmanifest, when it lies unformed before creation or after the worlds are drawn back. The hymn names the Lord Pradhāna-puruṣēśvara, the Lord of matter and of souls, and Kṣōbhaṇa, who at the beginning enters the unmanifest matter and the souls and stirs them into movement, so that the world unfolds.

Matter has three strands, sattva, rajas and tamas, and every body and thing of the world has some share of them. In the Śrīvaiṣṇava teaching it is one of the three realities, real and not a dream, but wholly the Lord's: it is His body, and it acts only by His will. It is the soul's joining with matter, through its own deeds, that holds it in the round of birth and death. The Gītā speaks of matter and the soul as both without beginning, and of both as the Lord's own.

At the end of a cycle, the tradition says, He gathers the spread-out worlds back into their fine, unmanifest state within Himself, and at the beginning lets them forth again. Matter is thus never apart from Him, whether formed or unformed, and He is its Self.

Puruṣa is the plain Sanskrit word for a man or a person, and in the hymn it is the Lord as the Person, full and whole. He is Puruṣaḥ, the Person, in the second śloka; the Person of the thousand heads in the forty-fourth; and Puruṣōttamaḥ, the Highest of Persons, in the third. Bhīṣma's opening verses and the phalaśruti both speak of a person who praises the Supreme Person with the thousand names. In the name Pradhāna-puruṣēśvara the word means the souls, whose Lord He is.

The tradition offers several reasons for the word and sets them side by side. It can be heard as puri śētē, He who dwells in the city of the body with its nine gates, where the Mahābhārata says the great Self rests, filling it. Or as He who gives in plenty, for Bhaṭṭar hears in it the One who bestows on the freed the abundant joy of Himself. Or as He who was there before all, or He who fills everything. Each reading shows one more side of Him.

Puruṣōttama is the Person higher than the rest. The Bhagavad Gītā speaks of the perishable person and the imperishable person, and of the Highest Person beyond both; the Śrīvaiṣṇava teachers read the perishable as the souls bound to matter and the imperishable as the souls set free, so that He stands above souls bound and freed alike. The Person with a thousand heads, eyes and feet is the Person of the Puruṣa Sūkta, the Vēdic hymn that sings of Him filling the earth on every side and standing far beyond it; the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition holds this Person to be Viṣṇu Himself, as this name does.

Ātman is the self: not the body, the senses or the mind, but the one within who knows and acts. The hymn uses the word in two ways, and a capital letter marks the difference. With a small s it is the self of one living being, which is its soul. With a capital S it is the Lord, who is the Self of every self; so the names call Him the Self of all beings, the Supreme Self, the Self of the universe and the One Self, and each says that He is within what He has made.

The Śrīvaiṣṇava teachers explain the nearness in this way: all beings, the souls and the matter they live in, are the Lord's body, and He is their Self, entering them, holding them up and ruling them from within. The teachers read Bhūtātmā just so, and read Paramātmā as the Self of all selves who has no Self above Him to guide Him, since there is none higher. Though He dwells in every body, the fruit of its deeds does not touch Him, and so the hymn also calls Him Pūtātmā, the Pure Self.

The word turns up in other names, with the sense of a self or a very nature. Ātmavān is the One established in Himself, needing nothing from another; Dhṛtātmā upholds the selves of all beings and holds His own nature unchanged; Ātmayōni has no source but Himself, and in Him every self finds its beginning.

A soul, jīva, is the self of one living being: the one within a body who knows, wills and acts, who feels pleasure and pain, and who is carried by its own deeds from birth to birth until it is set free. It is not the body, the senses or the mind, which it uses and in which it dwells. The hymn speaks of it where it asks who will be freed from the bond of birth, and where it names the Lord the Lord of matter and of souls.

The Śrīvaiṣṇava teaching counts three realities: the Lord, the souls, and matter, which has no awareness. Souls are many and without beginning. They are never the Lord Himself, yet they are always His, His body and His servants, and He is the Self within each. The teachers speak of three kinds: bound souls, still turning in birth and death; freed souls, who have reached Him; and the ever free, who were never bound.

Written with a capital, Self means the Lord; soul means the individual being. The soul is also called the knower of its own field, the body it lives in, and the Lord is the Knower of the field in a higher way.

Śrī is the Goddess Lakṣmī, the Lord's consort, whom the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition honours as the Mother of all the worlds and holds to be never apart from Him: where He is, there She is, as fire is never apart from its heat. The hymn turns to Her again and again, in the names that call Him Śrīmān, Śrīnivāsa and Śrīpati, in the long run of names that begin with Her word, and at last in the name Lakṣmī itself.

The word śrī is older and wider than the Goddess. It means light and radiance, then beauty, grace, good fortune, prosperity and the dignity of a king, so that the names which carry it can be heard both ways, as the Goddess and as the splendour that is Hers. It is also the common mark of honour set before the names of gods, holy persons and holy works, as in Śrī Rāma, Śrī Viṣṇu or Śrī Bhagavān; in such a place it speaks reverence and nothing more.

The Śrīvaiṣṇava teachers give Her a work of Her own. She is the Mother who does not count the faults of Her children and who speaks for the souls that come to Him for refuge, so that His majesty is made gentle to those who approach in need; for this reason refuge is taken at the Lord's feet together with Her. The teachers hear two senses in the word itself: She is the one to whom all resort, and She is the one who ever resorts to Him. Tradition tells that She rose from the Milk Ocean at the churning and chose Him, and that She comes with Him in His descents, as Sītā beside Rāma.

Vyūha means an array, an ordered manifestation. In the Pāñcarātra teaching, which the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition honours, the Lord who dwells in the highest abode as Vāsudēva shows Himself, for the care of the world, in a fourfold array: Vāsudēva, Saṅkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna and Aniruddha. It is the second of the five ways in which the tradition knows Him, after His supreme form and before His descents, the image in the temple and the Lord within the heart.

The six great qualities of the Lord, knowledge, strength, lordship, valour, power and splendour, are all full in Vāsudēva. The other three take them up in pairs: knowledge and strength in Saṅkarṣaṇa, lordship and valour in Pradyumna, power and splendour in Aniruddha. In the account the Śrīvaiṣṇava commentary follows, each has a work: Saṅkarṣaṇa draws the world in at its close, Pradyumna sends it forth and teaches the scriptures, and Aniruddha protects. Other Pāñcarātra tellings share out the works differently. The tradition pictures the Lord of the array reclining on Śēṣa in the Milk Ocean.

The array is not four gods but the one Lord. The hymn says so in the name Caturātmā, whole in each of His four forms, and it names Him Caturvyūha twice, both times among names that count fours. Balarāma, Kṛṣṇa's elder brother, is read as Saṅkarṣaṇa come down among men, and one reading of a later name sees all four shown once more within Kṛṣṇa's family, as Balarāma, Kṛṣṇa, Pradyumna and Aniruddha.

In the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition, which follows Rāmānuja, souls and the world are neither outside the Lord nor a second thing standing beside Him: they are His body, and He is their Self. A body, as the teachers understand it, is what a self supports, rules and uses for its own ends, and in that sense every being, great and small, is the Lord's body, held in being by Him and living for His purposes. When the hymn says that the universe or the three worlds are His body, it states how the tradition understands the relation between the world and Him.

The hymn returns to the thought again and again. He is the Self of all beings and the Self of the universe; He bears the beings who are His body as the self bears the body, from within and at every moment; the whole world is His form and He is the Self within it. The Vēdas are the limbs of His body, and the parts of the sacrifice are His limbs. Even the vast form that Kṛṣṇa showed to Arjuna is understood so, as the universe seen as His body.

Two things follow, as the teachers draw them. He is greater than the world, because the Self is not limited by the body; and the change and decay of the body do not wear Him down, because He dwells in what changes without being changed. Since nothing lies outside His body, nothing lies outside His care. The thought is closely bound to that of the Lord within: He is within as the Self because the world is His body.