Chapter Five: Avatāra Doctrine and Rama Worship

—and reported that he was worshipped in the Shurasena country, where the city of Mathura stood and the Yamuna flowed. Bhandarkar explicitly connects Sri Krishna with the Satvata people and accordingly calls this “the Satvata religion.”¹

The Satvata religion came to be called the Bhagavata religion; bhāgavata means a devotee of Bhagavan. Around 140 BCE, Heliodorus—the representative of the Greek king Antialkidas of Taxila—and Bhagabhadra, king of Vidisha, used the title Bhāgavata. Inscriptions at ancient Besnagar record Heliodorus’s establishment of a Garuda standard associated with the temple of Bhagavan Vasudeva.²

From the third to the fifth centuries, Gupta emperors followed the Bhagavata religion. The Śrīmad Bhāgavata Purāṇa, Viṣṇu Purāṇa, and similar works are held to have been composed in their period. On their coins and copperplates they proudly placed the title Parama-bhāgavata before their names. The religion spread especially through Malava, Magadha, Kannauj, Gauda, and Gurjara. By the time of the Bhagavad Gītā, Sri Krishna Vasudeva was being worshipped as the Supreme Person.

Inscriptions discovered at Ghosundi mention the construction of a “worship enclosure” and a “Narayana garden” for Vasudeva and Sankarshana.³ This shows that the Pancharatra system, in which Vasudeva’s four vyūhas were worshipped, had become established. The Bhagavata religion was now also called Pancharatra. Pancharatra is commonly explained as a sacrificial observance to the Puruṣa performed over five nights. Later, Puruṣa and Vishnu were identified; Sri Krishna, Vasudeva, and Narayana were understood as one form and became the principal deity of Bhagavata religion or Pancharatra. In Indian Theism, p. 65, Nicol Macnicol writes that Krishna worship had an unmistakable influence upon Buddhism and Jainism.

Many people doubt the historicity of the Rama narrative. Rama-bhakti is certainly more recent than Krishna-bhakti. The name of King Ikshvaku occurs in the Ṛgveda; the word Ikshvaku also occurs once in the Atharvaveda.⁴ Dasharatha is mentioned only once in Vedic literature. A dāna-stuti of the Ṛgveda praises Dasharatha together with other kings.⁵ The word Rama, however, is used in the Ṛgveda in the sense of a powerful king. Likewise, Sita’s name occurs at two places in Vedic literature—