AVATAR 6

'Whenever virtue subsides and vice prevails, I manifest Myself, for redemption of the virtuous, annihilation of the vicious and for the establishment of Religion in every Age.' This is the utterance of a personality who the Hindus worship as the Supreme Being, a prophecy which has unfailingly come to pass since the moment of its utterance and which forms the bedrock of the continuing spiritual vitality of the Hindu race. These were the words of Shree Krishna, a supremely endowed spiritual being of the Later Vedic Age, who is the central personality of the Mahabharata and within it the Bhagavad Geeta where he gave utterance to these. This verse from the Geeta is pregnant with the philosophy of Avatarvaad (The Principle of the Avatar) and represents the mercy of the Divine on fallen man, His commitment to His children when they go astray and, from the rational-scientific standpoint, is the admission of the inbuilt adjustment of terrestrial forces as operative on the human plane whenever the delicate equilibrium of forces that needs be is upset for entropic considerations. And this verse is also the axis of the revolving principle of evolution through the four ages, Satya, Treta, Dwapar and Kali, as envisaged by the Hindu Rishis, a concept apparently very simplistic but really most profound.

Hindus are man-worshippers, so said Swami Vivekananda. And it is this worship of the divinity of the human soul that reaches its zenith in the Hindu's veneration of the God-man, the Divine Incarnation, the Avatar. It is the highest form of the dualistic mode of worship, the acme of the spiritual culture of the Hindus barring the still higher flight towards the non-dual Absolute Brahman.

That man may reach Godhead was in the Vedic Period an established fact through the supersensuous realisations of the Rishis. But that God may reach man through a descent into the human form was revealed unto man only gradually with the advent of supreme spiritual beings like Rama and Krishna. Discussions, deliberations and debates through the ages notwithstanding, these luminous beings have found favour of acceptance as Divine Incarnations by the vast majority of the Hindus owing to a general convergence of similar opinion on their divinity by sages and saints who have trodden the Holy Land that is Bharatvarsha (India) for millenia.

This then is the religion of the Hindus, the worship of the Personal God in the form of deities and the Divine Incarnations leading gradually up to absorption in the Impersonal Brahman whose manifestation these personalised ideals are.