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Vishnu

4 paragraphs · about 1 minute

Every paragraph the index cites under Vishnu, once, in the order of the book. Beside each stand the entries that cite it.

85:3.4The wor­ship of in­sects and other an­i­mals was pro­moted by a later mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the golden rule—do­ing to oth­ers (ev­ery form of life) as you would be done by. The an­cients once be­lieved that all winds were pro­duced by the wings of birds and there­fore both feared and wor­shiped all winged crea­tures. The early Nordics thought that eclipses were caused by a wolf that de­voured a por­tion of the sun or moon. The Hin­dus of­ten show Vishnu with a horse’s head. Many times an an­i­mal sym­bol stands for a for­got­ten god or a van­ished cult. Early in evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gion the lamb be­came the typ­i­cal sac­ri­fi­cial an­i­mal and the dove the sym­bol of peace and love.

94:4.5The wor­ship of the sec­ond and third mem­bers, Siva and Vishnu, arose in the first mil­len­nium af­ter Christ. Siva is lord of life and death, god of fer­til­ity, and mas­ter of de­struc­tion. Vishnu is ex­tremely pop­u­lar due to the be­lief that he pe­ri­od­i­cally in­car­nates in hu­man form. In this way, Vishnu be­comes real and liv­ing in the imag­i­na­tions of the In­di­ans. Siva and Vishnu are each re­garded by some as su­preme over all.

94:4.6–8 · three paragraphs not cited here ·

94:4.63. Vedic and post-Vedic de­i­ties. Many of the an­cient gods of the Aryans, such as Agni, In­dra, and Soma, have per­sisted as sec­ondary to the three mem­bers of the Trimurti. Nu­mer­ous ad­di­tional gods have arisen since the early days of Vedic In­dia, and these have also been in­cor­po­rated into the Hindu pan­theon.

94:4.74. The demigods: super­men, semigods, heroes, demons, ghosts, evil spir­its, sprites, mon­sters, gob­lins, and saints of the later-day cults.

94:4.8While Hin­duism has long failed to viv­ify the In­dian peo­ple, at the same time it has usu­ally been a tol­er­ant re­li­gion. Its great strength lies in the fact that it has proved to be the most adap­tive, amor­phic re­li­gion to ap­pear on Uran­tia. It is ca­pa­ble of al­most un­lim­ited change and pos­sesses an un­usual range of flex­i­ble ad­just­ment from the high and semi­monothe­is­tic spec­u­la­tions of the in­tel­lec­tual Brah­man to the ar­rant fet­ish­ism and prim­i­tive cult prac­tices of the de­based and de­pressed classes of ig­no­rant be­liev­ers.

94:4.9Hin­duism has sur­vived be­cause it is es­sen­tially an in­te­gral part of the ba­sic so­cial fab­ric of In­dia. It has no great hi­er­ar­chy which can be dis­turbed or de­stroyed; it is in­ter­wo­ven into the life pat­tern of the peo­ple. It has an adapt­abil­ity to chang­ing con­di­tions that ex­cels all other cults, and it dis­plays a tol­er­ant at­ti­tude of adop­tion to­ward many other re­li­gions, Gau­tama Bud­dha and even Christ him­self be­ing claimed as in­car­na­tions of Vishnu.

104:1.5Among the Hin­dus the trini­tar­ian con­cept took root as Be­ing, In­tel­li­gence, and Joy. (A later In­dian con­cep­tion was Brahma, Siva, and Vishnu.) While the ear­lier Trin­ity por­tray­als were brought to In­dia by the Sethite priests, the later ideas of the Trin­ity were im­ported by the Salem mis­sion­ar­ies and were de­vel­oped by the na­tive in­tel­lects of In­dia through a com­pound­ing of these doc­trines with the evo­lu­tion­ary triad con­cep­tions.

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Cited alongside: Hinduism, India, Siva