Avatar

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An avatar is the descent of a deity into the world in a born and embodied form. The Sanskrit avatāra means literally a crossing-down — from ava, “down,” and a root meaning “to cross over” — and it names the act by which a god leaves its proper sphere and enters the world of birth and death, taking on a body to act within it. The word belongs above all to Vaishnavism, the strand of Hinduism centered on Vishnu, the deity who preserves the order of things.

The classic statement is in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna — held in the tradition to be Vishnu himself in human form — explains why he returns. He says that whenever righteousness declines and disorder rises, he brings himself into being, age after age, to protect the good, destroy the wrongdoers, and restore the law. The descent is therefore purposeful and recurring rather than singular: a god who comes back as often as the world requires it. Later texts fixed the most famous count at ten principal avatars of Vishnu, the dashavatara — among them the fish that survives the flood, the man-lion, the dwarf, Rama, Krishna, and a tenth, Kalki, still to come at the end of the present age.

The avatar is not, in the tradition’s own understanding, a god merely disguised as a creature, nor a separate being adopted by a god. It is the deity genuinely present in a living form while remaining undiminished at its source — a distinction Vaishnava theologians worked out with care, and one on which schools differ in emphasis. Around it grew a vast devotional literature, the Bhagavata Purana foremost, in which the deeds of Krishna in particular became the heart of bhakti, the religion of loving devotion to a personal god.

Western writers have long reached for the word to translate experiences from other religions — most insistently the Christian Incarnation, where God becomes man once and decisively. The comparison is old and tempting, and the resemblance is real: in each a transcendent god takes flesh and acts in history. It is also imprecise. The Christian Incarnation is unrepeatable and its subject is one divine person; the Hindu avatar is by definition recurrent, plural, and often other than human. The nineteenth-century theosophists borrowed the term more loosely still, fitting it into a scheme of periodic teachers descending to instruct humanity — a usage by which “avatar” entered English well before it named anything on a screen. What the word holds onto through all of this is its first sense: a movement downward, from the divine into the world, made on purpose.

→ In the library: The Bhagavad Gita (Arnold, 1885)

→ Related: Vishnu · Brahman · Emanation