mind, and Selves—and that whatever
exists was both knowable and name-
able. The Vaisheshikas subscribed to the
causal modelknown as asatkaryavada,
which posited that when a thing was
created, it was a whole new aggregate,
completely different from its con-
stituent parts. This causal model tends
to multiply the number of things in the
universe because each act of creation
brings a new thing into being. It also
admits that human efforts and actions
are one of the causes influencing these
effects, making it theoretically possible
to act in a way that brings final libera-
tion of the soul (moksha).
According to the Vaisheshika analy-
sis, the objects of experience can be
divided into six categories: substances,
qualities, activity, universals, particu-
lars, and inherence(samavaya); some
later Vaisheshikas add a seventh category,
absences. The first three categories
can be perceived, whereas the others
must be inferred, but the concept of
inherence is central to their system of
thought. Inherence is the subtle glue
connecting all the elements of the uni-
verse: wholes and their parts, sub-
stances and their qualities, motions and
the things that move, general properties
with their particular instances, and most
important, pleasure and pain to the Self.
The philosophical problems with inher-
ence—particularly the notion that it was
one single principle and not a collection
of things—caused them great difficulty
and were responsible for the rise
of Navyanyayaschool, which attempted
to explain these relationships in a
more sophisticated way. For further
information see Karl H. Potter and
Sibajiban Bhattacharyya (ed.), Indian
Philosophical Analysis, 1992; and
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles
A. Moore (eds.), A Sourcebook in Indian
Philosophy, 1957.
Vaishnava
Name denoting a devotee (bhakta) of
the god Vishnu, in any of his myriad
forms. Vaishnava theology is most
prominently characterized by the doc-
trine of the ten avatars, or divine incar-
nations: Fish, Tortoise, Boar, Man-Lion,
Vamana(dwarf ), Parashuram, Rama,
Krishna, Buddha, and Kalki. It is gener-
ally accepted that the avatar doctrine
provided a way to assimilate smaller
regional deitiesinto the larger pantheon
by designating them as forms of Vishnu,
and it is in the form of these avatars that
Vishnu is most commonly worshiped.
Of the ten avatars, the two most impor-
tant ones have been Rama and
Krishna, although in the early cen-
turies of the common era, the Boar
avatar and the Man-Lion avatar were
influential regional deities.
Early Vaishnava religion is cloudy
and mysterious. Although Vishnu
appears in several hymns in the Vedas,
the oldest Hindu religious texts, he was
clearly a minor deity, and it is difficult to
get from there to being the supreme
power in the universe. Some scholars
have speculated that the cult of
Krishna—a deified local cowherd
hero—originally came from outside
the Vedic religious matrix, and that
Krishna was identified with Vishnu as a
way to assimilate Krishna’s cult into
respectable Vedic religion. Such ideas
are intriguing but have little hard evi-
dence to support them. Inscriptional
evidence clearly shows that the worship
of Krishna was well-established by the
first century B.C.E. These devotees are
generally described as Bhagavatas
(“devotees of the Blessed One”), a name
that for the next thousand years is used
to refer to Vaishnavas in general. One
particular subset of this early Bhagavata
community was known as the
Pancharatrikas (“followers of the
Pancharatra”), who later evolved dis-
tinctive cosmological doctrines. These
mainstream Bhagavatas expressed their
devotion to Krishna by composing texts,
including parts of the Bhagavad Gita,
the Harivamsha, and various puranas,
culminating with the Bhagavata
Puranain about the tenth century.
The tone of Vaishnava devotion took
a dramatic turn with the advent of theVaishnava