Avatars [Divine Incarnations]

[shvu]

 

The Avatar concept came with Vedha Vyasa's works. He came up with a list of Avatars and that's where the whole thing began.

 

Since then we have had several of them. Apparently the Puranas were writen before the time of Buddha and they predicted the coming of Buddha. It is to be noted that the location, mothers's name, etc of the Buddha mentioned in the Bhagavatam do not match with that of the Buddha we know. His name was Sidhartha. So we have 3 possibilities,

 

1. Somebody decided that he was the Buddha mentioned in the Puranas [for whatever reason]and he became famous as the Buddha.

 

2. The Puranas were written after the Buddha and are cooked up. [unlikely because they would not have mismatched names]

 

3. The Buddha mentioned in the Puranas is different from the Buddha we know. He may be yet to come or may have come and gone as some people believe.

 

Since then,

 

Shankara was called as an Avatar of Shiva. Madhvacharya was called as an avatar of Hanuman.

Chaithanya was called as an avatar of Krishna.

 

Now recently Ramana was called as an Avatar of Subramanya, Shirdi Sai Baba as an avatar of Dattatreya Avadhut. Later people may begin to call Prabhupada as an avatar of the Supreme Personality of Godhead and so on.

 

It is to be noted that none of these people with the possible exception of Krishna called themselves as divine. It was always the people around them who did the Branding work.

 

Cheers

[ggohil]

Jai Sri Krsna

 

Shvu, sorry to stray away from the subject.

 

In BG, Sri Krsna claims himself to be the Supreme.

 

He revels all kinds of absolute knowledge to Arjun. He even makes bold statements like "Ch 7.7

Higher than Myself there is nothing else...." and "(Ch 7.2 ....knowing which there remains

nothing further to be known here."

 

And yet curiously he leaves one crucial piece of information out, that he is in fact an incarnation

of Vishnu or Narayan.

[shvu]

 

Dear ggohil,

 

Krishna is the Supreme. It is the Supreme power [Narayana] that incarnated as Krishna. So one cannot really differentiate between the two.

 

However we should differentiate between Krishna the supreme power, and Krishna the human being. The Bhagavatam has ample Information to show that Krishna was an [one of] avatar of Narayana. I will post some of the verses tonight.

 

Cheers