Page 159 - Hinduism

(tortoise) and Varaha (boar) of the Puranas have a cosmic character and are foreshadowed in the hymns of the Vedas. The fourth incarnation, Nrsimha (man-lion), seems to belong to a later age, when the worship of Vishnu had become established. The fifth, Vamana (dwarf), whose three strides deprived the Asuras of the domination of heaven and earth, is in character anterior to the fourth Avatara and the three strides are attributed to Vishnu in the Vedic text as Urukrama. The sixth, seventh and eighth avatars Parasurama, Ramchandra and Krishna, are mortal heroes whose exploits are celebrated in these poems so fervently as to raise the heroes to the rank of gods. The ninth Avatara, the Buddha, is the deification of a great teacher. The tenth, Kalki, is yet to come.
The system of religious thought propounded in the Vedas and the Epics and especially in the Bhagavad-Gita (a part of the Mahabharata) survived the Buddhist impact which led to a renunciation of much ritual and metaphysics on the part of a sizable proportion of the population. Buddhism was absorbed into the parent religion within a few centuries and Hinduism, as the Vedic religion had come to be called, adopted the theory of the Avataras or incarnations according to which the Buddha himself was accepted as Avatara. Jainism also became, in essence, a doctrinal modification and adaptation of the Vedic religion. Thus we find that in response to an ever more insistent craving in
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