e post-epic. Some are referred to
in the story of Cicup[=a]la in the second book of the
Mah[=a]bh[=a]rata, but this scene has been touched up by a late hand.
The Vishnu Pur[=a]na, typical of the best of the Pur[=a]nas, as in
many respects it is the most important and interesting, represents
Krishnaite Vishnuism as its height. Here is described the birth of the
man-god as a black, _k[r.][s.][n.]a,_ baby, son of Nanda, and his real
title is here Govinda, the cow-boy.[63] 'Cow-boy' corresponds to the
more poetical, religious shepherd; and the milk-maids, _gopis_ with
whom Govinda dallies as he grows up, may, perhaps, better be rendered
shepherdesses for the same reason. The idyllic effect is what is aimed
at in these descriptions. Here Krishna plays his rude and rustic
tricks, upsetting wagons, overthrowing trees and washermen,
occasionally killing them he dislikes, and acting altogether much like
a cow-boy of another sort. Here he puts a stop to Indra-worship,
over-powers Civa, rescues Aniruddha, marries sixteen thousand
princesses, burns Benares, and finally is killed himself, he the one
born of a hair of Vishnu, he that is Vishnu himself, who in 'goodness'
creates, in 'darkness' destroys,[64] under the forms of Brahm[=a] and
Civa.[65]

In Vishnu, as a development of the Vedic Vishnu; in Civa, as
affiliated to Rudra; in Brahm[=a], as the Brahmanic third to these
sectarian developments, the trinity has a real if remote connection
with the triune fire of the Rig Veda, a two-thirds connection, filled
out with the addition of the later Brahmanic head of the gods.

To ignore the fact that Vishnu and Rudra-Civa developed inside the
Brahmanic circle and increased in glory before the rise of sectaries,
and to asseverate, as have some, that the two chief characters of the
later trinity are an unmeaning revival of decadent gods, whose names
are used craftily to veil the modernness of Krishnaism and
Civaism,--this is to miscalculate the waxing dignity of these gods in
earlier Brahmanic literature. To say with Burnouf that the Vishnu of
the Veda is not at all the Vishnu of the mythologists, is a statement
far too sweeping. The Vishnu of the Veda is not only the same god with
the Vishnu of the next era, but in that next era he has become greatly
magnified. The Puranic All-god Vishnu stands in as close a relation to
his Vedic prototype as does Milton's Satan to the snaky slanderer of
an age more primitive.

Civa-worship appears to