The Four-Armed Standing Vishnu: A Historical Analysis Part 1

Rohan Rajesh

Last summer I took an amazing class on South Asian Art & Architecture (ARTH/ASIA 153). I did an analysis of the Four-Armed Standing Vishnu sculpture which I would like to share with you because it is representative of the incredible syncretism that pervades the culture of the subcontinent. Hinduism and Buddhism are the two most well-known and widely practiced religions that emerged from the Indian subcontinent. Hinduism evolved through the confluence of indigenous, animist practices and the practices of the Central Asian Sanskrit speakers who wrote the Vedas (Tharoor 21). The orthodox Vedic practices involved complex, arcane rituals that disillusioned many in ancient India. Buddhism was one of many philosophies that emerged from this disillusionment in the 6th century BCE (Tharoor 22). Buddhism became a dominant force in the subcontinent when it gained state support from the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE (Craven 37-38). Since then, numerous examples of Buddhist art and architecture – including pillars, capitals, stupas, sculptures, incense burners, and more – have been found. It is not until much later, starting from the 3rd century CE with the Gupta Empire, that we see significant growth in Hindu art and architecture (Craven 64). 

An example of this Gupta-era Hindu art is the Four-Armed Standing Vishnu sculpture, a 5th-century terracotta sculpture that was found in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and is currently in the Samuel Eilenberg Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What at first seems like an innocuous (albeit finely detailed) sculpture of an important Hindu deity actually gives significant insight into the processes that led to a resurgence in orthodox Hinduism, which had faced significant cultural and intellectual competition from Buddhism and other heterodox philosophies. This Four-Armed Standing Vishnu sculpture shows significant influence from Buddhist art and is part of the process through which orthodox Hinduism adopted Buddhist iconography and ideas as part of its revival.

Hinduism and Buddhism in the Gupta Period

By the time of the Gupta period, orthodox (āstika in Sanskrit) Hinduism had begun absorbing the philosophies of various schools of thought that officially acknowledged the supremacy of the Vedas (in addition to the traditional following of rituals and sacrifices), ranging from dualism to atomism (Eliot xxxiv). Further, deities that were minor or not mentioned in the Vedas had since become the most popular post-Vedic Hinduism, including Vishnu, Shiva, Shakti, and all of their avatars (Eliot xxxiv). At the same time, many important texts and philosophers of Hinduism adopted important Buddhist ideas. For example, Adi Shankaracharya began adopting Buddhist practices like the establishment of monasteries (Tharoor). The Bhagavad Gita’s most famous sections involve Krishna exhorting Arjuna to become detached from the fruits of his labors, a key Buddhist concept (Holt 11). By the eighth century, the absorption was so complete that the Buddha became the ninth avatar of Vishnu in the Puranas (a series of mythological texts that detail the exploits of heroic deities) (Holt 17). Although this absorption was originally done disingenuously – the Buddha was described as the Vishnu avatar whose purpose was to lead the wicked further on a false non-Vedic past – the irony is that in colonial and modern India, the Buddha and his philosophy have been fully embraced by many Hindus as part of their own theology, ever since Swami Vivekananda tried to counter Western condescension of Hinduism by incorporating and repackaging popular (perhaps even liberal) Buddhist ideas as fundamentally Hindu to redefine India as a spiritual counterpart to the materialistic West (Holt 18-19). In ancient India, however, the absorption of Buddhism into orthodox Hinduism was a matter of practicality. As Holt writes, “before the eighth century, the Buddha and Buddhism enjoyed a sociopolitical status that the Brahmanical community simply could not ignore, and its attacks upon Buddhist institutions were more tempered or muted in fashion as a result” (12). As we shall see, the Four-Armed Standing Vishnu sculpture is a perfect example of this absorption of the ideas of the prevailing, dominant Buddhist tradition, and I will discuss this in the next article.

Works Cited

Craven, Roy C. Indian Art: A Concise History. Thames and Hudson, 2006. 

Eliot, Charles. Hinduism and Buddhism: An Historical Sketch. Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2020. 

Frankopan, Peter. The New Silk Roads: the New Asia and the Remaking of the World Order. Vintage Books, a Division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2017. 

Lerner, Martin, and Steven M. Kossak. The Lotus Transcendent: Indian and Southeast Asian Art from the Samuel Eilenberg Collection. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991.

Meeks, Wayne. “The Collision With Paganism | From Jesus To Christ - The First Christians | FRONTLINE.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, Apr. 1998, www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/first/paganism.html. 

Tharoor, Shashi. “Adi Shankaracharya: Hinduism’s Greatest Thinker Review: A Lesson from the Past.” The Hindu, The Hindu, 3 June 2018, www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/adi-shankaracharya-hinduisms-greatest-thinker-review-a-lesson-from-the-past/article24065950.ece.

Tharoor, Shashi. Why I Am a Hindu. Scribe, 2018.

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The Four-Armed Standing Vishnu: A Historical Analysis Part 2

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US Relations in South and East Asia: A Game of Checks and Balances