Concise Concepts – Who Exactly Is An Avatar
What are the characteristics of different avatars and how they fall in various categories now we often translate the word avatar as incarnation the word incarnation has the seed karna karna is as we have it in carnivorous flesh so incarnation is actually a Christian concept because Jesus came to the world and Jesus had a material body like everyone else and still still the Christians consider Jesus to be divine so the divinity of God was manifested in the humanity of Jesus and that is expressed through the concept of reincarnation of incarnation Srila Prabhupada had to present a complex philosophy which is quite unfamiliar to the western audiences so actually words are handles for concepts concepts are in the mind and words are handles by which we can get hold of concepts so rather than having both unfamiliar words and unfamiliar concepts because the concept of avatar in the Vedic tradition has no parallels in any of the other religious traditions of the world there the contact of God may be as the son of God, as the messenger of God or as the revealed word of God but the concept of God descending himself in his full glory and revealing his pastimes for the whole world to behold and relish not just for that time but for all of eternity that is the unique revelation of the Vedic tradition to world theology those incarnations of the Lord who come to this world to perform pastimes, so I was talking about the word incarnation, so ideally speaking the Vedic concept is avatariti iti avatar one who descends as an avatar so it is not that Krishna has no existence before he came, sometimes people ask before Krishna came 5000 years ago were there Krishna temples, was Krishna being worshipped? Krishna is not a historical personality Krishna is not a mythological personality he is a supreme personality he exists beyond the realm of time and he reveals himself occasionally through the medium of history for us, so Krishna in that sense is eternally existing in the spiritual world, so avatariti one who descends from the spiritual realm to this realm to glimpse, give us a glimpse of his pastimes that is avatar, so the more accurate word for avatar is descent so Prabhupada uses the word incarnation to keep things simple for his western audience, but then he makes the philosophy very clear, Krishna does not have any material body, nor do any of his incarnations so when we talk about these dasha avataras these are personalities or the Lord, so in one sense the various avataras are one person, many.