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HISTORY OF THE HINDU TRINITY.
In closing the Puranic period (which name we employ loosely to cover such sects as are not clearly modern) we pause for a moment to cast a glance backwards over the long development of the trinity, to the units of which are devoted the individual Pur[ra]nas. We have shown that the childhood-tales of Krishna are of late (Puranic) origin, and that most of the cow-boy exploits are post-epic. Some are referred to in the story of Çiçup[=alla 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. Ja, 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 Çiva, 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 Çiva.[65]
In Vishnu, as a development of the Vedic Vishnu; in Civa, as affiliated to Rudra; in Brahm[ra], 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
