with the old one. Rudra, for example, is seen resenting the treatment accorded him. The supreme Adorable One pacifies him by saying that homage paid to one was equivalent to that given to another, for they were both one and the same. When Bhagavat or Vasudeva rises to be the supreme God in the fourth century b.c., Brahma and Shiva are declared to be his creations and are relegated to subordinate positions to carry out the will of the new god. Similarly when Brahmanism later absorbed the cult of Bhagavat, Vishnu, the sun god, who was popular at the period, became the supreme God. Thus did the generality of mankind find that they could not live without personal gods and kindly gods did not desert them to their fate.
The religion of devotion. Krishna Vasudeva, a member of the warrior caste, founded Bhagavatism, the religion of bhakti, devotion or love, about the 4th century b.c. Bhagavatism arose under the influence of Sankhya and Yoga. Sankhya being an atheistic system, Bhagavatism allied itself with Yoga. Concentration of thought, which is Yoga's fundamental concern, was converted into devotion to a personal God. This personal God, whom he termed the Adorable One, was the objective of man's devotion and love. This doctrine is later propounded in the Bhagavad Gita, or the Song Celestial, originally composed in the 2nd century b.c., and surviving in its later redacted form. In transcendent beauty and elegance of form, this philosophical poem is among the sublimest that have been vouchsafed to man. It teaches an eclectic philosophy weaving ideas from Sankhya and Yoga around the central doctrine of devotion or love to God.
Whole-hearted love of God and duty selflessly performed in the name of God, dedicating one's actions to the glory of God, win deliverance for man—such is the message of the Gita. Rituals, concentration of thought, and disciplinary ascetic practices are aids to the life of devotion or love for God. Love for God leads man to know him better and teaches him to do his deeds, leaving their outcome to God. Those who know Krishna are freed from the binding nature of actions. Those who piously seek and find refuge in him are absolved of their sins. Faith, love, and resignation in him sustain man in this life and open for him, after his death, a life of felicity in loving fellowship with God.
New gods thus replaced the old Indo-Iranian gods. The
