Here is a series of articles that I once wrote for children in the age group 5 - 10 years.
(E) What is an 'Avatara'?
Today we shall talk about God and some of the ways in which God is present in the world. When Hindu thinkers speak about the ways in which God is related to us, they use a number of ideas and one of the most central of these is that of Avatara. Perhaps you have come across this word on yahoo messenger which allows you to make up your personal avatara. There you choose an icon (a boy, a girl, a teddy and so on) and dress it up nicely in a manner that you think expresses ‘who you are’. The yahoo avatara is, in other words, like your signature or your stamp: this is the way you want others to see you, this is the way you present yourself to the world around you. We shall soon see that in Hinduism the term Avatara means something very similar: through an Avatara, God expresses to us what God is like and what God’s plans for us are.
Now all the major texts of Hinduism, including the Upanisads which were composed many thousands of years ago, teach that God is omni-present, that is, God is present everywhere. If God is every-where, why does God need to express Himself through an Avatara? The short answer to this question is that we cannot see God with our human eyes. To understand why, think of the light of the sun. If you stare at the sun for more than a few minutes, what would happen? Your eyes will be blinded, right? You cannot possibly withstand the full glory of the sun’s light. But if you allow a thin ray of sunlight to enter your room through a window and guide the ray through a prism, you will see many beautiful colours on the opposite wall. In other words, the sun cannot be seen with the eye (not for too long in any case!), but its light can be filtered through a prism.
In a similar way, God’s light is so much more powerful than the light of a thousand suns combined together that this light cannot be seen by our eyes. What we need is an earthly form which, in the manner of a prism, will filter this light, and this earthly form is what we call an Avatara. That is, God wants to approach us, to be with us and to live with us, but God knows that we cannot see God in His ‘true form’. So God comes down to our human level and provides us with an earthly form through which we can know more about God. That is why this earthly form is called an Ava-tara, which is a Sanskrit word which means ‘descent’ or ‘coming down’.
Here is another way to think of this matter. We human beings are finite creatures. What do we mean by ‘finite’? We are small in size (not as big as, say, a dinosaur), we contain very little knowledge (unlike, say, a huge encyclopedia) and we are not immortal (unlike, say, an angel). But God is infinite --- God is all-powerful, all-knowing and the source of all the good things you can think of. Now how can something that is finite understand what the infinite is like? Just as an ant cannot understand what it is like to be a human being (and your baby sister cannot understand what it is like to be a teenager), we cannot know what God is really like, unless God comes down to our side by providing us with a bridge. This bridge is, once again, the Avatara of God.
So what exactly are these earthly forms or these bridges that we have called Avataras? Hinduism believes in ten major Avataras of God. Some of these are the Matsya (Fish), the Kurma (Tortoise), Gautama Buddha, Rama and Krishna . We shall have separate sections in this series for Gautama Buddha (the founder of Buddhism), Rama and Krishna ; but what about the Fish and the Tortoise Avataras? Does God really come down to us in the form of an animal? When we say that Hinduism believes that God is present everywhere and in everything, we must take this statement seriously: God is indeed everywhere and in everything, including trees, plants and animals. God has descended to our midst many times, sometimes as an animal and at other times as a human being.
Before we conclude, let us note one more reason why Hinduism uses the image of the Avatara to speak about the presence of God in our midst. In the scripture called the Bhagavad-Gita (which means ‘the Song of the Lord Krishna’), Krishna tells his disciple Arjuna that he comes down to the world both to rescue the devotees of God from the hands of the bad people and to show everyone the good path that leads back to God. Once again, we see that an Avatara is like a ‘connecting point’ between the infinite, supreme God and finite, mortal human beings.
As you think more about the Avataras of God, here is an exercise which you might find like to do in your spare time. Think of all the beautiful things that you see around you. Perhaps you find the trees in your garden beautiful, and also the blue skies in spring, the elm trees down your avenue and the white snow in winter. And then one summer vacation your uncle takes you to Yellowstone National Park where you stand on a hilltop and watch the sun going down in the horizon. You feel that you have never seen such a beautiful sunset, that the scene has made you see for the first time what ‘true beauty’ is like. Likewise, though God is present within everything and everyone around us, the Avataras of God make us see, more clearly than otherwise, what God is really like. They are like a window that God opens for us; we have to look through that window and grow more and more close to God.
Now all the major texts of Hinduism, including the Upanisads which were composed many thousands of years ago, teach that God is omni-present, that is, God is present everywhere. If God is every-where, why does God need to express Himself through an Avatara? The short answer to this question is that we cannot see God with our human eyes. To understand why, think of the light of the sun. If you stare at the sun for more than a few minutes, what would happen? Your eyes will be blinded, right? You cannot possibly withstand the full glory of the sun’s light. But if you allow a thin ray of sunlight to enter your room through a window and guide the ray through a prism, you will see many beautiful colours on the opposite wall. In other words, the sun cannot be seen with the eye (not for too long in any case!), but its light can be filtered through a prism.
In a similar way, God’s light is so much more powerful than the light of a thousand suns combined together that this light cannot be seen by our eyes. What we need is an earthly form which, in the manner of a prism, will filter this light, and this earthly form is what we call an Avatara. That is, God wants to approach us, to be with us and to live with us, but God knows that we cannot see God in His ‘true form’. So God comes down to our human level and provides us with an earthly form through which we can know more about God. That is why this earthly form is called an Ava-tara, which is a Sanskrit word which means ‘descent’ or ‘coming down’.
Here is another way to think of this matter. We human beings are finite creatures. What do we mean by ‘finite’? We are small in size (not as big as, say, a dinosaur), we contain very little knowledge (unlike, say, a huge encyclopedia) and we are not immortal (unlike, say, an angel). But God is infinite --- God is all-powerful, all-knowing and the source of all the good things you can think of. Now how can something that is finite understand what the infinite is like? Just as an ant cannot understand what it is like to be a human being (and your baby sister cannot understand what it is like to be a teenager), we cannot know what God is really like, unless God comes down to our side by providing us with a bridge. This bridge is, once again, the Avatara of God.
So what exactly are these earthly forms or these bridges that we have called Avataras? Hinduism believes in ten major Avataras of God. Some of these are the Matsya (Fish), the Kurma (Tortoise), Gautama Buddha, Rama and Krishna . We shall have separate sections in this series for Gautama Buddha (the founder of Buddhism), Rama and Krishna ; but what about the Fish and the Tortoise Avataras? Does God really come down to us in the form of an animal? When we say that Hinduism believes that God is present everywhere and in everything, we must take this statement seriously: God is indeed everywhere and in everything, including trees, plants and animals. God has descended to our midst many times, sometimes as an animal and at other times as a human being.
Before we conclude, let us note one more reason why Hinduism uses the image of the Avatara to speak about the presence of God in our midst. In the scripture called the Bhagavad-Gita (which means ‘the Song of the Lord Krishna’), Krishna tells his disciple Arjuna that he comes down to the world both to rescue the devotees of God from the hands of the bad people and to show everyone the good path that leads back to God. Once again, we see that an Avatara is like a ‘connecting point’ between the infinite, supreme God and finite, mortal human beings.
As you think more about the Avataras of God, here is an exercise which you might find like to do in your spare time. Think of all the beautiful things that you see around you. Perhaps you find the trees in your garden beautiful, and also the blue skies in spring, the elm trees down your avenue and the white snow in winter. And then one summer vacation your uncle takes you to Yellowstone National Park where you stand on a hilltop and watch the sun going down in the horizon. You feel that you have never seen such a beautiful sunset, that the scene has made you see for the first time what ‘true beauty’ is like. Likewise, though God is present within everything and everyone around us, the Avataras of God make us see, more clearly than otherwise, what God is really like. They are like a window that God opens for us; we have to look through that window and grow more and more close to God.
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