Lord Vishnu

About

Lord Vishnu murtis Vishnu is the preserver, the second of the trimurti, and there is a quirk to buying him: most Indian households keep him without keeping him. They keep Krishna, or Ram, or Balaji, all of whom are Vishnu, and comparatively few keep the four-armed figure itself. So if you have arrived here wanting an avatar rather than Vishnu directly, the fastest thing this page can do is point you at the right shelf. Krishna is the eighth avatar and Ram the seventh. Tirupati Balaji is Vishnu as Venkateswara and is the most kept form of all in South India, by a wide margin. Jagannath is a form of Krishna and therefore of Vishnu, with a tradition entirely his own. Each keeps its own collection because each is a separate devotional world rather than a variant. He answers to several names in the listings and none of them changes the object. Vishnu ji, Bhagwan Vishnu, Vishnu Bhagwan ki murti, Narayan, and Bishnu in Bengali and Odia usage. Judge by the photograph and the dimensions rather than the wording. How to read a Vishnu The four attributes are the whole identification, and they are the fastest way to tell a proper casting from a soft one. He carries the shankha, the conch, and the chakra, the discus, in the upper hands, and the gada, the mace, and the padma, the lotus, in the lower. Four objects, four hands, and each should read as a distinct thing rather than a lump against the palm. Enlarge the photograph before you order and look at those four points and at the crown. They are the first detail a soft mould loses, and on a four-armed figure there is nowhere for that softness to hide. A figure with the right posture and unreadable attributes is a generic deity that has been given a Vishnu name. The forms The standing four-armed figure, crowned, is the form most people mean. In this collection it is the antique finish that carries it, and the finish suits this deity particularly: the patina sits down into the modelling and gives the four arms and their attributes