Vāsudeva

Vāsudeva (; ), later incorporated as Vāsudeva-Krishna (, "Krishna, son of Vasudeva"), Krishna-Vāsudeva or simply Krishna, was the son of Vasudeva Anakadundubhi, king of the Vrishnis in the region of Mathura. He was a leading member of the legendary Vrishni heroes, and may well have been a historical ruler in the region of Mathura.

Vāsudevism arose with the decline of Vedism in India, which occurred during the 8th to 6th century BCE. Vāsudeva then became the object of one of the earliest forms of personal deity worship in India, and is attested from around the 4th century BCE. At that time, Vāsudeva was already considered as a deity, as he appears in Pāṇini's writings in conjunction with Arjuna as an object of worship, since Pāṇini explains that a ''vāsudevaka'' is a devotee (''bhakta'') of Vāsudeva.

By the end of the 2nd century BCE, Vāsudeva was considered as ''Devadeva'', the "God of Gods", the Supreme Deity, whose emblem was the mythical bird Garuda, as known from the Heliodorus pillar inscription. This pillar, offered by the Greek ambassador and devotee Heliodorus, also shows that Vāsudeva even received dedications from the Indo-Greeks, who also represented him on the coinage of Agathocles of Bactria (190–180 BCE). The Heliodorus pillar, joining earth, space and heaven, is thought to symbolize the "cosmic axis" and express the cosmic totality of the Deity. Next to the pillar, a large Temple of Vāsudeva was discovered, where he was celebrated together with his deified kinsmen, the Vrishni heroes.

The movement of Vāsudeva was one of the major independent religious movements alongside those of Narayana, Shri and Lakshmi, which later coalesced to form Vaishnavism. After the movement of Vāsudeva had been established, the tribe of the Vrishnis fused with the tribe of the Yadavas, who had their own hero-god named Krishna. The early Krishna is known from the ''Mahabharata'', where he is described as the chief of the Yadavas kingdom of Dvārakā (modern Dwarka in Gujarat). The fused religious movement of Vāsudeva-Krishna became a major component of the amalgamated worship of Krishna, the 8th incarnation of Vishnu. According to the Vaishnava doctrine of the avatars, Vishnu takes various forms to rescue the world, with Vāsudeva-Krishna understood as one of the most popular ones. This process lasted from the 4th century BCE when Vāsudeva was an independent deity, to the 4th century CE, when Vishnu became much more prominent as the central deity of an integrated Vaishnava movement, with Vāsudeva-Krishna regarded as one of his manifestations.

"Vāsudeva" is the first name to appear in the epigraphical record and in the earliest literary sources such as the writings of Pāṇini. It is unknown at what point of time precisely Vāsudeva came to be associated with "Krishna". The association between the names "Vāsudeva" and "Krishna" starts to appear with the Mahabharata and the Harivamsa, both completed in the 3rd century CE, where "Vāsudeva" appears as the patronymic of Krishna, his father being called Vasudeva Anakadundubhi in these writings. "Vāsudeva-Krishna" refers to "Krishna, son of Vasudeva", "Vāsudeva" in the lengthened form being a vṛddhi-derivative of the short form "Vasudeva" standing for Vasudeva Anakadundubhi, a type of formation very common in Sanskrit signifying "of, belonging to, descended from". Provided by Wikipedia