Who Are the Main Hindu Gods? One Reality and a Million Names

The Rigveda, composed more than three thousand years ago, already contains the line that the wise speak of what is one by many names, and the Upanishads that followed identified Brahman, the reality behind everything, with atman, the self within each person. On that view a god is a form the formless takes so that it can be loved, and the question of which god is real is badly posed. Different schools weight this differently: Advaita Vedanta treats the personal gods as provisional, while the devotional traditions hold that the supreme reality is personal and is Vishnu, or Shiva, or the Goddess. Most Hindus in practice have a chosen deity, an ishta-devata, worshipped at home, alongside the household, village and family gods and the great figures everyone knows.

The largest traditions are named for the god at their centre:

• •Vishnu, the preserver, who maintains the order of the world and descends into it as an avatar when order fails; his avatars include Rama, the ideal king of the Ramayana, and Krishna, the cowherd, lover and charioteer of the Bhagavad Gita, both worshipped in their own right by hundreds of millions
• •Shiva, the destroyer and transformer, ascetic and dancer, lord of yogis, whose emblem is the linga and whose dance, as Nataraja, sets the rhythm of creation and dissolution
• •Devi, the Goddess, worshipped as Parvati, Shiva's consort, as Lakshmi, who brings fortune, as Saraswati, of learning and music, and as Durga and Kali, who destroy demons and, in Kali's case, time itself
• •Ganesha, elephant-headed son of Shiva and Parvati, remover of obstacles, invoked at the start of anything new, and the most widely worshipped of all
• •Hanuman, the monkey god of the Ramayana, the model of devotion and strength
• •Brahma, the creator, who completes the trimurti with Vishnu and Shiva and who, oddly, has almost no temples

Beneath the familiar names lies an earlier set. The gods of the Vedas were largely of nature and sacrifice, Indra the storm king who slays the drought-serpent, Agni the fire who carries offerings to the gods, Surya the sun, Varuna of the cosmic order, Vayu the wind, and they receive the majority of the Rigveda's hymns; most have faded to minor figures while Vishnu and Shiva, marginal in the Vedas, rose to the centre over the following thousand years. That turnover is itself a feature of the tradition, which has absorbed local gods, village goddesses and tribal deities continuously by identifying them with the great ones, so that a shrine to a regional protector is also a shrine to Devi, and the pantheon has grown by inclusion rather than by conquest.

The central act is puja, the honouring of a deity present in an image, murti, which is not an idol in the sense the word usually carries but a form the god has consented to inhabit so as to be seen; the worshipper offers light, water, flowers, incense and food, and receives back a portion, prasada, and darshan, the sight of the god, which is the point of a temple visit. Puja is done at a home shrine daily and at a temple when wanted, without a congregation or a fixed day, and the priest's role is to perform rites rather than to lead a service. The festivals mark the stories: Diwali, the lights that welcome Rama home; Holi, the spring colours of Krishna; Navaratri, nine nights of the Goddess; Ganesh Chaturthi, when clay Ganeshas are paraded and dissolved in water; and Maha Shivaratri, the night vigil for Shiva.

The figure of 330 million comes from a Vedic phrase, thirty-three koti, where koti means both ten million and kind or category, so the older reading is thirty-three types of divinity rather than an enormous number; the larger figure stuck because it says something true about a tradition with a god for every trade, river, mountain and household. The practical answer to the question of how many gods Hinduism has was given by a sage in one of the Upanishads, who is asked the number, answers three thousand three hundred and six, is pressed, and reduces it step by step to thirty-three, to six, to three, to one and a half, and at last to one.

Hinduism's deities are understood by most of its schools as forms of a single reality, Brahman, approached through whichever face a worshipper chooses: Vishnu the preserver and his avatars Rama and Krishna, Shiva the transformer, the Goddess as Parvati, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Durga and Kali, and the widely loved Ganesha and Hanuman, with the Vedic gods of storm, fire and sun now in the background. Worship is puja before an image at home or in a temple rather than congregational, and the famous 330 million comes from a phrase that probably meant thirty-three kinds.