معرفت ادیان

Abstract Vishnu Purana is one of the eighteen basic Puranas and one of the basic texts of Vishnuite sect in Hinduism. In this text, a coherent structure of Hindu theism is presented by collating the ancient myths of Hinduism and the achievements of the important philosophical schools in India, like Vedanta and Sankhya, and multiple gods of various historical periods were incorporated in a pantheistic theology. Hence, this text is considered a good source about the developed type the belief in God in Hinduism. Using a documental-analytical approach, this paper extracts from this text the theological views about the most important issues, and, offering a logical explanation of the relationship between them, it seeks to arrange multiple gods and divinely creatures in a coherent order. The main findings of this research show that the theological system of Vishnu Purana is a kind of structure which is composed of the simple and impersonal essence of God Almighty and the identified levels of that essence. Classified into different forms, the impersonal essence of God exposes the different levels of creatures including triple and basic gods, subordinate gods, divinely creatures and natural phenomena; phenomena which en masse are a portion of Vishnu’s energy and so they should not be considered as a real and separate being.