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Both of these incarnations had for many centuries8 attracted popular veneration, and their histories had been celebrated by poets in epics and by weavers of religious myths in Purānas or “old stories”; but it was apparently ���峾��Գ��Ჹ’s teaching which secured for them, and especially for Rāmachandra, their exclusive place as the objects of bhakti—ardent faith and personal devotion addressed to the Supreme.

Subsequently to ���峾��Գ��Ჹ his doctrine appears to have been set forth, about 1250, in the vernacular of the people by Jaidēo, a Brahman born at Kinduvilva, the modern Kenduli, in the Bīrbhūm district of Bengal, author of the Sanskrit Gītā Gōvinda, and by Nāmdēo or Nāmā, a tailor11 of Mahārāshtra, of both of whom verses in the popular speech are preserved in the Ādi Granth of the Sikhs.

The Vaishnava doctrine is commonly carried back to ���峾��Գ��Ჹ, a Brahman who was born about the end of the 11th century, at Perambur in the neighbourhood of the modern Madras, and spent his life in southern India.

The adherents of ���峾��Գ��Ჹ were, however, all Brahmans, and observed very strict rules in respect of food, bathing and dress; the new doctrine had not yet penetrated to the people.

Whether ���峾��Գ��Ჹ himself gave the preference to Rāma against Krishna as the form of Vishnu most worthy of worship is uncertain.