Viṣṇu across the layers — three strides to everything after
The popular claimA minor Ṛgvedic god with one famous act became the one who holds the world together.
In the Ṛgveda, Viṣṇu is a companion of Indra — he helps in the Vṛtra fight, he is called Indra's friend — and he has one thing that is his: idaṁ viṣṇur vi cakrame tredhā ni dadhe padam — this Viṣṇu strode out; three times he set down his step. From that one line comes everything.
The three strides
The hymn 1.154 says he measured out the earthly regions in three steps; that two of them are visible to men and the third is beyond the flight of birds; that his highest step — paramaṁ padam — is where the wise see him, like an eye stretched across the sky, and where the honey-spring is. The commentators read the three as earth, air and heaven, or as sunrise, noon and sunset. The image is of a god who is not one place but the whole extent, and whose third, highest step is where one goes. The Vaiṣṇava idea of Vaikuṇṭha, the highest heaven, is paramaṁ padam given a name.
The sacrifice
The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa says flatly that Viṣṇu is the sacrifice — yajño vai viṣṇuḥ. And it tells the dwarf story for the first time: the gods, defeated, are given as much land as Viṣṇu, who is a dwarf, can lie on; he lies down and grows to cover everything. The Purāṇas will make this the Vāmana avatāra and give it a king, Bali, and three steps that cover the world and press the king into the underworld. The three strides of the Ṛgveda and the growing dwarf of the Brāhmaṇa are the same idea, and the avatāra is the story that joins them.
Nārāyaṇa
The Mahābhārata's Nārāyaṇīya section, in the Śānti Parva, is where Viṣṇu becomes the supreme god of a theology. He is Nārāyaṇa, resting on the waters, on the serpent Śeṣa, from whose navel Brahmā rises to make the world; he is the one whom the sage Nārada finds in Śvetadvīpa, the White Island, worshipped by beings who have no other god. The name Nārāyaṇa is not in the Ṛgveda — it arrives from a separate cult, of a god of the waters, and merges with Viṣṇu here, and after the merger there is no seam.
The one who descends
The avatāra — the descent — is the idea that turned a sustainer into a story. The list of ten settles late: fish, tortoise, boar, man-lion, dwarf, Paraśurāma, Rāma, Kṛṣṇa, Buddha, Kalki. The boar and the tortoise are, in the Brāhmaṇas, Prajāpati's forms, transferred to Viṣṇu. The dwarf is the Śatapatha's. Rāma and Kṛṣṇa are the two the tradition lives in, and Kṛṣṇa is the one who speaks the Bhagavad Gītā — which says, in its fourth chapter, why he descends: whenever dharma declines, I make myself. That verse is the theology of the whole list.
The sustainer
The trimūrti — Brahmā makes, Viṣṇu keeps, Śiva ends — is a Purāṇic scheme, tidy and later, and the Vaiṣṇava texts do not really accept it; for them Viṣṇu does all three. But sustainer fits what the Ṛgveda already saw: the god who is the extent of things, who holds the three worlds apart with his steps, and whose highest step is the place the worlds are held from.
Viṣṇu now
Every Rāma temple and every Kṛṣṇa temple; Tirupati, the largest pilgrimage in the world by count; Jagannātha at Purī; the Ekādaśī fasts twice a month, kept by more people than any other vow; the Cāturmāsya, when he sleeps and no weddings are held — the panchang on this site marks all of it. And the tulasī in the courtyard, which is his.
What this page does not say
It does not say the layers are one god revealed by stages, or that they are separate gods stitched together — the tradition holds the first and the texts show the stitching, and the reader may hold both. It gives what each text added, in the order the texts come, so that the reader at a Rāma temple knows the strider and the dwarf and the serpent-bed are all standing there too.
Source — Rigveda 1.154–1.156, 7.100 (the Vishnu hymns); Shatapatha Brahmana 1.2.5 (Vishnu as the sacrifice, the dwarf); Vishnu Purana; Bhagavata Purana; the Mahabharata's Narayaniya section (Shanti Parva); the Bhagavad Gita
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