Vishnu as the supreme deity

Vaishnavas affirm Vishnu, and his avatars, above all Krishna and Rama, as the supreme deity, the source and sustainer of all, from whom the other gods derive. On this view the ultimate reality is a personal, gracious Lord who descends into the world in successive incarnations (avataras) to restore righteousness whenever it declines, as the Bhagavad Gita has Krishna declare. Salvation comes chiefly through bhakti, loving devotion and surrender to the Lord, who receives the devotee by grace.

Vaishnava theology is itself divided among several major lineages (sampradayas), each with its own philosophical school: the Sri Vaishnavas, following Ramanuja's eleventh-century qualified non-dualism (Vishishtadvaita); the Madhva or Brahma sampradaya, holding Madhva's thirteenth-century strict dualism (Dvaita), on which the soul and God remain eternally distinct even in liberation; and the Gaudiya Vaishnavas, founded on the ecstatic devotionalism of the Bengali saint Chaitanya (1486 to 1534), whose tradition of congregational chanting (kirtan) of Krishna's names underlies the modern International Society for Krishna Consciousness, founded by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada in 1966.

Vaishnavism is the most widely followed of the major Hindu traditions, elaborated by theologians such as Ramanuja and by devotional movements across India, and expressed in a vast literature of hymn, story, and philosophy. Its affirmation that Vishnu is supreme distinguishes it from Shaivism and Shaktism, which accord that place to Shiva and to the Goddess respectively, and from the Smarta view that the great deities are forms of one Brahman.

Within a shared Hindu framework of dharma, karma, samsara, and moksha, Vaishnavism gives the ultimate the face of a personal, saving Lord. Vaishnava devotion draws deeply on the Alvars, Tamil poet-saints active roughly from the sixth to ninth centuries whose passionate hymns to Vishnu were collected as the Divya Prabandham and came to be revered by the Sri Vaishnava tradition as a "Tamil Veda," recited in temple worship alongside Sanskrit scripture. This elevation of vernacular devotional poetry to near-canonical status alongside the Sanskrit Vedas is characteristic of Vaishnavism's historical openness to bhakti expressed in regional languages, a pattern repeated later in Hindi devotional poetry to Rama and Krishna by poets such as Tulsidas and Surdas, and it distinguishes the tradition's textual culture from schools that restrict ultimate scriptural authority to Sanskrit texts alone.