In the later classical and Puranic period Indra undergoes a striking demotion. He remains king of the devas and guardian of the east, but he is repeatedly outwitted, humbled and made subordinate to the greater gods Vishnu and Shiva, most pointedly when the boy Krishna lifts Mount Govardhan on one finger to shelter the cowherds from the very storm that Indra, in wounded pride, has sent, after which the chastened king bows to him. This decline registers a real shift in the history of Hinduism, as the sacrificial gods of the Veda gave way to the devotional worship of Vishnu, Shiva and the Goddess. Buddhism, meanwhile, preserved Indra under the name Sakra as the well-disposed ruler of the Trayastrimsha heaven and a frequent attendant on the Buddha, so that the old storm-king lived on, tamed, in a new tradition.
Jainism preserved Indra too, though refracted through its own very different cosmology: Jain texts describe multiple Indras presiding over different heavens, and the Indra of the first heaven is said to descend, along with his consort, to perform the ceremonial bathing of a Tirthankara at birth, one of the most celebrated rituals in Jain sacred narrative and temple art. That a figure once addressed in roughly a quarter of the Rigveda's hymns as supreme storm-king should end up, across the history of Indian religion, honoured as a still-respected but distinctly subordinate attendant figure in Buddhism and Jainism alike illustrates how thoroughly the old Vedic pantheon was reordered as devotional Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism each developed their own later hierarchies.