Originally posted by: viper833
I will as soon ask some of the people in forum stop deaming lord vishnu character.I understand that people believe what they believe. But in the forum people think that what they talk about on tvshow is acttually true. When its not. People are entitled to there opinion but also look at what facts. That majority of all hindu are Vaishnavs . The shaviate are not as big as vaishnav.
That's pretty irrelevant b'cos what's being discussed here is not whether Vishnu is greater than Shiva or not, but whether Vishnu was a hypocrite. I mean, in the Ramayan & Mahabharata, both Rama & Krishna are big about the dignity of women - in fact, in Rama's case, his entire crusade against the rakshashas revolved around that. Yet, here is a story in which Vishnu behaves in a more despicable way than Ravan.
Let's just objectively look at this, ok? Imagine if Ravan, in order to win Sita over, approached her taking the form of Rama in Panchavati itself. Or, in Asoka Vatika, did that and touched her. The most that he did was show her Rama's head in a platter to try & persuade her, but Sita wanted to die after that. Whatever else Ravana did, he never tried to trick Sita into believing that he was Rama, but Vishnu pulled off that very trick on Vrinda.
Also, once Vrinda died, the dignified thing to have done would have been to honorably hand over her remains to whatever was left of her family, and let them do the funeral and put her ashes into the Ganga, and let her in her afterlife return to Jalandhar. But taking her ashes and planting a tulsi in it, or making her take the form of a tulsi and then marrying her was making a further mockery of her - the rakshashas or asuras never did that to any woman that they got hold of.
Whether 80% of Hindus are Vaishnavas or not is irrelevant. If a certain deed is considered evil, then Vishnu doing it is as bad, if not worse, than a demon doing it. If people worship him despite that, then they obviously have missed the point of why the scriptures declare certain things as good or evil. It is tough to lead by example if the leading deities make exceptions for themselves while laying down the laws. And I'm not even touching on Vishnu's bias against asuras & rakshashas even when they were not evil, as in the case of Virochan & Bali, or the Tripurasuras.
Originally posted by: anu rulz
i am probably the only one but i disagree with the popular view of the whole vrinda- Lord Vishnu saga..i feel personally tht she was wronged..and i dnt agree with the view of it being for the greater good..a pious woman was cheated and i dnt think tht any reason given for the same is justified..not even by God.. it was her bhakti which was her strength and tht itself was converted to being the cause of her doom..
I agree w/ you as well, and pretty much removed Vishnu from my list of respected deities when I read about this story. In the Shiva Purana, Parvati is said to have asked Vishnu to take Jalandhar's form to trick Vrinda in return for what he tried to do to her. Sure, what Jalandhar did was despicable as well, but having managed to detect that Jalandhar was Jalandhar & not Shiva, Parvati should have arranged for a different punishment for Jalandhar, not Vrinda.
Indeed, Vishnu's treatment of Vrinda in this story was even worse than Indra's treatment of Ahalya. Essentially, he was less restrained w/ Vrinda than he was even w/ Lakshmi.
Edited by .Vrish. - 12 years ago
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