Vishnu has been eleven times on the globe in different shapes, and Siva seven times.[4] The avatars of Vishnu are celebrated in many popular poems, such as the Ramayana, or history of the Rape of Sita, the wife of Rama, the seventh incarnation;[5] the Mahabharata, and the Bhagavata [Purana], which describe the wars and amours of this god in his last human shape.[6] All these books are believed to have been written either by the hand or by the inspiration of the god himself thousands of years before the events they describe actually took place.

'It was', they say, 'as easy for the deity to write or dictate a battle, an amour, or any other important event ten thousand years before as the day after it took place'; and I believe nine-tenths, perhaps ninety-nine in a hundred, of the Hindoo population believe implicitly that these accounts were also written.

It is now pretty clear that all these works are of comparatively recent date, that the great poem of the Mahabharata could not have been written before the year 786 of the Christian era, and was probably written so late as A.D.

1157; that Krishna, _if born at all_, must have been born on the 7th of August, A.D.600, but was most likely a mere creation of the imagination to serve the purpose of the Brahmans of Ujain, in whom the fiction originated; that the other incarnations were invented about the same time, and for the same object, though the other persons described as incarnations were real princes, Parasu Rama, before Christ 1176, and Rama, born before Christ 961.

In the Mahabharata Krishna is described as fighting in the same army with Yudhishthira and his four brothers.