of Māmallapuram (Pl. LXIII, a). Here the goddess is enthroned on the Brahmā lotus with turned-down petals; four river-goddesses are in attendance bringing water for her morning bath, assisted by the Elephants of the Skies, which form a canopy over her head.
The actual churning is rendered on a grand scale in the bas-reliefs of the procession path of the great temple of Augkor Vat in Cambodia, built about the twelfth century by Sūrya-Varman II, one of the last of the Hindu kings who ruled over the Indian colony in the Far East. Pl. LXIII, b, shows the central portion where Vishnu, manifesting himself in several Avatars, is directing the churning. Below he is the Great Tortoise. In the middle he appears in his four-armed form joining hands with the Devas and Asuras. At the top he is holding the churning-stick in its place.
The legends of Rāma and of Krishna, the seventh and eighth Avatars, fill a great part in Vaishnava poetry and painting, but they do not take a very prominent place in classical Indian sculpture now extant. Rāma in temple images and as a household god is the typical Indo-Aryan king. His faithful ally, Hanuman, the monkey-king whose devoted service enabled him to rescue Sītā from the stronghold of the demon-king, Rāvana, is often rendered with the sympathy and keen observation of animal life characteristic of the best Indian art (Pl. LXX, b). Krishna is commonly represented either as an infant cradled on a lotus leaf and floating upon the cosmic waters—a counterpart of Nārāyana—or as a child-hero dancing upon the serpent Kaliya, which infested a whirlpool in the Jumna.
The cult of Vishnu, centred in the idea of bhakti, the loyal devotion, as of the soldier to his chief (as in the
