[Footnote 30: I regret that I cannot accept the ingenious hypothesis lately put forward by Rai Saheb Dineshchandra Sen in his _Bengali Ramayanas_. The story of the Dasaratha-jataka seems to me to be a garbled and bowdlerised snippet cut off from a possibly pre-Valmikian version of the old Rama-saga; the rest of the theory appears to be quite mistaken.]
With all its attractions and success, the new Krishnaism did not everywhere overgrow the older stock upon which it had been engrafted. There were many places in which the early worship of Vishnu and Vasudeva remained almost unchanged. The new legends of Krishna's childhood might indeed be accepted in these centres of conservatism, but they made little difference in the spirit and form of the worship, which continued to follow the ancient order. In some of them the Bhagavad-gita, Narayaniya, and other epic doctrinals still remained the standard texts, which theologians connected with the ancient Upanishads and the Brahma-sutra summarising the latter; in other centres there arose, beginning perhaps about the seventh century A.D., a series of Samhitas, or manuals of doctrine and practice for the Pañcharatra[31] sect, which, though in essentials agreeing with the Narayaniya, taught a different theory of cosmogony and introduced the worship of the goddess Sri or Lakshmi, the consort of Vishnu, as the agency or energy through which the Supreme Being becomes active in finite existence; and in yet other places other texts were followed, such as those of the Vaikhanasa school. This worship of Vishnu-Vasudeva on the ancient lines was peculiarly vigorous among the representatives of Aryan culture in the South, who had introduced the cults of Vishnu and Siva with the rest of the Aryan pantheon into the midst of Dravidian animism. Hinduism, transplanted into the Dravidian area, has there remained more conservative than anywhere else, and has clung firmly to its ancient traditions. There is nothing of Dravidian origin in the South Indian worship of Vishnu and Siva; they are entirely Aryan importations. But they have become thoroughly assimilated in their southern home, and each of them has produced a huge mass of fine devotional literature in the vernaculars. In the Tamil country the church of Vishnu boasts of the Nal-ayira-prabandham, a collection of Tamil psalms numbering about 4,000 stanzas composed by twelve poets called Alvars, which were collected about 1000 A.D.; and the worship of 'Siva is equally well expressed in the Tiru-murai, compiled about the twelfth century, of which one section, the Devaram, was put together about the same time as the Nal-ayira-prabandham. Both the Tiru-murai and the Nal-ayira-prabandham breathe the same spirit of ecstatic devotion as the Bhagavata-purana; they are the utterances of wandering votaries who travelled from temple to temple and poured forth the passionate raptures of their souls in lyrical praise of their deities. Through these three main channels the stream of devotion spread far and wide through the land. Like most currents of what we call "revivalism," it usually had an erotic side; and the larger temples frequently have attached to them female staffs of attendant votaries and _corps de ballet_ of very easy virtue. But this aspect was far more marked in neo-Krishnaism, which often tends to intense pruriency, than in the other two cults. The Alvars pay little regard to the legends of Krishna, and concentrate their energies upon the worship of Vishnu as he is represented in the great temples of Srirangam, Conjevaram, Tirupati, and similar sanctuaries.