Pancharatra

Pancharatra (IAST: Pāñcarātra) was a religious movement in Hinduism that originated in the late 3rd-century BCE around the ideas of Narayana and the various avatar and forms of Vishnu as their central deities. The movement later merged with the Bhagavata tradition and contributed to the development of Vaishnavism. The Pancharatra movement created numerous literary treatises in Sanskrit called the Pancharatra Samhitas, and these have been influential Agamic texts within the theistic Vaishnava movements.

The term Pancharatra literally means five nights (pañca: five, rātra: nights) in Sanskrit, though the name has multiple traditional and scholarly interpretations.The Pancharatra Agamas constitute some of the most important texts of many Vaishnava philosophies including the Madhva Sampradaya or Brahma Sampradaya of Madhvacharya and the Sri Vaishnava Sampradaya of Ramanuja. The Pancharatra Agamas are composed of more than 200 texts likely composed between 600 CE to 850 CE.

The Shandilya Sutras (~100 CE) are the earliest known texts that systematized the devotional Bhakti pancharatra doctrine. 2nd-century CE inscriptions in South India suggest that Pancharatra doctrines were known there by then. The 8th-century Adi Shankara criticized elements of the Pancharatra doctrine along with other theistic approaches, stating the doctrine was against monistic spiritual pursuits and non-Vedic. The 11th-century Ramanuja developed a qualified monism doctrine (Vishishtadvaita) which bridged ideas of the Pancharatra movement and those of monistic ideas in the Vedas. The Pancharatra theology is a source of the primary and secondary avatar-related doctrines in traditions of Hinduism.

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