Devalok
How a tradition frames it · 2 tellings · Pan-India, West India

Three gods in one guru

Maharashtra folds Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva into the single three-headed guru Dattatreya, whose cult grows from the Guru Charitra and is claimed by Nath and Mahanubhava lines.

Who is in it

The story, beat by beat

  1. The three gods, tested by the sage's wife Anasuya, are born to her as one child, Dattatreya.
  2. The Bhagavata's Dattatreya names twenty-four teachers in nature, from the earth to a wasp.
  3. The 16th-century Guru Charitra tells the life of Narasimha Saraswati as an incarnation of Datta.
  4. From that text the image of a three-headed guru with four dogs and a cow spreads through Maharashtra.
  5. The Nath yogis and the Mahanubhavas each claim Dattatreya as their own founder-figure.

trinity guru dogs nature teachers

How it is told, place by place

Base telling · Folk documentation

Marathi Datta Sampradaya and Nath telling

West India · Maharashtra; Ganagapur, Narsobawadi, Mahur Smarta Marathi Datta devotees, Nath and Mahanubhava lineages

In Maharashtra the Trimurti is not three gods side by side but one figure: Dattatreya, shown with three heads, six arms, four dogs at his feet and a cow behind him. The cult as it exists today took shape around the Guru Charitra, a sixteenth-century Marathi text on the life of Narasimha Saraswati, who is honoured as Datta come again; Britannica dates the Datta Sampradaya to that century. Older material sits underneath: the Puranic birth to Anasuya after the three gods tested her, and the Bhagavata's Dattatreya who learned from twenty-four teachers in the natural world. The Nath yogis treat him as their patriarch, the Mahanubhavas count him among their five founders, and saints such as Tukaram sang of him. Devdutt Pattanaik has written on the dogs as the four Vedas; that reading is his.

Dattatreya — Britannica unverified; Dattatreya — Wikipedia; Dogs of the gods

Primary text (translation)

Bhagavata Purana 11.7–9

Pan-India Vaishnava

In the Bhagavata's eleventh book Dattatreya is an avadhuta sage who tells King Yadu of the twenty-four teachers he found in nature; there is no three-headed image and no guru lineage.

What is different here:

The Purana gives a wandering sage; the Marathi tradition gives a three-headed god who is all three of the Trimurti at once and the source of living guru lineages.

Srimad Bhagavatam (Bhagavata Purana); Dattatreya — Wikipedia

Sources: Dattatreya — Britannica; Dattatreya — Wikipedia; Dogs of the gods; Srimad Bhagavatam (Bhagavata Purana)

More stories with the same people

In stone and bronze

Dattatreya: the three natures in one son

The sage Atri and his wife Anasuya earn great merit through their conduct and austerity.
Legend

Anasuya tests the three gods

Narada provokes the three consorts into sending their husbands to test Anasuya's virtue; she turns them into infants and nurses them; the consorts beg for their husbands and she asks for sons — one three-headed Dattatreya, or three sons.
How a tradition frames it

One being, three functions: the Trimurti idea

The Maitri Upanishad names Brahma, Rudra and Vishnu together as portions of one being, matched to the three gunas.
In stone and bronze

The Elephanta bust: Trimurti or Sadashiva?

A seven-metre three-faced bust fills the south wall of Elephanta's Cave 1.
In stone and bronze

The so-called Trimurti cave at Mahabalipuram

Three Pallava shrines on one platform: Shiva in the centre, Vishnu on the right, and a disputed left shrine read as Brahma by Vogel but as Subrahmanya or Brahmasasta by later scholars; a Durga panel stands beside.
Origin

The golden womb and Prajapati

Before the gods there are only the primordial waters.
Origin

Brahma is born in the golden egg

A golden egg forms in the waters and glows like the sun.
Origin

The lotus from Vishnu's navel

During the dissolution Vishnu lies on the serpent Ananta in the cosmic waters.