Vaikuntha

Also Known As: Sanskrit वैकुण्ठ, Vaikuṇṭha, from vi- plus kuṇṭha, “without dullness” and so “without anxiety”; also Vishnuloka, Paramapada, and Tirunatu in the Tamil tradition
Region/Culture: South Asia
Mythos: Hindu Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: Time, decay and rebirth have no purchase inside it, and the souls who arrive there do not come back.
Role in Mythos: It is the eternal residence of Vishnu and Lakshmi and the final destination of liberated Vaishnava souls, standing above all fourteen worlds.
Relation to Humans: Mortals do not earn Vaikuntha by merit the way they earn a term in Svarga, since it is reached through liberation rather than reward, and the Narayana Upanishad offers the mantra om namo narayanaya as the road. Once a year, at Srirangam and other southern temples, a northern gate normally kept shut is opened so that living worshippers can walk through what stands in for its threshold.

Once a year, in the hour before dawn, a doorway on the north side of the Ranganathaswamy temple at Srirangam is unbarred. It stays shut the other three hundred and sixty four days. On Vaikuntha Ekadashi the processional Vishnu, Namperumal, comes out through it in an armour of diamonds and worked gems and is carried into the thousand pillared hall, and behind him the crowd that has been standing in the dark since the previous evening files through the same opening. The gate is called the Paramapada Vasal, the door to the highest place. Everyone shuffling over its cold granite threshold understands the arithmetic on offer: walk through this, and you have walked through the gates of Vaikuntha.

Which leaves the question of what is on the other side.

Vaikuṇṭha is a word before it is an address. It parses as something like “without dullness” or “without blunting”, vi set against kuṇṭha, and by extension without anxiety, which is the sense most Vaishnava commentary settles on. Its earliest career in the record has nothing to do with Vishnu at all. Hymns 47 to 50 of the tenth book of the Rigveda are addressed to Indra Vaikuntha, Indra the son of Vikuṇṭhā, and what Indra says in them is the usual Indra business: Tvaṣṭar forged him the iron thunderbolt, he stripped the Dasyus of their strength, he is never a thrall to death. A strand of Puranic tradition keeps that maternal derivation and carries it across to Vishnu, making Vaikuntha the son of a woman called Vikuṇṭhā and the sage Śubhra, so that the god takes his name from his mother and the realm takes its name from the god.

Vishnu’s own Vedic address is a different phrase entirely. The Rigveda calls it viṣṇoḥ paramaṃ padam, the highest step of Vishnu, the third of the three strides with which he measured out the world. The hymn that lingers there describes a cattle pen: ample horned unbridled cows, men who seek the gods finding their elation, and a wellspring of honey in that highest step which fills and never runs down. It is a herdsman’s heaven, warm and small and specific in a way the later thing is not.

The later thing is enormous. By the time the Bhagavata Purana takes the subject up, Vaikuntha sits above all fourteen lokas, past the reach of the three gunas, untouched by creation and by dissolution. No text gives it a founding, because a place standing outside creation cannot have been built. There is no rajas in it and no tamas, and the Purana is careful to add that neither of them gets mixed into its sattva. Time has no power there. Brahma, granted a look, sees residents whose radiance is dark blue and whose eyes are hundred petalled lotuses, dressed in yellow, four armed, wearing gold that throws light, bright as coral and lapis lazuli, their earrings appearing to bloom. Aerial cars stand in ranks on every side. The complexions of the women are like lightning, and the whole prospect reads like a sky packed with cloud that still has the lightning in it. Shri tends the feet of the lord and sings what he has done, and the bees that follow spring take up the line and praise her back.

The gardens get the closest attention. Palaces walled in crystal. Parks that shine like liberation itself. Trees that grant wishes and blossom the year round with no season to interrupt them. Warm winds carrying scent, creepers by the water heavy enough with honey that it beads and drips, the calls of unfamiliar birds threaded through the hum of bees. Vishnu’s people travel about in vehicles built of jewels, emeralds and gold, their wives beside them, and the Purana is clear that although everyone there is beautiful and smiling, nobody distracts anybody, since all of them are entirely taken up with Krishna.

For a realm beyond measurement it has been measured with some enthusiasm. One passage sets the Vaikuntha worlds 26,200,000 yojanas above Satyaloka, which works out to something over two hundred million miles. Most Puranic and Vaishnava accounts give it a direction, towards the sign of Makara, the constellation the west calls Capricorn, and one version of the cosmology stations Vishnu’s eye at the south celestial pole, watching the whole machine from the bottom of the sky.

The gate is guarded. Jaya and Vijaya stand at it, and their story is the one myth Vaikuntha genuinely has, because a place where nothing decays and nothing ends makes a difficult setting for a plot. Brahma’s four mind born sons, Sanaka, Sanandana, Sanatana and Sanatkumara, ancient beyond reckoning but shaped like small children by their own austerity, came to the door wanting to see Vishnu. The gatekeepers looked at four naked boys and said the lord was resting and could not be disturbed. The Kumaras answered that Vishnu is available to his devotees at any hour, and then cursed the pair out of their divinity and down into mortal birth. Vishnu offered them a choice of sentence: seven lives as his devotees, or three as his enemies. They took the three, on the reasonable ground that it was quicker, and went down to be Hiranyakashipu and Hiranyaksha, then Ravana and Kumbhakarna, then Shishupala and Dantavakra, each pair dying at the hands of the god they had once turned away from a door.

The Tamil tradition reaches the same realm from another direction and gives it a different temperature. Nammalvar calls it Tirunatu, the sacred land, and the Sri Vaishnava reckoning lists it as the hundred and eighth of the Divya Desams, the last of them and the only one that does not stand where a pilgrim can walk to it. The Tiruvaymoli describes the arrival rather than the architecture. Clouds crowd the sky to applaud the Srivaisnavas going up. Some residents offer fragrance and lamps, others blow trumpets and conches. The lord’s consorts come out to meet the new arrivals with their divine attendants and their greatest treasures, and the image the poem reaches for is a mother catching sight of a son who has been away a long time.

Ramanuja supplied the technical vocabulary. Vaikuntha is the paramapada, the highest station, and the nitya vibhuti, the eternal splendour, as against the perishable world below it. He sorted the souls in it: the baddha still bound, the mukta who were bound and have been released, and the nityasuris, who were never in bondage and have never been anywhere else.

What the realm grants is plain enough. No sorrow, no fear, no decay, no confusion. Bodies that are not material bodies at all but pure forms shaped like Vishnu’s own. Above everything, no return, since the peaceful ascetics who reach it are not fed back into birth, which is the whole point and the one thing that separates it from Svarga, where merit runs out and residence expires. You do not get there by dying. The route the Narayana Upanishad gives is a mantra, om namo narayanaya, said until the bondage of repeated birth lets go.

Its limits are stranger than its powers. The gate that admits souls also let two of them out, permanently, on a curse delivered by children, so the arrangement is less unconditional than the cosmology makes it sound. In Gaudiya Vaishnavism the highest realm turns out not to be the highest at all: Jiva Goswami, working through the Brahma-samhita and a shelf of Puranas, sets Goloka Vrindavana above the Vaikuntha worlds entirely, on the grounds that the Krishna who plays there is playing a game crystal palaces cannot host. The word will not hold still either. It names Vishnu as readily as it names his house, and by the seventh century the Vishnudharmottara was attaching it to a four faced icon of the god, a lion’s head on one side and a boar’s on the other.

The nityasuris are the detail worth sitting with. They have no biography. Nothing has ever happened to any of them, because Vaikuntha is the one address in Hindu cosmology where nothing needs to.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Vaikuntha?

Vaikuntha is the eternal realm of Vishnu and his consort Lakshmi, the highest world in Vaishnava cosmology and the destination of souls who attain liberation. It stands above all fourteen lokas, outside the reach of time, decay and the three gunas. The Bhagavata Purana describes it as a country of crystal walled palaces and gardens of wish-granting trees where nothing wears out.

Who guards the gates of Vaikuntha?

The twin gatekeepers Jaya and Vijaya guard Vaikuntha, and Vishnu’s army there is led by Vishvaksena. Jaya and Vijaya once refused entry to Brahma’s four mind born sons, the Kumaras, who looked like small children, and were cursed into mortal birth for it. Given the choice of seven lives as devotees or three as enemies, they chose three, and were born as Hiranyakashipu and Hiranyaksha, Ravana and Kumbhakarna, and Shishupala and Dantavakra.

Where is Vaikuntha located?

Vaikuntha is placed above the fourteen worlds, beyond creation and dissolution, so its location is theological rather than geographical. One Bhagavata Purana passage nonetheless sets it 26,200,000 yojanas above Satyaloka, and most Puranic accounts give its direction as that of Makara, the sign the west calls Capricorn. One version of the cosmology puts Vishnu’s eye at the south celestial pole.

How does a soul reach Vaikuntha?

Vaikuntha is reached through liberation rather than through accumulated merit, which is what distinguishes it from Svarga, where a residence runs out when the merit does. The Narayana Upanishad gives the mantra om namo narayanaya as the means, and Ramanuja taught that souls freed from bondage join the nityasuris who have always lived there. Souls who arrive are not returned to rebirth.

Is Vaikuntha the same as Goloka?

No. In Gaudiya Vaishnavism, following Jiva Goswami and the Brahma-samhita, Goloka Vrindavana is a distinct and higher realm than Vaikuntha, the place where Krishna carries on his own pastimes. Vaikuntha remains the abode of Vishnu and Lakshmi, and in Sri Vaishnavism it is the highest realm without qualification, named by Ramanuja as the paramapada.