© Richard Randall

Caribbean

Sundries

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

Matsya

Matsya (Fish in Sanskrit) was the first Avatara of Vishnu.

According to legend, the king Manu was washing his hands in a river when a little fish swam into his hands and begged him to save it. He put it in a jar, which it soon outgrew; he successively moved it to a tank, a river and then the ocean. The fish then warned him that a Great Flood would occur in a week that would destroy all life. Manu therefore built a boat which the fish towed to a mountaintop when the flood came, and thus he survived along with some "seeds of life" to re-establish life on earth.

The story strangely resembles Noah's Ark story.

A statue in Keshava Temple, Somnathpur, Karnataka depicts Matsya.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Oceania