Comparative Religion Books

“One of the earliest attempts to portray the human embodiment of the divine was made by the ancient Hindus a few centuries before the Christian era. In the ancient Hindu scriptures, the sacred hymns called the Vedas, the god Indra wandered about in many forms, sometimes as a bull and sometimes as a ram, and the god Varuna is said to have come out of the point of an arrow and appeared as a bull. [...] The Sanskrit terms used to express the manifestation of God coming into this world evolved from rupa, vapus, and tanu, to pradurbhava (appearance), and gradually there came about the Sanskirt word avatara, composed of two parts, the verb root tr, meaning pass or cross, and the prefix ava, signifying down. The finite verb form avatarati means 'he descends'. This passing, crossing, or coming down is symbolic of the passage of God from eternity into the temporal realm, from unconditioned to conditioned, from infinitude to finitude the descent of the divine to our world. A variant of the word avatara is the Sanskrit word avatarana, a term used to describe the entry of an actor upon the stage making his appearance from behind a curtain, just as the God-man manifests himself upon the world-stage coming down from heaven. The Anglicization of the Sanskrit term avatara is the word avatar, the word designated to describe the advent of the divine, God appearing on earth.”
― Daniel E. Bassuk, Incarnation in Hinduism and Christianity: The Myth of the God-Man