As mentioned already the word god has more than one meaning.  In India we have at least two different classes of divinities, distinguished in the native languages.  First there is Brahman the one self-existent, omnipresent, superpersonal spirit from whom all things emanate and to whom all things return.  The elaboration of this conception is the most original feature of Indian theology, which tends to regard Brahman as not merely immanent in all things, but as being all things, so that the soul liberated from illusion can see that it is one with him and that nothing else exists.  Very different is the meaning of Deva:  this signifies a god (which is not the same as God, though our language insufficiently distinguishes the two) roughly comparable with the gods of classical mythology[137].  How little sense of divinity it carries with it is seen by the fact that it became the common form of address to kings and simply equivalent to Your Majesty.  In later times, though Siva is styled Mahadeva, it was felt that the great sectarian gods, who are for their respective worshippers the personal manifestations in which Brahman makes himself intelligible, required some name distinguishing them from the hosts of minor deities.  They are commonly spoken of by some title signifying the Lord:  thus Siva is Isvara, Vishnu and his incarnations are more often styled Bhagavad.

From the Vedic hymns onwards the gods of India have been polymorphic figures not restricted by the limitations of human personality.  If a Jew or a Moslim hears new views about God, he is disposed to condemn them as wrong.  The Hindu’s inclination is to appropriate them and ascribe to his own deity the novel attributes, whether they are consistent with the existing figure or not.  All Indian gods are really everything.  As the thought of the worshipper wanders among them they turn into one another.  Even so sturdy a personality as Indra is declared to be the same as Agni and as Varuna, and probably every deity in the Vedic pantheon is at some time identified with another deity.  But though in one way the gods seem vague and impersonal, in another the distinction between gods and men is slight.  The Brahmanas tell us that the gods were originally mortal and obtained immortality by offering sacrifices:  the man who sacrifices like them makes for himself an immortal body in the abode of the gods and practically becomes a Deva and the bliss of great sages is declared equal to the bliss of the gods[138].  The human and divine worlds are not really distinct, and as in China and Japan, distinguished men are deified.  The deification of Buddha takes place before our eyes as we follow the course of history:  the origin of Krishna’s godhead is more obscure but it is probable that he was a deified local hero.  After the period of the Brahmanas the theory that deities manifest themselves to the world in avataras or descents, that is in our idiom incarnations, becomes part of popular theology.