Vaishnavism is the most widely followed of the major Hindu traditions, elaborated by theologians such as Ramanuja and by devotional movements across India, and expressed in a vast literature of hymn, story, and philosophy. Its affirmation that Vishnu is supreme distinguishes it from Shaivism and Shaktism, which accord that place to Shiva and to the Goddess respectively, and from the Smarta view that the great deities are forms of one Brahman.
Within a shared Hindu framework of dharma, karma, samsara, and moksha, Vaishnavism gives the ultimate the face of a personal, saving Lord. Vaishnava devotion draws deeply on the Alvars, Tamil poet-saints active roughly from the sixth to ninth centuries whose passionate hymns to Vishnu were collected as the Divya Prabandham and came to be revered by the Sri Vaishnava tradition as a "Tamil Veda," recited in temple worship alongside Sanskrit scripture. This elevation of vernacular devotional poetry to near-canonical status alongside the Sanskrit Vedas is characteristic of Vaishnavism's historical openness to bhakti expressed in regional languages, a pattern repeated later in Hindi devotional poetry to Rama and Krishna by poets such as Tulsidas and Surdas, and it distinguishes the tradition's textual culture from schools that restrict ultimate scriptural authority to Sanskrit texts alone.