The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (302 page)

u) in the sculpture of a temple image (
arc
).
Finally, various religious movements have tended to regard their founder or their sages as avat
ras of their own specific deity. The concept of an
a
âvat
ra
, ‘partial incarnation’, remained unproductive outside the circles of the scholastics; in some areas
a
a
is actually used as a synonym of avat
ra.
The belief put forward in
Bh
gavata-pur
a
, that humans can become avat
ras by a divine infilling, has allowed the title to be extended to religious leaders, such as
G
ndh