śrī viṣṇuḥ aṣṭāviṃśatināma stotram

Seven verses that open by questioning the practice they belong to. What need is there, Arjuna asks, of repeating thousands of names over and over again — tell me the divine ones. Krishna's answer is twenty-eight: Matsya, Kurma, Varaha, Vamana, Janardana, Govinda, Pundarikaksha, Madhava, Madhusudana, and on through Vishvarupa, Vasudeva, Rama, Narayana, Hari, Damodara, Shridhara, Vedanga and Garudadhvaja. The set is deliberately the short form of a thousand, and the closing verse fixes when it is to be used rather than what it yields: remembered at dawn, recited at midday, remembered again at the evening twilight, it frees a man of all his sins.