Religion’s Future in View of Its Past

Part 7​—c. 1500 B.C.E. onward​—Hinduism—​Your Name Is Tolerance

“Every man should follow his own religion.”​—Ramakrishna, 19th-century Hindu reformer

TOLERANCE is normally considered a virtue. At any rate, it well describes that gigantic world religion known as Hinduism. In 1985 a reported 13.5 percent of the world’s population, about 650,000,000 people, professed to be Hindus.

Hinduism has been termed “a complex national religion, of many different strands” and simply “a generic term for all the religions of India.” The New Encyclopædia Britannica does little to clarify matters when it admits that “every attempt at a specific definition of Hinduism has proved unsatisfactory in one way or another, the more so because the finest Indian scholars of Hinduism, including Hindus themselves, have emphasized different aspects of the whole.”

Hinduism is, in any case, an old religion. It originated in the Indus River valley, now part of Pakistan. An Indo-European people known as the Aryans moved into this area about 1500 B.C.E. Since they regarded certain works as sacred knowledge (veda), their religion became known as Vedism. It contained certain elements drawn from the religion of the ancestors of today’s Iranians. Even the possibility of Babylonian influence exists, as the Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics explains, speaking of “various lines of coincidence between the Babylonian and early Hindu culture.” The religion of the original settlers built upon these foreign elements, adding or dropping beliefs and practices over the years as other religions exercised their influence. Thus, Hinduism is the result of a continued accretion of numerous elements derived from many sources.

Teachings and Practices

The Aryans helped lay the basis for the Hindu caste system. The four original castes multiplied to later include several thousand subdivisions. These four castes supposedly emanated from the different body parts of puruṣa, a Sanskrit word meaning “person” or “a man” in reference to mankind’s original father.

The Brahmans, supposedly born from his mouth, were religious leaders; the Kshatriyas, born from his arms, military and political leaders; the Vaisyas, born from his thighs, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants; and the Sudras, born from his feet, slaves. “Untouchables” were low-caste persons whose duties or way of life involved religiously unclean activities. Although India and Pakistan outlawed the severest forms of the Hindu caste system about 40 years ago, elements of it still exist.

For a time, animal sacrifices were an important part of worship, requiring a priesthood to perform necessary ceremonies. The Brahmans grew so powerful that a branch of the religion became known as Brahmanism. “The priests were feared and honored more than the gods,” says T. W. Organ, “because the priests could destroy enemies merely by changing the ritual.” As sacrificial rites became more complex, a trend began that stressed asceticism, or mortification of the flesh.

Samsara was a basic belief. It was propounded, at the latest, in the Upanishads, that group of Hindu scripture dating most likely from the first half of the first millennium B.C.E. They taught that after death and an intermediate stay in heaven or hell, individuals are reborn as humans or animals on a level either higher or lower than the one previously enjoyed, this according to the law of Karma. Life’s goal is to achieve moksha, release from the relentless cycle of birth and rebirth, being absorbed into the ultimate source of order called Brahma.

Vedism knew many gods. But according to the book Concepts of Indian Philosophy, its adherents found this unsatisfying, so “they slowly drifted towards a monotheistic conception of the god-head. . . . One process was to lump all the previous gods together . . . [to] produce a conceptualised god.” Brahma therefore came to be an impersonal god without attributes and qualities but one personified in various deities.

The desire to achieve moksha is based on what historian Will Durant calls the “revulsion against life . . . , which runs darkly through all Hindu thought.” This gloomy and pessimistic attitude is well illustrated in the Maitri Upanishad, which asks: “In this body, which is afflicted with desire, anger, covetousness, delusion, fear, despondency, envy, separation from the desirable, union with the undesirable, hunger, thirst, senility, death, disease, sorrow and the like, what is the good of enjoyment of desires?”

A way of avoiding this unhappy condition was given in the Puranas, a series of texts probably composed during the first centuries of the Common Era. Meaning “ancient stories,” these were widely available and came to be known as the scriptures of the common man. The Garuda Purana claims: “True happiness lies in the extinction of all emotions. . . . Where there is affection there is misery. . . . Renounce affection and you shall be happy.” Unfortunately, this solution seems almost as dreary as the condition of unhappiness it is designed to assuage.

Prior to this, the Bhagavad Gita, meaning “the Lord’s Song” and sometimes called “the most important book ever written in India,” suggested three ways of achieving liberation. “The path of duties” stressed discharging ritual and social obligations, “the path of knowledge” included practicing meditation and Yoga, and “the path of devotion” involved devotion to a personal god. The Bhagavad Gita has been likened to Christendom’s “New Testament.” Most Indians know some of its verses by heart, and many of them chant memorized portions daily.

The Bhagavad Gita is actually only a small section of a Hindu epic called the Mahabharata, which contains a hundred thousand verses, easily making it the world’s longest poem. With the incorporation of the Bhagavad Gita into the Mahabharata (probably in the third century B.C.E.), Hinduism had finally become a distinct religion apart from Vedism and Brahmanism.

Constant Reform

From its beginning, Hinduism has been marked by constant reform. Foremost among reformers of the sixth century B.C.E. were Siddhārtha Gautama and Vardhamāna Mahāvīra, the founders of Buddhism and Jainism respectively.

Mahāvīra considered himself the 24th in a line of Jinas (conquerors) upon whose lives Jainism is based. This religion differs from Hinduism in that it rejects a creator, teaching that the world has always existed. It lays particular emphasis on the doctrine of ahimsa. The nonviolent course followed by 20th-century Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi during his struggle for Indian independence was actually an application, in a political way, of this religious doctrine.

According to Jainism, right belief, right knowledge, and right conduct, combined with the practicing of Yoga, lead to liberation. At the same time, it contends that everything is essentially a matter of viewpoint, thus ruling out absolute standards of right and wrong. This points up the tolerant attitude of Hinduism, from which Jainism sprang.

Some 2,000 years later, in the 15th century, another reformer arose. Named Nānak, he attempted to codify a religion acceptable to both Hindus and Muslims. The result was Sikhism, “Sikh” being derived from a Sanskrit word meaning “disciple.” Nānak was the first of ten gurus, the tenth of whom founded in 1699 a fraternity called the Khalsa (pure ones). To eliminate caste distinctions and to emphasize their being soldiers of their faith, members were given the common surname Singh (lion). They were required to observe the five K’s: to leave their hair and beard (kesh) uncut; to fasten their turban-covered hair with a comb (kangha); to wear shorts (kachs), perhaps under long trousers; to carry a saber (kirpan); and to wear a steel bracelet (kara). The line of gurus ended at ten. The sacred book of Sikhism, the Guru Granth Sahib, took its place. Compiled in 1604, it was revised a century later.a

In the latter part of the 19th century, Calcuttan priest Ramakrishna tried blending Hinduism with what he considered the best of Western religious thought. He argued that even as water has different names in different languages, so “Sat-chit-ananda, the everlasting-intelligent-bliss, is invoked by some as God, by some as Allah, by some as Jehovah, by some as Hari, and by others as Brahman.” Even “as one can ascend to the top of a house by means of a ladder or a bamboo or a staircase or a rope, so divers are the ways and means to approach God. . . . Different creeds are but different paths to reach the Almighty.”

Such a tolerant attitude accommodates great leeway in Hindu worship. It allows some sects to direct their worship mainly to Brahma (Brahmanism), others to Vishnu (Vaishnavism), and still others to Siva (Saivism). It allows folk Hinduism, Shaktism, and Tantrism to preach Hinduism each in its own fashion. Tantrism, for example, includes tribal and folk practices and stresses goddess worship, which appeared early in the history of Hinduism. Indians speak of their country as “Mother India,” and it is represented by a goddess named Bhārat Mā.

Tolerance​—Good or Bad?

“Hinduism has constantly proved itself capable of absorbing new teachings,” writes Geoffrey Parrinder, British theologian and lecturer in comparative religion. “This syncretism, or mingling, of religions,” he adds, “is perhaps the commonest line of Hindu teaching today.” Many people apparently agree with this Hindu philosophy of tolerance, saying, as it were, ‘Serve God in the way that is right for you.’

But Parrinder points out that “by equating all beliefs,” there is the “danger of failing to discriminate between good and bad.” And is it not becoming increasingly obvious that religion can be bad as well as good? Is there any virtue in introducing elements of bad religion into one’s own?

Today, many people are disappointed with their religion. So was a Hindu of the Kshatriya ruling caste who lived some two and a half millenniums ago. Hinduism failed to answer his questions. He sought enlightenment. Our next installment, “An Enlightenment That Promised Liberation,” will tell us more.

[Footnotes]

[Box on page 25]

You May Have Wondered

How do Hindus explain samsara? The Bhagavad Gita says: “As a man, casting off worn-out garments, taketh new ones, so the dweller in the body, casting off worn-out bodies, entereth into others that are new.” The Garuda Purana explains that “it is the works of this self in a prior existence which determine the nature of its organism in the next . . . A man gets in life what he is fated to get, and even a god cannot make it otherwise.” In illustration, The Markandeya Purana quotes a person who says: “I was born as a Brahmana, a Kshatriya, a Vaisya and a Sudra, and again as a beast, a worm, a deer and a bird.”

Do Hindus consider cows sacred? Both the Rig-Veda and the Avesta refer to cows as “beings not to be killed.” But this seems to be based on the policy of ahimsa rather than on the belief in reincarnation. Nevertheless, The Markandeya Purana points up the seriousness of failing to obey this law, saying that “one who kills a cow goes to hell for three successive births.”

How do Hindus view the river Ganges? “Saints, who are purified by bathing in the waters of this river, and whose minds are devoted to Kesava [Vishnu], obtain final liberation. The sacred river, when heard of, desired, seen, touched, bathed in, or hymned, day by day purifies all beings. And those who living even at a distance of a hundred yoyanas [900 miles] [1,400 km] exclaim ‘Ganga and Ganga’ are relieved of the sins committed during the three previous existences.”​—The Vishnu Purana.

Who are the Hare Krishnas? They are members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, a missionary form of devotional Hinduism. Its founder, the late A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, brought his message to the United States in 1965. It retains certain elements of Hindu asceticism, centers around the worship of the god Krishna, and stresses the chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra. Bhaktivedanta considered the mere reciting of God’s name sufficient for salvation.