The Mathematics of Divinity
In 1858, German Indologist Max Müller wrote that “Hinduism is a decrepit religion, and has not many years to live.”1 Müller was wrong. Hinduism may be the oldest of the great religions, but it is also the third largest (after Christianity and Islam), with roughly 900 million followers, or about 15 percent of the world’s population. Most Hindus live in India, the world’s largest democracy, where roughly four out of every five people are Hindu. But during the first millennium of the Common Era, Hinduism spread throughout Southeast Asia. The Prambanan temple complex, dedicated to Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu, was built in the ninth century on the island of Java in Indonesia, and Angkor Wat in Cambodia, now a Buddhist site, was built in the twelfth century by and for Hindus. Today Hinduism is the majority religion in Nepal, and Hindus number in the millions in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Malaysia, and the United States.
In the United States, Asian Americans are often seen as a “model minority” because of their successes in school and at work. Like any stereotype, this is part true and part false, but it fits American Hindus who run neck-and-neck with Unitarians and Jews when it comes to such markers of success as levels of higher education and per-capita income. Hindus run 40 percent of the high-tech firms in California’s Silicon Valley.2 Back in India, Hindus form the bulk of a rapidly industrializing economy that many predict will become the next China.
It is difficult to say what, if anything, all these Hindus have in common because, of all the great religions, Hinduism is the least dogmatic and the most diverse. Rather than repelling new influences, Hindus are forever absorbing them. Of course, no religion is uniform. Christians have their feminist theologians and their macho fundamentalists, their “smells and bells” Anglicans and their speaking-in-tongues Pentecostals. But Hindus take diversity to new heights. Hindus do have a shared scripture (the Vedas), a shared sacred symbol (Om), and a sacred center (Varanasi in North India). They have no founder, however, or current leader. They have no shared creed and no mechanism for excommunication. When American poet Walt Whitman wrote, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself,” he was channeling the absorptive spirit of Hinduism. It, too, is large; it, too, contains multitudes.
In the Western monotheisms, one is the holiest number, but Hindus worship many gods through many different paths (margas), disciplines (yogas), and philosophies (darshanas). Their deities appear as powerful kings, starving ascetics, brave monkeys, graceful dancers, blue-faced flute players, and impersonal stones. Some Hindus say that there is really just one god underlying these many manifestations. Others say that there are many gods but one is supreme. Still others say there are many gods and all are equal. Some Hindus even say there is no god whatsoever—that the gods are a by-product of our hyperactive imaginations. Hindus are also divided on just how the gods are present in the murtis (icons) bearing their names. In a dispute that resembles the divide between Catholics (who believe that bread and wine are transubstantiated in the Mass into the body and blood of Jesus) and Protestants (who believe that bread and wine are just symbols representing Jesus), some Hindus say that the divine resides in these images, while others say that these images are symbols pointing beyond themselves to divinity.
Tellingly, Hindus cannot even agree on what to call their religion, or whether it is a religion at all. One of the most common claims among Hindus in the West is that “Hinduism is a way of life” rather than a religion. And many prefer to refer to that way of life not as Hinduism but as Sanatana Dharma (Eternal Law).
Because you typically become a Hindu by birth rather than conversion, Hinduism is, like Judaism, as much a people as a religion. The term Hindu originally conjured up a place—the ancient Indus River Valley—and the people who occupied it. During the Mughal Empire of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, this term referred to any non-Muslim, and, as late as the early twentieth century, Americans were referring to all immigrants from India (Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim) as “Hindoos.” British Orientalists and Indian nationalists popularized the notion of Hinduism as a world religion distinct from Islam and Christianity in the Victorian era, but the word Hinduism (spelled Hindooism at the time) doesn’t even appear in English until the 1790s, and its usage was not widespread until the latter half of the nineteenth century.3 That is why it was possible in 1845 for the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson to locate the popular Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, inside the wrong religion—“the much renowned book of Buddhism,” he called it.4
In the absence of some entity with the authority to magically transform one specific vision of what Hinduism ought to be into what Hinduism actually is, Hinduism is what Hindus do and think, and what Hindus do and think is almost everything under the sun. More than a term pointing to a unified religion, therefore, Hinduism is an umbrella term for the religious tradition that gave the world karma and reincarnation and yoga. Under Hinduism’s sacred canopy sit a dizzying variety of religious beliefs and behaviors practiced in the wildly complex and contradictory subcontinent of India and its diasporas.
Samsara and Moksha
Although Hindus disagree on how to reach the religious goal, there is considerable consensus on both the human problem and its solution. The problem is samsara, which literally means wandering on or flowing by but in this context refers to the vicious cycle of life, death, and rebirth. We are born and die, and then we are born and die again. And so it goes for the cosmos itself, which flows equally endlessly through its own cycle of creation, destruction, and recreation.
In the West, belief in reincarnation is growing rapidly. More than one out of every four Americans and Europeans believes that the soul takes on another body after death.5 But for Westerners reincarnation is usually seen as a reward rather than a punishment: perhaps in your next life you can buy that Porsche or marry that hottie or land that six-figure salary. Hindus, however, have classically seen reincarnation as a problem rather than an opportunity: this world is a vale of tears, and whatever happiness we might cobble together here is transitory and impermanent. Even heaven is subject to the flux and frustrations of the iron law of samsara. It, too, was created and will be destroyed, as will whatever gods reside there. The Hindu goal, therefore, is not to escape from this world to some heavenly paradise, but to escape from heaven and earth altogether.
Hindus call this goal moksha, which literally means release and in this case refers to spiritual liberation—freeing the soul from bondage to samsara and its unsatisfactoriness. This is the closest Hinduism gets to the Christian notion of salvation. But to refer to moksha as salvation is incorrect, since the concept of salvation implies salvation from sin, and Hindus do not believe in sin and so harbor no desire to be saved from it. What needs escaping is not sin but samsara. And moksha, not salvation, is that escape.6
Hindus understand that not everyone will be able to attain this goal, or even to strive after it. So they recognize four different aims in life. The first three are: kama, or sensual pleasure (as in the ancient sex manual the Kama Sutra); artha, or wealth and power; and dharma, or duty. But the ultimate goal is moksha. Some conceive of moksha as a loving union of the individual soul with a personal god. Others see it as a more impersonal merging of what Emerson called the “Over-Soul” into the ineffable essence of impersonal divinity. Still others visualize moksha as a place. Instead of the Christian heaven and its streets paved with gold, they imagine a paradise either at Vishnu’s home in Vaikuntha or at Shiva’s home in Kailasa.
One of the most fascinating conversations in the Hindu tradition concerns how to reach this religious goal. What are the techniques for moving from samsara to moksha? As they wrestled with this question, Hindus developed three very different yogas (literally “disciplines”). The first, developed by priests and described in the ritual scripture the Vedas, was karma yoga, or the discipline of action, which initially referred to ritual action and particularly to fire sacrifice. The second, developed by wandering sages and
written down in the philosophical scripture the Upanishads, was jnana yoga, or the discipline of wisdom. The third, bhakti yoga, or the discipline of devotion, is now by far the most popular form of Hinduism. It affirms that neither priestly sacrifice nor philosophical knowledge is necessary for release from the bondage of samsara. All that is needed is love—heartfelt devotion to the god of your choosing.
Today when Westerners think of Hinduism, many think of Apu, the Kwik-E-Mart proprietor on The Simpsons television show, a worshipper of Ganesha and Shiva, and arguably the Western world’s most celebrated Hindu. But the classic image is the Hindu holy man. In the nineteenth century, missionary reports, ship-captains’ travelogues, and Oriental tales seared into Western consciousness images of crazy ascetics walking barefoot on hot coals, contorting their emaciated bodies into impossible positions, and swinging from metal hooks dug into their backs. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, this “race of knaves,” as one French missionary called them, went from being reviled to being revered.7 As the counterculture traded in the “materialistic West” for the “spiritual East,” Americans and Europeans fell in love with gurus such as the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of Transcendental Meditation (TM) fame, who seemed to many baby boomers (not least The Beatles) the perfect antidote to the drab life of the corporate man in the grey-flannel suit. Today one of the stock scenes in New Yorker cartoons depicts Western seekers meeting Hindu holy men. In one, an emaciated mountaintop guru answers his visitor’s question with a question: “If I knew the meaning of life, would I be sitting in a cave in my underpants?”8
This image of the Hindu holy man, still alive in movies and television commercials (and reinforced by books on Hinduism that focus on the mystical experiences of elites), drives the popular perception that Hinduism is an otherworldly path of self-denial in which simple sadhus trade in jobs and families for lives of meditation, yoga, celibacy, and other austerities. And this is how Hinduism began over 2,500 years ago—as an elite tradition of ascetics seeking to solve the problem of samsara through wisdom. But today Hinduism is far less exotic—a popular tradition of ordinary fathers, mothers, and children seeking moksha through nothing more extraordinary than love.
Indus Valley Civilization
Religions are often described as trees with roots, trunks, and branches. But geology rather than botany is Hinduism’s metaphorical home ground. Imagine the Hindu tradition as layer upon layer of rocks of various sorts stacked on top of one another. In some places antediluvian granite pokes up to the surface, but in other places those ancient rocks are buried under the lava of relatively recent volcanic eruptions.
The most ancient layer in Hinduism’s geology is Indus Valley civilization, a proto-Hindu culture that provides the barest glimpses of Hinduism as it is practiced today. The second layer is Vedic religion, a karma yoga path that takes its name from ancient ritual manuals called the Vedas. Next comes philosophical Hinduism, a jnana yoga path of wandering renouncers and their scriptures, the Upanishads. The fourth layer is devotional Hinduism, the bhakti yoga of the Hindu epics, a story-driven path tailor-made not for priests or holy men but for ordinary men and women for whom Hinduism is about inviting the grace and favor of the gods into everyday life. Modern Hinduism is the final layer. Here intellectuals from the nineteenth-century Hindu Renaissance and beyond struggle to bring Hinduism into conversation with Islam, Christianity, and the modern world.
Indus Valley civilization dates at least as early as 2500 to 1500 B.C.E., making its architecture older than the pyramids and its cities earlier than Athens and Rome. Excavations conducted in the early 1920s at Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, both in present-day Pakistan, have shown that Indus Valley civilization supported a vast population that may have stretched from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea. We now know that this civilization was urban, technologically advanced, and literate. But because its script has not yet been deciphered, we do not know much about its religious beliefs and practices. As a result, it is unclear how much Indus Valley civilization contributed to Hinduism. Some find Hindu precursors in its art and architecture, which seem to provide evidence of ritual bathing and animal sacrifice. Might the figurines of full-hipped women unearthed by archaeologists be prototypes of Hindu goddesses? Might the images of a man in a yogalike posture surrounded by animals be a prototype of Shiva, who is worshipped today as both an ascetic and the Lord of Animals? Perhaps. But in the absence of a deciphered script that can explain how these figures were actually used, any connections remain speculative.
Vedic Religion
The second layer in the geology of Hinduism, Vedic religion, takes its name from the world’s oldest holy books, the Vedas (from the Sanskrit term veda, meaning “knowledge”). Hindus divide their many scriptures into two categories: sruti (“that which is heard,” or texts authored by divinity) and smrti (“that which is remembered,” or texts authored by human beings). The Vedas fall into the higher category of sruti. Regarded as eternal, these Sanskrit texts are said to have been revealed to human beings through rishis (seers) and then compiled by the sage Vyasa.
Like the term Torah in Judaism, which refers in a narrow sense to the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers) and in a more expansive sense to the entire Hebrew Bible, the Vedas refer in a narrow sense to a collection of four books (the Rig, Sama, Yahur, and Arharva Vedas) and in a broader sense to sruti literature in general, which includes these four books plus three other classes of Vedic scriptures: the Brahmanas (Priestly Books), the Aranyakas (Forest Books), and the Upanishads (Secret Doctrines). The simplest way to make sense of these four classes of revelation (all written in Sanskrit) is to think of the Vedas as technical manuals instructing priests in the proper performance of rituals (including the hymns to sing and the mantras to chant), the Upanishads as philosophical dialogues speculating on the meanings of these rituals and the Ultimate Reality underlying them, and the Brahmanas and Aranyakas (texts that fall chronologically between the Vedas and the Upanishads) as mixtures of the two.9 The oldest of these scriptures is the Rig Veda, a collection of 1,028 hymns composed over centuries but dating back to at least 1200 B.C.E. The latest, the Upanishads, were probably composed between 600 and 300 B.C.E., though they were not written down until the seventeenth century C.E.
The French philosopher Simone Weil once wrote that “the first of the soul’s needs, the one which touches most nearly its external destiny, is order.”10 So it is fitting that this first of religions begins by attacking the problem of disorder. Demons of chaos are always arrayed in a pitched battle with the gods, so family, community, and cosmos alike are forever collapsing into disarray. The aim is to create and sustain social and cosmic order, or what the Vedas refer to as rita (a cognate of the English word right). But this cannot be accomplished by human beings alone. So priests turn to the gods through ritual, and especially through fire sacrifice (yajna), the central preoccupation of the Vedas.
In Europe and the United States, most of us see calling order out of chaos as a political task to be undertaken by secular means: a democratic republic, perhaps, or a constitutional monarchy. But for most of human history creating and sustaining order has been a religious burden. Confucianism shares with Vedic religion the conviction that ritual is the glue that holds society together. But in the Chinese context rituals have been more secular and interpersonal—between rulers and subjects, parents and children. Here the transactions are between humans and gods. And fire sacrifice is transactional. Priests, who serve as Vedic religion’s exemplars, feed the gods with animals, milk, grains, and other plants (including the intoxicant soma) in exchange for order and all that sustains it, including sons and cows and bountiful harvests and victories in war. Echoes of Vedic sacrifice can be heard today in the sacred fires that continue to burn in Hindu temples worldwide, in the arati ritual in which devotees wave a lighted lamp before a divine image, in marriage ceremonies where vows are always taken before a sacred fire, and in the practice of cremation, in which the impure corp
se is offered to the gods for purification.
Hinduism’s controversial system of caste may also have its origins in Vedic sacrifice. According to the Rig Veda’s “Hymn of the Primeval Man,” the world first appeared at the beginning of time when a Primeval Man (purusha) was offered to the gods as a sacrifice. Out of this dismembered corpse came horses, cows, and other animals, and the hymns and mantras of the Vedas themselves. From its mind came the moon, from its eyes the sun, from its breath the wind, from its head the sky, and from its feet the earth, setting the cosmos in order. But this primeval sacrifice set society in order too. Its mouth became the priestly caste (Brahmin); its arms the warriors (Kshatriya); its thighs the merchants (Vaishya); and its feet the servants (Shudra).
In the polytheistic world of the Vedas, we find gods associated with the earth, sun, sky, water, wind, storms, and other forces of nature; gods associated with such principles as order and duty and such hopes as health and good fortune; and goddesses of night, dawn, sacred speech, and rivers. Vishnu is a minor Vedic deity, as is the mountain god Rudra, who will later metamorphose into Shiva. There is no single high god in Vedic religion, but the most important are Agni and Indra.
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