God Is Not One

by Prothero, Stephen

  Agni is the god of fire (the English word ignite is a cognate) but in keeping with the ancient Indian theme of multiplicity, he is also associated with sacrifice, the sun, the sacred cow, and the inner fire in the belly (tapas) that will later be employed by renouncers but here is tied to sacrifice. Because fire rituals are viewed as transmissions between earth and heaven, Agni is, like Eshu in Yoruba religion, a messenger. And because these rituals take place in private homes as well as public places, he is also the god of hearth and home.

  Indra, the god of war and weather (especially bad weather) is after Agni the most important in the Vedic pantheon. A stern rebuke to the Western presumption that gods, like Miss America candidates, must be models of virtue, Indra is, according to one scholar, “a ruffian from birth, an unfilial son, a lecherous youth, and a gluttonous, drunken, and boastful adult.”11 Huge, hard-drinking, hard-charging, and possessed of both Superman-style strength and NFL-style bravado, Indra is a take-no-prisoners warrior whose ingestion of the bottled courage of soma (both an intoxicant and a god) makes him fearless, and reckless, in battle. Although Indra’s influence diminishes as Hinduism evolves, he puts in an appearance in the Bhagavad Gita as the father of the warrior Arjuna.

  There is much controversy, with huge political implications, about how Hinduism per se emerges out of its Indus Valley and Vedic foundations. We know that Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas, is an Indo-European language that shares much with other members of the Indo-European family, including Greek, Latin, German, French, Spanish, and English. For example, deva, the Sanskrit term for god, is related to the English term divine, to deus in Latin, to theos in Greek, and even to the Greek high god Zeus himself, who shares with Indra (and Vajrayana Buddhism to come) a fancy for the thunderbolt. But we do not know where the Indo-European language family originated.

  What is known is that Dravidian-speaking Indus Valley civilization abruptly gives way around 1500 B.C.E. to Aryan civilization, the Sanskrit language, and Vedic religion. Global shifts in climate may have played a part in the demise of Indus Valley civilization, but the traditional theory is that a people calling themselves Aryans (“Noble Ones”) came across modern-day Afghanistan and conquered northern India by force. Other Aryans then moved into Iran and still others into Europe, taking their languages with them. This theory explains the linguistic parallels between Sanskrit, Persian, and many ancient and modern European languages. It also explains the importance in the Vedas of horses, animals notably absent from Indus Valley civilization yet very much a part of the Central Asian cultures of the time. But this “Aryan invasion” theory, advanced by Europeans as early as the nineteenth century, has come under sharp attack by champions of Hindutva (Hinduness), who view India as a “Hindu nation” rather than a secular state. Their theory says that Aryan culture was indigenous to the Indian subcontinent—there is an unbroken line of development from Indus Valley civilization to Aryan civilization to Vedic religion to Hinduism. Hinduism, in this view, is home grown and the homeland of the Indo-European language family is not modern-day Turkey but the Ganges plains.

  Philosophical Hinduism

  Though there may be continuities between Indus Valley civilization and Vedic religion, and there are certainly continuities between Vedic religion and Hinduism, Hinduism is a new religious creation—at least as different from its predecessors as Islam is from Christianity and Judaism. In philosophical Hinduism, the third layer in Hindu geology, some gods carry over from Vedic religion, but many new gods emerge, and gods that were once central become marginal, and vice versa. Ritual takes a backseat to philosophy, and mystics replace priests as the religious exemplars. The practical spirit of the world-affirming Vedas yields to a preoccupation with the afterlife. Most important, the central religious problem shifts from social and cosmic disorder to something far more familial and individualistic: the nature and destiny of the human soul.

  The modern novel is obsessed with the self, more specifically with the problem of authenticity. In classics from Don Quixote to The Catcher in the Rye the hero is not the person who commands great armies or gathers great wealth but he (and, increasingly, she) who avoids the fate of the fake and the phony. But this is heroic only because it is so difficult. Today young people and adults in both Europe and the United States shuffle from day to day and year to year imprisoned in roles assigned to them by families, friends, and employers. But who am I really? What is my true self?

  The Danish nuclear physicist Niels Bohr once wrote, “I go into the Upanishads to ask questions,” and the Upanishads, the midwife birthing early Hinduism out of Vedic religion, ask these questions with even more urgency than Don Quixote or Holden Caulfield. Often ignoring and sometimes attacking the ritual obsessions of the Vedas, Hinduism’s homeless sages preoccupied themselves with philosophy instead. As they wandered across the belly of India, they wrestled with great questions of life and death, creation and destruction, and often with an individualistic twist. How did I come to be born? What happens when I die? What is my relationship with Ultimate Reality?

  A product of the Axial Age, the Upanishads were compiled beginning in the sixth century B.C.E., a period of astounding religious creativity that gave the world not only Hinduism but also Buddhism and Jainism, Greek philosophy and the Hebrew prophets, Confucius and Laozi. The Upanishads introduced concepts such as karma and reincarnation that we now recognize as common coin not only of the Hindu tradition but also of human civilization. Philosophical Hinduism also introduced various meditative and yogic techniques designed to awaken liberating insight in practitioners willing to withdraw from the world into lives of celibacy and other austerities. These mystics, known as renouncers (sannyasins), became Hinduism’s earliest exemplars. Although Hinduism now recognizes dharma (duty), artha (power), and kama (sensual pleasure) as legitimate aims of life, these renouncers saw moksha as the summum bonum, and turned their backs on wealth and power and sex and everything else that makes modern Western democracies tick. Convinced that the path to liberating wisdom was an extraordinary path requiring extraordinary means, these renouncers walked this path as former householders, leaving behind spouses and children and jobs in order to pursue moksha full-time.

  There is a Jewish tradition of mourning for apostates—sitting shivah for them for seven days as if they were actually dead. In the Hindu tradition, renouncers die socially too. Their marriages are legally terminated, they no longer answer to their birth names, and the possessions they abandon as they go on their spiritual quest are distributed to their heirs. But what really distinguishes these renouncers from the priests who exemplified Vedic religion is not just their withdrawal from the dharma world of work and family but also their withdrawal from the karma world of fire and sacrifice. While Vedic priests trafficked in karma, or action, these new exemplars focused on jnana, or wisdom. Whereas Vedic religion was a tradition of priests performing fire sacrifices in order to keep chaos at bay, early Hinduism was a tradition of renouncers cultivating knowledge in order to liberate themselves from samsara.

  Some renouncers rejected the Vedas outright, but most did not. In keeping with Hinduism’s absorptive sensibility, they reinterpreted Vedic sacrifice instead. Focusing on this ritual’s inner meaning rather than its outer performance, they asserted that fire sacrifice happens not just on an altar but inside us too. They referred to their ascetic austerities as tapas, which means heat, and they came to believe that they could carry this sacred fire inside them wherever they went. And where they went was far and wide, wandering homeless and alone, never staying long in any one village except during the four months of the monsoon, subsisting (barely) at the margins of society, sleeping in mountain caves and at river banks, accomplishing nothing other than their own austerities, seeking nothing less than spiritual liberation.

  These renouncers referred to themselves by many names: sadhus (holy men), shramanas (strivers), munis (silent ones), parivrajakas (wanderers), bhikshus (beggars). As a rule, they were homeless and celibate and begged
for food. Some took vows of silence. Today the most notorious are the Nagas (“Naked Ones”) who clothe themselves in nothing more than the ashes of cremation grounds. But the most audacious are the Aghoris, devotees of Shiva who have been known to eat excrement, drink urine, and use human skulls as begging bowls. All this was catnip to nineteenth-century missionaries and ship captains who saw in these practices further evidence of the superiority of Christianity to the inanities of “Hindooism.” But these renouncers knew what they were doing: smashing social taboos in order to experience the mystical reality of nondual awareness. If everything is one, what is the difference between following social conventions and breaking them?

  Together these renouncers gave the world a new understanding of the human being and a new diagnosis of the human problem. Because they were philosophers, everything turned for them on foolishness and wisdom. The problem was no longer chaos but samsara. What got us into this mess was avidya (ignorance), so what would get us out would have to be jnana (wisdom).

  This wisdom begins with the fact that we humans are essentially spiritual. Inside each of us, these philosophical Hindus argued, there is an unchanging and eternal soul. And we are that soul. But our souls are trapped in the prisons of our bodies and in the illusions (maya) these bodies are forever conjuring up. As long as we inhabit flesh and bones, we are destined to suffer. Yet death offers no release either because, after we die, we will be reborn in other bodies and repeat again and again the sorrowful cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

  Whereas Vedic sacrifice was fueled by fire, this cycle is fueled by karma (literally, “action”), which used to refer largely to ritual action but refers here to moral action and its consequences. In the ethical monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, human beings are rewarded and punished for their good and bad deeds by a good and just God. In Hinduism, however, consequences follow from actions without any supernatural intervention. Just as, according to the law of gravity, what is dropped from a tree will fall to the ground, according to the law of karma, evil actions produce punishments and good actions produce rewards. Karmic law explains why human beings keep migrating from death to life and back again. When you die, you die with a combination of good and bad karma—punya (merit) and papa (demerit). If that were the end of it, however, justice would not be upheld, because there would still be good actions awaiting reward and bad actions awaiting punishment. Therefore you must be reborn into another body, and the cycle of samsara continues apace. The circumstances into which each of us is born, therefore, have nothing to do with luck. They are a result of the good and bad actions we took in our prior lives. Or, as the Shvetashvatara Upanishad puts it, we wander in the cycle of transmigration according to our deeds (5:7).

  To end this wandering is moksha—liberation from ignorance, karma, and rebirth alike. But how to achieve this goal? According to philosophical Hinduism, moksha came not through the external revelation of the Vedas but from within, not by the secondhand ministrations of priests but through your own efforts and by your own experience. But renouncers were not left entirely to their own devices. They accepted guidance from gurus. In fact, they insisted on it. The main method for the transmission of learning in early Hinduism was from guru to student. But what these gurus transmitted was not so much knowledge itself as techniques for arriving at that knowledge on your own.

  Yoga is now a popular pastime in the West, employed by millions for such thisworldly aims as stress reduction and weight loss. But yoga in its original sense of discipline means “to yoke” one thing to another, and the things being yoked in the yogas practiced by philosophical Hindus were the self and reality, the self and divinity, the self and immortality. The secret knowledge that gurus whispered to those who sat at their feet was how to use body and breath to transport yourself from ignorance to wisdom, from illusion to reality, from humanity to divinity, from samsara to moksha.

  Around the time the Upanishads were taking shape, Socrates gave the world his famous Allegory of the Cave: People imprisoned in this cave see only shadows cast on a wall before them, so they are forever mistaking appearance for reality. The renouncers of early Hinduism made a similar observation: the world is not as we see it; we are not who we think we are. Every day, we look at ourselves and the world through a veil of illusion called maya. To be wise is to lift that veil, to see self and world not as they seem to be but as they really are. And how they really are is one. Yes, human beings appear to be different from divinity, but appearances can be deceiving, and here they most certainly are, because once you drill down past the inauthentic to the authentic—past caste and job and gender and race and ethnicity and nationality and language group and height and weight and name and birth date and serial number—you will see that you, too, are divine. Our sense of separateness from God is but a shadow cast on the wall of the cave. The sacred is inside us. The essence of the human being is the same as the essence of divinity.

  Hindus refer to the essence of the human being as Atman, which is typically translated as “self” or “soul.” The essence of divinity they refer to as Brahman. And the liberating wisdom of Hindus who walk this jnana path is as simple and complicated as this: The individual soul is divine. The essence of each of us is uncreated, deathless, and immortal. Atman and Brahman are one and the same.

  To know this is to achieve moksha. But it is not enough to believe in the Atman-Brahman equivalence. You must experience it. Neither book learning nor secondhand transmission will do. Shankara (788–820), considered by many to be the greatest Hindu philosopher, was emphatic on this point. Ritual cannot get you to moksha, he argued, but neither can yoga or philosophy or good works or scriptural study. “When a man has been bitten by the snake of ignorance he can only be cured by the realization of Brahman,” he wrote. “A sickness is not cured by saying the word ‘medicine.’ You must take the medicine. Liberation does not come by merely saying the word ‘Brahman.’ Brahman must be actually experienced.”12

  In one of the Upanishads’ most famous stories, a boy named Svetaketu has just returned home after years of studying the Vedas at the feet of his guru. He is an A+ student, filled to the brim with book learning, and proud of it. But his father, Uddalaka, is not so easily impressed. Have you ever pondered, he asks Svetaketu, how to “hear what cannot be heard … perceive what cannot be perceived … know what cannot be known?” But Svetaketu’s training has taught him nothing of such mysteries. So one evening Uddalaka gives his son some salt and tells him to put it in a container of water. The next morning he asks his son to give him back the salt. But the salt has dissolved in the water. So Uddalaka tells him to taste the water. “How is it?” his father asks. “It is salty,” the son replies. Atman and Brahman, the father says, are like that salt and that water.13

  This dialogue concludes with one of the most famous quotations of philosophical Hinduism. “Tat tvam asi,” the father tells his son: “You are that.” Precisely what this simple formula means is, like so many things in Hinduism, up for grabs. Clearly, Uddalaka is equating Atman and Brahman. But what does this mean? Some believe it means that Atman and Brahman are identical—the essence of the human being is the same as the essence of God. Others claim that Brahman and Atman are different but indivisible. There is no disagreement, however, about the importance of attaining this liberating wisdom by experience. In this classic story, the son does not just sit at the feet of his father. He tastes the water, and the salt, for himself.14

  Devotional Hinduism

  If you are confused at this point, you are not alone. This third geological layer of philosophical Hinduism is rock hard—both difficult to practice and difficult to understand. It requires extraordinary austerities and extraordinary insight. Historically, most renouncers have come from the upper castes, and almost all have been men. But what about the rest of us? By doing our duty both morally and ritually, we can accumulate good karma so that one day we might be reborn into circumstances conducive to a life of renunciation and release. But in the mean
time the ultimate goal of moksha is out of reach. All we can hope for is the proximate goal of a better rebirth.

  As Hinduism developed, ordinary people decided that this was not enough. Women and lower-caste men wanted to reach out and grab the brass ring of moksha. They wanted it in this lifetime, and they did not want to be forced to give up families and friends, sex and success to get it. So beginning around the time of Jesus, Hinduism moved in a more popular direction referred to today as bhakti yoga or the discipline of devotion. The quest for spiritual liberation shifted from a one-man drama of utmost seriousness to a playful musical with a colorful cast of thousands, and devotional Hinduism was born.

  While the jnana-style Hinduism of the philosophers was expressed in Sanskrit in the difficult disputations of the Upanishads and embodied in the austerities of wandering ascetics, this fourth layer in the geology of Hinduism was expressed in vernacular songs, poems, dramas, and dances, and embodied in heartfelt worship of one’s chosen deity. Instead of controlling their bodies and emotions through meditation and yoga, devotional Hindus let both bodies and emotions go. Instead of sneering at the body as a prison, they celebrated the body as a temple of their chosen god. When it comes to revelation, wrote the fifteenth-century North Indian poet Kabir, Sanskrit is like the still water of the well, while vernacular languages such as Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, and Marathi are like the living water of an everflowing stream.

  Philosophical Hindus had understood God as something beyond our ken—nirguna Brahman, God without attributes. The only words they were willing to attach to God were sat (existence), chit (consciousness), and ananda (bliss). Devotional Hindus, however, happily described their chosen deities as male or female, four-armed or eight-armed, wild or mild. And they worshipped their unapologetically personal divinity—saguna Brahman (God with attributes)—with relish.