God Is Not One

by Prothero, Stephen

  As if to illustrate that no religion can live by philosophy alone, devotional Hindus emphasized their tradition’s narrative dimension over its doctrinal and experiential dimensions. They recited intimate poems about their overflowing love of the god of their choosing. They sang kirtans (devotional songs) reminiscent of the praise songs so popular today in evangelical Christian circles. And they listened to epic stories of gods and heroes, conveyed through puppeteers, folk singers, and street-corner poets. Whereas renouncers spoke of Atman and Brahman and samsara and moksha, these artists and their audiences spoke of hunting and fighting and lovemaking. Their ecstasies were for this world.

  The ecstasies of bhakti-style worship were particularly emphasized by the Hindu reformer Caitanya (1485–1533), whose singing and dancing to Krishna live on today in the International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON, or the Hare Krishnas), which sees Krishna not as one god among many but as the Supreme Lord of the universe. Another great figure in bhakti-style Hinduism was the seventeenth-century poet (and contemporary of Milton) Tukaram (1608–50), who gave voice to many of the great themes of this Hindu revolution in a short poem devoted to Narayana, another name for Vishnu. “I have been harassed by the world,” he begins, “I am bound fast in the meshes of my past … I have no power, O God, to end my wanderings.” After remarking on just how endless his wanderings are, he asks, “Who will finish this suffering of mine? / Who will take my burden on himself?” The answer, of course, is Narayana:

  Thy name will carry me over the sea of this world,

  Thou dost run to help the distressed,

  Now run to me, Narayana, to me, poor and wretched as I am.

  Consider neither my merit nor my faults.

  Tukaram implores thy mercy.15

  As this poem demonstrates, one of the key transformations as Hinduism layered this way of devotion on top of its way of wisdom was a shift from self-help to other-help. One curiosity about early Hinduism is how little the gods were involved. Since the time of the Vedas all sorts of divinities have inhabited the Indian subcontinent. But philosophical Hinduism was functionally atheistic; while the gods existed, they were largely irrelevant to the task at hand. Moksha was something you achieved by yourself, not something handed to you from on high.

  Over time, however, moksha became a product not of self-effort but of other power. In devotional Hinduism, samsara remains the problem and moksha the solution, but now the path to spiritual liberation is quicker and easier. Instead of relying on yourself, as jnana yoga practitioners did, you can get moksha through the mercy and grace of your chosen god. There is no requirement to renounce job and family and social life, or to work toward moksha for many lifetimes. As wisdom takes a backseat to love, release from the fetters of karma comes as a gift, and it is given to men and women alike, and to people of all social ranks.

  But moksha is not the only aim of this new, more egalitarian form of Hinduism. By the grace of your chosen deity, it becomes possible to win not only release from the cycle of suffering but also happiness here and now. Eminently practical and unapologetically thisworldly, devotional Hinduism addresses the full gamut of thisworldly concerns. Devotees ask their chosen gods to heal their arthritis, protect their harvest, and guide their loved ones through rites of passage—birth, marriage, childbirth, and death. The point of this world is not simply to get out of it, but to prosper in it, and your family with you.

  This way of devotion is rooted in the hugely popular Mahabharata and Ramayana epics, which were in process as the Common Era began, but bhakti yoga did not spread widely until the seventh century in South India and the twelfth century in North India. Once it got traction, however, this devotional approach quickly outran the philosophical approach of the Upanishads, becoming India’s most popular path to the divine.

  Muslim rule came to India during the Mughal Empire of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, and Christian rule arrived with the British Raj of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but Hinduism’s way of devotion outran them both. Today there are a few million renouncers in India, but there are close to a billion practitioners of bhakti yoga. The notion that God is impersonal and ineffable is now confined to the rare philosopher. For everyone else God is personal, emotional, and even erotic. Hinduism today is a way of devotion.

  The Trinity: Vishnu, Shiva, Mahadevi

  Although the Hindu trinity is often said to consist of Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the sustainer), and Shiva (the destroyer), Brahma is now a marginal deity, invoked far more often than he is worshipped. Like the largely irrelevant watchmaker God of the Deists, he creates the world only to sit back and watch events unfurl. So the real trinity (or trimurti: “three forms”) is Shiva, Vishnu, and the Mahadevi (“Great Goddess”), and the three main branches of bhakti-style Hinduism are Vaishnavism (worship of Vishnu), Shaivism (worship of Shiva), and Shaktism (worship of the Great Goddess, also known as Shakti).

  Vishnu is best known for his ten avatars, or incarnations—as a fish, tortoise, boar, half lion/half man, dwarf, and then (in his human embodiments) as Rama, Krishna, the Buddha, and finally Kalki, the incarnation still to come. As Krishna, Vishnu is a hero of the Mahabharata, and as Rama he is the hero of the Ramayana.

  Krishna is best known (and loved) for his mischievousness. Although he is a good god, he is also a trickster who loves to play a good prank. Krishna is often paired with a paramour such as Radha but is best remembered for his erotic encounters with the gopis, or cowherd girls. Krishna would serenade them on his flute, and they would fall under the lure of his mischievous grin, long black locks, peacock-feathered crown, lotus eyes, and deep-blue complexion. (The word Krishna literally means “black” or “dark,” and Krishna is typically depicted with black or deep-blue skin.) In one classic tale, Krishna steals the clothes of the gopi girls as they are bathing naked in a river and then tricks them into exposing their beautiful bodies to him. In the Hindu tradition, a woman cannot be naked in front of any man except her husband, so he fixes things by marrying them all.

  Famous among worshippers of Krishna, who was expert in all of India’s sixty-four arts of love and according to some accounts enjoyed the affections of over sixteen thousand wives, is the rasa lila, the story of Krishna dancing with his gopi girls. In Sanskrit, rasa means emotion and lila means play, so this dance is about the play of emotions or, as it is sometimes translated, the “sweet pastimes” of Krishna. The story takes place at night as the gopis, upon hearing the sweet sound of Krishna’s flute, sneak out of their houses to dance the night away—a night Krishna magically stretches into billions of years. The rasa lila is now performed throughout the Hindu world, most famously in Vrindavan, a town in North India said to be Krishna’s childhood home. These performances demonstrate that the gods are playful. In fact, the cosmos itself is seen by some Hindus as a lila or game of the gods.

  Most Hindus today are uncomfortable with their tradition’s eroticism. Many of my Hindu students refuse to see anything sexual whatsoever about the Shiva lingam that to Western eyes at least seems to unite quite explicitly the male and female sex organs—the phallus and the yoni. But there is no denying that Hindus have long cultivated a close connection between the love that passes between human beings and the love that passes between humans and gods. The sexually explicit sculptures at North India’s Khajuraho temples and the sexually explicit instructions in the Kama Sutra testify to the fact that Hindus traditionally accepted sex not only as a fact of life but also as one of life’s glories. Many see Radha’s love for Krishna as a symbol of the union of lover and beloved, devotee and god. Some Vaishnavas do not worship just Krishna alone but Radha Krishna, the divine union of male and female. Either way, we are to love the god of our choosing with all the passion (and at least some of the eros) that Radha and her gopis lavished on Krishna.

  Shiva puts a very different face on divinity than the mischievous grin of Krishna. Shiva literally means “friendly,” and in recent years Hindus have gravitated toward pictures o
f him as a sweet and happy child. But traditionally Shiva has been associated with divinity’s wilder side—as the destroyer in the trimurti and the inheritor of the awesome powers of the Vedic god Rudra (“Roarer”) whose third eye can turn anything (and anyone) to dust. A bundle of contradictions, Shiva is wrathful and loving, male and female. Sometimes referred to as an “erotic ascetic,” Shiva is both a solitary Himalayan yogin, dressed in tiger skin and smothered in ashes, and a no-holds-barred lover who in one record-breaking lovemaking session has sex with his wife Parvati for a thousand years.16

  Shiva is often depicted in the West as the multiarmed dancer, Nataraj, who dances inside the circle of samsara, holding both the drum of creation and the fire of destruction. In Bali, where he is the most popular of the gods, he resides at the center of the five directions, reconciling opposites and sustaining the balance so highly prized in Balinese culture. Shiva also has a special relationship with Varanasi, the North Indian sacred center famous for its ghats, or steps, along the Ganges, some for bathing ascetics, others for cremation. Here the other power of devotional Hinduism reaches its apex, because it is said that anyone who dies in this City of Shiva achieves moksha. At the moment of death, Shiva whispers the mantra of the crossing into your ear and you are released from rebirth.

  Shakti is a term for the feminine energy animating all divinities, a Hindu analog to the Yoruba concept of ashe—the power to make things happen. Shakti is also a name for the Mahadevi, or “Great Goddess.” This goddess appears in many forms, which are often classified into the auspicious and the terrific, the mild and the wild.

  On the mild side are the Mahadevi’s gentler incarnations as a consort of one god or another: Parvati the consort of Shiva, Radha the consort of Krishna, and Sita the consort of Rama. Lakshmi, another mild goddess (she is often paired with Vishnu), is particularly popular. Like Ganesha, she is associated with prosperity and good luck and adorns the walls of many homes and businesses. On the wild side are the Mahadevi’s incarnations as a more independent and ferocious deity: unmistakeable Kali, goddess of cremation grounds and battlefields, with her necklace of skulls and her thirst for blood, and many-weaponed Durga who rides a tiger or lion and is fierce for righteousness. Invincible Durga emerges out of the combined powers of other gods to slay the buffalo demon of chaos they cannot kill themselves. After nine nights of carnage, she saves the world from its terrors by doing just that.

  The Tantric tradition, a somatic philosophy and body of rituals (some sexual) that since the arrival of British prudery has served largely as an embarrassment to ordinary Hindus, typically worships the goddess Shakti. It sees the cosmos as a field for the creative play of Shiva and Shakti and uses a variety of techniques (mantras, mandalas, and various meditative strategies, visualization techniques, and sexual rites, both real and imagined) to seek after spiritual liberation and thisworldly power. This hugely influential tradition is still a powerful force today not only in India but also in Tibet and Nepal and throughout East and Southeast Asia. Some revisionist scholars see it as the master key to unlocking the secrets of the Hindu tradition.17

  Puja

  Today Hinduism is best known in the West not via Vishnu, Shiva, and the Mahadevi but via yoga, which now seems to be on offer at almost every other street corner in cities from San Francisco to Paris to Berlin. In fact, much of what most Americans and Europeans know of Hinduism they have learned from their yoga teacher’s impromptu comments on karma and reincarnation, Atman and Brahman. Hardly any of my Hindu students do yoga, however. What they do is go on pilgrimages to sacred cities, rivers, and mountains, and to places associated with the exploits of their chosen gods. As devotional Hindus, they also observe festivals, which, like the gods themselves, come in local and pan-Hindu varieties. Some of the biggest are Diwali, a festival of lights, and Holi, a spring festival of reversal when people of all ages and stations in life douse one another with water and colored powder. “My karma ran over my dogma,” reads a bumper sticker popular among the “spiritual but not religious” set. That isn’t quite how Hindus would put it, but in Hinduism doing your duty does take precedence over knowing your dogma, and right ritual (orthopraxy) is more important than right doctrine (orthodoxy).

  The central ritual practice of my Hindu students, and of devotional Hindus worldwide, is puja. Like Vedic sacrifice, puja involves a food offering. In Vedic times animals were sacrificed, but today the offerings are usually vegetarian. If these offerings are made in a temple, they are typically mediated by a priest. But they can also be given by ordinary people at a home shrine, with oil lamps and incense sticks lit in front of an icon.

  The offering has been elevated to an art form in Bali, where canang sari, as they are called, can be seen almost everywhere—from hotel lobbies and shops to taxicabs and even motor scooters. These elegant offerings usually start with a four-sided palm-leaf basket, which is then adorned with flowers, rice, and a slice of banana or sugar cane. As they are strategically placed to align with the five sacred directions (north, east, south, west, and center), an incense stick is lit across the top, and the offerings are splashed with holy water. All this is a gift, a free expression of love to a given god. But it is also an exchange. Those who bring an offering to a temple take home with them prasada—the rice, fruit, sweets, and flowers offered by others to the gods and now offered by the gods (without regard to caste) back to worshippers. Devotees also hope to receive merit in return. “If one disciple soul proffers to me with bhakti a leaf, a flower, fruit, or water, I accept this offering of love from him,” says Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. “Whatever you do, or eat, or offer, or give, or mortify, make it an offering to me, and I shall undo the bonds of karma.”

  Religious rituals typically engage a wide range of the senses—the bells and smells of a Greek Orthodox Mass, the tastes of the Sikh langar meal. Hinduism engages the senses with all the subtlety of a professional wrestling match. Incense infuses the air. Brides sport bright red saris. Images of the gods are a riot of primary colors. Worshippers ring bells as they enter and exit temples, which ring out themselves in a cacophony of sacred mantras and profane chatter. In Balinese Hinduism each of the main gods is associated with both a cardinal direction and a color: Vishnu, north, black; Ishwara (another name for Shiva, but here a distinct god), east, white; Brahma, south, red; Mahadevi, west, yellow; with multicolored Shiva lording over the center. If you had to name a religion whose aesthetic diverged the farthest from Quaker simplicity, Hinduism would be it.

  Hindu worship, however, is first and foremost about sight. Whereas Protestants go to church to hear the gospel reading and the sermon, Hindus go to temple to see and be seen—to gaze at their beloved gods and to be gazed at lovingly in return. Worshippers build up to this key moment in puja by circumambulating the temple itself and then the image of their god. Only then do they take darshan by engaging their deity in an intimate, eye-to-eye encounter. “When Hindus go to a temple, they do not commonly say, ‘I am going to worship,’ but rather, ‘I am going for dars´an,” writes Harvard professor Diana Eck in her book on this “religious seeing.” Not without reason have Eck and others referred to darshan as “the central act of Hindu worship.”18

  Hindu Storytelling: The Mahabharata

  As much as ritual, however, devotional Hinduism is about stories. In fact, just as story and law are two sides of the same coin in Judaism, story and ritual are integrated in Hinduism. At Passover, Jews listen to the Exodus story and reenact it; in Hinduism’s Vrat Katha tradition, Hindus listen to a story of a fast and then vow to fast themselves.

  The key repositories of Hindu stories are the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Although these epics are technically classified as smrti, and are therefore supposedly of secondary importance (to sruti), they are actually more influential among devotional Hindus than the Vedas. Classically, these stories, which take place in mythic time, have been handed down orally through parents or gurus or dancers or singers or puppeteers. Nowadays young people also learn them t
hrough comic books, television, or the Internet. When I was living in India in the late 1980s, almost everyone who had access to a television seemed glued to it each afternoon as a lavishly produced Hindi miniseries on the Mahabharata unfurled over ninety-four episodes.

  The Bible has been billed as “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” but the Mahabharata, which means “Great India,” is at least as dramatic and far, far longer. At one hundred thousand verses and roughly 1.8 million words, it dwarfs the Bible, the Iliad, and the Odyssey combined. But the Mahabharata is also remarkable for its longevity. Composed between 400 B.C.E. and 400 C.E., the Mahabharata has been popular entertainment for roughly two millennia. Its scenes were carved into reliefs at Angkor Wat in Cambodia in the twelfth century, and in 1985 Royal Shakespeare Company director Peter Brook produced a nine-hour-long stage version that toured the world for four years to rave reviews before finding a second life in 1989 as a six-hour miniseries.

  Duty is the Mahabharata’s central preoccupation, but drama is its draw. Its scenes are the stuff of Shakespeare’s plays and America’s soap operas, combining heroism and holiness with betrayal, lechery, murder, adultery, and lust for both body and blood—all on a stage where gods and humans walked the same Earth.

  The Mahabharata tells the story of a family feud that makes the troubles of West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet look like child’s play. On the one hand there are the righteous sons of King Pandu, the Pandavas; and on the other there are the evil sons of a blind king, Dhritarashtra, the Kauravas. Both clans are descended from a king called Bharata (a term used today to refer to India itself). The start of this epic concerns the winning, losing, and dividing of a kingdom, but the first major plot point comes when the Kauravas win this kingdom in a dice game. As a result, the Pandavas are set to wandering, but it is agreed they can return after thirteen years to reclaim their kingdom from their cousins. Upon their return, however, the unrighteous Kauravas go back on their word. So a battle ensues that puts the charioteering of Ben Hur to shame. The deus ex machina arrives in the form of Krishna, who takes the side of the righteous Pandavas, who after eighteen days of carnage win a great victory.