Today the most beloved portion of the Mahabharata is the Bhagavad Gita (“Sacred Song“), a dialogue on the ethics of war that since the nineteenth century has functioned like something of a Hindu New Testament—the Hindu holy book par excellence. The central problematic of the Gita, as it is popularly known, is dharma, a Sanskrit term variously translated as duty, law, justice, truth, order, righteousness, virtue, ethics, and even religion. The root of the word dharma is the Sanskrit term dhr, which means hold or support, so dharma is whatever upholds cosmic order and supports what is right.
The Gita gets going just as the bloodletting in the Mahabharata is about to begin. As Arjuna of the Pandava clan approaches the battlefield, a crisis of conscience comes over him. The householder tradition of caste says it is Arjuna’s duty to fight. He is, after all, a Kshatriya (warrior). But householder ethics tells him not to kill his kinsmen, and he knows that if he goes into battle, he will kill them by the score. What is a dutiful Hindu to do?
In the Gita, Arjuna seems to be talking with his charioteer, but his charioteer turns out to be Krishna in disguise. In this discussion two great tectonic plates in Hindu history start to rub against each other. Krishna offers a creative new synthesis of the devotional traditions of the householder and the philosophical traditions of the renouncer—a synthesis that would determine the shape of popular Hinduism from this moment forward. Do your dharma and fight, he tells Arjuna, but act without attachment to the fruits of your actions. Renounce any desire for reward. Fear no punishment. Devote your actions and their consequences alike to God. And remember that even the fiercest warrior cannot actually kill anyone, since we are not our perishable bodies but our immortal souls.
As this dialogue continues, Krishna lays out for the first time Hinduism’s three different paths to moksha. In addition to the karma yoga of ritual and ethical action (the sacrificial religion of Vedic religion) and the jnana yoga of asceticism and renunciation (the philosophical religion of early Hinduism), there is now a third option: the bhakti yoga of love and grace (the devotional religion of popular Hinduism). It is now possible to achieve the religious goal of moksha by other power rather than self-effort, by entrusting the fruits of your actions to the grace of God. “In whatever way people approach me,” Krishna tells Arjuna, “in that way I show them favor.”
There are as many ways to read the Gita as there are ways to read the gospel of Mark or the book of Job. Most Hindus read it as a spiritual allegory of sorts. Like those Muslims who understand the concept of jihad to refer not to the outer struggle against flesh-and-blood enemies but to the inner struggle against spiritual temptations, most Hindus understand the lessons of the Gita to be spiritual rather than military (or even ethical): the real struggle is not for kingdoms and cash but for the liberation of your soul. Reformation-era Protestants championed the “priesthood of all believers.” Everyone, they argued, is a priest. The Gita also blurred the distinction between householders and renouncers. We can all be renouncers of a sort, it argued—even women, servants, and outcastes. It was no longer necessary to choose between doing your duty and pursuing spiritual liberation. It was now possible to have both.
Hindu Storytelling: The Ramayana
Almost as popular as the Mahabharata is the Ramayana (“Story of Rama”). Here the central themes are more personal—not war and heroism and fidelity to the ethics of caste but love and longing and fidelity to the ethics of marriage. The Ramayana, which probably came into its current form between 200 B.C.E. and 200 C.E., extends to seven books and twenty-four thousand verses, making it far shorter than the Mahabharata but still about twice as long as the New Testament.
This scripture tells the story of a demon, a kidnapping, and the trials and tribulations of a virtuous prince named Rama and his faithful wife, Sita. The action begins when Rama’s father banishes him on the eve of his coronation to fourteen years of wandering in the forest. There Sita (who insists on accompanying her husband into exile) is captured by the ten-headed demon king, Ravana, and stolen away to his home in Lanka (now Sri Lanka), only to be freed through the cunning of the monkey god, Hanuman (who builds a bridge from India to Sri Lanka), the assistance of Rama’s brother, Lakshmana, and the courage of Rama himself, who kills Ravana in battle. But this is not the end of the story, because no sooner is Sita liberated than Rama banishes her on suspicions of adultery. Sita in turn throws herself onto a funeral pyre but, like the burning bush of the Bible, she is not consumed, because Agni, the god of fire, knows she is innocent. So Rama and Sita are reconciled, and together they return to Ayodhya, where Rama reigns as king. But this is not the end of the story either, because after Sita becomes pregnant, Rama (who apparently has some trust issues) becomes suspicious once again, worrying this time that her offspring may not be his. So again he banishes Sita, who gives birth to twin boys at the hermitage of the poet seer Valmiki, to whom the Ramayana is traditionally ascribed. When the twin sons grow up, all can see that they are the spitting image of Rama, so innocent Sita is once again called home. This time Sita refuses, however, disappearing into the earth. As for Rama, he gives his earthly kingship to his sons and assumes his rightful place in the cosmos as the seventh incarnation of Vishnu.
Because it is revered not only by Hindus but also by Jains, Buddhists, and even Muslims, the Ramayana stands alongside the Bible, the Quran, and the Analects of Confucius as one of the four most influential books ever written. Originally told in Sanskrit, it has been retold over the centuries in many different languages and from many different perspectives. The Sitayana, for example, tells the tale from Sita’s perspective, and Sita Sings the Blues, a humorous full-length animated feature film with a 1920s jazz music score, bills itself as “The Greatest Break-up Story Ever Told.”19 Diwali, the pan-Indian festival of lights, celebrates Rama’s return to rule in the kingdom of Ayodhya. And one of India’s greatest spectacles is the Ram Lila, a weeklong performance of the Ramayana staged annually in Ramnagar (“Rama’s City”) across the river from Varanasi. Like the Mahabharata, this story has been a magnet for allegorical interpretations. Many Hindus see Sita as the soul captured by the body (Ravana) only to be rescued by God (Rama).
In 1987 and 1988, a Hindi version of the Ramayana was serialized in seventy-eight television episodes in India, and “Ramayana fever” afflicted some hundred million viewers. The success of this series led to a remake, also in Hindi, in 2008 and 2009. A more modest and condensed English-language version of this “spiritual tale of romance,” billed as a cross between the Odyssey, Romeo and Juliet, and Star Wars, took to the stage in 2001 at the National Theatre in London.20 And in 2006 Virgin Comics debuted a comic book series called Ramayan 3392 A.D. billed as “the greatest legend relived—a saga of duty, bravery, loyalty, revenge, and redemption.”
In the Mahabharata and Ramayana and their contemporary retellings, we see the playfulness of Krishna and the bravery of Rama, but we also see the Hindu sensibility at work—its preference for stories over dogmas, its reveling in mystery and paradox, and its aversion to fixed boundaries and settled borders. At least for those who grew up under the impress of the Western monotheisms, the porous borderland in these stories between the animal, human, and divine worlds is striking. It is often remarked that Hinduism divinizes human beings, but as the epics demonstrate it also humanizes the gods. In Hindu temples and scriptures, we are miles away from the transcendent God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, who may have desires but is a stranger to need. Hindu deities are more like us. In this tradition, human beings need the gods, and the gods need human beings.
Modern Hinduism
The last layer in Hinduism’s geology begins as a response to British and American criticisms of Hinduism as idolatrous and polytheistic—“a vast museum of idols,” in Mark Twain’s words, “and all of them crude misshapen, and ugly.”21 The British arrived in India in 1757 via the ministrations of the East India Company and stayed for almost two centuries, until Indian independence in 1947. Modern Hinduism bent Hinduism’s
bhakti path in the direction of the Western monotheisms, and especially toward Anglo-American Protestantism. It also brought Hinduism into conversation with the Enlightenment—with science and reason, liberty and equality. Focusing more on the Upanishads than the epics, this movement accented the ethical and doctrinal dimensions of the religion over its ritual and narrative dimensions. In keeping with the ways and means of Victorianism, it downplayed Hindu eroticism, all but purging the tradition of Tantrism and creating generations of Hindus (including many of my students) who see nothing sexual in the phallus and yoni of the Shiva lingam. Modern Hinduism also aimed to undercut Christian missions by positioning Hinduism as a world religion equal (or superior) to Christianity. Also referred to as the Indian Renaissance, this movement had two main impulses, both visible in Indian religion and politics today.
The first impulse emphasized the unity of all religions. Its key figure was Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), a Brahmin from Bengal whose studies at a Muslim university and employment with the East India Company had familiarized him with Sufism, Unitarianism, and Deism. Under the auspices of the Brahmo Samaj, which he founded in Calcutta in 1828, Roy rejected bhakti-style polytheism as irrational and puja as “idol worship.” There is only one God, he argued, and that God is beyond description. Therefore, no one religion has a monopoly on religious truth. All religions are flawed human efforts to capture the elusive divine. In ethics, Roy and the Brahmo Samaj argued against caste, child marriage, and widow burning. They even rejected karma and reincarnation as affronts to rationality and impediments to social reform.
Another modern Hindu multiculturalist was Ramakrishna (1836–86), who pushed the unity of all religions beyond theory to practice. Like Roy, Ramakrishna was a Brahmin from Bengal, but his interests ran to mysticism more than social ethics. Ramakrishna began his spiritual life as a Kali devotee. He later had visions of Krishna and Jesus and practiced his own versions of Christianity and Islam. While reason had convinced Roy of the unity of all religions, for Ramakrishna it was experience. He knew all religions were different paths up the same mountain because he had traveled those paths himself and seen with his own eyes that each converges at the same peak.
Ramakrishna’s most famous pupil, Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) came to the United States as a representative at the World’s Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893. There he spoke against Christian missions and for the unity of religions with a combination of learning and humor (not to mention an elegant Irish brogue picked up at missionary school) that shocked and delighted his American audiences. He also spoke of Hinduism as a world religion deserving of the same respect as Judaism and Christianity. In 1894 in New York City he established the Vedanta Society, which in the early twentieth century was the largest and most influential Hindu organization in the United States.
All of these men were influenced by Hinduism’s Advaita Vedanta philosophy, whose emphasis on the one over the many led them, first, to collapse Hinduism’s many gods into one Brahman and, then, to collapse the world’s many religions into one religion. Their influence can be seen today in bestselling books on religion by Huston Smith and Karen Armstrong.
A second impulse of the Indian Renaissance had a very different vision of India’s religious character. Here the key figure was Dayananda Saraswati (1824–83), who was born into a Brahmin family in Gujarat and raised a Shaivite. Skepticism about the propriety of worshipping the Shiva linga launched him, first, into life as a sadhu and, later, a career as a Hindu reformer—the “Martin Luther of India.”22 Through the Arya Samaj, which he established in Bombay in 1875, he joined Roy and Ramakrishna in championing monotheism. But his distinctive emphasis was on purifying Hinduism by returning to the Vedas. He rejected the epics as myths and scorned popular practices such as puja and pilgrimage as superstitious. Saraswati matters today because of his aggressive nationalism. While Roy and Ramakrishna championed the unity of all religions, and did so in English, Saraswati attacked Christianity and Islam and championed Hindi as the national language.
Hinduism Today
When I was in college and graduate school, my professors told me that Hinduism was a tolerant faith, ever absorbing foreign religious influences rather than seeking to exterminate them. It was this tradition, I was told, that gave us the maxim “Truth is one, the sages call it by different names.” And its greatest exemplar was Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), who in the spirit of Roy, Ramakrishna, and Vivekananda labored not only for Indian independence but also for a multireligious India of Hindus and Muslims and Christians and more.
In addition to these multiculturalists, however, Hinduism has its militants—heirs not of Gandhi but of Saraswati. Critics call them fundamentalists, and Indian youth now call them “fundos.” They call themselves champions of Hindutva (“Hinduness”) who see India not as a multireligious nation but as a Hindu state that should be governed in the Hindi language and in keeping with Hindu beliefs and practices.
Giving the lie to the observation of American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau that “there is no touch of sectarianism” in Hinduism, these Hindu nationalists are sectarian to the core. Like America’s Moral Majority, a largely Protestant group that tried to reach out to Catholics and Jews, Hindutva advocates claim to represent not only Hindus but also Jains, Sikhs, and Buddhists. But there is no doubting their opposition both to the secular values of India’s Congress Party and to the Islamic values of India’s Muslim minority, who from the Hindutva perspective are the illegitimate heirs of foreign invaders of the Hindu holy land.
Political Hinduism of this right-wing sort goes back to Saraswati and the Arya Samaj, but it did not become a force in Indian politics until the 1980s. Today this marriage of nationalism and fundamentalism, often advanced in the name of Rama and at the expense of Muslims, Christians, and secularists alike, is represented by groups such as the RSS, or Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (est. 1925), the VHP, or Vishva Hindu Parishad (est. 1964), and the BJP, or Bharatiya Janata Party (est. 1980). The BJP ran India’s central government at the turn of the twenty-first century and remains a major force in Indian politics at both the national and state levels.
Although Hindu nationalism was not manufactured for export, it has found a foothold in both Europe and the United States, notably in some American chapters of the Hindu Students Association. A more militant form of the tradition also took hold in Sri Lanka where Hindu Tamils employed suicide bombers in a decades-long civil war that ravaged this island nation for over a quarter century beginning in 1983. But for the most part Hindus in the diaspora gravitate toward the multicultural impulse of modern Hinduism now associated first and foremost with Gandhi. If we divide contemporary Hindus, as sociologist of religion Prema Kurien has done, into “militant nationalists” and “genteel multiculturalists,” almost all of my Boston University students fall into the latter camp.23
Hindus gained a foothold in the diaspora through organizations such as Vivekananda’s Vedanta Society and the Self-Realization Fellowship of Swami Yogananda, whose Autobiography of a Yogi (1946) became a countercultural hit in the 1960s. Their religion first became visible in the West through the charismatic gurus who flocked to Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Today it has set up shop in yoga studies throughout the West. Nonetheless, the heart and soul of Western Hinduism resides in the temples dedicated to Vishnu, Shiva, the Great Goddess, and Ganesh that now punctuate the skylines of almost all European and American cities. In these temples, the ancient beliefs and practices of India continue to push up through the various geological layers we call Hinduism, and devotees continue to call on the gods of their choosing to bring them happiness in this life and release from samsara in the world beyond.
Chapter Five
Buddhism
The Way of Awakening
Buddhism begins with a fairy tale. Unlike Cinderella or Rocky, however, this is no underdog fantasy of someone who has nothing and gains the whole world. In fact it is just the opposite—a story of someone
who has everything and decides to give it all away.
It begins with a prince in a palace and a dim and distant sense that something has gone awry. The prince’s name is Siddhartha Gautama, also known as Shakyamuni (“Sage of the Shakya Clan”). The time is the sixth century B.C.E.—the Axial Age of Confucius in China, Cyrus the Great in Persia, and Pythagoras in Greece. The place is Lumbini, the Bethlehem of Buddhism in the foothills of the Himalayas in what is now southern Nepal.
This prince’s mother had died as he was taking his first breaths, so in his bones he knows suffering, but his father sees to it that life in the palace is whisked clean of dissatisfaction. Shortly after Siddhartha was born, a soothsayer had prophesied that he would be great in either politics or religion. His father was religious, but he was a practical man too. Determined to raise a Napoleon rather than a Mother Teresa, he went to great lengths to shield his son from anything that might upset his soul and set him to wandering.
Now a young man, this coddled prince enjoys what by all appearances is a life of champagne and caviar. Like Muhammad and Confucius, he lost a parent as a boy, but he has a beautiful house, a beautiful wife, and a beautiful son. All this beauty, however, cannot stop questions from bubbling up. He starts to ask himself, “How did I get here?” And then he looks at the roads radiating out from his palace and for the first time allows himself to imagine where they might lead.
This future Light of Asia informs his father that he wants to see the real world. His father reluctantly agrees to send him on a tour outside the cozy confines of his sheltered life but orchestrates things as carefully as advanced planners for a prime minister’s visit to Paris. The Champs-Élysées has been swept of homeless people, foreign minstrels, and other unpleasantness. But on this tour the Buddha-to-be sees a sick person. “What is that?” he asks his charioteer (because throughout his life he has been shielded from sickness). His charioteer tells him, “A sick person. Each of us falls ill. You and I alike. No one is exempt from sickness.” On his second tour, orchestrated in even greater detail by his father, Siddhartha sees an old man. “What is that?” he asks his charioteer (because throughout his sheltered life he has been shielded from old age). His charioteer tells him, “An old person. Each of us gets old. You and I alike. No one is exempt from old age.” On his third tour, Siddhartha sees a corpse. “What is that?” he asks his charioteer (because throughout his sheltered life he has been shielded from death). His charioteer tells him, “A dead person. Each of us dies. You and I alike. No one is exempt from death.” On his fourth and final tour, Siddhartha sees a wandering holy man. “What is that?” he asks his charioteer (because throughout his sheltered life, which has included encounters with all sorts of beautiful and wealthy and powerful people, he has never seen such a man). His charioteer tells him, “A sannyasin, a wandering ascetic who has left behind spouse and family and job and home in search of spiritual liberation.”
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