The Hindu Way
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2 THE HINDU WAY The sage Yajnavalkya was once asked to list the number of gods; it is said he began with the number 3,300 and ended by reducing them all to one—Brahman, the pervasive spirit of the cosmos that underlies all creation. The Rig Veda say ‘ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti’. This was also Swami Vivekananda’s favourite phrase about spirituality: ‘That which exists is One; the sages call It by various names.’ Hindus therefore understand that all worship of God reflects an effort to reach out to that which cannot be touched or seen; since God is, in that sense, literally unknowable, one may imagine Him/Her/It in any form, since each form may be just as valid as another and none can be guaranteed to be more accurate than the next one. The various forms of God in Hinduism, reducing the abstract to the specific visual form, reflect the limitations of the human imagination rather than any shapes within which the divine must be confined. Indeed, Hindu legends have the gods manifesting themselves in so many shapes and forms that the notion of one agreed image of God would be preposterous. Thus one can imagine God as a potbellied man with an elephant head, and also as a ten-armed woman with a beatific smile; and since both forms are equally valid to the worshipper, why not also imagine God as a bleeding man on a cross? All are acceptable to the Hindu; the reverence accorded to each representation of the unknowable God by worshippers of other faiths is enough to prompt similar respect from the Hindu. Acceptance is always the name of the game. As I have remarked at the outset, the key to understanding Hinduism is that it is one faith that claims no monopoly on the Truth. Hindus understand that theirs may not necessarily be the only path that leads to salvation; they are taught to respect all other paths that seek the Truth, knowing that these will vary depending on the circumstances of each individual’s life, the culture in which they are born or live, their values and motivations. In the Gita, Lord Krishna says, ‘Whosoever follows any faith and worships me under whatsoever denomination in whatsoever form with steadfastness, his faith I shall reinforce’. 1 The acknowledgement of multiple paths to the ultimate truth of creation is implicit in the philosophical disputes and arguments that have marked the faith for millennia. One consequence of this acceptance of difference is that it flies in the face of the certitudes most other religions assert. The French traveller François Bernier, on his well-documented journey through India in the seventeenth century, tried to introduce some Brahmins in 1671 Copyright © 2018. Scribe Publications. All rights reserved. All rights © 2018. Scribe Publications. Copyright to Christianity, and was startled by their response: ‘They pretended not [that] their law was universal; that God had only made it for them, and it was, therefore, they could not receive a stranger into their religion: that they thought not our religion was therefore false, but that it Tharoor, Shashi. Why I Am a Hindu, Scribe Publications, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usu/detail.action?docID=5390226. Created from usu on 2020-05-02 14:08:13. might be it was good for us, and that God might have appointed several different ways to go to heaven; but they will not hear that our religion should be the general religion for the whole earth; and theirs a fable and pure device.’ 2 We respect your truth, the Brahmins were saying; please respect ours. Some scholars have described Hindus as henotheists, that is, people who worship their God but do not deny the existence of other gods. Every Hindu worships some god, but it may not be the same god worshipped by every other Hindu either. As Radhakrishnan puts it: ‘God is more than the law that commands, the judge that condemns, the love that constrains, the father to whom we owe our being, or the mother with whom is bound up all that we can hope for or aspire to.’ 3 God is all that, and infinitely more. This henotheistic attitude means, however, undifferentiated respect for all the various possible ways of worshipping God, whether Hindu or not. A Hindu can accept the worship of the Abrahamic God as another practice of the same kind as he sees pursued by other Hindus. For him, someone worshipping Christ is essentially no different from himself worshipping Vishnu or Shiva. The acceptance of difference starts here for the Hindu. This was why it was possible for a large community of Jews, the Bene Israel, after arriving on the shores of western India around the time of Christ, to practise their faith for centuries in rural Maharashtra without being seen by their Hindu neighbours as practitioners of a different religion; Hindus used to seeing various Hindus pursue their own modes of devotion found nothing odd in a people with their own different practices, assuming them to be just another kind of Hindu, until a wandering rabbi from Jerusalem arrived in India centuries later and identified them as the Jews they were. It didn’t matter to the Hindus around them. The Haristuti has a prayer that says: ‘May Vishnu, the ruler of the three worlds, worshipped by the Shaivites as Shiva, by the Vedantins as Brahman, by the Buddhists as the Buddha, by the Naiyayikas as the chief agent, by the Jainas as the liberated, by the ritualists as the principle of dharma, may he grant our prayers.’ 4 This cheerful eclecticism was the attitude that enabled Swami Vivekananda, concluding the presentation of a paper at Chicago’s Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1893, to call upon the blessings of ‘He who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the Ahura Mazda of the Zoroastrians, the Buddha of the Buddhists, the Jehovah of the Jews, and the Father in Heaven of the Christians.’ To him they were one and the same: ‘That which exists is One; the sages call It by various names.’ SEEING LIFE WHOLE The British, who in their two centuries of imperial rule over India struggled to understand Copyright © 2018. Scribe Publications. All rights reserved. All rights © 2018. Scribe Publications. Copyright and come to terms with Hinduism, did a great deal to explore and debate its meanings as best they could. Some saw it, in E. M. Forster’s notorious phrase, as ‘a mystery and a muddle’; others tried to reduce it to terms they could relate to. Whether Hinduism was polytheistic or Tharoor, Shashi. Why I Am a Hindu, Scribe Publications, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usu/detail.action?docID=5390226. Created from usu on 2020-05-02 14:08:13. monotheistic was a question that agitated many British minds. After the Census of 1911, one senior British official concluded that ‘the great majority of Hindus have a firm belief in one supreme God—Parameshwara, Ishvara or Narayana.’ The chief British census official in India, Sir Herbert Risley, observed that ‘these ideas are not the monopoly of the learned: they are shared in great measure by the man on the street.’ An ‘intelligent Hindu peasant’, he claimed, not only was familiar with Hindu concepts like the paramatma (supreme soul), karma (loosely translatable as ‘fate’), maya (illusion), mukti (salvation) and so on, but had ‘a rough working theory of their bearing upon his own future’. 5 A few basic ideas were deeply ingrained into every Hindu, whether he lived up to them or not. Among these commonly-held beliefs were two four-fold divisions. The first was the organisation of life into four stages, or ashramas: these were brahmacharya, the bachelor existence, a time to be spent learning and acquiring mastery over the essential disciplines needed to lead a meaningful life; then grihastha, the life of a householder, when one married, procreated, and assumed the responsibilities of family life; then vanaprastha, when one retired and retreated to the forest to lead a life of contemplation in harmony with nature; and finally, sannyas, the stage of renunciation of all worldly ties, at which one seeks one’s ultimate merger with Brahman, the spirit suffusing the cosmos. The four stages of life also related to the four ends of life, the Purusharthas, that every Hindu had to pursue: dharma, the moral code (discussed more fully later), artha, prosperity or material well-being, kama, desire for pleasure and gratification, and ultimately moksha, or the salvation that comes from ultimate self-realisation, the fulfilment of which is the purpose of each individual life. These stages and ends of life in Hinduism embraced an all-encompassing idea of human needs in a comprehensive vision. Every person needs to learn and to earn; to have sex, food and money; to love, to nurture, to assume responsibility; each individual also has a shared concern for the common good and an indefinable curiosity about the unseen, about that which can only be experienced and not understood through words. All of these urges coexist in all of us; they overlap and interact with each other; we pursue them systematically or randomly, or we stumble across them, but they are present in each of our lives in an interdependence of which we are barely conscious but which the Hindu rishis fully appreciated. The common expression ‘mata, pita, guru, daivam’ encapsulates the human journey—one is first, from birth, totally dependent on the mother, then exposed to the outer world by the father, then taught and guided by the guru, until one finally finds God.