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the faith is almost Wikipedia-like in the authorial diversity of its scriptures and tenets.
My Hinduism was a lived faith; it was a Hinduism of experience and upbringing, a Hinduism of observation and conversation, not one anchored in deep religious study (though of course the two are not mutually exclusive).
Swami Vivekananda
As a Hindu I can claim adherence to a religion without an established church or priestly papacy, a religion whose rituals and customs I am free to reject, a religion that does not oblige me to demonstrate my faith by any visible sign, by subsuming my identity in any collectivity, not even by a specific day or time or frequency of worship.
I am proud that I can honour the sanctity of other faiths without feeling I am betraying my own.
It is therefore a timeless faith, populated by ideas at once ancient and modern, hosting texts, philosophies, belief systems and schools of thought that do not necessarily all agree with each other.
Hindus cannot refer to nirguna Brahman as ‘He’ since God can be and is also ‘She’ and ‘It’. The Vedas use the interrogative pronoun ‘ka’ (who?), or more precisely kasmai (to whom?) for the unknowable God.
In the shade of the vast canopy of this capacious banyan tree, sustained by multiple roots and several trunks, a great variety of flora and fauna, thought and action, flourishes.
any attempt at a truism about Hinduism can be immediately contradicted by another truism about Hinduism.’
“that the singular thing about the country is that you can only speak about it in the plural”,
there is no one Hindu way.’24
In Hindu thought, the world has no beginning and no end, but only experiences endless repetitive cycles of time in four yugas (aeons or ages): Satya Yuga, the age of truth, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga and Kali Yuga (the age of destruction and untruth,
the one in which we are all living now). Each Kali Yuga ends with a great flood (pralaya) that destroys the world, only to start afresh with a new Satya Yuga. Some
dharma in its classic sense embraces the total cosmic responsibility of both God and Man.
The Western faiths look outward to the heavens for their revealed truths; the Hindu looks within himself.
The ancient tradition of caste was one my nationalist parents tried to shield me from for years,
India had castes, but not a caste system:
‘The sage Vararuchi, son of Sankaracharya’s preceptor, married a pariah woman, and fathered 12 children with her. One became a Brahmin, another a carpenter, and one was even a Muslim. Yet another sibling, when they all met for a feast, brought to the table food that he enjoyed: the udder of a cow, or beef if you will.
Of course the story goes on to transform the meat into a plant that everyone then consumed, but the lesson is simply that though they were different in what they did and what they ate, they were all born of the same parents, and children of the same land.’
Until my fifties, when I entered the caste-ridden world of Indian politics,
As an uncle of mine sagely observed, ‘In our country now, you can’t go forward unless you’re a backward.’
The news that a recent survey has established that 27 per cent of Indians still practise caste untouchability35 is not, in many ways, news at all. Most Indians have grown up in an India where we have seen such behaviour, though the kind of people who read English-language books probably think of it as something that happens in rural, backward villages rather than urban India.
Dera Sacha Sauda is one of the biggest, but far from the only, of several deras dotting Punjab and Haryana. The deras, after all, helped keep social peace, tamp down discontent, and channel frustrations towards constructive activity.
Hindu fatalism, a tendency for us to be resigned to our lot and to accept the world as it is ordained to be.
One does not fight against that which one cannot overcome, but seeks instead to find the best way, for
oneself, to live with it.
God is not just above and beyond us; to the Hindu, He is also within us.
If heaven is a place where a soul should sprout white wings and sing the praises of God, it must be rather a boring place, hardly worth aspiring to, and God must be a rather insecure Being. And as for hell, the very notion of hell is incompatible with Hindu cosmology, since it suggests there is a place where God is not, and that, to the Hindu,
is impossible to conceive, for God is everywhere or He would not be God.
ahimsa (non-violence), satyam (truth), shivam (piety), sundaram (the cultivation of beauty), vairagyam (detachment), pavitram (purity) and swabhavam (self-control).
If you stopped thinking of God that way, however, but saw God in everyone and everything, in the bad and the good, in the unfair as well as the just, as an impersonal cosmic force that just is—then you can come to terms with the world’s tragedies as well as its joys.
Be good so that you are reborn in a better situation in your next life than in the present one;
hyperactive extra-curricular life
Prajnanam Brahma’ (knowledge is Brahman), ‘Ayam Atma Brahma’ (this atman is Brahman), ‘Tattvamasi’ (that you are), and ‘Aham Brahmasmi’ (I am Brahman)—
sat-chit-ananda (truth-consciousness-bliss),
I am not the mind, nor the intellect, nor the ego, nor the material of the mind; I am not the body, nor the changes of the body; I am not the senses of hearing, taste, smell, or sight, Nor am I the ether, the earth, the fire, the air; I am Existence Absolute, Knowledge Absolute, Bliss Absolute— I am Shiva, I am Shiva. (Shivoham, Shivoham).
restrictions on entry into temples (to safeguard their treasures from prying eyes), child marriages (to win protection for girls before they were old enough to be abducted by lustful invaders) and even the practice of sati (the burning of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre) were all measures of self-defence during this turbulent period of Indian history,
(notably Kashmir, where most of the population, including many Brahmins, converted en masse to Islam, mostly under duress during the reign of Sultan Sikander
Most Britons in India sneered at a faith they saw as primitive and mired in superstition. (There were, of course, notable exceptions, but in general the colonial attitude to Hinduism was one of incomprehension and contempt.)
Arya Samaj departed from the principle of acceptance of other faiths as equally valid, the principle that characterizes Swami Vivekananda’s Hinduism.
Sree Narayana Guru, who overcame the disadvantages imposed upon the ‘backward caste’
Westerners think of the self as a body that possesses a soul, Hinduism sees the self as a soul that possesses a body:
(The ‘One’ was a carefully-chosen word; whereas to the Swami it implied the oneness of Brahman and atman, cosmic spirit and soul, it also embraced the idea of the One God of the Semitic faiths.)
The Hindu believes that every soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere, but whose centre is located in the body, and that death means the change of this centre from body to body….
man ought to live in this world like a lotus leaf, which grows in water but is never moistened by water; so a man ought to live in the world—his heart to God and his hands to work.’
the images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols—so many pegs to hang spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for everyone, but those that do not need it have no right to say that it is wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism.’
‘Kanyakumari resolve of 1892’,
‘Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life—think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success, that is the way great spiritual giants are produced’.
‘Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached’
Ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti: the Truth is One but sages call It by different names.
