Hinduism

Not one religion, and not called that by its own practitioners until Europeans needed a word — a family of traditions containing monists, dualists, theists and atheists who have argued for three thousand years.

What it is

The religious traditions of the Indian subcontinent that trace themselves, in various ways, to the Vedas — followed by something over a billion people, and the third largest religious grouping in the world.

The name is external. "Hindu" comes from the Persian for the people beyond the Sindhu, the Indus. "Hinduism" as a single religion was largely a construction of European writers and colonial administrators in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who needed one category for what they found. Practitioners historically identified with a specific sampradāya — a lineage — or spoke of sanātana dharma, the eternal order.

That matters because the internal variety is not a detail. The major streams:

Vaiṣṇava — devotion to Viṣṇu and his avatāras, principally Kṛṣṇa and Rāma
Śaiva — devotion to Śiva
Śākta — devotion to the Goddess, Devī or Śakti, as ultimate
Smārta — a more philosophical orientation, worshipping several deities as aspects of one reality

Theologically these range from strict non-dualism through qualified non-dualism to outright dualism, and the Sāṃkhya school is effectively atheistic. All of them are Hinduism.

Where it came from

The Vedas are the oldest layer — the Ṛg Veda composed in an archaic Sanskrit, conventionally dated to roughly 1500–1200 BCE and transmitted orally with extraordinary precision for centuries before being written. They are śruti, "heard", and are formally the authority the tradition rests on.

The Upaniṣads, from around 800–200 BCE, turn from ritual toward speculation, and introduce the vocabulary that dominates afterwards: brahman, the ground of reality; ātman, the self; karma; saṃsāra, the round of rebirth; and mokṣa, release from it.

Then the smṛti literature — the epics Mahābhārata (containing the Bhagavad Gītā) and Rāmāyaṇa, the Purāṇas, and the legal and social texts.

Six classical schools — darśanas — were formalised in the following centuries: Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta, which came to dominate. Vedānta itself splits sharply: Śaṅkara's Advaita holds that only Brahman is real and the self is identical with it; Rāmānuja's Viśiṣṭādvaita qualifies this; Madhva's Dvaita holds God and soul eternally distinct. These are not shades of emphasis — they are incompatible positions, argued at length.

The bhakti movement, beginning in the Tamil south around the sixth century with the Āḻvārs and Nāyaṉārs and spreading north over the following millennium, made devotion rather than knowledge or ritual the primary path — and, importantly, made it available regardless of caste or learning. Its poets — Mīrābāī, Kabīr, Tulsīdās, Caitanya — are among the most loved figures in Indian religion.

How it is practised

For most people, at home and in the temple rather than in doctrine. Pūjā, offering to a deity image; darśana, the reciprocal seeing of and being seen by the deity; a household shrine; festivals — Dīvālī, Holī, Navarātri, Durgā Pūjā and hundreds of regional observances; pilgrimage; life-cycle rites; and observances tied to caste, region, family and lineage.

The four aims of life — dharma (duty), artha (prosperity), kāma (pleasure) and mokṣa (liberation) — frame a religion that does not treat ordinary life as an obstacle.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the diversity is genuine and irreducible. Any sentence beginning "Hindus believe" is almost certainly false of a large number of Hindus.

We can say caste has to be addressed directly. The fourfold varṇa scheme appears in the Vedas, and the far more complex jāti system structured social life for centuries — governing marriage, occupation, food and physical contact, with those outside it, now self-designated Dalit, subject to untouchability. Caste discrimination was abolished by the Indian constitution in 1950 and remains socially powerful. B.R. Ambedkar, the constitution's principal author and a Dalit, concluded that the system was inseparable from the religion and in 1956 converted to Buddhism with hundreds of thousands of followers. Hindu reformers have argued the opposite for two centuries. The argument is internal and it is live.

We can say the modern political dimension is real and contested. Hindutva — a twentieth-century political ideology defining Indian nationhood in Hindu terms — is a distinct thing from Hinduism as a religion, is regarded by many Hindus as a distortion of it, and has been associated with communal violence. Describing the religion is not describing the movement.

We can say the Western reception has been selective. Advaita Vedānta and yoga travelled; the devotional traditions that most Hindus actually practise largely did not, and "Hindu philosophy" in Western usage often means one school out of six, in one interpretation.

We cannot adjudicate between the darśanas, and neither has three thousand years of Indian philosophy — which is not a failure but the shape of a tradition that never had a central authority to close a question.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is practised

What we can and cannot say

Further reading