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At the outset, one is confronted by the difficulty of defining what Hinduism is. To many it seems to be a name without any content. Is it a museum of beliefs, a medley of rites, or a mere map, a geographical expression? Its content, if it has any, has altered from age to age, from community to community. The ease with which Hinduism has steadily absorbed the customs and ideas of peoples with whom it has come into contact is as great as the difficulty we feel in finding a common feature binding together its different forms. But, if there is not a unity of spirit binding its different expressions and linking up the different periods of its history into one organic whole, it will not be possible to account for the achievements of Hinduism. The dictum that, if we leave aside the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin, has become a commonplace with us. But it is not altogether true. Half the world moves on independent foundations which Hinduism supplied. China and Japan, Tibet and Siam, Burma and Ceylon look to India as their spiritual home. The civilisation itself has not been a short-lived one. Its historic records date back for over four thousand years, and even then it had reached a stage of civilisation which has continued its unbroken, though at times slow and almost static course, until the present day. It has stood the stress and strain of more than four or five millenniums of spiritual thoughts and experience. Though peoples of different races and cultures have been pouring into India from the dawn of history, Hinduism has been able to maintain its supremacy, and even the proselytising creeds backed by political power have not been able to coerce the large majority of Indians to their views. The Hindu culture possesses some vitality which seems to be denied to some other more forceful currents. It is no more necessary to dissect Hinduism than to open a tree to see whether the sap still runs.
The Hindu civilisation is so called, since its original founders or earliest followers occupied the territory drained by the Sindhu (the Indus) river system corresponding to the North-West Frontier province and the Punjab. This is recorded in the Rg Veda, the oldest of the Vedas, the Hindu scriptures which give their name to this period of Indian history. The people on the Indian side of the Sindhu were called Hindu by the Persian and later western invaders. From the Punjab, the civilisation flowed over into the valley of the Ganges where it met with numerous cults of primitive tribes. In its southward march the Aryan culture got into touch with the Dravidian and ultimately dominated it, though undergoing some modification from its influence. As the civilisation extended over the whole of India, it suffered many changes, but it kept up its continuity with the old Vedic type developed on the banks of the Sindhu. The term “Hindu” had originally a territorial and not a credal significance. It implied residence in a well-defined geographical area. Aboriginal tribes, savage and half-civilised people, the cultured Dravidians and the Vedic Aryans were all Hindus as they were the sons of the same mother. The Hindu thinkers reckoned with the striking fact that the men and women dwelling in India belonged to different communities, worshipped different gods, and practised different rites.
As if this were not enough, outsiders have been pouring into the country from the beginning of its history, and some have made for themselves a home in India and thus increased the difficulty of the problem How was Hindu society built up out of material so diverse, so little susceptible in many cases to assimilation, and scattered across a huge continent measuring nearly two thousand miles from north to south and eighteen hundred miles from west to east? It cannot be denied that in a few centuries the spirit of culture steeped in a common atmosphere. The differences among the sects of the Hindus are more or less on the surface, and the Hindus as such remain a distinct cultural unit, with a common history, a common literature and a common civilisation. Mr Vincent Smith observes, “India beyond all doubt possesses a deep underlying fundamental unity, far more profound than that produced either by geographical isolation or by political superiority. That unity transcends the innumerable diversities of blood, colour, language, dress, manners, and sect.” In this task of welding together heterogeneous elements and enabling them to live in peace and order, Hinduism has had to adopt her own measures with little or not historic wisdom to guide and support her. The world is not full of racial, cultural and religious misunderstandings. We are groping in a timid and tentative way for some device which would save us from our suicidal conflicts. Perhaps the Hindu way of approach to the problem of religious conflicts may not be without its lessons for us.
The Hindu attitude to religion is interesting. While fixed intellectual beliefs mark off one religion from another, Hinduism sets itself no such limits. Intellect is subordinated to intuition, dogma to experience, outer expression to inward realisation. Religion is not the acceptance of academic abstractions or the celebration of ceremonies, but a kind of life or experience. It is insight into the nature of reality (darsana) or experience of reality (anubhava). This experience is not an emotional thrill, or a subjective fancy, but is the response of the whole personality, the integrated self to the central reality. Religion is a specific attitude of the self, itself and no other, though it is mixed up generally with intellectual views, aesthetic forms, and moral valuations.
Religious experience is of a self-certifying character. It is svatassiddha. It carries its own credentials. But the religious seer is compelled to justify his inmost convictions in a way that satisfies the thought of the age. If there is not this intellectual confirmation, the seer’s attitude is one of trust. Religion rests on faith in this sense of the term. The mechanical faith which depends on authority and wishes to enjoy the consolidations of religion without the labour of being religious is quite different from the religious faith which has its roots in experience. Wesley asks, “What is faith?” and answers, “Not an opinion nor any number of opinions put together, be they ever so true. It is the vision of the soul, that power by which spiritual things are apprehended, just as material things are apprehended by the physical senses.” Blind belief in dogma is not the faith which saves. It is an unfortunate legacy of the course which Christian theology has followed in Europe that faith has come to connote a mechanical adherence to authority. If we take faith in the proper sense of trust or spiritual conviction, religion is faith or intuition. We call it faith simply because spiritual perception, like other kinds of perception, is liable to error and requires the testing processes of logical thought. But, like all perception, religious intuition is that which thought has to start from and to which it has to return. In order to be able to say that religious experience reveals reality, in order to be able to transform religious certitude into logical certainty, we are obliged to give an intellectual account of the experience. Hindu thought has no mistrust of reason. There can be no final breach between the two powers of the human mind, reason and intuition. Beliefs that foster and promote the spiritual life of the soul must be in accordance with the nature and the laws of the world of reality with which it is their aim to bring us into harmony. The chief sacred scriptures of the Hindus, the Vedas, register the intuitions of the perfected souls. They are not so much dogmatic dicta as transcripts from life. They record the spiritual experiences of souls strongly endowed with the sense for reality. They are held to be authoritative on the ground that they express the experiences of the experts in the field of religion. If the utterances of the Vedas were uninformed by spiritual insight, they would have no claim to our belief. The truths revealed in the Vedas are capable of being re-experienced on compliance with ascertained conditions. We can discriminate between the genuine and the spurious in religious experience, not only by means of logic but also through life. By experimenting with different religious conceptions and relating them with the rest of our life, we can know the sound from the unsound.
The Vedas bring together the different ways in which the religious-minded of that age experienced reality and describe the general principles of religious knowledge and growth. As the experiences themselves are of a varied character, so their records are many-sided (visvatomukham) or “suggestive of many interpretations” (anekarthatam).
It is essential to every religion that its heritage should be treated as sacred. A society which puts a halo of sanctity round its tradition gains an inestimable advantage of power and permanence. The Vedic tradition became surrounded with sanctity, and so helped to transmit culture and ensure the continuity of civilisation. The sacred scriptures make the life of the spirit real even to those who are incapable of insight. Men, in the rough and tumble of life with their problems and perplexities, sins and sorrows, have no patience for balanced arguments or sustained meditation, but they want some formula or rule of life which they can accept as valid. Through it, they are inducted into a new way of life. A living tradition influences our inner faculties, humanises our nature and lifts us to a higher level. By means of it, every generation is moulded in a particular cast which gives individuality and interest to every cultural type. Even those who wish to discern the truth for themselves require a guide in the early stages.
The Hindu attitude to the Vedas is one of trust tempered by criticism, trust because the beliefs and forms which helped our fathers are likely to be of use to us also; criticism because, however valuable the testimony of past ages may be, it cannot deprive the present age of its right to inquire and sift the evidence. Precious as are the echoes of God’s voice in the souls of men of long ago, our regard for them must be tempered by the recognition of the truth that God has never finished the revelation of His wisdom and love. Besides, our interpretation of religious experience must be in conformity with the findings of science. As knowledge grows, our theology develops. Only those parts of the tradition which are logically coherent are to be accepted as superior to the evidence of the senses and not the whole tradition.
The Hindu philosophy of religion starts from and returns to an experimental basis. Only this basis is as wide as human nature itself. Other religious systems start with this or that particular experimental datum. Christian theology, for example, takes its stand on the immediate certitude of Jesus as one whose absolute authority over conscience is self-certifying and whose ability and willingness to save the soul it is impossible not to trust. Christian theology becomes relevant only for those who share or accept a particular kind of spiritual experience, and these are tempted to dismiss other experiences as illusory and other scriptures as imperfect. Hinduism was not betrayed into this situation on account of its adherence to fact. The Hindu thinker readily admits other points of view that his own and considers them to be just as worthy of attention. If the whole race of man, in every land, of every colour, and every stage of culture, is the offspring of God, then we must admit that, in the vast compass of his providence, all are being trained by his wisdom and supported by his love to reach within the limits of their powers a knowledge of the Supreme. When the Hindu found that different people aimed at and achieved God-realisation in different ways, he generously recognised them all and justified their place in the course of history. He used the distinctive scriptures of the different groups for their uplift since they remain the source, almost the only source, for the development of their tastes and talents, for the enrichment of their thought and life, for the appeal to their emotions and the inspiration of their efforts. Hinduism is the religion not only of the Vedas but of the Epics and the Puranas. By accepting the significance of the different intuitions of reality and the different scriptures of the peoples living in India, Hinduism has come to be a tapestry of the most variegated tissues and almost endless diversity of hues. The Puranas with their wild chronology and weird stories are mainly imaginative literature, but were treated as a part of the sacred tradition for the simple reason that some people took interest in them. The Tantras, which deal especially with yogic sadhana, or discipline, and have influenced the lives of some communities from the time of the Rg Veda, are accepted as a part of the sacred literature, and many Hindu ceremonies show traces of the Tantrik worship. Every tradition which helps man to lift his soul to God is held up as worthy of adherence. “The Vedas, the Samkhya, the Yoga, the Pasupata and the Vaisnava creeds, each of them is encouraged in some place or other. Some think that this is better, or that is better owing to differences of taste, but all men reach unto you, the Supreme, even as all rivers, however zigzag their courses may be, reach the sea. Hinduism is therefore not a definite dogmatic creed, but a vast, complex, but subtly unified mass of spiritual thought and realisation. Its tradition of the godward endeavour of the human spirit has been continuously enlarging through the ages.
The dialectic of religious advance through tradition, logic and life helps the conservation of Hinduism by providing scope for change. Religion and philosophy, life and thought, the practical and the theoretical, to use the language of Croce, form the eternal rhythm of the spirit. We rise from life to thought and return from thought to life in a progressive enrichment which is the attainment of every higher levels of reality. Tradition is something which is for ever being worked out anew and recreated by the free activity of its followers. What is built for ever is for ever building. If a tradition does not grow, it only means that its followers have become spiritually dead. Throughout the history of Hinduism the leaders of thought and practice have been continually busy experimenting with new forms, developing new ideals to suit new conditions. The first impulse of progress came when the Vedic Aryans came into contact with the native tribes. A similar impulse contributed to the protestant movements of Jainism and Buddhism when the Aryans moved out into the Gangetic valley. Contact with the highly civilised Dravidians led to the transformation of Vedism into a theistic religion. The reform movements of Ramananda, Caitanya, Kabir, and Nanak show the stimulus of Islam. The Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj are the outcome of the contact with Western influences, and yet Hinduism is not to be dismissed as a mere flow and strife of opinions, for it represents a steady growth of insight, since every form of Hinduism and every stage of its growth is related to the common background of the Vedanta. Thought Hindu religious thought has traversed many revolutions and made great conquests, the essential ideas have continued the same for four or five millenniums. The germinal conceptions are contained in the Vedanta standard.
The three prasthanas, or divisions, of the Vedata, the Upanisads, the Brahma Sutra and the Bhagavadgita, answer roughly to the three stages of faith, knowledge and discipline. The Upanisads embody the experiences of the sages. Logic and discipline are present in them, though they are not the chief characteristics of those texts. The Brahma Sutra attempts to interpret in logical terms the chief conclusions of the Upanisads. The Bhagavadgita is primarily a yoga sastra giving us the chief means by which we can attain the truly religious life. They form together the absolute standard for the Hindu religion. It is said that other scriptures sink into silence when the Vedanta appears, even as foxes do not raise their voices in the forest when the lion appears. All sects of Hinduism attempt to interpret the Vedanta texts in accordance with their own religious views. The Vedanta is not a religion, but religion itself in its most universal and deepest significance. Thus the different sects of Hinduism are reconciled with a common standard and are sometimes regarded as the distorted expressions of the one true canon. As the Mahabharata, one of the great epics, says, the Veda is one, its significance is one, though different Vedas are constructed on amount of misunderstanding. The acceptance of this common authority by the different sects helps to purify them. Those parts of the new faith which are not in conformity with the Vedic Canon tend to be subordinated and gradually dropped out. While no creeds and no scruples were forced to disappear as outworn or out of date, every one of them developed on account of the influence of the spirit of the Vedanta, which is by no means sectarian.
If religion is experience, the question arises, what is it that is experienced? No two religious systems seem to agree in their answers to this question. The Hindu philosopher became familiar very early in his career with the variety of the pictures of God which the mystics conjure up. We know today from our study of comparative religion that there are different accounts of the mystical vision. Some Christian mystics declare that they see in the highest mystical vision the blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Orthox Muslim mystics deny this triune conception. From such variety the Hindu thinker did not rush to the conclusion that in religious experience we ascribe objective existence to subjective suggestions. The Upanisad says that “God, the maker of All, the great spirit every seated in the hearts of creatures, if fashioned by the heart, the understanding, and the will. They who know that become immortal. Religious experience is not the pure unvarnished presentment of the real in itself, but is the presentment of the real already influenced by the ideas and prepossessions of the perceiving mind. The mind of man does not function in fractions. It cannot be split up into a few sharply defined elements, as the intellect, the emotions and the will. The intellect of man is not so utterly naked and undefiled as to justify the view that it is one and the same in all men. The Pragmatists have done a notable service to the philosophy of religion in pointing out that different philosophies reflect different temperaments. The Divine reveals itself to men within the framework of their intimate prejudices. Each religious genius spells out the mystery of God according to his own endowment, personal, racial, and historical. The variety of the pictures of God is easily intelligible when we realise that religious experience is psychologically mediated.
It is sometimes urged that the descriptions of God conflict with one another. It only shows that our notions are not true. To say that our ideas of God are not true is not to deny the reality of God to which our ideas refer. Refined definitions of God as moral personality, and holy love may contradict cruder ones which look upon him as a primitive despot, a sort of sultan in the sky, but they all intend the same reality. If personal equation does not vitiate the claim to objectivity in sense perception and scientific inquiry, there is no reason to assume that it does so in religious experience.
The Hindu never doubted the reality of the one supreme universal spirit, however much the descriptions of it may fall short of its nature. Whatever the doctrinaires may say, the saints of God are anxious to affirm that much is hidden from their sight. God hideth himself. It is a sound religious agnosticism which bids us hold our peace regarding the nature of the supreme spirit. Silence is more significant than speech regarding the depths of the divine. The altars erected to the unknown gods in the Graeco-Roman world were but an expression of man’s ignorance of the divine nature. The sense of failure in man’s quest for the unseen is symbolised by them. When asked to define the nature of God, the seer of the Upanisad sat silent, and when pressed to answer exclaimed that the Absolute is silence. The mystery of the divine reality eludes the machinery of speech and symbol. The “Divine Darkness”, “That of which nothing can be said”, and such other expressions are used by the devout when they attempt to describe their consciousness of direct communion with God.
The Hindu thinkers bring out the sense of the otherness of the divine by the use of negatives, “There the eye goes not, speech goes not, nor mind, we know not, we understand not how one would teach it.” The neti, “not this”, of Yajnavalkya reminds us of the nescio of Bernard, of “the dim silence where all lovers lose themselves” of Ruysbroeck, of the negative descriptions of Dionysius the Aeropagite, Eckhart and Boehme.
But the human mind finds it extremely difficult to resign itself to absolute silence or negative descriptions. Man is a talking animal. He insists on interpreting the religious mystery in terms of his own experience. The completely other, the absolutely unlimited, seems to be akin to the utterly indefinite. The human mind craves for something definite and limited and so uses its resources for bringing down the Supreme to the region of the determined. We cannot think of God without using our imagination. The religious seer needs the help of the imagination to express his vision. “Without a parable spake he not unto them.” The highest category we can use is that of self-conscious personality. We are persons, purusas, and God is perfect personality (uttama purusa). If we analyse the concept of personality, we find that it includes cognition, emotion, and will, and God is viewed as the supreme knower, the great lover, and the perfect will, Brahma, Visnu, Siva. These are not three independent centres of consciousness, as popular theology represents, but three sides of one complex personality. The different pictures of God which prevailed in the country were affiliated to one or the other of this trinity.
The soul of man is complex in character and so is the environment. The reactions of an infinite soul to an infinite environment cannot be limited to this or that formula. When we suffer from the pressure of the finite, we take refuge in the infinite. The finite presses on us at so many different points, and our different accounts of God are the outcome of this protean pressure. “Such as men themselves are, such will God Himself seem to them to be,” says the Cambridge Platonist, John Smith. The seers of the Upanisads were impressed by the unreality of the world, its fleeting and transitory character, and sought for the infinite real, the sat which would not roll away like the mists of maya, or illusion. The sorrow and the suffering of the world cut into the soul of the Buddha and added a poignancy to his conviction of the unreality of finite things, and he found an escape from it in the eternal dharma, or righteousness. The inversion of the moral values affected the Hebrew most, and he found relief in an omnipotent and just God, who would destroy the wicked and save the righteous. The Hebrew prophets and Mahomet were struck by the majesty and the unconditional binding force of the imperative of conscience. Since they were familiar with kingship as the source of all authority, they made the supreme a lord of lords, a king of kings. The Protestant Christians do not care so much for the inviolable dignity of the ethical imperative as for the essential benignity and beneficence of the Supreme. God is our Father in heaven and we are his prodigal sons who have wandered from him, though he is ever ready to welcome us with rejoicing the moment we are willing to return. While fathers are just, mothers are merciful, and so the Catholic Christians and the Saktas look upon God as the Mother, whose compassionate heart pours itself for the child out of vatsalya, or the love analogous to that of the cow for the calf, whose impurities she licks away. Every view of God from the primitive worship of nature up to the Father-love of a St Francis and the Mother-love of a Ramakrsna represents some aspect or other of the relation of the human to the divine spirit. Each method of approach, each mode of address answers to some mood of the human mind. Not one of them gives the whole truth, though each of them is partially true. God is more than the law that commands, the judge that condemns, the love that constraints, 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. “Him who is the One Real sages name variously.” “My names are many as declared by the great seers.” To admit the various descriptions of God is not to lapse into polytheism. When Yajnavalkya was called upon to state the number of gods, he started with the popular number 3306, and ended by reducing them all to one Brahman. “This indestructible enduring reality is to be looked upon as one only.
These different representations do not tell us about what God is in himself but only what he is to us. The anthropomorphic conception of the divine is relative to our needs. We look upon God as interested in flowers and stars, little birds and children, in broken hearts and in binding them up. But God exists for himself and not merely for us. To look upon God as an instrument for the advancement of human ends is to exaggerate our own importance. We seem to give value to God, more than God to us. Tukaram says, “That we fall into sin is thy good fortune: we have bestowed name and form on thee; had it not been we, who would have asked after thee, when thou was lonely and unembodied? It is the darkness that makes the light shine, the setting that gives lustre to the gem. Disease brought to light Dhanvantari; why should a healthy man wish to know him? It is poison that confers its value on nectar; gold and brass are high or low compared with each other. Tuka says, know this, O God, that because we exist, Godhead has been conferred on you.” What constitutes existence for other sis not what constitutes existence for oneself.
Every attempt at solving the problem of the ultimate basis of existence from a religious point of view has come to admit an Absolute or God. Rationalistic logic and mystic contemplation favour as a rule the former conception, while ethical theism is disposed to the latter. It has been so in Hindu thought from the age of the Upanisads till the present day. We find the same ambiguity in Christianity. The personal category is transcended in the highest experiences of the Christian mystics. Hinduism affirms that some of the highest and richest manifestations which religion has produced require a personal God. There is a rational compulsion to postulate the personality of the divine. While Hindu thought does justice to the personal aspect of the Supreme, it does not allow us to forget the supra-personal character of the central reality. Even those who admit the personal conception of God urge that there are heights and depths in the being of God which are beyond our comprehension. The supreme cause and ground and end of the world is certainly not less than what we know as self-conscious personality. Only it is not an object among objects, or a subject among subjects, but is the immanent ground and operative principle in all subjects and objects. The supra-personal and the personal representations of the real are the absolute and the relative ways of expressing the one reality. When we emphasise the nature of reality in itself we get the absolute Brahman; when we emphasise its relation to us we get the personal Bhagavan.
Hindu thought believes in the evolution of our knowledge of God. We have to vary continually our notions of God until we pass beyond all notions into the heart of the reality itself, which our ideas endeavour to report. Hinduism doe not distinguish ideas of God as true and false, adopting one particular idea as the standard for the whole human race. It accepts the obvious fact that mankind seeks its goal of God at various levels and in various directions, and feels sympathy with every stage of the search. The same God expresses itself at one stage as power, at another as personality, at a third as all-comprehensive spirit, just as the same forces which put forth the green leaves also cause the crimson flowers to grow. We do not say that the crimson flowers are all the truth and the green leaves are all false. Hinduism accepts all religious notions as facts and arranges them in the order of their more or less intrinsic significance. The bewildering polytheism of the masses and the uncompromising montheism of the classes are for the Hindu the expressions of one and the same force at different levels. Hinduism insists on our working steadily upwards and improving our knowledge of God. “The worshippers of the Absolute are the highest in rank; second to them are the worshippers of the personal God; then come the worshippers of the incarnations like Rama, Krsna, Buddha; below them are those who worship ancestors, deities and sages, and lowest of all are the worshippers of the petty forces and spirits.” Again, “The deities of some men are in water (i.e. bathing-places), those of the more advanced are in the heavens, those of the children (in religion) are in images of wood and stone, but the sage finds his God in his deeper self.” “The man of action finds his God in fire, the man of feeling in the heart, and the feeble-minded in the idol, but the strong in spirit find God everywhere.” The seers see the Supreme in the self, and not in images.
It is, however, unfortunately the case that the majority of the Hindus do not insist on this graduated scale but acquiesce in admittedly unsatisfactory conceptions of God. The cultivated tolerate popular notions as inadequate signs and shadows of the incomprehensible, but the people at large believe them to be justified and authorised. It is true that the thinking Hindu desires to escape from the confusion of the gods into the silence of the Supreme, but the crowd still stands gazing at the heavens. In the name of toleration we have carefully protected superstitious rites and customs. Even those who have a clear perception of religious values indulge in practices which are inconsistent with their professions on the comfortable assumption that superiority should not breed want of sympathy for those who are not up to the mark. There has not been in recent times any serious and systematic endeavour to raise the mental level of the masses and place the whole Hindu population on a higher spiritual plane. It is necessary for the Hindu leaders to hold aloft the highest conception of God and work steadily on the minds of the worshippers so as to effect an improvement in their conceptions. The temples, shrines and sanctuaries with which the whole land is covered may be used not only as places of prayer and altars of worship, but as seats of learning and schools of thought which can undertake the spiritual direction of Hindus.