12.2 — Hinduism as a Family of Religions

The word "Hindu" was originally geographical. It comes from Sindhu, the Indus river, used by Persians for the people beyond it, and it meant "people who live over there."

It became a religious label largely under Islamic rule and then, decisively, under the British, who needed a census category.

Which means: the thing the word names was not assembled by its practitioners as a single religion. It was named from outside, and then people inside it took up the name.

What it actually contains

And the contents are genuinely incompatible with each other, which is the interesting fact.

Monotheism. Many traditions hold one supreme reality, personal or impersonal.

Polytheism. Many hold many gods, really existing.

Monism. Advaita says there is only one thing and the appearance of many is an error (9.8).

Dualism. Madhva says there are permanently two (9.9).

Atheism. Samkhya and Mimamsa have no God (9.4, 9.7). And Charvaka denies everything and is still counted as a school in the same conversation (9.10).

All of these are Hindu. Nobody is excommunicated.

How that is possible

Three mechanisms, and they are worth understanding because they are unusual.

Authority is textual and diffuse

There is no church, no pope, no council, no single authoritative body, and no mechanism for declaring anybody wrong.

There are texts, and there are lineages of teachers, and there are enormous numbers of them, and they disagree.

A tradition with no institution capable of enforcing orthodoxy cannot have heresy.

The adhikara principle

And the idea that does most of the work.

Adhikara means fitness, or eligibility — the right teaching for the person's stage and capacity.

Which converts what would otherwise be contradiction into sequence. The image-worshipper, the ritualist, the devotee, the philosopher and the renunciate are not disagreeing; they are at different points, and the teaching appropriate to each is different.

The Gita's three routes (5.1) are exactly this, and 5.7's remark that the abstract path is harder for embodied beings is the principle stated openly.

It is a generous device and it has a cost. It also permits any position to be accommodated by declaring it a lower stage, which is how Advaita absorbed devotional practice and how Buddhism was absorbed by making the Buddha an incarnation of Vishnu (6.14).

Practice does not require agreement

From 12.1: this is a practice-organised tradition.

Two people can perform the same festival, in the same street, with completely different accounts of what they are doing, and neither will ask the other.

The main streams

Four, and most practising Hindus are principally in one.

Vaishnavism — Vishnu and his incarnations, principally Krishna and Rama. The largest, and strongly devotional (9.9).

Shaivism — Shiva (Part 7). Older in some of its elements, more ascetic in flavour, strong in the south and in Kashmir.

Shaktism — the Goddess as the supreme reality. Durga, Kali, Parvati and the many regional forms. Dominant in Bengal and the north-east (12.3), and philosophically it inverts the usual arrangement: the Goddess is the active reality and the male principle is inert without her.

And Smarta — a tradition associated with Shankara (9.8) that worships five or six deities as equal forms of one reality, which is a deliberate reconciliation.

And underneath all four: folk and village religion, which is what most Hindus have actually practised for most of history — local deities, village goddesses, ancestor observances, and specific hills, trees and rivers. Much of it predates the Sanskrit tradition and was absorbed by it (7.1).

The concepts everybody shares

Even across the incompatible philosophies, a small set recurs.

Karma (8.1). Dharma (8.3). The four aims and four stages (8.4). Samsara, the cycle of rebirth. Moksha, release. And atman and brahman as terms, even where their relationship is disputed (9.2).

And ahimsa, non-harm, though the degree varies enormously and 9.11 shows where it was taken furthest.

What outsiders get wrong

Four things, and they are worth correcting because they are persistent.

"Thirty-three million gods." The number is a misreading — the Vedic phrase is trayastrimsati koti, and koti means both "crore" (ten million) and "category" or "kind." The older sense is thirty-three types. And in any case most Hindus in practice worship a small number of deities, and many hold them to be forms of one.

"Idol worship." The philosophical position, stated across the tradition, is that the image is a support for attention rather than the deity itself. The technical concept is that the divine is invited into the image for the duration of the worship and released afterwards — which is explicit in the rituals for many festivals, and 12.3's immersion of the Durga image is exactly that.

"Caste is Hinduism." The relationship is real and it is not identity. The tradition's own texts contain the strongest arguments against hereditary status: the Yaksha's answer that conduct alone decides (3.10), the Gita's verse on the wise seeing the same in a Brahmin and a dog (5.10), the bhakti poets, several of whom were from the lowest castes (9.9), and Nanak's langar (9.11). And caste persists across Indian Christianity, Islam and Sikhism too, which suggests it is a social structure that religion accommodated rather than a doctrine that produced it. Volume VIII covers the history properly.

And "Hindus believe X." For almost any X, some do and some do not.

The honest problems

Three, stated plainly.

Caste. Whatever its origin, the tradition supplied the theological justification for it in the Purusha hymn (9.1) and in the dharma literature, and that justification did enormous harm for two thousand years and is not fully gone. Ambedkar's critique (6.14) is the serious one and should be read.

The treatment of women varies enormously across the tradition and includes both a Goddess as the supreme reality and legal codes that made women permanent minors. Both are genuinely in the tradition.

And the modern political use. A religion with no central authority is unusually easy to speak for, and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen the construction of a political Hinduism that is much more unified, much more defined against outsiders, and considerably less internally various than anything in its history. That is a modern development and it should be recognised as one.

What is genuinely remarkable

And the thing worth admiring, stated without flattery.

A tradition contained, simultaneously and without anybody being burned for it, systems that assert one reality and many, a personal God and no God, the world as real and the world as an error, ritual as everything and ritual as nothing.

And the mechanism was not indifference. They argued ferociously — 9.3's debate format was formal, public and consequential. What was absent was an institution capable of ending the argument by force.

Whether that is a strength or a weakness is a real question, and the answer is probably: it is why the tradition is so intellectually rich, and it is why it has been so easy to speak for.

What to carry from this page

The name came from outside and the thing it names was not assembled as one religion.

A tradition with no institution capable of enforcing orthodoxy cannot have heresy. Which explains almost everything else about it.

Adhikara converts contradiction into sequence — the right teaching for the person's capacity — and it is generous and it can absorb anything by calling it a lower stage.

And for almost any claim beginning "Hindus believe," some do and some do not.

Next: 12.3 — the question this volume was asked directly: why does Bengal have Durga, Maharashtra have Ganesh, and Kerala have Onam, and why does the bond run so deep?