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101 CH APTER SEV EN The Many Gods and the One God of Hinduism “Yes,” said he, “but just how many gods are there, Yājñavalkya?” “Thirtythree .” . . . “Yes,” said he, “but just how many gods are there, Yājñavalkya?” “One!” —Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad III, IX, 1 About a score of different Sanskrit words are rendered by the one English word god.1 We have to look at some of them in order to find out how Hindus can at one and the same time have many gods and believe in One God. V EDIC DEVAS When English publications on Vedic religion speak about gods, they use this term as translation for the Vedic word deva or devatā.2 Thus they enumerate faithfully the eleven celestial gods, the eleven atmospheric gods, and the eleven terrestrial gods. F. Max Müller was struck by the evident fact that in a number of Vedic hymns, the deva to whom the song was addressed was praised as the only one, the supreme, the greatest, and that praise was not restricted to one and the same deva, but given to various devas in various hymns. This did not conform to the classical notion of polytheism, so Müller coined the new term henotheism (from the Greek term hen[os] = one) to distinguish this religion from monotheism, the revealed Biblical religion. The Hindu deva is not God—at the most deva could be loosely translated as a “divine being.” Etymologically it means “shiny,” “exalted”; and thus we find that the term deva covers everything that has to do with the supernatural: all figures, forms, processes and emotions, melodies, books and verse meters—whatever needs the explanation of a transcendent origin or status—are called devas or devatā 102 PART I: HINDUISM in one place or another.3 The functions of different parts of the body, symbols, and syllables are explained as deva. In Vedic religion we find the term used in a relatively restricted way; but even there we are not entitled to equate it with god, but rather with supernatural powers in a general sense. Anthropologists have become aware of the importance of the idea of “power” in tribal religions. R. N. Dandekar attempted to show that behind the Vedic deva worship lies such an idea of an all-pervading ultimate power, of which the devas partake without being quite identical with it. According to him most of the Vedic devas are created for the myths and not the myths for devas. Mythology is thus primary and devas are secondary. The Vedic ṛṣis had a message that they conveyed in images for which they created the concretized figures of devas. Thus we can see that Vedic mythology is evolutionary, implying a change of the character of a deva according to changed circumstances. Much more important than the variable figure of the deva was the basic underlying potency of which the individual devas were only expressions and manifestations ; the Vedic counterpart to the mana power is the asura power, which is shared by all beings, especially the devas. That is also the explanation of the highly variable and flexible anthropomorphism of the Vedic devas. There is, strictly speaking, no Vedic pantheon in the sense in which there is a Greek or a Roman one.4 The Vedic seer did not share the outlook of moderns. Though agni is the term for “fire” in the most general sense, to the Vedic religious mind the reality of agni is not simply the chemical process of carbonization of organic matter that modern scientists would associate with the term fire. In fire the ṛṣi sees a deva, a transcendent aspect that makes agni fit to be used as an expression that hints at a something beyond the material reality investigated by modern chemistry. Agni is a deva, not a “personification of a natural phenomenon ” as nineteenth-century Western scholarship would describe it, but the manifestation of a transcendent power. The physical reality of fire is so obvious and so necessary that the Hindu would not think of spiritualizing it away; but there is more to it than meets the senses—the ṛṣi is inspired to “see” and express the mystery behind all visible reality. Objective natural science never found devas nor will it find God in the physical universe; it requires the sensibilities of a kavi, the poet and the prophet to discover divine reality in it. Granting that the hymns of the Ṛgveda in...

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