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Part III The Structural Supports of Hinduism Hinduism is a way of life and not only a religion or a system of philosophy in the more narrow sense of these words, and Hinduism is what it is because of the physical reality of India: the land and its people. Hinduism is intimately connected with the specific features of the landscape of India in which the Divine has revealed itself to its people. The mountains, the rivers, and the oceans of India are an essential ingredient of the Hindu tradition. The Divine is present in India also in the shape of images made of stone and wood, of metal and of paper. Hinduism has created holy cities and was in turn profoundly shaped by them. Millions undertake pilgrimages each year to famous temples in the North and South, East and West. Hindus, finally, have an acute awareness of the qualitative differences embedded in time: of holy and ordinary days, of auspicious and inauspicious occasions. A great many professionals are constantly employed to interpret the signs of time since all rites have to be performed at specific auspicious times. Sacred spaces, places, and times are connected with the physical reality of India and provide a sacred structure in its nature. The age-old caturvarṇāśramadharma provides a sacred structure to society and to history. By divine fiat society was divided into functional strata and the life of the individual was structured in such a manner to give room to the realization of all essential human values. It was the caste structure that provided Hinduism with a social and political basis strong enough to not only accommodate change and development but also to withstand attacks from outside. The assignment of a specific function in society provided individuals with a purpose in their lives, ensured on the whole a noncompetitive kind of society, and also created a social security net for all its members. Its major failing did 262 PART III: THE STRUCT UR A L SUPPORTS OF HINDUISM not concern those who belonged to it but those who did not: the outcastes. Either by expelling from its fold such members who did not conform to the caste regulations or by not accepting outsiders into it, Hinduism created a parallel society of people without social standing and without rights, considered good only for doing the most degrading work and treated worse than cattle. Hinduism has always reserved the highest respect for those who made religion their profession. It expected the members of the upper castes to abandon toward the end of their lives all attachment to the world and to concentrate all efforts on mokṣa, spiritual liberation. Samnyāsis have been the spiritual backbone of Hinduism for many centuries, and they are so today as well. There are millions of them, belonging to hundreds of orders and associations. They include all types of men and women—attractive and repulsive, old and young, learned and illiterate, pious and fanatical, serene and excitable. In more than one way they provide the ultimate support to Hinduism. They are the living examples to the rest of the Hindus of a life dedicated to the activities and ideals that they only casually partake in or aspire to. As an ideal, samnyāsa has enormous attraction also for many a modern-educated Hindu, not to mention Westerners who have joined modern Hindu movements in fair numbers. One can safely predict that Hinduism will flourish as long as samnyāsa is followed by a significant number of Hindus. There can be no doubt that this is the case today. In Hinduism, as in most religions, women play a very important role as transmitters and preservers of sacred stories and domestic rituals. While women had been legally deprived in the public arena since medieval times, they continued to command a major role in worship and character formation. As important as the physical environment of India and the social structures are, it is the thought systems that hold the symbolic world of Hinduism together. Philosophical speculation and critical enquiry were characteristic for Hinduism throughout its long history. The Hindu mind excelled in both analytic and systematic thinking. The controversies that periodically erupted, leading to the formation of new schools of thought, sharpened concepts and logic to a degree probably not reached anywhere else. The assumption of the greatest exponents of Hinduism, that eternal happiness and release from rebirth depended on a specific kind of knowledge and that wrong notions about the nature...

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