A Survey of Hinduism: Third Edition

Introduction

1 Introduction More than eight hundred million of India’s over one billion people call themselves Hindus.1 In addition, some fifty million Hindus are living outside India: eighteen million in Nepal, the only country that has declared Hinduism its state religion, fifteen million in Bangladesh, three million in Sri Lanka, two million in Pakistan, the rest all over the world. North America is by now home to about 2.5 million Hindus, and most major cities have Hindu temples, often replicas of classical Indian temples executed by traditional Indian craftsmen.2 Hindu gurus have become very visible in the West during the past few decades as promoters of a faith that many young Westerners adopted as their own. The establishment of fairly large, permanent Hindu communities around temples in North America is already leading to what has been called the Hinduization of America,3 the incorporation of the landscape, mountains, and rivers of North America into Hindu sacred spaces and localities. Hinduism is not only one of the numerically largest but also the oldest living major tradition on Earth, with roots reaching back into prehistoric times. It has preserved beliefs and practices from times immemorial, and it has developed new expressions under the influence of many other traditions. For many centuries India had been a distant and mysterious land to Westerners . Since the Age of Discovery—and it is an interesting coincidence that the discovery of America took place as the result of Europe’s search for India— India has become increasingly familiar to the West. The West realized that India had more to offer than spices and markets, and in turn India gave up its initial reserve, opening up its treasures of literature and culture to Western scholars. India’s ancient heritage is readily accessible today. Hinduism, while offering many striking parallels to other great religions, nevertheless cannot be easily compared to any of them. That has as much to do with its history as with its present adherents, with the way religion has been conceived in India, and the way it is understood today in the West. Hinduism , while certainly circumscribing Indian religiosity, has many other specific historic-cultural and socio political dimensions. It both represented and 2 Photo 1. Temple scene in Mathurā (Uttar Pradesh) INTRODUCTION 3 always found itself in a situation of cultural and religious pluralism. Hinduism has aroused the curiosity not only of scholars of religion but equally that of sociologists and anthropologists, political scientists and archaeologists, philosophers and historians, not to forget the philologists who were the first to get seriously interested in Hindu literature. We must remind ourselves, however, that Hinduism was not primarily created by its sages and saints to provide material for doctoral dissertations for European and American scholars or to enable anthropologists and sociologists to do their obligatory field work but for the physical and spiritual sustenance of its population: it interprets the world to Hindus, makes life meaningful to them, provides them with a theoretical and practical framework for their individual and corporate existence, educates them intellectually and morally, and finally, fulfills their aspirations for transcendent freedom and salvation. In contrast to Ancient Greece and Rome, whose classical literatures and traditions have been the major inspiration of Western humanities, but whose modern successor nations have little in common with them, India is a modern country in which much of its ancient tradition is still alive. It is alive not only in the age-old rituals that continue to be performed, in its ancient temples and places of pilgrimage that attract millions of worshipers, or in the popular stories from epics and Purāṇas that are still enjoyed by contemporary audiences in theaters and films, but also in the structure of its society and many of its laws, in its institutions as well as in its popular customs. It would be wrong, however, to portray Hinduism as a relic of a fossilized past, a tradition unable to change, a museum exhibit that must not be touched. On the contrary, Hinduism in its long history has undergone many changes, rapidly adapting to modern times, constantly bringing forth new movements, and taking new directions. Hinduism has always been more than a religion in the modern Western sense, and it aims at being a comprehensive way of life as well today, a tradition by which people can live. Much scholarly writing on Hinduism focuses on the past of India...