Hinduism

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Hinduism is the family of religious traditions native to the Indian subcontinent — not a single church with one founder and one creed, but a vast and internally various web of scriptures, deities, philosophies, and practices that have grown and overlapped across more than three thousand years. The word itself is comparatively recent: it began as a foreign geographical term, from the Persian name for the people beyond the river Indus, and only in the modern period was it pressed into service as the name of a religion. Many of those it describes have preferred sanātana dharma, the eternal law or order, a phrase that frames the tradition as something discovered rather than invented. To think within it is to assume that the order it names was not legislated at a moment in time but was always so, glimpsed by seers and handed down — that the hymns and the disciplines describe the structure of reality rather than prescribe a belief about it.

The strata of a tradition without a founder

What scholarship can establish about its origins is layered. The oldest stratum is the Vedas, four collections of hymns and ritual formulae composed in archaic Sanskrit and transmitted orally with extraordinary fidelity over centuries before being written down. The four are the Rigveda, the oldest, a body of invocations to gods such as Agni the fire and Indra the storm-king; the Samaveda, which sets Rigvedic verses to chant; the Yajurveda, the prose formulae of the sacrifice; and the Atharvaveda, with its spells, blessings, and speculative hymns. Each Veda gathers around it further layers — the Brāhmaṇas that expound the meaning of the rites, the Āraṇyakas of the forest-dwellers, and finally the Upanishads. The world the early hymns address is the world of the historical Vedic religion: a cosmos sustained by correctly performed sacrifice, in which the offering fed the gods and the gods in turn upheld the order of things.

The decisive turn came with the Upanishads, the speculative texts that close the Vedic corpus and are known accordingly as Vedānta, “the end of the Veda.” They turn from the sacrifice outward to questions inward — the nature of the self, the ground of the world, what survives death. Where the older priestcraft had asked how the rite secures its effect, the Upanishadic teachers asked what underlies the rite, the priest, and the cosmos alike, and answered with a single word: brahman, the one reality from which all things proceed and into which they return. Their boldest move folds that ground of the world together with the ground of the person, declaring brahman identical with ātman, the innermost self — the claim compressed into the great Upanishadic formulas, tat tvam asi, “that thou art,” and ayam ātmā brahma, “this self is brahman.” The center of gravity shifts here from action to knowledge, from the altar to the realizing mind. The shift is not a repudiation: the sacrifice is reread, the ritual word recovered as the trace of the absolute, and the older religion carried forward inside the new.

Later came the great epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, and a body of narrative scripture, the Purāṇas, that carried the high doctrines of the Upanishads into story and devotion accessible to all. The Mahābhārata — the longest poem of the ancient world, the war of the Pāṇḍavas and Kauravas on the field of Kurukshetra — holds within it the Bhagavad-Gītā, the dialogue between the warrior Arjuna and his charioteer Krishna that has become the most widely read of all Hindu scriptures. The Rāmāyaṇa, attributed to the sage Vālmīki, tells of Rāma, the exiled prince and ideal king, and of his recovery of Sītā. No central authority ever closed this canon; the tradition kept absorbing rather than excluding. The scholarly distinction between śruti (“that which is heard,” the Vedas and Upanishads, held to be uncreated and eternal) and smṛti (“that which is remembered,” the epics, Purāṇas, and law-books, of human authorship) gives the tradition a way to keep a fixed revelation at its center while letting an open literature grow around it without limit.

Brahmā, Vishnu, Shiva: the architecture of divinity

What its various schools and worshippers have held differs sharply, and deliberately. Devotion may center on Vishnu, on Shiva, on the Goddess in her many forms, or on a household’s chosen deity, and the same worshipper may honor several without contradiction. The classical tradition gathers the divine functions into a trimūrti, a single godhead in three forms: Brahmā the creator who brings the worlds into being, Vishnu the preserver who sustains them and descends into them age after age to restore the right order, and Shiva the destroyer in whom the cosmos is dissolved so that it may be made again. The three are not three gods in competition but three faces of the one creative-sustaining-dissolving movement of reality — and tellingly, the creator among them, Brahmā, receives almost no cult; it is the preserver and the destroyer, the deities of the turning world, around whom living worship gathers.

That living worship organizes itself into the tradition’s great streams. Vaishnavism takes Vishnu and his descents — above all Krishna and Rāma — as supreme, and is the soil from which much of the devotional literature grew; Krishna devotion and the Tamil Vaishnava bhakti of the Āḻvār poets, gathered later into Śrīvaishnavism, belong to it. Shaivism makes Shiva the absolute, the lord of ascetics and of the inner discipline of yoga, and runs from the Tamil devotion of the Nāyaṉār saints through the rigorous theology of Tamil Śaiva Siddhānta to the non-dual Śaivism of Kashmir. Shaktism worships the Goddess — Devī, Durga, Kālī — as Śakti, the power that is the very energy of the divine, without which the god is inert; in its theology the masculine absolute and his power are finally one. These are not sects in the exclusive Western sense but emphases, currents that share scriptures and freely overlap, so that a single temple may house Vishnu, Shiva, and the Goddess and a single devotee move among them.

Karma, samsara, dharma, moksha

Across most of these currents run shared assumptions about the shape of existence, an inheritance the Indian traditions hold in common even where they agree on little else. The first is karma, the principle that action carries moral consequence: that the moral quality of a deed is conserved and ripens, in this life or a later one, into a fitting result for the one who acted. The second is saṃsāra, the round of birth, death, and rebirth through which the self is carried by the momentum of its karma, life after life, without natural end. The third is dharma — at once the cosmic order, the moral law, and the particular duty that falls to a person by virtue of station, stage of life, and circumstance; to act according to one’s svadharma, one’s own proper duty, is to keep the order of the world. And the fourth, set against the endlessness of saṃsāra, is mokṣa: release, liberation, the breaking of the cycle and the self’s arrival at its true condition. What that condition is, the schools dispute — absorption into brahman without remainder, eternal nearness to a personal God, the soul’s recovery of its own isolated purity — but that the deepest human aim lies in release rather than in any worldly good is common ground.

The classical syntheses arrange the aims of a human life accordingly into the puruṣārthas, the four ends: dharma (right conduct), artha (prosperity and power), kāma (pleasure and love), and mokṣa (liberation), the first three governing life in the world and the last transcending it. The same architecture shapes the ideal life-course of the āśramas — student, householder, forest-dweller, renunciant — so that a single life moves from learning through worldly duty toward eventual release. This is the framework within which the Gītā poses its central problem: how one may act in the world, even to the point of fighting a righteous war, without being bound by the fruits of action, and Krishna’s answer — that action offered without attachment to its results, niṣkāma karma, does not bind — reconciles the householder’s duty with the renunciant’s freedom.

The six darshanas

The philosophical schools range from rigorous dualisms to the non-dualism of Advaita Vedānta, whose teachers held that the innermost self, ātman, is finally identical with brahman, the single reality underlying all things — a claim of unity beneath multiplicity that has drawn the attention of comparativists for two centuries. The orthodox tradition counts six darśanas, “viewpoints” or systems, all of them āstika in that they accept the authority of the Veda, as against the nāstika schools — Buddhism, Jainism, and the materialists — that do not. They are conventionally taken in three pairs. Nyāya, the school of logic and epistemology, is paired with Vaiśeṣika, which analyzes the world into categories of being and an atomism of substances. Sāṃkhya, the oldest of the systematic philosophies, sets out a dualism of puruṣa, pure consciousness, and prakṛti, primordial matter whose three strands or guṇas weave the manifest world; it is paired with Yoga, which takes over that metaphysics and adds the practical discipline by which consciousness is disentangled from matter. And Mīmāṃsā, the science of the ritual portion of the Veda and of the interpretation of sacred text, is paired with Vedānta, the science of its knowledge-portion, the Upanishads.

It is Vedānta that became, in the long run, the philosophical heart of the tradition, and its internal disputes mark the deepest fault line in Hindu thought. The eighth-century teacher Śaṅkara read the identity of self and brahman without remainder: only brahman has true being, the manifold world an appearance laid over it by ignorance, māyā, and liberation the waking recognition that the self was never separate from the absolute at all — the position called Advaita, “non-dualism.” Rāmānuja, centuries later, refused the collapse: for him brahman is a personal God of whom souls and world are the real body, distinct yet wholly dependent, so that loving devotion, not bare knowledge, completes the path — Viśiṣṭādvaita, “qualified non-dualism.” Madhva pressed further still to an outright dualism, Dvaita, holding God, souls, and world eternally distinct. All three claimed the same scriptures; the span of Vedāntic positions is not a quarrel over data but over what oneness can mean. The disciplines through which any of these ends is sought are gathered under the broad heading of yoga — not only the postural practice the modern world knows but the whole family of paths: the yoga of knowledge (jñāna), of action (karma), of devotion (bhakti), and the meditative ascent codified in Patañjali’s Yoga-Sūtras.

Devotion, ritual, and the body

If the Upanishads turned the tradition inward toward knowledge, the bhakti movement, swelling from the Tamil south in the seventh and eighth centuries and spreading across the subcontinent over the following thousand years, turned it toward love. Bhakti is devotion to a personal God as the sufficient path to release — not the priest’s sacrifice nor the philosopher’s discrimination but the heart’s surrender, sung in the vernacular languages rather than guarded in Sanskrit, and open to those whom the older order excluded. Its poets — the Āḻvārs and Nāyaṉārs of the Tamil country, and later the nirguṇa singers of the north who worshipped a God without form — recast the whole tradition around the relationship of the soul to its Lord, and in doing so reached across the boundary between Hindu and Muslim devotion that the period’s politics had drawn.

Alongside the way of devotion runs the way of ritual power, the Tantra — a body of post-Vedic scripture, the Āgamas and Tantras, that treats the cosmos as the play of Śiva and Śakti and the human body as a microcosm threaded with centers and channels of subtle energy. Its Śākta form, centered on the Goddess, supplied much of the Anglophone world’s first encounter with Hindu esotericism through the early-twentieth-century translations issued under the name “Arthur Avalon” — the collaborative project of the Calcutta High Court judge Sir John Woodroffe (1865–1936) and the Bengali Śākta scholar Atal Bihari Ghose (1864–1936), whose The Serpent Power (1918) and Mahānirvāṇa Tantra (1913) made the subtle-body imagery of the cakras and the coiled kuṇḍalinī current in the West. Tantra and bhakti and the orthodox philosophies were never sealed off from one another; the same temple liturgy might draw on Āgamic ritual, the same devotee read the Gītā and chant a Tantric hymn, and the whole was held together less by doctrine than by a shared idiom of deities, texts, and disciplines.

The encounter with the West

The encounter with the West reshaped how the tradition presented itself. Nineteenth-century European scholars edited and translated the Sanskrit texts — F. Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East, begun in 1879, set Vedic and Vedāntic literature before a Western readership for the first time in disciplined form — and the texts thus made available fed back into Indian self-presentation as much as into European Orientalism. The Theosophical movement and later popularizers carried a particular reading of Vedānta abroad, and reform-minded Indian teachers answered with their own accounts. The pivotal moment was the World’s Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893, where Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), disciple of the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna, presented a universalist Advaita to a Western audience and made himself, almost overnight, the dominant Western image of Hinduism. The scholar Wilhelm Halbfass named the modernizing reformulation Vivekananda exemplified “Neo-Hinduism”: the reinterpretation of traditional ideas in the light of imported categories, so that the Vedānta that reached the West was already, at the point of departure, substantially recast for a global audience. Much of what circulated in Western esoteric circles as “the wisdom of the East” was this filtered Vedānta, sincere but selective.

The resemblances later drawn — between mokṣa and other traditions’ language of liberation, between brahman and the One of the Neoplatonists, between ātman and the divine spark of the gnostic traditions — are real and worth tracing. The Renaissance dream of a prisca theologia, an ancient and universal wisdom underlying all the traditions, found in Vedānta its most powerful modern confirmation, and the perennialist philosophers built much of their case on it. The convergence stops short of sameness, though: a word like mokṣa carries the weight of the whole system that uses it, and Śaṅkara’s non-dualism, in which the world is an appearance laid over the one reality, does the work of a different metaphysics than the emanationism of Plotinus, in which the many genuinely flow from the One. Hinduism never required its adherents to share a single creed; the philosophies that disagree most sharply are all counted within it, and it is precisely this capacity to hold contradiction within a single house that the comparative tradition has found both fascinating and difficult to classify.

The textual record and its scholarship

The modern study of Hinduism rests on a body of critical editions and translations, most of it now in the public domain, that first made the Sanskrit corpus available to readers outside the Sanskrit-knowing world. The foundational collection is the Sacred Books of the East, edited by F. Max Müller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879–1910), whose Hindu volumes include Müller’s own translation of the principal Upanishads — hosted here as the Müller Upanishads (Sacred Books of the East I and XV, 1879–1884). The standard nineteenth-century scholarly Gītā is Kāshināth Trimbak Telang’s The Bhagavadgîtâ, with the Sanatsugâtîya and the Anugîtâ (Sacred Books of the East VIII, Oxford, 1882), the first rendering of the text in a major European scholarly series by an Indian scholar, available as the Telang Gītā. For the philosophy of non-dual Vedānta the central document is George Thibaut’s translation of the Vedānta-Sūtras with the Commentary of Śaṅkara (Sacred Books of the East 34 and 38, Oxford, 1890–1896), held here as Thibaut’s Vedānta-Sūtras.

For the wider readership it was Sir Edwin Arnold’s verse paraphrase, The Song Celestial; or, Bhagavad-Gîtâ (London: Trübner, 1885), that carried the Gītā into Victorian devotional reading and shaped its reception by Gandhi and the Theosophists; it is hosted here as Arnold’s Song Celestial. The Sanskrit epics reached English chiefly through Ralph T. H. Griffith’s verse Rámáyan of Válmíki (London and Benares, 1870–1874) and Kisari Mohan Ganguli’s complete prose Mahabharata (Calcutta, 1883–1896), the only complete English Mahābhārata in the public domain. The Vedic hymns themselves are accessible in Griffith’s translations of all four Saṃhitās (Benares, 1889–1899) and, with fuller scholarly apparatus, in Hermann Oldenberg and Müller’s Vedic Hymns (Sacred Books of the East 32 and 46, 1891–1897). The Tantric corpus entered English through John Woodroffe’s “Arthur Avalon” volumes, of which the Mahānirvāṇa Tantra (London: Luzac, 1913) is hosted here — read today, after the work of Kathleen Taylor (Sir John Woodroffe, Tantra and Bengal, Routledge/Curzon, 2001), as a collaborative colonial-era presentation rather than a transparent window onto an unbroken tradition.

The scholarly framing of the whole is set by a handful of standard works. Gavin Flood’s An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge University Press, 1996) is the field’s standard survey; Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin, 2009) reads the tradition through its margins and its narratives; Wilhelm Halbfass’s India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (SUNY Press, 1988) is the indispensable account of the two-way encounter between Indian thought and the West and the origin of the category “Neo-Hinduism”; and Patrick Olivelle’s critical edition and translation of The Early Upaniṣads (Oxford University Press, 1998) is the modern scholarly standard for the texts on which the whole edifice of Vedānta rests.

→ In the library: The Upanishads (Müller, 1879–1884) · The Bhagavad-Gītā (Telang, 1882) · The Vedānta-Sūtras with Śankara's Commentary (Thibaut, 1896) · The Bhagavad-Gītā: The Song Celestial (Arnold, 1885) · The Mahānirvāna Tantra (Woodroffe, 1913)

→ Related: Buddhism · Pantheism · Gnosis · Theosophy · Vishnu · Shiva · Brahman · Karma · Yoga · Bhakti Movement · Vedanta Advaita Visistadvaita Dvaita · Mahabharata · Jainism