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.

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 Upanishads, the speculative texts that close the Vedic corpus, turn from sacrifice toward inward questions — the nature of the self, the ground of the world, what survives death. Later came the great epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, and within the former the Bhagavad-Gītā, the most widely read of all Hindu scriptures. No central authority ever closed this canon; the tradition kept absorbing rather than excluding.

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 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. Across most of these currents run shared assumptions: that action carries moral consequence through karma, that the self is reborn across many lives, and that the deepest aim is mokṣa, release from that cycle.

The encounter with the West reshaped how the tradition presented itself. Nineteenth-century European scholars edited and translated the Sanskrit texts; the Theosophical movement and later popularizers carried a particular reading of Vedānta abroad, and reform-minded Indian teachers answered with their own accounts. 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 — are real and worth tracing. They are not identities; each tradition means something exact in its own vocabulary. Hinduism never required its adherents to share a single creed; the philosophies that disagree most sharply are all counted within it.

→ In the library: The Upanishads (Müller, 1884) · The Bhagavad-Gītā (Telang, 1882) · The Vedānta-Sūtras with Śankara's Commentary (Thibaut, 1896)

→ Related: Buddhism · Pantheism · Gnosis · Theosophy