Hinduism The Rev. Roger Fritts February 10, 2013 My younger sister died in 2004. A rare cancer called liposarcoma caused her death. Today pharmaceutical companies are testing new drugs on liposarcoma patients. However, nine years ago, there was no effective treatment, and my sister died at the age of forty-two. I think of my sister when I think of Hinduism because she was a Transcendental Meditator. When she was a teenager, she started meditating for twenty minutes twice each day. She liked the feeling that meditation gave her and she made it her full-time vocation. In the early 1980s, she graduated from Maharishi International University, in Fairfield, Iowa. After living in Europe and India, my sister returned to the United States and lived with a group of meditators in North Carolina. She was a vegetarian and meditated so much that nothing appeared to trouble her. When we got together, she seemed calm, happy, and at peace. As her older brother, I felt it was my responsibility to challenge her life style. I teased her about the Maharishi s claims about levitation. She smiled politely. I suggested that she get a husband, a few children, and a mortgage so that she could feel the anxiety that the rest of us feel. She smiled and said, Each of us has our own path to follow in life. However, I did get a reaction from her when I said that Transcendental Meditation is a branch of the Hindu religion. In response, she insisted that Transcendental Meditation is a technique, not a religion. In fact, she has a point. Hinduism is the name westerners outside India have applied to describe many diverse activities that occur in India. The word Hindu comes originally from the Sanskrit name for the river Indus, Sindhu. The Persians changed the S sound to an H sound and pronounced it Hindu. Over time, the Persians started calling all the land near and beyond the river Hindu. The English started using the word about 1829 as a name for the diverse beliefs and practices of people living in India. This collection of different opinions and customs display few of the characteristics that we generally expect of a religion. For example: Hinduism has no founder. Judaism has Abraham, Buddhism has the Buddha, Christianity has Jesus, and Islam has Mohammad. However, Hinduism has no single founder. Hinduism has no creed, no doctrine, and no dogma, to which all Hindus are required to agree. Hinduism has no worldwide or nationwide organization, no bishop, or pope. Instead, Hinduism is a collection of different beliefs and practices of people who live in India. Outsiders combined these different beliefs and practices together under one name and called it Hinduism. Page 1
Some question this classification. For example, my sister insisted that Transcendental Meditation is not a branch of the Hindu religion. It is, she said, a technique for reducing stress and anxiety invented by people who lived in India. I countered that the root of the word religion comes from a Latin root that means to connect or to tie, or to bind together. I like to define religion as the act of connecting all the different experiences that we have in life into a meaningful whole. In this sense, Hinduism is a religion. Hinduism is the name we give to the efforts of hundreds of millions of people living in India to bind together the many different experiences of their lives into a meaningful whole. Is there anything that all Hindus have in common, other than the fact that they come from India? Does the diversity of Hindus doom any attempt to describe the basic teachings or the fundamental beliefs? My expert on this, our own Mira Frederick, whose father was a professor of eastern philosophy and religion, tells me that her father compared Hinduism to a museum of many texts. However, Mira tells me, the culture of Hinduism evolved from three primary sources, the Upanishads, the Ra-ma-yan-a, and the Ma-ha-baa-ra-ta, In particular the stories of the Ma-habaa-ra-ta are told to all children as examples to live by and so become part of the religion and culture. From these writings, come underlying presuppositions that make up an essential core of Hinduism. God Most Hindus have an idea of an impersonal, absolute, universal God that underlies the universe and exists simultaneously both within our reality and beyond the limits of our ordinary experience and knowledge. The Hindu position on God is a mixture of pantheism and monotheism. Pantheism is the belief that God is in everything. Hindus believe that God is all the forces and laws of the universe. Hindus accept that each individual may worship their preferred deity exclusively as God. Hindus do not deny or oppose other deities and beliefs. They accept these as valid for others, although not regarded as of the same order of excellence as one s own deity. For example, a believer of Vishnu will see all other Gods as servants of the one supreme Vishnu. A believer in Shiva will see all other Gods as manifestations of the one supreme Shiva. A believer in the Brahma will see all other Gods as servants and manifestations of the one supreme Brahma. A list of the various deities worshiped in India suggests polytheism. However, Hinduism is not polytheist. For each individual there is only one supreme God and various other spiritual powers. These other spiritual powers merit respect and worship, but they are subordinate manifestations of one God. Hindus are monotheistic because they believe one God underlies the diversity of the universe. They are pantheists because they believe God is all the forces and laws of the universe. Page 2
Ethics Most Hindus agree the goal of life is to work to be one with God. We reach oneness by living in harmony with dharma. Dharma is the unchanging universal law of order. The eternal dharma decrees that every entity in the universe should behave according to the laws that apply to its own particular nature. Hindus believe that patterns exist in the universe. They believe a cosmic order of exists. For humans, dharma is the source of moral law and describes the right way of living for Hindus. A general code of ethics applies to everyone. It includes injunctions to go on pilgrimages and make charitable endowments. This general code of ethics also includes prohibitions against causing injury and lying. Each person gets religious merit by following these laws of order. Besides this general code of ethics, traditionally each of the four classes of society has specific duties. The four classes of society are the teachers, the rulers, the merchants, and the servants. Traditionally most Hindus believed that people s duties vary according to who they are and where they are in life. Each person was born into the same caste as his or her parents. Their families taught them to marry within that caste and to work in a job related to that caste. Historically, caste-linked dharma determined what work a person could do and whether widows may remarry. What one caste found acceptable another did not, so that dharma produced a morality based on conformity to custom backed by social sanctions. If members broke their caste s purity rules, the pollution they incurred could affect the whole caste group, so the social sanctions against the offender could be severe. For example, if a member of the rulers caste polluted himself by lying, this violation of dharma polluted the whole caste of rulers. The other caste members would require the offender to do ritual acts of purification before he was entitled to resume full caste rights. Many ways existed for coping with the different types of pollution, but a particularly common one was the use of running water. A pious Hindu s bathing was not simply a wash, but a ritual purification to bring him to the state of purity considered necessary in Hinduism. Traditionally the family had the primary responsibility for transmitting dharma from one generation to another. They taught by example and by telling stories and myths. The nature of the Hindu family helped the handing down of dharma from one generation to the next. However, in 2013, all this is rapidly changing. India's fast economic growth is causing this historic caste system to quickly break down and inter-caste marriage is on the rise. Death Hindus tie dharma to the Hindu view of death. Most Hindus believe in reincarnation. They believe that each of us has a soul and that our souls are involved in a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Hindus tie reincarnation closely to the doctrine of karma. Karma is the belief that the Page 3
actions during our previous life determine the conditions of each person s birth. Every action produces its inevitable result. Therefore, our conduct in our former life determines our status in this life. Actions that deviate from dharma increase an individual s store of papa or sins. For example, a person in the ruler caste who is guilty of lying will build up a store of sins. As my sister took more morphine for the pain from her cancer, she wondered what bad thing she might have done in a past life for which she was now paying. She said to me I must have done something really bad in a past life, like kill babies, and now I am suffering for it. As a Unitarian Universalist, I told her I did not think God was punishing her. I argued that some bad things that happen to us are just random events. They are not punishment or testing by God. As she grew sicker, my sister talked about being ready to die, but she said that she did not want to end her life with assisted suicide. She believed she needed to learn what she could from the experience of dying and not try to escape from it. She believed that, if she learned from her dying, she would increase her store of merit (punya). There are many ways we can increase our store of merit. For example, some Hindu priests say that giving gifts to priests is an especially meritorious act. Certain rituals, such as bathing in the Ganges River and making amends for sins increase the store of merit of an individual. The balance between sin and merit will eventually determine, through the law of karma, how a person is born in a future life. They may be reborn as an insect, an animal or as a human. If they are reborn as a human, the law of karma will determine the caste into which they are reborn. Another idea central to Hinduism s view of death is liberation. People work to achieve liberation from the cycle of birth and rebirth. This cycle continues endlessly unless the soul merits, or is blessed with, a lifetime during which it attains liberation. Then the soul passes out of the cycle. One method of achieving liberation is renunciation, where a person abandons home, society and worldly pleasures. Through this renunciation, usually by doing extreme austerities and practicing some form of yoga, a person becomes liberated. What is it like to achieve liberation? One school of thought says that the liberated soul of a human is identical with God. In this view, God absorbs the liberated soul as the ocean absorbs a drop of water. At the other end of the spectrum are those who hold that the immortal soul of a human being maintains its individual identity. In this view, the liberated soul lives in an eternal relationship with God. The same way humanity is subject to cycles of birth and rebirth, Hindus believe the universe itself goes through cycles of dissolution and recreation endlessly repeating. It is not unlike the scientific explanation for the origin of the universe. Hindus would have no trouble with the idea that sometime in the distant future the universe will fall back into itself and creation will begin again in another big bang. This is Hinduism: Page 4
First: Most Hindus have an idea of an impersonal, absolute God that underlies the diversity of the cosmos. Often called The Brahman, this comprehensive, boundless God exists both within our reality and beyond the limits of ordinary experience and knowledge. Second: Most Hindus agree that an order, a pattern, called dharma, exists in the universe and every entity in the universe has a responsibility to behave following the laws that apply to its own particular nature. At the human level, dharma is the source of moral law and describes the right way of living for Hindus. Besides this general code of ethics, historically, each class of society has specific duties or right ways of living that each generation teaches its children to follow. Third: Most Hindus believe in the doctrine of reincarnation. Each of us has a soul and our souls are involved in a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. The actions during the previous life determine the conditions of each birth. This cycle continues endlessly unless our soul attains liberation. Liberation is a state of oneness with God. When my sister was dying, most of the time she was not afraid. She believed that her soul would be reincarnated and that her task in dying was to learn the lessons she could learn from the experience of having cancer. She was far more certain about life and death than I am. Still, both her Hinduism and my Unitarianism encourage tolerance and respect. Therefore, our discussions about religion were always friendly. Until she died, my sister tried her best to live the words of a Hindu poet: Look to this Day! For it is Life, the very life of life. In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence: The bliss of growth, The glory of action, The splendor of beauty; For yesterday is but a dream, And tomorrow is only a vision; But today, well lived, makes every yesterday A dream of happiness And every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore, to this day. Page 5