Hinduism, as we talk about the main religion of India, is often compared to a mighty river into which are flowing many tributaries.  It is also compared to a tree with many branches.  With a history of more than three thousand years in a country of some five hundred languages, Hinduism is not going to be some one easily defined system of beliefs and practices.  Instead it is a myriad of cults, and what is called Hindu philosophy itself is traditionally seen as comprised of six major schools that differ markedly in their approach.

What we need to start with is the recognition that India has been invaded repeatedly.  The most important invasion for our story is that of those who called themselves the Aryas, the lords.  This was  a nomadic tribe whose origins are somewhere up in the steppes of Russia, and those who came to India were cultural cousins of the Greeks and the Romans and the Celts and the Teutons--all the groups that invaded Europe back in the second millennium.  Sanskrit, the early language of the invader still preserved as a sacred language for rituals (just as Latin once was for the descendants of the Romans in the Catholic Church) is one of a number of Indo-European languages with a writing system developed early in the first millennium.

Click on here for more about the history and culture of India.  This is a page you may want to bookmark for future reference.

In the conquest of India what may have been a cultural pattern of social separation in the Harappa culture of the third millennium was taken over and made ever more rigid.  The invaders and those who held parallel positions in the areas that accepted them were seen as fitting into the three main castes of priests (brahmanas), warriors (kshyatriyas), and merchants (vaisyas).  Males in these castes were the twice-born, with reference to a ceremony by which boys in their teens were ritually accepted as adults.  Most individuals would be in the caste of laborers (shudras), and many would be below that even as "untouchables," assigned the tasks that would involve a sense of contamination.

The castes (varnas) are the general labels, but the real identification is in terms of occupational specialties (jatis). Mohandas Gandhi, for example, was born as a bania (grocer) in the vaisya caste, even though in India his father was in government and Gandhi himself became a lawyer.  Marriage--arranged by the parents, which has led to severe problems in the treatment of women--ideally is between children in the same jati, and although a woman might marry a man of a higher caste a man cannot marry upwards.  Those who violated these and other important restrictions traditionally slipped into the status of being "untouchables."

Be sure to read more about Gandhi, who learned the value of nonviolence (ahimsa) as a child in the Jain community and later as a spiritual leader demanded that the former untouchables (dalits) be referred to as harijan--the children of God.

The caste system is tied in with the concept of reincarnation: individuals have numerous lifetimes, and social mobility is achieved not in the present life but in a future one, when, for example, the merchant who has performed his caste-assigned duties (his dharma) might be reborn as a warrior, just as the negligent warrior might be reborn as a merchant.  The ultimate goal is seen as an upward movement through the priestly caste to a stage of freedom (moksha) beyond the need to be reborn.  For the twice-born Hindu male, there would be an ideal (seldom realized in practice) of different life stages beginning and ending with more intense religious practices, and for the adult in the stage of the householder there would be the key values of duty (dharma), success (artha), pleasure (kama), and spiritual freedom (moksha).

Hindu religious practices initially were codified in four sets of documents (vedas)--a set of sacred chants (rig veda) along with a set of rituals and a set of directions for chanting, and a set of what we might think of as magical spells (atharva veda).  The deities we meet in the Rig Veda are those of the invading aryas--above all, gods of the sky and weather.  There is also a hymn to a consciousness-altering beverage called soma, identified by some scholars today as a drink made with the hallucinogenic mushroom amanita muscaria.

What happens quickly enough after the invasion is that the sky-oriented cults of the invaders begin to merge with the earth-oriented cults of the peoples already there.  In time, the cults of Krishna and Shiva assume new prominence, and a more complex mythology emerges that preserves polytheism while still moving toward a more mystical outlook.  New religious teachers (gurus) who would be seen as having achieved some personal stage of enlightenment added to the body of sacred literature with the Upanishads (from the Sanskrit for sitting at someone's feet).  A key notion is the idea that all of us are ultimately expressions of an absolute reality (Brahman), as in the phrase tat tvam asi ("you are that which is"): the underlying spiritual self or soul of each of us (atman) is the same as Brahman, and the goal is to get past that which creates the awareness of difference.

Still later the key philosophical movements of Samkhya, Yoga and Vedanta are developed.  Samkhya and Yoga are dualist in the sense they assume there is the ever-existing world of nature (prakriti) and the ever-existing world of spirit (purusha), and the path to moksha is achieved by systematically reversing the way in which our individual purusha (think of it like the platinum in an automobile's catalytic converter, something that allows a reaction without itself being changed) has permitted the organization of our nature.  Vedanta is typically monist, meaning that there is but one ultimate reality (Brahman) and the plural objects of our conscious experience are ultimately illusory (maya).

The teachings of the gurus were necessarily elitist, since they were presented as secret or esoteric teachings for the twice-born.  Religion at the popular level remained polytheistic, but the notion that only a select few could escape the wheel of rebirth was not always acceptable to individuals looking for spiritual growth.  Reform movements that broke with the Vedas, such as the Jains and the Buddhists, offered two ways of life: a fairly ordinary but morally restrained life for most people that still did away with caste restrictions and another, far more ascetic way of life for those who would become monks.  Both reforms focused on how some human beings either became divine (as with the 24 deities of the Jains) or were incarnations of a divine reality (as in Buddhism, which is the subject of the following lecture).

The Hindu response, sometime around the beginning of the first millennium CE, was the elevation of the Krishna cult to a new status through the mystical narrative known as the Blessed Lord's song (Bhagavad Gita).  Krishna, a warrior fighting alongside his lifelong friend Arjuna, deals with Arjuna's question of conscience about how he could go into battle against his own relatives. Krishna's answer is to follow the path of action (karma yoga), an ethics of unselfish observance of the duties of one's caste.  A still higher path, however, is to do everything out of a personal devotion (bhakti) to himself, since in reality he is the incarnation of the god Vishnu, who sustains the universe.

A point to keep in mind as we move on would be the striking parallels in the development of Hindu and Christian theology, so that Jesus might be seen as a Christian Krishna or Krishna as a Hindu Jesus.  In both there is the notion of an incarnation, some type of salvation (forgiveness of sins in Christianity, a release from the effects of karma in Hinduism), and unity with God through often highly emotional practices of devotion.

Hinduism was exported to the United States at the turn of the century by Western-educated Indians who downplayed the complexity of Hindu philosophy and religion on their own country.  In particular, the Vedanta Society, which appealed to English expatriates such as Aldous Huxley in the Hollywood area, offered an attractive alternative to the traditional Christian emphasis on sin and salvation. One tradition of Yoga also took hold in the work of the Self-Realization Fellowship, and in the counterculture era of the 1960s the Krishna Society made itself visible throughout the country.

There is certainly much more you may want to read on the Internet about the various teachers and movements that have come to the United States.  Also, with the increasing population of Indian immigrants, there are many more Hindu temples being built, and those in the Los Angeles area might want to visit a very interesting temple in the Malibu hills.

A more tragic note in the current religious scene in India is the increasing rise of a Hindu fundamentalism that has led to violence directed against other religions (Muslims, Sikhs, Christians).

REVIEW QUESTIONS FOR SECTION A:

1) Is Hinduism a single religion?
(2) Where did the Sanskrit-speaking invaders come from?
(3) What are the four castes?
(4) What does it mean to be one of the "twice-born"?
(5) What is the connection between the caste system and reincarnation?
(6) What are the four key values for someone at the householder stage of life?
(7) What are the Vedas?
(8) What are the Upanishads?
(9) What is the importance of the phrase "tat tvam asi"?
(10) What is the difference between purusha and prakriti?
(11) What is meant by saying that Vedanta presents a monist approach?
(12) Why did reform movements such as the Jains and the Buddhists appear?
(13) What is the significance of the Bhagavad Gita as a response to the reform movements?
(14) What is Arjuna's question of conscience and how does Krishna advise him?
(15) How did the first presenters of Hinduism in the United States adapt it for a Western audience?

One thing to keep in mind is that "Hinduism" is largely a construct of Western commentators.  To think of all the traditions lumped together as "Hindu" would be like attempting to use the common label of "Indian" for all the indigenous ethnic traditions of North America, from Aztecs to Yakuts.  What we do find is that the Vedas and the caste system are defining characteristics, and we also meet the idea that Hinduism is "less a series of explicitly religious ideas and practices than complying with the behavioral implications of the social situations in which the individual participates."  To be "Hindu," then, is not so much having a set of beliefs as living in a certain way.

Traditionally this way of life has involved a respect for the caste system.   Almost predictably, reform movements attacking caste would appeal to those who are the underprivileged in the system.  This was true of Buddhism in the past and it is part of the present appeal of Christianity, which is growing in influence.

When Hindu teachers first came to the United States they downplayed the idea of caste in order to focus on a set of spiritual techniques.  The Vedanta Society, the Self-Realization Fellowship, and Transcendental Meditation are among the best-known examples.  To some extent, then, this has prevented Americans from fully appreciating the diversity of Indian traditions.  However, with Indian immigration it is now possible to get more of the flavor of these traditions by visiting Hindu places of worship, and it is something I strongly encourage you to do.