God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (20 page)

Devotion to Ganesha is not confined to India, or even Hindus, however. It extends to Buddhists and Jains and far beyond the borders of the Indian subcontinent. One of the first traditional Hindu temples built in the United States—the Sri Maha Vallabha Ganapati Devasthanam in Flushing, New York—is dedicated to Ganesha (who is also known as Ganapati). A large framed rendering in cloth of this jolly god of prosperity, girdled by a snake and riding his customary mouse, adorns the entrance to Boston University’s Department of Religion where I work, and a pen-and-ink Ganesha, his belly as plump as a Chinatown Buddha, greets visitors to my Cape Cod cottage.

Hinduism is an over-the-top religion of big ideas, bright colors, soulful mantras, spicy foods, complex rituals, and wild stories. One of the wildest of these stories concerns how Ganesha got his head. Like most everything in India, this story comes in different shapes and sizes, but one popular version goes like this: Once upon a time the goddess Parvati was lonely because her husband, Lord Shiva, was off with his buddies on yet another interminable hunting trip. So she created a son from the dirt and dead skin on her own body. One day she asked her son to stand guard over her privacy while she took a bath. When Shiva returned, he found a strange boy barring him from his own home. When Ganesha would not let him pass, Shiva in his rage (Hindu gods are not constrained by the virtues) cut off his head. When Parvati saw her son lying lifeless in a pool of blood, she was so possessed by rage of her own that she threatened to destroy the universe. So Shiva, the destroyer god who is better at taking lives than creating or sustaining them, turned for help to Brahma (the creator) and Vishnu (the sustainer). Brahma told Parvati that her boy could be revived if the head of another creature could be procured. So Vishnu found an elephant and cut off its head, which Shiva, in the world’s first example of xenotransplantation, attached to the boy’s body. Shiva then declared his resuscitated son the leader of his celestial armies, and, honoring Parvati’s demand, declared that from that moment forward worshippers should call on his son’s name before beginning any new undertaking, including worship itself. In this way, Parvati’s dutiful son came to be the guardian of thresholds. He also came to be called Ganesha, which combines the Sanskrit words
gana
(meaning gang) and
isha
(meaning lord) and refers here to Ganesha’s status as lord of Shiva’s celestial armies.

The Mathematics of Divinity

In 1858, German Indologist Max Müller wrote that “Hinduism is a decrepit religion, and has not many years to live.”
¹
Müller was wrong. Hinduism may be the oldest of the great religions, but it is also the third largest (after Christianity and Islam), with roughly 900 million followers, or about 15 percent of the world’s population. Most Hindus live in India, the world’s largest democracy, where roughly four out of every five people are Hindu. But during the first millennium of the Common Era, Hinduism spread throughout Southeast Asia. The Prambanan temple complex, dedicated to Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu, was built in the ninth century on the island of Java in Indonesia, and Angkor Wat in Cambodia, now a Buddhist site, was built in the twelfth century by and for Hindus. Today Hinduism is the majority religion in Nepal, and Hindus number in the millions in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Malaysia, and the United States.

In the United States, Asian Americans are often seen as a “model minority” because of their successes in school and at work. Like any stereotype, this is part true and part false, but it fits American Hindus who run neck-and-neck with Unitarians and Jews when it comes to such markers of success as levels of higher education and per-capita income. Hindus run 40 percent of the high-tech firms in California’s Silicon Valley.
²
Back in India, Hindus form the bulk of a rapidly industrializing economy that many predict will become the next China.

It is difficult to say what, if anything, all these Hindus have in common because, of all the great religions, Hinduism is the least dogmatic and the most diverse. Rather than repelling new influences, Hindus are forever absorbing them. Of course, no religion is uniform. Christians have their feminist theologians and their macho fundamentalists, their “smells and bells” Anglicans and their speaking-in-tongues Pentecostals. But Hindus take diversity to new heights. Hindus do have a shared scripture (the Vedas), a shared sacred symbol (Om), and a sacred center (Varanasi in North India). They have no founder, however, or current leader. They have no shared creed and no mechanism for excommunication. When American poet Walt Whitman wrote, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself,” he was channeling the absorptive spirit of Hinduism. It, too, is large; it, too, contains multitudes.

In the Western monotheisms, one is the holiest number, but Hindus worship many gods through many different paths (
margas
), disciplines (
yogas
), and philosophies (
darshanas
). Their deities appear as powerful kings, starving ascetics, brave monkeys, graceful dancers, blue-faced flute players, and impersonal stones. Some Hindus say that there is really just one god underlying these many manifestations. Others say that there are many gods but one is supreme. Still others say there are many gods and all are equal. Some Hindus even say there is no god whatsoever—that the gods are a by-product of our hyperactive imaginations. Hindus are also divided on just how the gods are present in the
murtis
(icons) bearing their names. In a dispute that resembles the divide between Catholics (who believe that bread and wine are transubstantiated in the Mass into the body and blood of Jesus) and Protestants (who believe that bread and wine are just symbols representing Jesus), some Hindus say that the divine resides in these images, while others say that these images are symbols pointing beyond themselves to divinity.

Tellingly, Hindus cannot even agree on what to call their religion, or whether it is a religion at all. One of the most common claims among Hindus in the West is that “Hinduism is a way of life” rather than a religion. And many prefer to refer to that way of life not as Hinduism but as
Sanatana Dharma
(Eternal Law).

Because you typically become a Hindu by birth rather than conversion, Hinduism is, like Judaism, as much a people as a religion. The term
Hindu
originally conjured up a place—the ancient Indus River Valley—and the people who occupied it. During the Mughal Empire of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, this term referred to any non-Muslim, and, as late as the early twentieth century, Americans were referring to all immigrants from India (Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim) as “Hindoos.” British Orientalists and Indian nationalists popularized the notion of Hinduism as a world religion distinct from Islam and Christianity in the Victorian era, but the word
Hinduism
(spelled Hindooism at the time) doesn’t even appear in English until the 1790s, and its usage was not widespread until the latter half of the nineteenth century.
³
That is why it was possible in 1845 for the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson to locate the popular Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, inside the wrong religion—“the much renowned book of Buddhism,” he called it.
⁴

In the absence of some entity with the authority to magically transform one specific vision of what Hinduism ought to be into what Hinduism actually is, Hinduism is what Hindus do and think, and what Hindus do and think is almost everything under the sun. More than a term pointing to a unified religion, therefore, Hinduism is an umbrella term for the religious tradition that gave the world karma and reincarnation and yoga. Under Hinduism’s sacred canopy sit a dizzying variety of religious beliefs and behaviors practiced in the wildly complex and contradictory subcontinent of India and its diasporas.

Samsara and Moksha

Although Hindus disagree on how to reach the religious goal, there is considerable consensus on both the human problem and its solution. The problem is
samsara
, which literally means wandering on or flowing by but in this context refers to the vicious cycle of life, death, and rebirth. We are born and die, and then we are born and die again. And so it goes for the cosmos itself, which flows equally endlessly through its own cycle of creation, destruction, and re-creation.

In the West, belief in reincarnation is growing rapidly. More than one out of every four Americans and Europeans believes that the soul takes on another body after death.
⁵
But for Westerners reincarnation is usually seen as a reward rather than a punishment: perhaps in your next life you can buy that Porsche or marry that hottie or land that six-figure salary. Hindus, however, have classically seen reincarnation as a problem rather than an opportunity: this world is a vale of tears, and whatever happiness we might cobble together here is transitory and impermanent. Even heaven is subject to the flux and frustrations of the iron law of samsara. It, too, was created and will be destroyed, as will whatever gods reside there. The Hindu goal, therefore, is not to escape from this world to some heavenly paradise, but to escape from heaven and earth altogether.

Hindus call this goal
moksha
, which literally means release and in this case refers to spiritual liberation—freeing the soul from bondage to samsara and its unsatisfactoriness. This is the closest Hinduism gets to the Christian notion of salvation. But to refer to moksha as salvation is incorrect, since the concept of salvation implies salvation from sin, and Hindus do not believe in sin and so harbor no desire to be saved from it. What needs escaping is not sin but samsara. And moksha, not salvation, is that escape.
⁶

Hindus understand that not everyone will be able to attain this goal, or even to strive after it. So they recognize four different aims in life. The first three are:
kama,
or sensual pleasure (as in the ancient sex manual the Kama Sutra);
artha,
or wealth and power; and
dharma,
or duty. But the ultimate goal is moksha. Some conceive of moksha as a loving union of the individual soul with a personal god. Others see it as a more impersonal merging of what Emerson called the “Over-Soul” into the ineffable essence of impersonal divinity. Still others visualize moksha as a place. Instead of the Christian heaven and its streets paved with gold, they imagine a paradise either at Vishnu’s home in Vaikuntha or at Shiva’s home in Kailasa.

One of the most fascinating conversations in the Hindu tradition concerns how to reach this religious goal. What are the techniques for moving from samsara to moksha? As they wrestled with this question, Hindus developed three very different yogas (literally “disciplines”). The first, developed by priests and described in the ritual scripture the Vedas, was
karma yoga
, or the discipline of action, which initially referred to ritual action and particularly to fire sacrifice. The second, developed by wandering sages and written down in the philosophical scripture the Upanishads, was
jnana yoga
, or the discipline of wisdom. The third,
bhakti yoga
, or the discipline of devotion, is now by far the most popular form of Hinduism. It affirms that neither priestly sacrifice nor philosophical knowledge is necessary for release from the bondage of samsara. All that is needed is love—heartfelt devotion to the god of your choosing.

Today when Westerners think of Hinduism, many think of Apu, the Kwik-E-Mart proprietor on
The Simpsons
television show, a worshipper of Ganesha and Shiva, and arguably the Western world’s most celebrated Hindu. But the classic image is the Hindu holy man. In the nineteenth century, missionary reports, ship-captains’ travelogues, and Oriental tales seared into Western consciousness images of crazy ascetics walking barefoot on hot coals, contorting their emaciated bodies into impossible positions, and swinging from metal hooks dug into their backs. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, this “race of knaves,” as one French missionary called them, went from being reviled to being revered.
⁷
As the counterculture traded in the “materialistic West” for the “spiritual East,” Americans and Europeans fell in love with gurus such as the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of Transcendental Meditation (TM) fame, who seemed to many baby boomers (not least The Beatles) the perfect antidote to the drab life of the corporate man in the grey-flannel suit. Today one of the stock scenes in
New Yorker
cartoons depicts Western seekers meeting Hindu holy men. In one, an emaciated mountaintop guru answers his visitor’s question with a question: “If I knew the meaning of life, would I be sitting in a cave in my underpants?”
⁸

This image of the Hindu holy man, still alive in movies and television commercials (and reinforced by books on Hinduism that focus on the mystical experiences of elites), drives the popular perception that Hinduism is an otherworldly path of self-denial in which simple
sadhus
trade in jobs and families for lives of meditation, yoga, celibacy, and other austerities. And this is how Hinduism began over 2,500 years ago—as an elite tradition of ascetics seeking to solve the problem of samsara through wisdom. But today Hinduism is far less exotic—a popular tradition of ordinary fathers, mothers, and children seeking moksha through nothing more extraordinary than love.

Indus Valley Civilization

Religions are often described as trees with roots, trunks, and branches. But geology rather than botany is Hinduism’s metaphorical home ground. Imagine the Hindu tradition as layer upon layer of rocks of various sorts stacked on top of one another. In some places antediluvian granite pokes up to the surface, but in other places those ancient rocks are buried under the lava of relatively recent volcanic eruptions.