God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (21 page)

The most ancient layer in Hinduism’s geology is Indus Valley civilization, a proto-Hindu culture that provides the barest glimpses of Hinduism as it is practiced today. The second layer is Vedic religion, a karma yoga path that takes its name from ancient ritual manuals called the Vedas. Next comes philosophical Hinduism, a jnana yoga path of wandering renouncers and their scriptures, the Upanishads. The fourth layer is devotional Hinduism, the bhakti yoga of the Hindu epics, a story-driven path tailor-made not for priests or holy men but for ordinary men and women for whom Hinduism is about inviting the grace and favor of the gods into everyday life. Modern Hinduism is the final layer. Here intellectuals from the nineteenth-century Hindu Renaissance and beyond struggle to bring Hinduism into conversation with Islam, Christianity, and the modern world.

Indus Valley civilization dates at least as early as 2500 to 1500
B.C.E.
, making its architecture older than the pyramids and its cities earlier than Athens and Rome. Excavations conducted in the early 1920s at Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, both in present-day Pakistan, have shown that Indus Valley civilization supported a vast population that may have stretched from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea. We now know that this civilization was urban, technologically advanced, and literate. But because its script has not yet been deciphered, we do not know much about its religious beliefs and practices. As a result, it is unclear how much Indus Valley civilization contributed to Hinduism. Some find Hindu precursors in its art and architecture, which seem to provide evidence of ritual bathing and animal sacrifice. Might the figurines of full-hipped women unearthed by archaeologists be prototypes of Hindu goddesses? Might the images of a man in a yogalike posture surrounded by animals be a prototype of Shiva, who is worshipped today as both an ascetic and the Lord of Animals? Perhaps. But in the absence of a deciphered script that can explain how these figures were actually used, any connections remain speculative.

Vedic Religion

The second layer in the geology of Hinduism, Vedic religion, takes its name from the world’s oldest holy books, the Vedas (from the Sanskrit term
veda
, meaning “knowledge”). Hindus divide their many scriptures into two categories:
sruti
(“that which is heard,” or texts authored by divinity) and
smrti
(“that which is remembered,” or texts authored by human beings). The Vedas fall into the higher category of sruti. Regarded as eternal, these Sanskrit texts are said to have been revealed to human beings through
rishis
(seers) and then compiled by the sage Vyasa.

Like the term
Torah
in Judaism, which refers in a narrow sense to the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers) and in a more expansive sense to the entire Hebrew Bible, the Vedas refer in a narrow sense to a collection of four books (the Rig, Sama, Yahur, and Arharva Vedas) and in a broader sense to sruti literature in general, which includes these four books plus three other classes of Vedic scriptures: the Brahmanas (Priestly Books), the Aranyakas (Forest Books), and the Upanishads (Secret Doctrines). The simplest way to make sense of these four classes of revelation (all written in Sanskrit) is to think of the Vedas as technical manuals instructing priests in the proper performance of rituals (including the hymns to sing and the mantras to chant), the Upanishads as philosophical dialogues speculating on the meanings of these rituals and the Ultimate Reality underlying them, and the Brahmanas and Aranyakas (texts that fall chronologically between the Vedas and the Upanishads) as mixtures of the two.
⁹
The oldest of these scriptures is the Rig Veda, a collection of 1,028 hymns composed over centuries but dating back to at least 1200
B.C.E.
The latest, the Upanishads, were probably composed between 600 and 300
B.C.E.
, though they were not written down until the seventeenth century
C.E
.

The French philosopher Simone Weil once wrote that “the first of the soul’s needs, the one which touches most nearly its external destiny, is order.”
¹⁰
So it is fitting that this first of religions begins by attacking the problem of disorder. Demons of chaos are always arrayed in a pitched battle with the gods, so family, community, and cosmos alike are forever collapsing into disarray. The aim is to create and sustain social and cosmic order, or what the Vedas refer to as
rita
(a cognate of the English word
right
). But this cannot be accomplished by human beings alone. So priests turn to the gods through ritual, and especially through fire sacrifice (
yajna
), the central preoccupation of the Vedas.

In Europe and the United States, most of us see calling order out of chaos as a political task to be undertaken by secular means: a democratic republic, perhaps, or a constitutional monarchy. But for most of human history creating and sustaining order has been a religious burden. Confucianism shares with Vedic religion the conviction that ritual is the glue that holds society together. But in the Chinese context rituals have been more secular and interpersonal—between rulers and subjects, parents and children. Here the transactions are between humans and gods. And fire sacrifice
is
transactional. Priests, who serve as Vedic religion’s exemplars, feed the gods with animals, milk, grains, and other plants (including the intoxicant soma) in exchange for order and all that sustains it, including sons and cows and bountiful harvests and victories in war. Echoes of Vedic sacrifice can be heard today in the sacred fires that continue to burn in Hindu temples worldwide, in the
arati
ritual in which devotees wave a lighted lamp before a divine image, in marriage ceremonies where vows are always taken before a sacred fire, and in the practice of cremation, in which the impure corpse is offered to the gods for purification.

Hinduism’s controversial system of caste may also have its origins in Vedic sacrifice. According to the Rig Veda’s “Hymn of the Primeval Man,” the world first appeared at the beginning of time when a Primeval Man (
purusha
) was offered to the gods as a sacrifice. Out of this dismembered corpse came horses, cows, and other animals, and the hymns and mantras of the Vedas themselves. From its mind came the moon, from its eyes the sun, from its breath the wind, from its head the sky, and from its feet the earth, setting the cosmos in order. But this primeval sacrifice set society in order too. Its mouth became the priestly caste (
Brahmin
); its arms the warriors (
Kshatriya
); its thighs the merchants (
Vaishya
); and its feet the servants (
Shudra
).

In the polytheistic world of the Vedas, we find gods associated with the earth, sun, sky, water, wind, storms, and other forces of nature; gods associated with such principles as order and duty and such hopes as health and good fortune; and goddesses of night, dawn, sacred speech, and rivers. Vishnu is a minor Vedic deity, as is the mountain god Rudra, who will later metamorphose into Shiva. There is no single high god in Vedic religion, but the most important are Agni and Indra.

Agni is the god of fire (the English word
ignite
is a cognate) but in keeping with the ancient Indian theme of multiplicity, he is also associated with sacrifice, the sun, the sacred cow, and the inner fire in the belly (
tapas
) that will later be employed by renouncers but here is tied to sacrifice. Because fire rituals are viewed as transmissions between earth and heaven, Agni is, like Eshu in Yoruba religion, a messenger. And because these rituals take place in private homes as well as public places, he is also the god of hearth and home.

Indra, the god of war and weather (especially bad weather) is after Agni the most important in the Vedic pantheon. A stern rebuke to the Western presumption that gods, like Miss America candidates, must be models of virtue, Indra is, according to one scholar, “a ruffian from birth, an unfilial son, a lecherous youth, and a gluttonous, drunken, and boastful adult.”
¹¹
Huge, hard-drinking, hard-charging, and possessed of both Superman-style strength and NFL-style bravado, Indra is a take-no-prisoners warrior whose ingestion of the bottled courage of soma (both an intoxicant and a god) makes him fearless, and reckless, in battle. Although Indra’s influence diminishes as Hinduism evolves, he puts in an appearance in the Bhagavad Gita as the father of the warrior Arjuna.

There is much controversy, with huge political implications, about how Hinduism per se emerges out of its Indus Valley and Vedic foundations. We know that Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas, is an Indo-European language that shares much with other members of the Indo-European family, including Greek, Latin, German, French, Spanish, and English. For example,
deva
, the Sanskrit term for god, is related to the English term
divine
, to
deus
in Latin, to
theos
in Greek, and even to the Greek high god Zeus himself, who shares with Indra (and Vajrayana Buddhism to come) a fancy for the thunderbolt. But we do not know where the Indo-European language family originated.

What is known is that Dravidian-speaking Indus Valley civilization abruptly gives way around 1500
B.C.E.
to Aryan civilization, the Sanskrit language, and Vedic religion. Global shifts in climate may have played a part in the demise of Indus Valley civilization, but the traditional theory is that a people calling themselves Aryans (“Noble Ones”) came across modern-day Afghanistan and conquered northern India by force. Other Aryans then moved into Iran and still others into Europe, taking their languages with them. This theory explains the linguistic parallels between Sanskrit, Persian, and many ancient and modern European languages. It also explains the importance in the Vedas of horses, animals notably absent from Indus Valley civilization yet very much a part of the Central Asian cultures of the time. But this “Aryan invasion” theory, advanced by Europeans as early as the nineteenth century, has come under sharp attack by champions of
Hindutva
(Hinduness), who view India as a “Hindu nation” rather than a secular state. Their theory says that Aryan culture was indigenous to the Indian subcontinent—there is an unbroken line of development from Indus Valley civilization to Aryan civilization to Vedic religion to Hinduism. Hinduism, in this view, is home grown and the homeland of the Indo-European language family is not modern-day Turkey but the Ganges plains.

Philosophical Hinduism

Though there may be continuities between Indus Valley civilization and Vedic religion, and there are certainly continuities between Vedic religion and Hinduism, Hinduism is a new religious creation—at least as different from its predecessors as Islam is from Christianity and Judaism. In philosophical Hinduism, the third layer in Hindu geology, some gods carry over from Vedic religion, but many new gods emerge, and gods that were once central become marginal, and vice versa. Ritual takes a backseat to philosophy, and mystics replace priests as the religious exemplars. The practical spirit of the world-affirming Vedas yields to a preoccupation with the afterlife. Most important, the central religious problem shifts from social and cosmic disorder to something far more familial and individualistic: the nature and destiny of the human soul.

The modern novel is obsessed with the self, more specifically with the problem of authenticity. In classics from
Don Quixote
to
The Catcher in the Rye
the hero is not the person who commands great armies or gathers great wealth but he (and, increasingly, she) who avoids the fate of the fake and the phony. But this is heroic only because it is so difficult. Today young people and adults in both Europe and the United States shuffle from day to day and year to year imprisoned in roles assigned to them by families, friends, and employers. But who am I really? What is my true self?

The Danish nuclear physicist Niels Bohr once wrote, “I go into the Upanishads to ask questions,” and the Upanishads, the midwife birthing early Hinduism out of Vedic religion, ask these questions with even more urgency than Don Quixote or Holden Caulfield. Often ignoring and sometimes attacking the ritual obsessions of the Vedas, Hinduism’s homeless sages preoccupied themselves with philosophy instead. As they wandered across the belly of India, they wrestled with great questions of life and death, creation and destruction, and often with an individualistic twist. How did I come to be born? What happens when I die? What is my relationship with Ultimate Reality?

A product of the Axial Age, the Upanishads were compiled beginning in the sixth century
B.C.E.
, a period of astounding religious creativity that gave the world not only Hinduism but also Buddhism and Jainism, Greek philosophy and the Hebrew prophets, Confucius and Laozi. The Upanishads introduced concepts such as karma and reincarnation that we now recognize as common coin not only of the Hindu tradition but also of human civilization. Philosophical Hinduism also introduced various meditative and yogic techniques designed to awaken liberating insight in practitioners willing to withdraw from the world into lives of celibacy and other austerities. These mystics, known as renouncers (
sannyasins
), became Hinduism’s earliest exemplars. Although Hinduism now recognizes dharma (duty), artha (power), and kama (sensual pleasure) as legitimate aims of life, these renouncers saw moksha as the
summum bonum
, and turned their backs on wealth and power and sex and everything else that makes modern Western democracies tick. Convinced that the path to liberating wisdom was an extraordinary path requiring extraordinary means, these renouncers walked this path as
former
householders, leaving behind spouses and children and jobs in order to pursue moksha full-time.