premjan

I can't imagine what Hinduism is if it is not a religion. A religion is a life-discipline that integrates all the aspects of life into a set of practices. Hinduism is more philosophical and metaphysical than some other religions, but at its core is Vedic scholarship. This is the oldest continuous stream within Hindu religion anyway. Of course, every community has its own variation of Hindu practices, so Hinduism is very heterogeneous and diverse. This is a very positive thing in general.

There is nothing so "unique" about Hinduism that is not there in any other culture. The desire not to consider Hinduism a religion but a "way of life" et cetera is just a desire to remain stuck in the middle ages. Religion has a limited but well-defined role in life. Religion does not fill the belly or give jobs. The caste system nowadays is more meaningful in terms of government reservations than in many other ways. I feel we need to get over our "Hindu" hangup.

Just my own 2 cents. No intention of hurting the sentiments of others.

victorialis

Hello again. I've thought it over a bit.
Aren't the tolerant (those who make a practice of acceptance) always labouring under this disadvantage? I think it can be a serious hindrance only if one is not clear on the why of one's religion. And then, one must prepare oneself for the possibility of bombs.
I see what you are saying; on the surface, it is true. But there is an enormous difference between professing belief (gaining entry) and practicing the religion (becoming integrated with the community of believers). Membership in the community will have everything to do with appearance and behaviour, and maybe nothing at all to do with the actual state of one's faith -- even though regular recitation of the creed may be required (there's a reason why they require it!).

It could be that in a lifetime, one, five, all, or none of those recitations are made with genuine conscious conviction. How can anyone know, about anyone else?

In the case of individuals born and bred to their tradition: there might be no occasion on which those individuals are ever given a genuine opportunity to refuse the creed. It is the faith of their fathers (or mothers, in Judaism), and they're raised in it as part of submission to parental discipline, beginning well prior to the time when a personal interest in religion would develop on its own.

Here, too, membership in the faith community is at least as experiential as it is belief-based. If one goes regularly to one's family's temple, mosque or church and has no particular wish to do otherwise, that is more experience than belief; or, if I may put it this way, it is belief secondary to the reinforcement of habit (experience). Belief may indeed grow, during those years; but behaviour is what will count, and as long as behaviour conforms, belief is largely left to take care of itself.

You've gone on to describe the condition of post-Bhakti Hinduism as "amorphous and diffuse"; in response, I suggest that despite socio-political efforts to the contrary, Abrahamic traditions in practice are no less vulnerable than Hinduism to being amorphous and diffuse.

This is, in part, why our discussion interests me. Won't an Abrahamic get more roiled up about religious ambiguity than a Hindu? or am I wrong about that?
Here is a similarity between the two: both the proletarian movements in the west and the anti-Brahmin sentiment you cite reflected strong disaffection with an element of society which was perceived to be unduly powerful. Both were primarily sociopolitical (socioeconomic?) backlash.
I hope you do not feel that India is alone in this condition; she is not. In a fully literate country (if there is such a thing), the same problems of information would exist.

premjan

Hinduism is pantheist so its whys are a fair bit more diffuse than Judaism for example. This has to do with its origins and its history and form its essential character which is pluralistic and caste-based.

The whys of original Hinduism are genetic and racial in nature. People are of different genetic types hence have different proclivities. Hence the rules of life are different people. Different strokes for different folks. The thinkers keep the religion and scholarship organized, the warrior folks protect and govern. The mercantile class take care of commercial transactions. The artisans and farmers perform manual labor. Each celebrates life in a different way. Hinduism is racist and genetic in its origin. Not in the manner of Hitler, but in a celebration of the essential diversity of mankind.

The other thing about Hinduism is that it is integrative not essentially dualistic. It does not limit its boundaries regarding what it will accept and what it will not. Experimentation and freedom of faith is essentially present. The priestly class serves the rest of society. Talking about excessive elitism of the brahmans, the anti-brahman surge in south india is essentially anti-rational. My ancestors were South Indian brahmins. They were probably haughty folks, but they were not the wealthiest of society by any stretch of the imagination. The only rules they made and upheld were regarding worship (some of these may have been insulting and excessive but they did not exercise any military force, only the force of entrenched social beliefs, which can be stifling in some ways in a country lacking in new ideas.). They did not control the administration of the people in any meaningful way. This is why the anti-brahmin surge in south India is essentially a communist phenomenon of jealousy. It has hurt Brahmins through the creation of anti-brahmin reservations. People who were genetically (and through reasons of cultural specialization) suited for intellectual tasks have been cast aside. Many have made it elsewhere but with significant difficulty nevertheless. They have become a non-Judaic diaspora. Racial/Genetic jealousy is not essentially different in its character than monetary jealousy. I can't decide whether it is more or less just. However it has happened. India, having lost a significant portion of its intellectual upper crust has undoubtedly been somewhat impoverished.

Hindus are tolerant folks because the "other" is not well-characterized. There are those who are "losers" or seen as being unable to make it, and seemed to form a distinct 10-20% of the population in all parts (the dalits). These people were socially ostracized and they have been hurt by Hinduism. Other than that, there are semites (of which even some have been partially integrated, such as Christians and Muslims who still practise caste).

Anyway, the anti-Brahmin sentiment is due to the fact that Brahmins were seen as controlling that most ephemeral of things: contact with God. This was because this was their livellihood. They were not in it out of big-heartedness. They depended on their practice for their livelihood and therefore did not make any significant changes except in the rare cases of reformers. The caste system has maintained a certain closedness of thinking among Indians until relatively modern times. There have always been the rare enlightened reformers but the level of thinking of the average man, while tolerant, was pretty narrow.

Brahmanism and pluralism are the most distinctive and enduring characteristics of Hinduism.

The reason Abrahamic folks get more roiled up over heterodoxy is because of the widely disseminated written scriptures which are readable by all. Hinduism used to have its violent religous wars (mainly Shaivite vs. Vaishnavite). In fact the Ramayana is an example, where Ravana is a Shaivite and Rama is an incarnation of Vishnu. A fair amount of bloodshed did occur between rival kingdoms which espoused opposite sides of this Shiva-Vishnu divide. But it got resolved a fairly long time ago, and now they are mainly ideological differences.

As for genuine conviction: what is it? Hindus marry without genuine conviction and grow into it. "Genuine conviction" is often a matter of repeating the thing often enough until it becomes familiar. This is the traditional interpretation and the rest is new-fangled nonsense.

The other thing that is characteristic of traditional Hinduism is the joint family system, which, however is fading slowly. Hinduism practise salvation both through children (like Judaism) and through faith or knowledge. This is actually a very strong Protestant contribution that appears better than Hindu practise: individual salvation through belief in Christ. I expect this aspect to survive in modernity. I think it underpins the notion of "individualism".

Hmmmm....I've written a long and diffuse message. Let's check if I addressed any of the questions.

Hindus are unclear on the why of their belief, other than "unity in diversity". So perhaps in the modern day, they can do no more than endure the bombs and survive them. Only secular socialism can marry Islam and Hinduism. No religious prescription will do it.

I find the western dismissal of "mysticism" actually very refreshing compared to the Indian weakness for holy men. While I consider the Bhagavad Gita and the epics to be great contributions, I feel we have slid a little too far into Godmanhood. It should be understood that Krishna and Buddha were talented and insightful philosophers and metaphysicians, and even that the elevation of Krishna to Godhood should be taken with the requisite grain of salt. The divinity of human beings can only be conditional not absolute. Krishna is the most adored symbol of Godhead in India, he is not to be literally considered God. God is formless and absolute and expresses himself only partially and incompletely through his minions and symbols and deities.

Hinduism is pluralistic, integrative, functions within a notion of different strokes for different folks and the best way of encapsulating it all is the age-old notion of "Dharma" or righteousness. The rest of it is amorphous and confounding bogosity.

True Hinduism is the upholding of Dharma. We must understand our place in the universe and how it connects to our innermost yearnings and responsibilities. We must then act righteously and without hesitation. We have entered into an age which has become obsessed with Moksha to the detriment of Dharma.

In contrast, Judaism is about the upholding of man's contract with God. This is the essential contrast between these two types of religions.

hinduwoman

Hindus do not have enough respect for facts. They are good at intuitive and abstract argument, butr very bad at empirical data collection.
I concur that there is too much empahsis on mysticism and holy men.

But like all polytheistic religions Hinduism is assimilative and it is not done by force.

RE: joint family. During vedic times the son after getting married would move out to establish a separate household. Joint family came in only after landholdings and scarcity of land became the norm.

premjan

I totally agree that Hindus need to have much higher respect for objective facts, rather than "concepts" and "ideas". Maybe it is due to our obsession with cycles, since the Hindu idea seems to have begun with Rta and ritualism. Hindus love to "feel good inside" at the expense of long-term planning or sense, or nearly almost everything. I place the blame for this at the feet of the Bhakti movement.

victorialis

The traditional interpretation, then, is simply a gloss on a normative social process. Do Hindus marry without genuine conviction? Those who are satisfied with the normative social process do not seem to lack conviction; what they believe in is the validity of the norm -- that it is the best way.

It's true that such a person may not be in the throes of romantic love on the wedding day -- but they have found the social norm acceptable enough to uphold it. Any discrete group we could name would be equally unclear (in the aggregate) on the why of their belief. Some individuals have certainly built a little more clarity for themselves; from this subgroup come the leaders. I wonder if belief even exists per se, in large groups. The larger the group of people, the more diffuse any shared meanings become (resulting in the bogosity you alluded to). Cohesion in a group depends upon the amount of random overlap that is present among individual members' beliefs.

Unity in diversity is a rather good basic principle. One could do worse than that. When the basic principle is established, the committed and the devout then have the task of making personal interpretations in their own lives. Those who are only socially religious, need not trouble themselves with such struggle; others in the faith community will work out the details of the religious norms and tell them how to behave. For this approach to succeed, secularism will have to somehow dominate the religious impulse in a way acceptable to the whole population. I sense a nascent human-rights conflict here.The western dismissal of mysticism has come at a price. This price now seems unsupportable to many present-day westerners, who find a materialist universe without divine mystery to be soulless, meaningless and without purpose.

The challenge for them is to find a way to return to a sense of mystery without getting dangerously lost in subjectivity.This is true not only for Hindus. If I were to take that last sentence and read "self" for Moksha and "community" for Dharma, many people of my acquaintance would agree heartily with the sentiments expressed.

If I were to read "eternity" for Moksha and "real life" for Dharma, it would elicit equally enthusiastic agreement.Christianity arose in part as a response to the legalism of the Judaic way. The more law there is, the more of us are going to be lawbreakers, one way or another.

Can you see the advantage of Hinduism that is shown in that contrast?

victorialis

I've looked around for Brian K. Smith and I'm guessing that the work you're citing is his 1989 Reflections on Resemblance, Rituals and Religion. Unfortunately it is not in my local library system, nor does amazon seem to have it available; it may be out of print (many good books are). I am still waiting for a book I've ordered on Eastern philosophy (a very competent overview by Ray Billington, which I mean to use as a sourcebook); it's been ten weeks now, and the book was supposed to arrive in five weeks.

I wonder if Smith's 1994 Classifying the Universe: The Ancient Indian Varna System and the Origins of Caste is worth a look?

I had a good chuckle over "Hinduism is a process." (Aha! Now I Understand Everything! ) Such a conclusion is probably no better than I deserve for the kind of questions I'm asking.

In the 20th Century, everything was a system. Today, everything is a process.
I agree, these events are politically motivated. What I wonder is why more people do not see the cynicism of such manipulation. Religion is merely the excuse being used. One can either be the rider, or be the horse.

premjan

I guess the strengths of Hinduism are for you and the weaknesses are for me. That way both sides learn something.

premjan

Once you admit the necessity of some categories (as opposed to obssessing about them), Hinduism does appear to be a "process", since the usual top-level categories are all processes:

Brahma = creation
Vishnu = preservation
Shiva = destruction

I suppose Shakti ("energy??") is more primordial and is an attribute rather than a process.

premjan

I think a lot of religion is obsession with purity (in the eyes of God). Once you get over this part of religion (which is motivated by fear), there is only one thing left, and I think the Buddha summed it up well in one word over 2500 years ago: compassion. Our capacity for compassion is what bounds the condition of the world we live in. The more compassion we show, the better the world will be and become.