HINDUISM FOR THE NEXT GENERATION
Wave 2: A Simplistic
Overview of Hinduism
Hinduism is an ancient religion and one of the major religions of
the world. To present it in a single essay is a formidable task. We shall
highlight only the bare essentials and that too, without any sophistication.
The first distinguishing feature is that it has no founder who started
the religion. Also there is no single event or sequence of events which may be
cited as responsible for the founding, if any, of the religion. In this sense
it differs from every other religion of the world.
According to the Vedas which are the supreme authority for
everything in Hinduism, there is only one God. You may call Him by any name and
give Him any form. The wise call Him by any one of several names. He is present
everywhere and at all times. To refer to God as a ‘He’, is by itself an unintended
compromise. It could be a ‘She’ also. To recognize this, the scriptures speak
very often of Godhead rather than God and refer to that Absolute Godhead as
‘It’. (For more on the Absolute, click here).
This unique Godhead, this Divinity, is in everything that we see,
hear, smell, touch or feel. It is in every inanimate object and also in every
animate being. It is in our heart of hearts. But then why don’t we see It, Him
or Her? Why don’t we feel the presence of this Godhead in us? It is because our
minds are so impure.
If we can get rid of all the impurities
from the innermost recesses of our hearts,
Hinduism asserts, we can certainly see
God
reflected in the crystalline purity of our heart and mind.
To be able to see it
and live in the constant awareness
of the presence of that Divinity
is the purpose of life.
In that living presence of the
reflection of God in our mind,
we must get tuned to the frequency of the call of that Divinity
and be of service to society
–
this is what we are for.
Anything that we do which encourages or is concordant with the
above process of realisation of God’s presence in us is called puNya or spiritual merit. Anything that
we do or think that takes us away from that realisation is called pApa or spiritual sin. Truth, non-violence, humility, compassion,
sympathy, unselfish service to society, helping the poor, the depressed and the
sick – these are certainly among the well-known puNyas of Hinduism, as in any other religion. If one accumulates a
large amount of extraordinary puNya
to his credit he goes to heaven after death, to enjoy, for a specified period
of time, the fruits of his puNya. If
one accumulates a large amount of extreme sin he goes to Hell, to suffer the
punishment for all that sin, again for a specified period.
But the large majority of humanity does not belong to either
category and are only a mixture of ordinary puNyas
and ordinary sins. This large majority of people are born again in this world. This
last one is the second most distinguishing feature of Hinduism.
Everyone who is born has to die some time or other. But when the
body dies the soul does not die. The soul is born again in another body. The
mind also goes along with the soul, though it does not remember what it did in
the previous body. The mind and soul, together individualized in this fashion,
go on from body to body again and again. This is the unique principle of
transmigration. When the soul travels like this from body to body, carrying
along with it the mind which has in some sense, irrevocably, attached itself to
it, the mind, on its own, carries a heavy luggage within itself, namely all the
imprints of pure and impure impressions of memories and experiences which it
has collected in each of its sojourns in
a body. The mind is like the wind which carries the smell of a rose garden
through which it has blown , even long after it has left the garden. Like the wind which has passed through a
filthy and stinking place, the mind carries the stink that it has collected in
its previous births and lives, into succeeding births. The soul knows no good
or bad, but the mind which is with it carries all the good and bad imprints in
it, which reflect themselves as the tendencies of the person in his present
birth. A mind which has in its previous births helped the poor, has been
sympathetic, compassionate and noble, carries such tendencies in its future
lives. This is why we see some people from their very birth are very noble and
gentle and some people, if we may say so, stink! Thus are born the tendencies
and in-born nature of people. These tendencies are known technically as vAsanAs.
VAsanA means smell. So the smell of purity or of impurity which one
carries from one’s actions in one’s previous lives is what distinguishes person
from person even though each has the same pure Divinity in oneself. This cycle of transmigration of soul and mind
will end only when man realises the presence of Divinity in himself and
‘reaches’ God. This will happen when his inner mind is devoid of all imprints
of any kind whatsoever, in other words, devoid of all vAsanAs. This is the state of Salvation of Man. Thereafter he never has to be born
again. Even souls which go to Heaven or Hell because of an extreme merit or
demerit, have to come back to be born as human beings on earth in order to
continue on their path of evolution. The ultimate destination of all souls is
to merge in the Supreme Presence of God.
God is the only Reality which is ever present, in the past, in the
present and in the future. Anything else is transient. The only Truth is God
and He has no name or form. He is therefore an Impersonal Absolute, though we
have used the pronoun He here. Anything that we see is His creation. When we
think of Him as the Creator, we call Him Brahma (pronounced brahmA). Anything that is created has to
be dissolved. When God takes up this function of Dissolution or Destruction we
call Him Siva (pronounced ‘shiva’ – where the sh denotes the palatal ‘s’
in the German word sprechen - , not ‘siva’ – where the ‘s’ is as in ‘sun’ or the ‘ss’
in ‘hiss’ - noor as ‘Shiva’ – where the ‘Sh’ is as in the English word ‘Show’ -). When we think of Him as our protector and
savior we call Him Vishnu (pronounced viShNu). The same unique Godhead of Hinduism has three major
functions. The three Gods of these functions form a Trinity. But actually there is only one God which we
speak of as three. Whether we worship Brahma, Vishnu or Siva, we are
worshipping the same Absolute Godhead.
Since God is present in all beings and in all creations of His, He
is present in all Nature. Every inanimate object is also a manifestation of His
presence. So we can worship Him in any form whatsoever. This is the basis of
idol worship in Hinduism and this is the third most distinguishing feature of
Hinduism. God is worshipped through images, or idols or
pictures of Him as imagined by us. Usually a newcomer to Hinduism is
confused about this idol worship. An idol is like the flag for an army. The
flag is not the country but it definitely stands for the country and one is
prepared to die for it. So also an idol is a symbol of God. In fact, any symbol
is good enough. The mind cannot worship in abstraction. So Hinduism says:
Worship God in any form you like, the
form is not important.
The name is not to be debated.
It is the intensity of devotion to God
that matters.
It is the attitude of worship, called bhakti, in Sanskrit, that is of real
consequence. Any one of the three Gods of the Trinity can be worshipped in this
way and each such worship will purify the mind, which is the objective of all
worship. Worshipping an idol in the tradition of Hinduism does not mean we are
worshipping that inanimate object as God in a pagan way, but it means that we
are worshipping the omnipresent Divinity in the form of the idol before us. We are worshipping God in the idol and not
the idol as God.
There is another distinguishing feature of Hinduism which is
present in no other religion. Just as the three Gods of the Trinity, namely,
Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva are only the same unique Godhead manifested in
different functions and forms so also there arfe otgher manifestations of God
in the mythological history of India.
God’s Will is supreme. So whenever He wants He can appear in this world
as a concrete person
or being in flesh and blood. This he has done many times. In fact, every time
there has been a decline of natural order in the Universe, every time there has
been a rise of cruelty and evil, God has manifested Himself. Each such
appearance is called an avatar. ‘Avatar’ means descent. The Impersonal Absolute
Godhead descends, as it were, to the level of ordinary concrete universe and
makes its presence felt in flesh and blood. The
Perfect God takes on, it seems, an imperfection in itself to appear as a living
being in order to take us imperfect beings, on the onward path to Perfection! So
whenever such an event takes place, as when the Son of God appeared on earth,
the people of that time who had the beatific experience of God’s proximate presence, consider themselves very fortunate and worship Him
as God. An this is how, every avatar, in Hinduism, has
come to be worshipped as God. These avatars are the closest approximations to
Divinity for us, who cannot see Him ourselves.
Once He appeared as Man-Lion (actually it was half-man, half-lion)
-- the Sanskrit
word being ‘narasimha’ – In order to put an end to the extreme cruelty which a
very powerful but inhuman king was perpetrating on the world. In fact the son
of this King, just a five-year-old boy, was very devoted to Lord Vishnu but the
King in his arrogance wanted himself to be recognised as the only God, the God,
of this universe. After many futile attempts to convert this little boy to his
viewpoint, the King asked the child to show him this God Vishnu whom he was
worshipping. In extreme desperation he showed a pillar and asked
: Is your God in this pillar? The
son, Prahlada, with supreme confidence in the omnipresence of the Lord, said
YES.
And lo and behold!
God obliged His devotee by appearing
In the concrete form of a
Man-Lion
From that pillar!
This Man-lion proved to be the end of the King.
The fact that He appeared as a Man-Lion itself has a history
behind it. In short, it was because the King, by his own supernatural prowess
was under a beneficient spell that he could never be killed by any human being
or by any being of the animal kingdom. This Man-Lion Avatar of Godx, which
occurred for a very specific purpose, is one of the earliest Avatars of Vishnu
in the mythology of India.
It shows the efficacy of a full-fledged hundred per cent faith in the
omnipresence of God. Prahlada is the model of such faith.
There are two most famous Avatars of God – without a knowledge of which
even a summary presentation of Hinduism is not complete. These are Rama and
Krishna, the two names with which the entire Hindu India will reverberate wherever you
go.
Rama and Krishna, who are the divines embedded in the two epics Ramayana
and Mahabharata,
are the two
divinities, among all such who ever walked on earth,
who have captured the hearts of the largest number of people
for the longest period of time.
In the same type of thinking,
Valmiki and Vyasa, the authors of the two
epics mentioned,
are the two authors who have influenced the largest number
of people
for the longest period of time,
in all of history.
Millions of years ago, there lived a King Ravana by name who was destroying all the good things that the Rishis were
doing to propitiate God for the good of humanity. His powers were so great that
no ordinary divine power could match him. Finally Lord Vishnu by His own Will, was born as the son in a royal family. This son of God
was known as Rama. The word Rama means in
Sanskrit the Ultimate Reality of everything. Rama and his consort Sita by
various circumstance underwent many sufferings by living folurteen years in the
forest away from civilisation and away from luxury and comfort. Finally Rama
had to fight all the evil men who worked for Ravana and in the end Ravana
himself was destroyed with all his clan.
This manifestation of God as Rama is a central thread in the vast
fabric of Hinduism, just as Resurrection is the central kingpin of christianity. Rama and Jesus had many things in common. Both
were a great colossus of humility without the least shade of arrogance. Both
undertook suffering on themselves for the rest of humanity. Jesus died on the
Cross so that humanity may be saved for God. Rama lived a life of truth
compassion and virtue throughout his long life and showed to the world how we
must not only be prepared to sacrifice but in reality renounce every single
attachment of ourselves, for the happiness of the rest of the world.
The avatar of Krishna happened five thousand years ago in the city of Mathura in North India.
Again it was the same purpose: Protection of the virtuous and punishment for
the wicked. Krishna’s story has several
parallels with the life of Jesus. The birth itself was a miracle. And in his
life Krishna performed several miracles. Once he had to carry a whole hill on his
shoulders in order to protect the entire community from destruction through
Nature’s fury.
Krishna’s life in another sense is most important for Hinduism
because He condensed all the truths and philosophy of Hinduism in a few
hundreds of simple verses and taught it directly to one of the most well-known
characters in the history of Hinduism, namely, Arjuna. This teaching is called
the Bhagavad-Gita, the Song of the Lord or the Divine Song or Poem. In fact for
those who cann ot go back to the entire Vedas to
understand Hinduism, the Gita has evedrything in it. It is very much relevant
in the modern context.
The final teaching of the Gita is:
Do your work in an unselfish way.
Even if your duty leads you on to do
apparently unjustifiable things,
Put the burden on God and do your duty.
Do not keep on worrying about what is
going to happen in the future.
Have faith in the ultimate Divinity of
every being.
Love and serve every being.
Each being has the same Divinity in
them as what you have in you.
If you serve God and humanity with
humility and surrender to the Will of God
You have nothing to fear
Either in this life or in
the after-life.
Do not be carried away by the ups and
downs of everyday life.
And leave the problem of Salvation to
God.
He will take care of it.
The really most distinguishing feature of Hinduism is, however,
that it is a matter of faith with the Hindus to consider all religions as true.
Since God can be worshipped in several forms and several ways, Hinduism considers
different religions as so many paths to God. No religion should think that it
is the only true religion. Each is a path to the same one God. And so there
should be no hate or distrust of another religion or another point of view with
respect to God. In this modern world of strife and hatred this tolerance of
other religions and other points of view with respect to God is one of the
major lessons that the world has to learn from the Hindu way of life. Even
within Hinduism, you can choose that path which suits your taste, evolution,
training and tradition. The only thing that is important is there should be no
feeling of selfishness or egoism.
Hinduism for the Next Generation
Wave
6: What it is to live as a Hindu?
Even the insiders in Hinduism do not usually know what is right at any given point of time or in any given circumstance. This is because
there is too much flexibility in the
norms and practices of the religion and too many varieties of rules and
regulations. What are the essentials
that should occupy the attention of the practising Hindu? What is the minimum that should be protected
for the next generation in terms of observances, attitudes and the ways of
life? Can these things be passed on to the next generation in a meaningful way,
meaningful to the next generation, particularly those of the younger generation
who are bred and brought up in an environment where they have no impact of
their own religion on them? Can the ways of Hinduism be explained to them in a
language which makes sense to them in their modern text?
Hinduism is not simply a religion in
the sense that there are several religions in the world and they all speak of
God, soul, morality, merit versus sin, mortality versus immortality, good
versus bad, heaven versus hell, and ways of living so that ultimately one
reaches salvation. Hinduism is an Action Plan
for how to live in peace and die in peace. Hinduism bereft of this
Action Plan for one’s daily life is nothing but a bundle of academic and esoteric adventures in human thought, though remarkable for their
profundity. These adventures in thinking
are all recorded in the great scriptures
called Upanishads.
But since they are very abstract they will not have any impact on you until you
have related them to the context of your daily living. When we say that Hinduism
is an action plan for daily living so that one can live in peace and die in
peace, we do not mean that one should retire from all the dynamism of life and
its challenges in the vibrant external world of activity. Hinduism has a unique
way of allowing you to be in the midst of worldly activity and still keep you
cool. This they do by recommending what they call Karma yoga,
elaborately explained in the Gita, which is the one scripture for all Hindus
that bridges one’s worldly finite interests and intelligence and the
philosophical infinities and wisdom of the Upanishads.
One major difficulty with Hinduism is
that you cannot expect to understand it in bits and pieces. For everything in
Hinduism a proper understanding comes only in the context of a global
perception of the entire gamut of the religion. This global perception is what
is explained in the Upanishads. Essentially it says that the innermost core of
every human being, the micro of the micro in him, is divine. The baser
instincts of man come from the mind which has accumulated them through its
several lives of association with this particular soul. These accumulated
imprints of the mind are called vAsanAs. The eradication of all vAsanAs
is what makes for release from samsAra, the cycle of births and deaths.
All the prescriptions of Hinduism are intended to help the mind rid itself of
all its load so that in that pure mind God will reflect Himself.
HINDUISM FOR THE NEXT GENERATION
Wave 6:
Krishnavatara, the Miraculous
Janmashtami is celebrated all over India and all
over the Krishna-conscious world in the memory of Lord Krishna’s birth said to
have happened 5000 years ago. Vyasa’s
Mahabharata is full of Krishna’s
exploits. But it is in one of his later works, namely, the Shrimad Bhagavatam,
that we find a systematic account of the graphic details of Krishna’s
birth and of his life, which was full of miracles. Any other account of Krishna
which was written much later, traces its source to these accounts of Vyasa. Vyasa’s
account is therefore the earliest record of one of the oldest events of human
history that mankind is remembering and celebrating, year after year. In fact
it is the second such oldest event of human history, the first one being the
birth of Lord Sri Rama.
Those who remember Krishna
can be broadly divided into two types. The first type is that of the emotional
and sentimental, who are charmed and mesmerised by Krishna’s
miraculous birth and exploits. The second type is that of the intellectual and
the analytic, who are fascinated by Krishna’s
Bhagavad-Gita. This latter shall be our starting point.
It was a major world war, again around
5000 years ago, in which every king of India was involved. The armies
arrayed on either side totalled 18 akshauhinis. One akshauhini is 21870 units,
each unit comprising one chariot, one elephant, one horse, five warriors on
these and five soldiers on foot. There were 11 akshauhinis on the side of
Duryodhana and 7 akshauhinis on the side of Yudhishtira. Everybody talked of
the foremost heroes of the war on either side, Karna and Arjuna. The dominant
personality throughout the one-month long preparation for the war was Lord
Krishna who donated all his armies to Duryodhana and stood by himself weaponless, to be the charioteer for Arjuna.
On the fateful first day of the War,
everything was almost set for the beginning, the first arrows were going to be
shot – and right at that time, Arjuna collapsed in total frustration at the
sight of his having to fight his own kith and kin, elders and masters. He threw
down his bow and arrow and sat down, refusing to take any step further – in
fact wanting to retire to the forest as a sannyAsi. Krishna
had to use all his miraculous ingenuity to quell the excitement of ignorance
and compassion that had arisen in Arjuna’s mind. Krishna talks of the great
truths of Vedanta embodied in the Upanishads, how the Self has nothing to do
with what happens to the body and mind, how one has to do one’s duty, come what
may, and how the misplaced compassion in Arjuna’s mind ill becomes him.
Arjuna asks several questions,
including the million dollar question: If you extol the quality of Detachment
and Renunciation so much why are you prodding me to kill? Then comes an
elaborate explanation from the Lord on what Karma Yoga
means, how actions fulfilled in total desireless attitude do not bind the
person, how Karma Yoga is the only resort of mankind since man cannot but keep
acting.
And Krishna adds: I have taught this
long ago to the Sun-God, who taught it to Manu, who taught it to the first king
Ikshvaku and from whom it has come down from generation to generation.
Arjuna suddenly wakes up from his
frustrated state of helplessness, becomes his own dynamic self of courage,
intelligence and inquisitiveness and asks: You were born just a few years
before me. How can it be true, that you taught it to the Sun-God and all that?
How is it possible? Arjuna behaves at this point like any intelligent rational
human being. Till now for the earlier two chapters of the Bhagavad-Gita, the
preacher and his disciple had been talking just like any other teacher and
student, just on the academic plane. Arjuna’s question shakes off the
self-imposed humility, as it were, from the Lord and He replies, in a few of
the most inspired shlokas of the Gita (IV – 5, 6, 7 and 8):
bahUni me vyatItAni janmAni tava cArjuna /
tAnyahaM veda sarvANi na tvaM vetha
param-tapa//
ajo’pi san-navyayAtmA bhUtAnAm-Ishvaro’pi san
/
prakRtiM svAm-adhishhTAya sambhavAmy-Atma-mAyayA
//
yadA yadA hi dharmasya glAnir-bhavati
bhArata /
abhyuthAnam-adharmasya tadAtmAnaM sRjAmyahaM //
paritrANAya sAdhUnAM vinAshAya ca dushhkRtAM /
dharma-samsthApanArthAya sambhavAmi yuge yuge //
Note that till now, the Gita reads as
if it were just an academic thesis on the truths of Hinduism. But at this point the Gita starts its character as a religious
work. In the western world, religion and philosophy are considered to be two
isolated independent facets of human activity. But not so in
the eastern world of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Here the daily
living of a religious life is based on a philosophical understanding of Man’s
innate nature. That is why it is very difficult to separate religion from
philosophy in the understanding of ancient Hindu traditions. In these shlokas, Krishna declares:
I have gone
through many lives and so have you. I know them all, you don’t know a thing.
Though I am ever unborn, and my Self is imperishable and though I am Master of
all beings, ruling over My own Nature, out of my own Free Will, I manifest
myself as a visible Being. Whenever there is a decline of Dharma and whenever
there is a rise of Adharma, I incarnate myself for the protection of the Good,
and for the destruction of the wicked, and for the establishment of Dharma, I
create myself, again and again, yuga after yuga.
These shlokas constitute the Avatara
rahasya, the secret of the concept of Avatar, in the Gita and it has not come
forth so majestically an so powerfully in any other portion
of Hindu religious literature. When Arjuna asked the question as to how it is
possible that Krishna, who was sitting before him in flesh and blood and who
was just under forty years of age, could have taught the Sun-God ages ago,
Arjuna was naturally referring to that birth of Krishna about which his mother
Kunti had told him several times
Om Tat Sat
(Continued...)
(My humble salutations to Brahmasri Sreeman V Krishnamurthy for the collection)
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