Hinduism for the next Generation -1










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)

0 comments:

Post a Comment