Why I am a Hindu – Part 1

The short answer to the question “why am I a Hindu” is simply because I was born to a Hindu family. That’s generally the case for all Hindus because one cannot convert to being a Hindu. That distinguishes the Hindu dharma from religions.

Here I have to distinguish between religions and dharmas. There are three major world religions. They are Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the order they arose. That’s the monotheistic family. They all arose in the Middle East. Judaism oral tradition goes back over 4,000 years and the written texts around 3,500 years. Christianity is around 2,000 years old and Islam only 1,400 years old.

Hinduism is not a world religion. First because it is not a religion; it’s a dharma. And second, to a first approximation, the nearly one billion Hindus live only in India. The Hindu and Jain dharma are Indian in origin and practiced only in India. The Buddha dharma originated in India but is practiced in many regions of the world.

Hindus used to be found over a vast area in South Asia but Islam has conquered much of that. Even what is today Pakistan and Bangladesh used to be majority Hindu. Now there are none. They’ve been killed or converted by Muslims in the subcontinent.

Hinduism is the oldest dharma. The scriptural texts of Hinduism go back around 3,000 years. The oral tradition of the Mahabharata was recorded in written Sanskrit around 2,600 years ago. That’s also around the time when two related dharmas arose in India: Buddhism and Jainism. Thus all three dharmas arose in India and all three religions originated in the Arabian peninsula.

As an aside, I recognize that the Sikh faith also arose in India but it is a hodgepodge of dharma and Islam. It is only marginally interesting but not relevant for my purpose here.

I focus my attention only on the dharmas and the religions since I am most familiar with them. The Chinese and Japanese traditions like Taoism and Shintoism are important but my goal here is to compare and contrast dharmas and religions. I want to explain why I am a dharmic person and not a religious person. I also want to explain why I don’t believe in god. The idea of a god is silly and meaningless.

OK, so here’s the first difference. The religions are monotheistic. Meaning that they have only one god. Hinduism has nothing to do with one or many gods. Hinduism does not have the concept of god at all. Some people claim that Hinduism is henotheistic. Henotheism is the worship of one particular god while recognizing that there are other gods. Hinduism is not henotheistic because Hindus don’t worship any god or gods.

The main confusion arises from the word “god.” The dictionary definition of god is:

1. 1. (in Christianity and other monotheistic religions) the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority; the supreme being.
   2. (in certain other religions) a superhuman being or spirit worshipped as having power over nature or human fortunes; a deity.

Then the word god is misapplied to entities that don’t have those characteristics. For example, people mistakenly think that Vishnu or Krishna are gods like the gods of the monotheistic religions. That’s wrong because the dharmas have devas, not gods. Why not?

Fun fact: the Sanskrit word deva and the English word divine are linguistic cognates.

Let’s refer to the basic features of the monotheistic god. First, he (and it is always a he) is unique, one without a second. He creates the universe. This happens at a particular point in time. The creator is by definition distinct from his creation. It’s like an inventor or an engineer creating a machine. The god is involved in the moment to moment running of that machine. He’s a celestial dictator.

He creates everything — living and nonliving — in it. Then he makes laws that his created creatures must follow. These are commandments. Then the god judges his creatures and the punishment for violations of his various commandments is hell.

Hell is also the punishment for people who don’t believe in the absolute supremacy of the one truegod. Finally, if one abides by all the commandments and believes in that god, then one gets to go to a place called heaven reserved only for the faithful.

That’s not how it works in the dharmas. Let’s focus on the Hindu dharma. The universe is Brahman — an eternal entity that exists outside of time and space. It’s a self-creating entity. Every bit of the universe is Brahman.

The me that I call myself is an inalienable part of the universe; the universe is Brahman; therefore I am Brahman. In Sanskrit, “aham Brahman”.  I am Brahman.

The me and the universe is identical in nature and substance. Thus the “tat tvam asi” – that you are. You and the not you have the same nature.

There are no commandments in the dharmas. Therefore there can be no violation of any commandments and therefore no punishment. There is no necessity for any beliefs. One does not have to believe in any deva. The dharmas are not belief based. It makes absolutely no difference what your beliefs are. By contrast, belief is central to the religions. If you don’t believe in Yahweh or Christ or Allah, you fry in hell for eternity. The dharmas stress not belief but action. The action and the consequences of one’s action is called karma.

The universe is what it is and operates according to laws that are immutable and which cannot be broken (unlike say commandments which can be broken by one’s action.) It’s like, say, the law of gravity. It’s not a commandment which you can choose to follow or not. Gravity cannot be “disobeyed”; it just is. But the commandment against, say, not coveting one’s neighbor’s ass is easily broken.

The religions are literal; the dharmas are abstract and symbolic. The religions are historical. Christ was born in a certain place and at a certain time. Then he was crucified and died, and rose from the dead. These are not symbolic; they are historical events that one must believe without sufficient evidence, or else.

The Hindu dharma has stories that are purely symbolic. The fundamental reality that is the universe is too vast for the limited human mind to comprehend. So they made up stories that explain the world. These stories are not to be taken literally, only symbolically.

The universe has one essence that is called Brahman. We can’t know that essence. So we have a story. It goes thusly. The entity called Bramha creates the universe at some point in time; the entity called Vishu maintains the universe; and the entity called Shiva (also named Mahesh) destroys the universe after a specific number of years. Then the whole drama repeats. These cycles of creation, maintenance and destruction go on eternally.

The dharmic conception of the universe is a drama, a play. The religions consider the universe as an artifact, a machine that the one true lord god creates at one point in time, rules over it, and then at the end of time judges his creatures according to rules that he’d made, dispatches his disfavored people to hell and his favored people to heaven, and finally ends his creation.

The religious story is childish, shallow and lacks any intellectual sophistication. It’s a story thought of by primitive goat herders who were not only illiterate but fairly savage. Their response to most situations was to kill. Their god therefore resorted to wholesale slaughter at the drop of a hat.

The god of the Bible (the Old Testament) has been accurately described by Richard Dawkins in his book “The God Delusion” thusly:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

The New Testament — the Christian bible — is an addendum to the Old Testament, a version 2.0 so to speak. In version 1.0 there was no hell. When  one died, that was the end of it. But in version 2.0, gentle Jesus introduced the concept of eternal hell for those who refused to believe in him. Nice touch there.

In the dharmic tradition, the universe is a drama that unfolds endlessly over time. In this drama, there is only one actor they call Brahman. Brahman manifests itself as every sentient being and plays all the infinite roles for eternity. Every sentient being is a reflection of the ultimate reality and is congruent with that. No one is born a sinner, no one needs salvation, there’s no judgment and no punishment. There’s no salvation because there’s no sin. There’s only karma, an endless cycle of births and rebirths, and finally moksha.

The idea that only Brahman exists is known as nonduality, which in Sanskrit is called advaita. Dvaita means two and advaita means not two. That means that only one thing — Brahman exists and the rest is just a reflection, a manifestation of that one reality.

The sacred texts of the Hindu dharma are the vedas. There are four principal vedas: the Rigveda, Yajurveda, Samaveda, and Atharvaveda. The concluding parts of the vedas are called Upanishads. Thus the Upanishads are known as vedanta or “the end of the Vedas.” I subscribe to the advaita vedanta school of thought.

Fun fact: The Sanskrit word veda and the English word wisdom are cognates.

The sacred texts of the Hindus are all composed by people. They are not “revealed,” unlike in the religions. In the religions, god creates the world, and then reveals his plan and his laws to his prophets who then pass it on to the rest. Humans are completely incapable of realizing the truth; god has to tell them.

In the dharmas, there are no prophets. There are teachers in every era who are revered as gurus who figure out the nature of the world through meditation. They teach the rest of us what they have found. As time goes on, more truths are discovered and our understanding of the universe continues to improve.

The dharmas evolve with the evolution of human understanding. They are not “one time revelations” that are fixed forever. They are the result of a painstaking process of discovery. The religions are fixed, unalterable, rigid — and therefore break with the advancement of human knowledge and understanding.

In the Hindu dharma, these teachers are known as rishis and swamis. In the Buddha dharma, they are called buddhas. The historical Buddha lived about 2,500 years ago. The Jaina dharma teachers are known as tirthankaras. It means “ford makers” — people who have figured out how to cross the stream of existence and have shown the path to others.

The teachers merely show and tell. They don’t command. Depending on your level of realization, you will figure out the way just like they did. There is no penalty for not learning what they are teaching. There’s no eternal damnation in hell. If you are capable, then learn; if not, take your time.

I have gone on long enough. I will take a break here and continue this in the next part.

Be well, do good work and keep in touch.

{Continue on to read Part 2.}

{Image at the top of this post is of Bahubali, a Tirthankara. The monks of the Digambar branch of Jains are “sky clad” — they don’t wear clothes.}