What is Hinduism really about?

Happy new year to everyone. For starters, there is no such thing as Hinduism. (You now know more than the average Christian and will immediately stand out in your next theological debate.) The term Hinduism implies a religion in which the parts are consistent with one another. But such a religion does not exist. That will no doubt surprise you, but consider this: the word Hinduism is a word the British coined as a catchall term for the innumerable and often contradictory religions they found on the Indian subcontinent. 

I say contradictory because, for example, some Indian religions are theistic (they believe in a personal god) and others aren’t. The latter think the divine is an it, not a Someone. This it includes everything and contains everything (this is called pantheism), but it most certainly is not a Person who created the world or to whom we can pray.

  

That’s the reason I say some Indian religions contradict others. Theistic Indian religions contradict pantheistic Indian religions. And these pantheistic religions can actually be called atheistic because their adherents don’t believe in a personal god who created the world or who can save us. They are religious (they have a reverence for the mystery and spiritual essence of the world) but atheistic (there is no personal god who created or rules the world).

  

Now, most Hindus probably would not agree that these different religions are contradictory. They would say either that it doesn’t matter because religious practice is most important, or that what seems contradictory to us is really harmonious at the “highest” level of reality.

  

Some Hindus talk about Hinduism as a journey in which they progress from worshiping a god to realizing that the god is merely an image of ultimate reality in which there are no personal gods. But back to my first point. Instead of one religion called Hinduism, there are many religions in India, often contradictory and wildly conflicting in beliefs. A more accurate title would be “the native religions of India.”

  

I say “native” because Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism (as well as others) are also flourishing religions in India, with millions of adherents there, but they were founded elsewhere.

There are many, many different religions that are called Hindu. The Hindu scriptures in fact say there are 330 million gods and at least several scores of these gods have their own sets of beliefs and practices. So where to start?

I think the best way to make some sense of this huge number of competing and mutually conflicting Indian religions is to look at two things about life and death that almost all Hindus believe in, and then to see the two major sets of Indian religions (all called Hindu) that try to resolve those two things.

  

The first thing most Hindus agree on is samsara. This is pretty much what we call reincarnation. Hindus call it the combination of karma (literally, “deeds”) and rebirth.

  

It means that after death we are judged by an impersonal law of karma, which determines what kind of life we will be reborn into. If we did bad deeds and therefore have bad karma, we are reborn into an unhappy life as a human being or animal or even insect.

  

If we led a good life and accumulated good karma, then we will be reborn into a happy human life. Samsara is the endless (and without beginning, either) cycle of life, death, and rebirth: after each life we die and are reborn into a different life.

Some movie stars have told the media that they look forward to their coming rebirths, but in the history of India, most Hindus haven’t. Life has usually not been too happy for most Hindus, and most of them know they may not have what it takes to earn a better rebirth the next time around.

  

Therefore, most Hindus earnestly seek the second thing most of them agree on: moksha. Moksha is Sanskrit for “liberation,” which in this case means liberation or release from the iron law of samsara.

In other words, Hindus want to be released from the iron law of life-death-rebirth. They don’t want to be reborn forever and ever. They want to stop the wheel and get off—finally to be free of reincarnation. Most of the assorted varieties of Hindu religions can be seen as ways to get free from samsara and therefore to achieve moksha.

Questions

Do you have a different idea of what Hinduism really is? Do you agree that Hinduism is simply an umbrella term used to describe many religions? At best, how would you describe Hinduism in your own words?