Asian Religions in Practice

An Introduction

Donald S. Lopez, Donald S. Lopez

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691214788
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Buddismo

Princeton Readings in Religions is a new series of anthologies on the religions of the world, representing the significant advances that have been made in the study of religions in the last thirty years. This volume brings together the introductions to the first five volumes of this acclaimed series: Religions of India in Practice (1995), Buddhism in Practice (1995), Religions of China in Practice (1996), Religions of Tibet in Practice (1997), and Religions of Japan in Practice (1999). The introductions to these volumes have been widely praised for their accessible, clear and concise overviews of the religions of Asia, providing both historical context and insightful analysis of Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto, and Bon, as well as many local traditions. The authors of the chapters are leading scholars of Asian religions: Richard Davis (India), Stephen Teiser (China), George Tanabe (Japan), and Donald Lopez (Buddhism and Tibet). They bring together the best and most current research on their topics, while series editor Donald Lopez provides an introduction to the volume as a whole. In addition to providing a wealth of detail on the history, doctrine, and practice of the religions of Asia, the five chapters offer an opportunity for sustained discussions of the category of "religion."

RELIGIONS OF INDIA IN PRACTICE

Richard H. Davis

Now Vidagdha, Śakala's son, asked him, “Yājñavalkya, how many gods are there?”

Following the text of the Veda, he replied, “Three hundred and three, and three thousand and three, as are mentioned in the Vedic hymn on the Viśvadevas.”

“Right,” replied Vidagdha, “but how many gods are there really, Yājñavalkya?”

“Thirty-three.”

“Right,” he assented, “but how many gods are there really, Yājñavalkya?”

“Six.”

“Right,” he persisted, “but how many gods are there really, Yājñavalkya?”

“Three.”

“Right,” he answered, “but how many gods are there really, Yājñavalkya?”

“Two.”

“Right,” Vidagdha replied, “but how many gods are there really, Yājñavalkya?”

“One and a half.”

“Right,” he agreed, “but how many gods are there really, Yājñavalkya?”

“One.”

“Right,” Vidagdha said. “And who are those three hundred and three, and three thousand and three gods?”

Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.9.1

In one of the world’s earliest recorded philosophical dialogues, the Indian sage Yājñavalkya pointed to the multiplicity of theological views concerning the number of gods in India. He then went on to show how, following different ways of enumerating them, each of these views could make sense.

Much the same can be said about the religions of India. Some scholars and observers focus on the tremendous diversity of distinct schools of thought and religious sects that have appeared over the course of Indian history. Others prefer to specify the three or five “great” or “world” religions that have occupied the subcontinent: Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, plus Jainism and Sikhism. And still others, of a more syncretic persuasion, maintain there is really just one religious tradition.

In the introduction I provide a brief account of the main periods, principal schools of thought, and most significant texts in Indian religions. Over the course of this account, I focus on certain key issues or points of controversy that appear and reappear through Indian religious history. I focus also on a set of terms—Veda, brahman, yoga, dharma, bhakti, Tantra, and the like—that constitute a shared religious vocabulary in India. As we will see, such terms were often considered too important to be left uncontested, and so different authors or traditions would attempt to redefine the terms to suit their own purposes.¹

The Question of Hinduism

The dominant feature of South Asian religious history is a broad group of interconnected traditions that we nowadays call “Hinduism.” Although other distinct non-Hindu religious ideologies (notably Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity) have challenged its dominance, Hinduism is now and probably has been at all times the most prevalent religious persuasion of the subcontinent. According to the most recent census figures, 83 percent of India’s population is classified as Hindu, a total of perhaps 700 million Hindus.

It is important to bear in mind, however, that Hinduism does not share many of the integrating characteristics of the other religious traditions we conventionally label the “world religions.” Hinduism has no founding figure such as the Buddha Śakyamuni, Jesus of Nazareth, or Muḥammad. It has no single text that can serve as a doctrinal point of reference, such as the Bibles of the Judaic and Christian traditions, the Islamic Qur'ān, or the Adi Granth of the Sikhs. Hinduism has no single overarching institutional or ecclesiastical hierarchy capable of deciding questions of religious boundary or formulating standards of doctrine and practice.

This is not to say that Hinduism, lacking these supposedly “essential” attributes of other religions, is therefore not a religion. Rather, the historical process by which Hindus and others have come to consider Hinduism a unitary religious formation differs markedly from other traditions. In one respect, Hinduism is one of the oldest, if not the oldest continuous recorded religion, tracing itself back to a text that was already edited and put into final shape by about 1200 B.C.E. In another respect, though, it is the youngest, for it was only in the nineteenth century that the many indigenous Indian religious formations were collectively named “Hinduism.” Before this, not only did these groups not have a name for themselves as a religious unity, but for the most part they did not consider that they were members of a single religious collectivity.

Since histories of names often tell us a good deal about the realities they signify, let us look more closely at the word “Hinduism.” The term derives originally from the Indo-Aryan word for sea, sindhu, applied also to the Indus River. Persians to the west of the Indus picked up the term, modifying it phonologically to hind, and used it to refer also to the land of the Indus valley. From Persian it was borrowed into Greek and Latin, where india became the geographical designation for all the unknown territories beyond the Indus. Meanwhile, Muslims used hindu to refer to the native peoples of South Asia, and more specifically to those South Asians who did not convert to Islam, lending the term for the first time a reference to religious persuasion. Non-Muslim Indians did not commonly take up the terminology, however, until much later.

Only in the nineteenth century did the colonial British begin to use the word Hinduism to refer to a supposed religious system encompassing the beliefs and practices of Indian peoples not adhering to other named religions such as Islam, Christianity, or Jainism. This coinage, based very indirectly on the indigenous term sindhu, followed the Enlightenment reification of the concept “religion” and the scholarly attempt to define a series of distinct individual “world religions,” each with its own essence and historical unfolding. “Hindu” was then incorporated into the Indian lexicon, taken up by Indians eager to construct for themselves a counterpart to the seemingly monolithic Christianity of the colonizers. As much as anything, it may have been British census taking, with its neat categories of affiliation, that spread the usage of “Hindu” as the most common pan-Indian term of religious identity. To specify the nature of this religion, Western scholars and Indians alike projected the term retrospectively, to encompass a great historical range of religious texts and practices.

Even though anachronistic, the term “Hinduism” remains useful for describing and categorizing the various schools of thought and practice that grew up within a shared Indian society and employed a common religious vocabulary. However, applying a single term to cover a wide array of Indian religious phenomena from many different periods raises some obvious questions. Where is the system? What is the center of Hinduism? What is truly essential to Hinduism? And who determines this center, if there is any? Scholars and Indians have largely adopted two contrasting views in dealing with these questions, the “centralist” and the “pluralist” views.

Centralists identify a single, pan-Indian, more or less hegemonic, orthodox tradition, transmitted primarily in Sanskrit language, chiefly by members of the brahmanic class. The tradition centers around a Vedic lineage of texts, in which are included not only the Vedas themselves, but also the Mīmaṃsā, Dharmaśāstra, and Vedanta corpuses of texts and teachings. Vedic sacrifice is the privileged mode of ritual conduct, the template for all subsequent Indian ritualism. Various groups employing vernacular languages in preference to Sanskrit, questioning the caste order, and rejecting the authority of the Vedas, may periodically rebel against this center, but the orthodox, through an adept use of inclusion and repressive tolerance, manage to hold the high ground of religious authority.

The pluralists, by contrast, envision a decentered profusion of ideas and practices all tolerated and incorporated under the big tent of Hinduism. No more concise statement of this view can be found than that of the eminent Sanskrit scholar J. A. B. van Buitenen in the 1986 Encyclopedia Britannica:

In principle, Hinduism incorporates all forms of belief and worship without necessitating the selection or elimination of any. The Hindu is inclined to revere the divinity in every manifestation, whatever it may be, and is doctrinally tolerant. . . . Hinduism is, then, both a civilization and a conglomeration of religions, with neither a beginning, a founder, nor a central authority, hierarchy, or organization.

Adherents of this viewpoint commonly invoke natural metaphors. Hinduism is a “sponge” for all religious practices or a “jungle” where every religious tendency may flourish freely. Within the pluralist view, the Vedic tradition figures as one form of belief and worship among many, the concern of elite brahmans somewhat out of touch with the religious multiplicity all around them.

In India, various contending religious groups have vied to present a view of the cosmos, divinity, human society, and human purposes more compelling and more authoritative than others. One finds such all-encompassing visions presented in many Hindu texts or groups of texts at different periods of history: the Vedas, the Epics, the puranic theologies of Viṣṇu and Śiva, the medieval texts of the bhakti movements, and the formulations of synthetic Hinduism by modern reformers. The religious historian may identify these as the paradigmatic formations of Hinduism of their respective times. Yet such visions have never held sway without challenge, both from within and from outside of Hinduism.

The most serious challenges to Hindu formations have come from outside, from the early “heterodoxies” of Buddhism and Jainism, from medieval Islam, and from the missionary Christianity and post-Enlightenment worldviews of the colonial British. These challenges have been linked to shifts in the political sphere, when ruling elites have favored non-Hindu ideologies with their patronage and prestige. In each case, such fundamental provocations have led to important changes within the most prevalent forms of Hinduism. This introduction will follow this pattern of historical challenge and transformation.

The Indo-Aryans and the Vedas

The textual history of Indian religions begins with the entry into the subcontinent of groups of nomadic pastoralists who called themselves “Āryas,” the noble ones. Originally they came from the steppes of south-central Russia, part of a larger tribal community that, beginning around 4000 B.C.E., migrated outward from their homeland in several directions, some westward into Europe and others southward into the Middle East and South Asia. These nomads were the first to ride and harness horses; they also invented the chariot and the spoked wheel and fabricated weapons of copper and bronze. Such material innovations gained them obvious military advantages, and they were able to impose themselves on most of the indigenous peoples they encountered as they migrated. Wherever they went they took with them their language, and it was this language that formed the historical basis for Greek, Latin, the Romance languages, German, English, Persian, Sanskrit, and most of the modern languages of northern India. We now call these pastoral peoples the Indo-Europeans, and those who migrated south into the Iranian plateau and the Indian subcontinent we call the Indo-Aryans.

As early as about 2000 B.C.E., Indo-Aryan peoples began to move gradually into the Indus River Valley in small tribal groups. In 1200 B.C.E.. they were still located primarily in the Punjab, the fertile area drained by the five rivers of the Indus system, but by 600 B.C.E. the Indo-Aryans had gained political and social dominance over the Gangetic plain and throughout much of northern India.

The Ṛg Veda

The religious beliefs and practices of this community are contained in a corpus of texts called the Vedas. Since the term Veda comes up frequently in all discussions of Indian religious history, it is helpful to consider briefly some of its meanings and usages. The term derives from the verbal root vid, “to know,” and so the broadest meaning of Veda is “knowledge,” more specifically knowledge of the highest sort, religious knowledge. It denotes several compendia of religious knowledge composed in an early form of Sanskrit (the “perfected” language) by the Indo-Aryan community, the four Vedic “collections” (samhitā): the Ṛg Veda, Yajur Veda, Sāma Veda, and the Atharva Veda. Supplementary compositions were attached to each of these four Vedic collections—namely, the Brāhmaṇas, Āraṇyakas, and Upaniṣads—and these too became part of the Veda. This entire corpus of sacred literature came to be portrayed by its proponents as revelation, something that was only “heard” and not composed by human beings. Additional texts were later added to the corpus: the Vedāṅgas or “limbs” of the Veda, auxiliary works that aimed to explain and extend the significance of the Vedas. These later texts did not have the same revelatory status as the Vedas themselves, but they did belong to the Vedic corpus in an extended sense. The Vedas constitute a huge, diverse, and fascinating corpus of texts composed over many centuries.

The earliest of the Vedic collections, and one of the world’s oldest intact religious texts, is the Ṛg Veda. It consists of 1,028 hymns, numbering around 10,000 verses, roughly equal in size to the complete works of Homer. These hymns were composed over a period of several hundred years by different lineages or families of poet-priests, and then compiled into a single large collection sometime around 1200–1000 B.C.E. This great collection was carefully memorized and transmitted orally, virtually without alterations, for almost 3,000 years by generations of religious specialists.

The hymns of the Ṛg Veda reflect the religious concerns and social values of the Indo-Aryan community as it settled in the Punjab. Most often the hymns address and praise a pantheon of deities, of whom the most important is undoubtedly Indra. The hymns portray Indra as an active, powerful, unpredictable, combative god who leads the other gods in a series of antagonistic encounters with a competing group of superhuman beings, the demons. The poets honor and extol Indra for his courage and strength, and also supplicate him to be generous to his votaries. Moreover, they view him as a model chieftain: as Indra leads the gods in defeating their enemies, the poets proclaim, so may our leaders guide us to victory over our enemies.

Indra’s paradigmatic status reminds us that the Indo-Aryans were not simply occupying uninhabited territory as they moved into the Indian subcontinent. They encountered oth...