Hinduism in America

A Convergence of Worlds

Jeffery D. Long

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781474248488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Hindouisme

Read the story of two worlds that converge: one of Hindu immigrants to America who want to preserve their traditions and pass them on to their children in a new and foreign land, and one of American spiritual seekers who find that the traditions of India fulfil their most deeply held aspirations. Learn about the theoretical approaches to Hinduism in America, the question of orientalism and 'the invention of Hinduism'. Read about: · how concepts like karma, rebirth, meditation and yoga have infiltrated and influenced the American consciousness
· Hindu temples in the United States and Canada
· how Hinduism has influenced vegetarianism
· the emergence of an increasingly assertive socially and politically active American Hinduism. The book contains 30 images, chapter summaries, a glossary, study questions and suggestions for further reading.

1

What Is Hinduism? A Brief Overview

Chapter 1 Summary and Outline

This chapter gives an overview of Hindu beliefs and practices and a summary of Hindu history, with a particular emphasis on aspects of Hinduism that are especially relevant to Hinduism in America.

Defining Hinduism

Hindu Texts and Basic Beliefs

Hinduism in Practice

The Issue of Caste

The Yogas

Hindu History

Study Questions

Suggestions for Further Reading

Defining Hinduism

John Cort, a prominent scholar of Jain traditions, has rightly observed, “Anyone who has ever taught about India knows that for every true statement about India there is an opposite, contradictory, yet equally true statement.”¹ This observation is as relevant to the study of Hindu traditions as it is to the study of India as a whole. Any attempt to summarize the entirety of Hindu belief and practice is bound to involve statements with which someone, somewhere, will disagree. Hinduism is such an internally diverse tradition, or family of traditions, that, as we shall see, there are scholars who argue that even to refer to it as an “it”—to use the term Hinduism in the singular at all—is to engage in an act of deception, or to refer to a concept with no corresponding reality. This is certainly not the view of many Hindus and is, as we shall see, problematic if it is taken to an extreme. It does, however, point to just how incredibly varied Hinduism is. One textbook on Hinduism, in fact, makes this point in its title: Living Hinduisms.²

As we saw in the last chapter, the very terms Hindu and Hinduism have some controversy attached to them. For most of history, the people who adhere to what is now called Hinduism did not use the term Hindu at all to speak of a singular religious tradition. They referred, rather, to what would now be regarded as Hindu “sects”: traditions with names like Vaiṣṇava, Śaiva, Śākta, Sāṃkhya, Yoga, and so on.

With that being said, most (though by no means all) Hindus today have embraced the term Hindu as a designation for their religious identity—and often, as we have seen, as a national and an ethnic designation as well. Hinduism, though, as a term, is less well received, with many preferring to use the terms Hindu Dharma or Sanātana Dharma. Many Hindus also express discomfort with the idea that the Hindu tradition is a “religion,” preferring to see it as dharma or a “way of life.”

For any serious religious person of any tradition, of course, a religion is a way of life. The frequently expressed discomfort one finds among many Hindus, and among practitioners of non-Western traditions worldwide, with the word religion is specifically with the idea of religion as a private orientation, largely removed from the rest of one’s existence: a distinctly modern notion of religion, which is rooted in the constitutional separation of church and state in Western democratic polities, and ultimately in Protestant Christian conceptions of religious faith and the belief through which this faith is expressed as a matter between the individual believer and God. The religious warfare of Europe, too, which emerged after the Protestant Reformation, and the desire to avoid violence of this kind have also played a role in the modern privatization of religious belief.

This modern approach to religion is often contrasted with the more holistic ideal of dharma, which encompasses one’s beliefs and spiritual practices, but also one’s day-to-day responsibilities as a member of society.³ Again, religion can have this meaning as well, but the idea of separating religiosity from the secular sphere—a largely Western preoccupation—is seen by many Hindus as a foreign concept, and not reflective of a traditional Hindu sensibility. This is one of the reasons the idea of secularism enshrined in the constitution of the Republic of India does not resonate with all Hindus. From the perspective, especially of those Hindus who are drawn to the political movement of Hindu nationalism—which sees India as a Hindu nation, in much the same way that the Christian right in the United States sees the United States as a Christian nation—the separation of religion from the state is not only unnecessary to ensure the protection of minority religious communities, but rather it is precisely the breadth and pluralism of Hindu traditions that can best provide such protection. This is, of course, a hotly contested view in India, particularly in light of modern history, in which there has been violence between Hindus and others, especially during the partition of India and Pakistan, which led to the deaths of more than a million people, and the displacement of over 15 million more.⁴

It is often pointed out by critics of the terms Hindu and Hinduism that these terms are not of Hindu origin but are distorting foreign impositions on what is really, again, a great variety of diverse traditions. Indeed, the first attested use of the term Hindu can be traced to the Persian king, Darius the Great. As Indologist Asko Parpola notes:

The etymology of “Hindu” goes back to about 515 BCE, when the Persian king Darius the Great annexed the Indus Valley to his empire. Sindhu, the Sanskrit name of the Indus River and its southern province—the area now known as Sindh—became Hindu in the Persian language.⁵

As noted in the previous chapter, the Persian pronunciation of Sindhu is the historical and linguistic source of the word Hindu. This fact is noted by scholars who aim to critique the idea of a singular Hindu tradition as a construct of colonialism, as well as by Hindus with a preference for indigenous terms, such as Sanātana Dharma, to denote the traditions by which Hindus live and practice.

In later centuries, Hindu came simply to mean Indian—an inhabitant of Hindustan, or India.

The original use of this term to refer to an ethnicity and a nationality continues to shade its meaning today. The Hindu nationalist political movement, which identifies Hinduness—or Hindutva—with Indianness, works with this understanding. For Hindu nationalist thought, as codified by one of its founding figures, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966), a Hindu is a person who is Indian by ethnicity, by nationality, and by religion.⁶

The term Sanātana Dharma, by way of contrast, has the connotation of an eternal dharma: an eternal order or way of life, with no beginning or final end point in time. It also has connotations of universality. For Hindu universalists, Sanātana Dharma conveys the idea of a religion with no boundaries, or of a deeper philosophy undergirding and encompassing all religions. Adherents of Vedānta in the modern period—a central system of Hindu thought—see this philosophy in universal terms. Hindu, with its ethnic and geographic implications, is seen as too limiting to convey eternal truth. In the words of Pravrajika Vrajaprana, one of its contemporary exponents:

Vedanta is the philosophical foundation of Hinduism; but while Hinduism includes aspects of Indian culture, Vedanta is universal in its application and is equally relevant to all countries, all cultures, and all religious backgrounds.⁷

Such a universalist understanding of a central Hindu system of thought is, of course, conducive to the extension of adherence to Hinduism beyond India, and into environments like North America. If the philosophical foundation of Hinduism is universal, it can be adopted by anyone.

The localized geographic and ethnic connotations of Hindu and Hinduism have, of course, been complicated by the rise of the Hindu diaspora and conversions to Hinduism among the non-Indian majority populations of countries to which Hindus have emigrated, as well as, within India, by the fact that many Indians do not identify, religiously, as Hindu, but rather as Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Jain, and so on. Some members of traditions indigenous to India, but distinct from Hinduism, describe themselves as “culturally” Hindu but not religiously.⁸ These persons use the term Hindu much as its etymology suggests, to refer to something native to India, and in this case, to refer to the larger religious culture of India and the many elements it includes that are shared by adherents of many distinct traditions. It is not uncommon, for example, for Jains to worship the goddesses Lakṣmī and Saraswatī, and even to frequent Hindu temples on certain occasions. This is for events and observances that are seen as part of the shared Indian—Hindu in this sense—cultural heritage. But Jains look to their distinctive Jain authorities and practices for the pursuit of mokṣa, the highest spiritual goal. It is in this sense that Jainism is their religion.

FIGURE 3 Hindu Goddesses Lakṣmī and Saraswatī, on left and right, respectively, flanking the Jain Goddess Cakreśwarī, from a Jain temple in Michigan (Photo by Jeffery D. Long).

Hinduism, as a word that refers to an ideology, a belief system, or a way of life, is a term of relatively recent coinage. It is an English word, originally used to refer to the worldviews and lifeways of the whole variety of people found in India (a term which itself traditionally referred to the entire region now known as South Asia). It excluded those religions with an Indian following that were already known to the Europeans: Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism. And though it originally included other traditions of Indian origin of which Europeans had, at that point, only limited awareness—Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism—it has come to refer, specifically, to the Indic traditions which adhere, in some sense, to the idea of the authority of an ancient set of texts known as the Vedas—a Sanskrit term which literally means “wisdom.”

Just as the geographic and the ethnic connotations of the term Hindu continue to resonate, in spite of the fact that not all Hindus are (nationally or ethnically) Indian and not all Indians are (religiously) Hindu, the extension of this term to encompass all religions of Indian origin is also a usage which continues to appear in various contexts—including the constitution of India, in which Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains are treated as Hindus.⁹

The reactions of Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains to being incorporated into some definitions of Hinduism vary enormously. It is also an issue on which feelings can be very strong and can run very deep. Some, particularly in rural areas, where religious identities are often fluid in practice, with multiple religious participation being a common phenomenon, do not mind seeing themselves as participants in a wider religious culture designated as Hindu while at the same time emphasizing the distinctiveness of their own spiritual heritage and lineage.

Others, however, sharply reject this designation and view it as an imperialistic attempt to incorporate them into another religion: in short, as an attempt at Hindu domination by definition. In light of widespread violence against Sikhs in the 1980s, as well as the fact that many Indian Buddhists are converts or descendants of converts who left the Hindu tradition in order to avoid caste prejudice, one finds this suspicion to be especially strong in these communities, although it is not entirely absent among Jains either.

The further back one looks into history, the more this issue is complicated by the traditional Indian attitudes toward religious labels and identities, which are not in the direction of singular or mutually exclusive definitions but of fluid, flexible, porous boundaries. The hardening of these boundaries has been a relatively modern development. The point here is not that everyone was once Hindu, but rather, that Indians simply did not concern themselves with this issue traditionally, as what the West calls religion was not a matter of exclusive allegiance and singular identity.¹⁰

Hindu Texts and Basic Beliefs

As already mentioned, Hinduism encompasses a range of systems of belief and practice. This is why, to paraphrase John Cort, for every true statement about Hinduism, there is an opposite, contradictory, yet equally true statement. Generalizing, therefore, about what Hindus believe and do is a difficult proposition, because one is bound to exclude someone or other even in the course of an expansive and detailed ac...