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The Essence of Hinduism
A Sermon Given
by The Reverend Roger Fritts
on February 7, 1999
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
My younger sister is a Transcendental Mediator. When she was a teenager she started meditating for twenty minutes twice each day. She liked the relaxed feeling that meditation gave her so much that she made it her full-time vocation. In the early 1980s she graduated from Maharishi International University, in Fairfield, Iowa. Born in India about 1911, Mahesh Yogi introduced the practice of transcendental meditation to the United States in 1959. Today my sister lives with a group of meditators in North Carolina where she works teaching school. She is a vegetarian and meditates so much that nothing appears to trouble her. When we get together, she seems calm, happy, and at peace.
As her older brother, I feel it is my responsibility to challenge her monastic life style. When I get together with my sister, I tease her about the Maharishi's claims about levitation. She smiles politely. When she meditates, I encourage my children to talk to her to see if we can break her concentration. She patiently laughs and goes back to her mantra. I suggest that she get a husband, a few children and a mortgage so that she will feel the anxiety that the rest of us feel. She smiles and says that each of us has his own path to follow in life.
However, I do get a reaction from her when I say that Transcendental Meditation is a branch of the Hindu religion. In response, she insists that Transcendental Meditation is a technique, not a religion.
In fact, she has a point. Hinduism and the Hindu religion are names that outsiders have applied to a variety of activities that occur on the Indian subcontinent. The word Hindu comes originally from the Sanskrit name for the river Indus, Sindhu. The Persians changed the "S" sound to an "H" sound and pronounced it Hindu. Over time the Persians started calling all the land near and beyond the river, Hindu. The English started using the word about 175 years ago. In 1829 the word Hinduism was first used as a name for the highly diverse beliefs and practices of the millions of people living in India. This collection of different opinions and customs displays few of the characteristics that we generally expect of a religion. For example:
- Hinduism has no major founder. Judaism has Moses, Buddhism has the Buddha, Christianity has Christ, and Islam has Mohammed. Hinduism, however, has no single originator.
- Hinduism has no creed, no doctrine, and no dogma to which all Hindus are required to agree.
- Hinduism has no specific scripture, no New Testament, no Koran, no Torah. It has many different scriptures, but none that people regard as uniquely defining.
- Finally, no ecclesiastical organization perpetuates Hinduism.
Hinduism is a collection of different beliefs and practices of people who live in India. Outsiders have lumped these together under one name, and some object to this classification. Thus, for example, my sister insists that Transcendental Meditation is not a branch of Hindu religion. It is, she says, a technique for reducing stress and anxiety invented by people who lived in India.
However, the root of the word "religion" comes from a Latin root that means to connect or to tie, or to bind together. Originally the word religion described the act of connecting, or tying all the different experiences that we have in life into a meaningful whole. In this sense Hinduism is a religion. Hinduism is the name given to the efforts of 650 million people (90 percent living in India) to bind together the many different experiences of their lives into a meaningful whole.
Is there anything that all Hindus have in common, other than the fact that they all come from India? Does the variety of Hindus doom any attempt to describe the basic teachings or the fundamental beliefs? In spite of the great differences in Hinduism, my reading suggests that certain underlying presuppositions make up an essential core of Hinduism.
God
In America the first question we often ask about religion deals with God. Most Hindus have an idea of an impersonal absolute, or universal, soul that underlies the diversity within the cosmos. Often called Brahman, this absolute, universal soul exists, simultaneously, both within a domain of our reality and beyond the limits of ordinary experience and knowledge. Broadly speaking, the Hindu position (in as far as a single Hindu position exists) is a mixture of pantheism and monotheism.
Hinduism is pantheistic in that Hindus equate God with the forces and laws of the universe and in the sense that Hinduism is inclusive. Under the principle of the chosen deity, Hindus accept that all individuals may worship their preferred deity exclusively as the supreme god. Furthermore, Hindus do not deny or oppose other deities and beliefs. They accept these as valid for others, although not regarded as of the same order of excellence as one's own deity. For example, a believer of Vishnu will subordinate all the other major gods, seeing them as servants or manifestations of the one supreme Vishnu.
A list of all the various deities worshiped in India suggests polytheism. However, Hinduism is not polytheist. For each individual there is one supreme God and various other spiritual powers. These other spiritual powers merit respect, and perhaps worship, but they are subordinate manifestations of one God. Hindus are monotheistic in that they believe that one God, one creative force, underlies the diversity within the universe.
Ethics
Most Hindus agree the goal of life is to work to be at one with Brahman, or God. We reach at-oneness by living in harmony with dharma. Dharma is the unchanging universal law of order. The eternal dharma decrees that every entity in the universe should behave according to the laws that apply to its own particular nature. Hindus believe that patterns exist in the universe. They believe a cosmic order exists. Dharma is the unchanging universal law of order that decrees that every entity in the universe should behave according to the laws that apply to is own particular nature.
At the human level, dharma is the source of moral law and describes the right way of living for Hindus. A general code of ethics applies to everyone. It includes injunctions to do meritorious acts such as going on pilgrimages and making charitable endowments. This general code of ethics also includes prohibitions against causing injury and lying. Each person gets religious merit by following these laws of order that apply to all humans.
Besides this general code of ethics, each of the four classes of society has specific duties. Most Hindus believe that people's duties vary according to who they are and where they are in life. All people are born into the same caste as their parents. Their families teach them to marry within that caste and to work in a job related to that caste. The four classes of society are the priests and teachers, the rulers and warriors, the merchants and cultivators, and the servants who do the menial work.
Caste-linked dharma can also determine what work a person may do, whether he may eat meat or drink alcohol, and whether widows may remarry. What one caste finds acceptable another does not, so that dharma produces morality based on conformity to custom backed by social sanctions.
If a member breaks his caste's purity rules, the pollution he incurs can affect the whole caste group, so the social sanctions against the offender can be severe. For example, imagine that a member of the rulers and warriors has polluted himself by lying. This violation of dharma, this violation of the laws of order that apply to all humans, pollutes the whole caste of rulers and warriors. The other caste members would require that the offender perform ritual acts of purification before he is entitled to resume full caste rights. Many ways exist for coping with the different types of pollution, but a particularly common one is the use of running water. A pious Hindu's morning bathing is not simply a wash, but a ritual purification to bring him to the state of purity considered necessary in Hinduism.
The family has the primary responsibility for transmitting dharma from one generation to another. They teach by example and by telling stories and myths. The nature of the Hindu family helps the handing down of dharma from one generation to the next. Most children accept the structure of authority and the follow the roles and responsibilities that their extended family teaches them.
Death
Dharma is tied to the Hindu view of death. Most Hindus believe in the doctrine of reincarnation. This is the belief that each of us has a soul and that our souls are involved in a cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Reincarnation is tied closely to the doctrine of karma. Karma is the belief that the actions during the previous life determine the conditions of each person's birth. Every action produces its inevitable result. Therefore, our conduct in our former life determines our status in this life. Actions that deviate from dharma increase an individual's store of demerits. Thus, for example, a person in the ruler and warrior caste who is guilty of lying, will build up a store of demerits.
To follow dharma is meritorious, and especially meritorious are such acts as pilgrimage and making gifts to priests or teachers. The merit so attained adds to one's store of merit. Certain rituals, such as bathing in the Ganges, make amends for sins and increase the store of merit of an individual. The balance between sin and merit will eventually determine, through the law of karma, how a person is born in a future life. A person may be reborn as an insect, an animal or as a human. If reborn as a human, the law of karma will determine the status. Most Hindus use the law of karma to explain a person's present status and situation. However, thoughts of future lives do not generally act as a factor in determining immediate behavior. The accumulation of merit through following dharma is an end in itself.
Another idea central and essential to Hinduism is liberation. People work to achieve liberation from the cycle of birth and rebirth. The immortal part of the human passes at death to a variety of heavens and hells. There the soul works out its karmic debt and is then reborn in the form it deserves. This cycle continues endlessly unless the soul merits, or is blessed with, a lifetime during which it attains liberation. In that case, the soul passes out of the cycle. One method of achieving liberation is renunciation, in which the ascetic abandons home, society, the world and all its bondage. Through this renunciation, usually by enduring extreme austerities and practicing some form of yoga, a person seeks to become liberated while still alive. In India today hundreds of thousands of persons have renounced worldly pleasures with the goal of achieving oneness with God.
What is it like to achieve liberation and oneness with God? One school of thought says that the liberated soul of a human is identical with Brahman. In this view the Brahman absorbs the liberated soul as the ocean absorbs a drop of water. At the other end of the spectrum are those who hold that the immortal soul of a human being maintains its individual identity. In this view the liberated soul lives in an eternal relationship with God.
The same way humanity is subject to cycles of birth and rebirth, Hindus believe the universe itself goes through cycles of dissolution and re-creation within immense time spans. Hindus believe that cycles exist in the universe, cosmic sequences of creation, maintenance and destruction with the conception of time almost endlessly repeating. It is not unlike the western scientific explanation for the origin of the universe in a big bang. Hindus would have no trouble with the idea that sometime in the distant future the universe will fall back into itself and creation will begin again in another big bang.
This is the essence of Hinduism:
First: Most Hindus have an idea of an impersonal, absolute soul that underlies the diversity within the cosmos. Often called Brahman, this comprehensive, boundless soul exists within a domain of our reality and beyond the limits of ordinary experience and knowledge.
Second: Most Hindus agree that an order, a pattern, called dharma, exists in the universe and every entity in the universe has a responsibility to behave following the laws that apply to its own particular nature. At the human level, dharma is the source of moral law and describes the right way of living for Hindus. Besides this general code of ethics, each class of society has specific duties or right ways of living that each generation teaches its children to follow.
Third: Most Hindus believe in the doctrine of reincarnation. Each of us has a soul and our souls are involved in a cycle of birth, death and rebirth. The actions during the previous life determine the conditions of each birth. This cycle continues endlessly unless the soul attains liberation. Liberation is a state of oneness with Brahman, the universal soul that underlies the diversity within the universe.
Frankly, I see similarities between Hinduism and the practices of Unitarian Universalism:
- Like Hinduism we have no single founder. Instead, like Hinduism, our religion has evolved as the result of the work of many different people over several centuries.
- Like Hinduism we have no creed, no doctrine, and no dogma to which all Unitarian Universalist are required to agree. Instead, we hold that our beliefs will develop and grow as each generation learns more about the nature of the universe.
- Like Hinduism we have no one scripture or book that people regard as uniquely defining. Instead we believe that we gain wisdom from all the great world religions and also from the great works of science and literature.
- Like Hinduism, we do not insist on only one correct notion of God. Instead we are inclusive of people of different ideas of God. We welcome Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Pagan, Hindu, Moslem, atheist and agnostic as part of our congregation.
- Like Hinduism, we believe that there is an order to the universe. We believe we should live in harmony with the interdependent web of all existence.
- Like Hinduism, we also debate what happens to us when we die. Some like the image of the human spirit returning to the universe like a drop of water returning to the ocean. Others hold out for a continuation of individual self-consciousness after death, and still others find idea of reincarnation attractive. No one knows for sure.
- And like Hinduism, outsiders sometimes claim we are not really a religion. They complain that we lack a creed or a scripture or a single definition of God to which everyone must agree.
However, I contend that Hinduism and Unitarian Universalism can both be defined as religions. Religion is the act of connecting, or tying all the different experiences that we have in life into a meaningful whole. Both Hinduism and Unitarian Universalism help people connect experiences together in a meaningful whole, without insisting on a single-minded doctrine or a high degree of uniformity.
This may explain why my young sister and I get along, although she is a fanatic Transcendental Mediator and I am a fanatic Unitarian Universalist. With all our differences, we are nevertheless both part of religious traditions that have tried to practice toleration and inclusiveness when it comes to religious beliefs.
Next time we get together, I will fulfill my role as the big brother. I will challenge her belief in reincarnation, question her assertions about the power of meditation, and debate the merits of the odd spices she puts in her vegetarian dishes. Still, it will be a friendly debate because both Hinduism and Unitarian Universalism encourage tolerance and respect for the great diversity of human experience. In the words of the Hindu poet:
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very life of life.
In its brief course lie all the verities
and realities of your existence:
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendor of beauty;
For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision;
But today, well lived, makes every yesterday
A dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.
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