Why
am I called Hindu and my Following Hinduism?
(Compilation
for a discourse by N.R. Srinivasan, Nashville, TN, USA August 2015)
Dharma
is the true name of the Vedic spiritual tradition. Hinduism
is not the true name. In the Shastras, the Sacred Scriptures, the term
"Hindu" never appears. Hinduism is the name given by the invading
occupiers of India. By giving it this name, the Dharma taught in the Vedas is
devalued to the ethnic and cultural condition of a country and the perspective
of the Sanatana of Eternal Wisdom for all humanity is withdrawn.
Our religion is not Hinduism according to many, but then why
do we pride on it? Are we Helpless to change it? Our Gurus and philosophers tell us we follow Sanatana Dharma; it is a way of life; it is a
philosophy. If you ask an Indian villager in Tamil Nadu what his religion is, he
just says “Murugan Vazhipaadu”, “Christu vazhipadu” or “Nabi vazhipadu” or ”Sai vazhipaadu” that is I am the follower of a
particular deity or Christ or Mohamad or Sai
for he does not know what religion is. It is hard to find a word equivalent to
religion in the ancient languages of Sanskrit or Tamil. The concept of religion
was given by the descendants of Abraham. Except Christianity and Islam they
added “—ism”
as suffix in English to all followings in the
world meaning cult, doctrine or theory. These two religions however have
treated Hinduism in derogatory sense of cult for a longtime and have also often
referred their spiritual/Religious pursuits as pagan following or beliefs. Probably the suffix “–ism” was added to other
followings to tell the world that only Christianity and Islam are true
religions as defined in the English dictionaries and all other followings are
cult based. Should we then console to the situation what we cannot change
should be endured and enjoyed! Today we have Viswa Hindu Parishad active
globally and Hinduttva parading all over India saying that they are following
Eternal Tradition which made others come out with the concept of religion and
they all converge to Hinduism in ethics.
Hindus in India have changed the names of many cities in
India christened by the British earlier gradually like Calcutta to Kolkota,
Benares to Varanasi, Baroda to Vadodara, and Madras to Chennai but seem to be
in no mood to change the word Hindu. Are we to submit to the situation the word
Hindu has a foreign origin and not a religious word but
have to live with it or we can find a reasoning to make ourselves more
comfortable and dignified and tell the world the word Hindu has its origin in
Vedas and is a Sanskrit word? Logical and convincing arguments given below
based on the wisdom of a learned Swamiji (Guru) do not make us feel good about
calling ourselves Hindus and our following based on it Hinduism more so because we are not cult based. Are we to believe Indian Historians who have
twisted Indian History based on their convenience or ignorance which promotes Aryan
Invasion theory and Aryan-Dravidian conflicts? While pondering over these things I was attracted
to the title of a book “Am I a Hindu?” by Ed. Viswanathan who talks about all
Hinduism which I often quote. Why did the author feel so and chose his title?
The word Hindu is of geographic
origin as per Historians and was derived from the name originally given to the
people settled on the river Indus called Sindhu as a proper name. But people forget the word Sindhu means river
in Sanskrit, is masculine and generic. It was corrupted by foreign visitors to the word
Hindu; the Dharmic Ways of Life of a native
of Bharat was given the name Hinduism later in English.
Hindus
are identified by Western Historians as Indus Valley citizens and therefore
called Sindhus which in turn became
Hindus. Some scholars have pointed that Rigvedic people were different from
Harappan people. Some even identify Harappan people with Dravidian culture and
Indus script with Dravidian language family. The archaeological evidence, and
particularly expert archaeologists of the area, Possehl and Bridget Allchin,
tell us that Sarasvatī stopped flowing down to the ocean at about 3800 BC.
Consequently, the hymns that praise Sarasvatī as “best-river, best mother, best
goddess” etc. must have been composed before that date. Otherwise, the Indus
would have been the best river!
The
Rigvedic hymn 6.61.9 and 6.61,12 saying
that Sarasvatī (goddess and river) spread the 5 tribes beyond Saptasindhu must
also have been composed at that date or before. Then
there are certain (more than 10) common items among the Harappan archaeological
evidence that are not found mentioned in the RV but are found abundantly in
post-Rigvedic texts, especially Brāhmaṇas and Sūtras.
Also
Indus is not one of the names among ten sacred rivers mentioned in MNU. Hence no river by Indus or Sindhu seems to
have existed during earlier period Saraswati Valley civilization or known to
the civilization there. If they had
known ten rivers of present days how they could have missed the giant river
Sindhu? In all probability the name Sindhu for the Indus
river is of much later origin than Hindu civilization. Therefore the word
Sindhu just refers to the generic name river and not to the present day river Indus
or Sindhu which is associated with Hindus. Their origin goes back to Saraswati Valley Civiliztion. This also proves Aryan Invasion Theory as well as Dravidian Aryan conflict is a myth created by Western Historinas to fix the creation as 4000 B.C.E. linking it to Biblical period and fix their own history as ancient.
Scholars earlier however called this
Brahminical Faith which is the ultimate aim of all Hindu Spiritual Thought even to-day.
Brahmanas were those who wanted to attain Brahman or the Universal Soul
through austerity (Tapas) and Sacrifices (Yajnas); they were not the birth-right
based caste Hindu Brahmins of today. The Dharma they followed is called
Sanatana Dharma or Eternal Tradition. Others call it Fellowship of all Religions
from its liberal absorption of all faiths of others. The name Brahminical
Religion did not find favor with Indian Society because of the class system introduced later claiming the title
Brahmin as birth-right and class hatreds developed later being jealous of their prosperity or ego developed by Brahmins themselves
as superior class. During Vedic
days priests and Gurus were respected out of free will of the people, accepted
as their leaders and they framed laws and ruled the society. Even during Puranic Period Brahma rishis
(Vasishtha, Viswamitra, Gautama, Jaabaali, Vyaasa etc.) were respected and sought
after for advice, who often obliged to be in the Council of Ministers who
advised and directed the kings and queens in ruling the country.
Sanatana Dharma now called Hinduism
is without beginning or end and is a continuous process even preceding the
existence of Earth and the many other worlds beyond. Science today accepts
there may be other worlds in the vast universe each with its own laws. Hindus have
held this view from time immemorial. Puranas
speak of Devaganas, Rakshasaas, Gandharvas, Yakshas, Kinnaras, Kimpurushas,
Elephant-headed Humans and Horse-headed humans in different Lokas or worlds.
Recently science spotted Earth cousin by Kepler telescope. Scientists have
spotted a planet much the same size as our Earth orbiting a star that closely
resembles our sun, making it the most likely known place outside our solar
system to harbor life. Who knows how
many such planets are there?
According to Swami Shraddhaananda "The word Hindu is very much misunderstood
and paraded upon or hated. Many people have no idea how the word
originated. In India, some politicians use the words Hindu and Hindutva with communal overtones either to
promote or oppose some ideology or party. To the rest of the world, Hindu and Hinduism refer to a set of people belonging
to definite religious system.
The fact is that both the words "Hindu" and "India"
have foreign origin. The word "Hindu"
is neither a Sanskrit word nor is this word found in any of the native
dialects and languages of India. It should be noted that "Hindu" is NOT a religious
word at all. There is no reference of the
word "Hindu" in the Ancient Vedic Scriptures. Indian as per Webster
dictionary is native of India or East Indies. It is said that the
Persians used to refer to the Indus River as Sindhu. Indus is a major river
which flows partly in India and mostly in Pakistan. However, the Persians
could not pronounce the letter "S" correctly in their native tongue
and mispronounced it as "H." Thus, for the ancient Persians, the word
"Sindhu" became "Hindu." The ancient Persian Cuneiform
inscriptions and the Zend Avesta
refer to the word "Hindu" as a geographic name rather than a
religious name. When the Persian King Darious
1 extended his empire up to the borders of the Indian subcontinent in 517
BC, some people of the Indian subcontinent became part of his empire and army.
Thus for a very long time the ancient Persians referred to these people as
"Hindus". The ancient Greeks and Armenians followed the same
pronunciation, and thus, gradually the name got firmly established.
The word "India" also has
a similar foreign origin. Originally, the Native Indians used to address the
Indian subcontinent as "Bharat". As a matter of fact in Mahabharata,
which is one of the two "Itihaasas", we find reference of the word
"Bharat". As per legend, the land ruled by the great King
"Bharata" was called Bhaarat.
The ancient Greeks used to
mispronounce the river Sindhu as Indos.
When Alexander invaded India, the Macedonian army referred to the river as
Indus and the land east of the river as India. The Greek writers who wrote
about Alexander preferred to use the same name. For the Arabs the land
became Al-Hind. The Muslim rulers and travelers who came to India during the
medieval period referred the Indian subcontinent as "Hindustan" and
the people who lived there as Hindus. The
proper word to use for those people who follow the Scriptures of The Vedas is
"Sanatana Dharma", not "Hinduism" as is commonly
used."
The word India to-day remains a political
term like America representing the Secular Indian Nation. India does not grant
dual citizenship as some European countries and it is therefore proper for
Hindu Americans to forget about Indian politics and also about what goes on
with Hindus in India. But since they have many relatives in India they often get
concerned about religious conflicts with other religions in India and vice
versa. Some Hindu Muslim migrants also similarly are concerned with Pakistan
politics as they have relatives both in Pakistan and India. Indian
Christians easily blend with their Western cultured religious counterparts in America
easier than Hindus and do not build their own churches and do not worry about
India. Indian Muslims join with other
American Muslims to have a common mosque with other immigrant Muslims. Hindu Americans are a class by themselves. Jains join Hindus in America. Sikhs want to
have their own Gurudwaras too. Buddhists
also join with Buddha Vihars of different cultures of the world. Buddhists and Jains of Indian origin would
like to identify themselves with Hindu Americans than Christians and Muslims of
Indian origin. They also often visit Hindu American Temples. However here I am focusing only on Hindu
Americans with multiple traditions to come together for my search is on the
origin of word Hindu. It is strange Fiji
Hindus have their own Hindu Temples in Sacramento, California.
“Sanatana dharma is built on the
foundation of Vedas. We have to believe in Vedas to be called Sanathanists. We
have to spread the knowledge of Vedas though not on adhyayana formats as no one
today would be willing to undergo 7 or 12 years Gurukulam method of study of
Vedas. It is also anybody's knowledge that no one has completely studied Vedas
and no tutors are easily available to teach Vedas. Vedic study has become a
specialized study like any other subject for one interested to study Vedas. Sanathana Dharma is saaswatha or eternal dharma. Dharmic way of living is best under today's
circumstances for one interested in upholding Sanathana religion if I may say
so. Nativity has nothing to do with adopting a particular dharmic life style.
We always care for what others would think of us and our lifestyle. If this
attitude changes and if we can muster enough courage to adopt and practice
dharmic way of life, we will be handing over a good legacy for the youngsters
to detract them from pursuing only material things all the time and deliberately
ignoring our own inherited Sanathana dharma. Practice is a good example to set” is the
opinion expressed by one of the learned commentators Tenparai Padmanabhan on my
draft circulated.
He further comments: “Let us not be
obsessed with the word Hinduism or the word India. Hinduism is not a religion.
Vedas don't talk about religions. If we are followers of Vedas, that is Believers
(asthikas), we should not identify ourselves with religion. There are customs,
practices and traditions. These are followed by individual families and groups
of families or people who live together as communities in villages, towns and
cities. Worship of God and Goddess is a matter of faith inculcated from birth
based on usages, practices, beliefs and customs infused by family traditions.
India is a proper noun being a name given to a particular geographical location
or a country as is commonly called. Hinduism
is of course a misnomer. Let us call
ourselves as belonging to a family with a particular tradition. No need to impose one's own tradition on
others. If one acquires citizenship
of America, he is an American citizen. That is all about it. If questions of ancestral origin arises, which
seldom does now-a-days generally, explanations can be given. So is about
ancestral geographical details. Laws are made by men and for that purpose
whatever needs to be done will have of course to be done as we are a civilized
people” says Mr. Padmanbhan. He
otherwise says “go back to the village philosophy of India and forget about the
word Hindu”.
But we are constantly reminded of our
ancient past in Sankalpas (religious resolution) including the details as to
how old Sanatana Dharma is and in Abhivaadanams (lineage declaration while
prostrating) unlike other religions. Who
will erase the rubber stamp of Hindu and Hinduism from world Forum and
Individual Nations including schools and colleges in India where one is forced
to declare his religion, caste, sub-caste etc., and even for Government jobs,
though India says it is secular.
In 1995, Chief Justice P.
B. Gajendra Gadkar was quoted in an Indian Supreme Court ruling: “When
we think of the Hindu religion, unlike other religions in the world, the Hindu
religion does not claim any one prophet; it does not worship any one god; it
does not subscribe to any one dogma; it does not believe in any one philosophic
concept; it does not follow any one set of religious rites or performances; in
fact, it does not appear to satisfy the narrow traditional features of any
religion or creed. It may broadly
be described as a way
of life and nothing more”.
In order to enjoy the minority status guaranteed by the Constitution of
India and for their own egotist or economic reasons Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism,
Brahma Samaj etc., do not like to identify themselves as belonging to Hinduism to-day.
The Supreme Court of India was once forced to consider
the question whether Jainism is part of
Hinduism in 2005 and 2006. In the 2006 verdict, the Supreme Court found that
the "Jain Religion is indisputably not a part of the Hindu Religion"
In 1995, while considering the question "who are
Hindus and what are the broad features of Hindu religion", the Supreme
Court of India highlighted Bal Gangadhar Tilak's formulation of
seven defining features of Hinduism:
- Acceptance of the Vedas with
reverence as the highest authority in religious and philosophic matter and
acceptance with reverence of Vedas by Hindu thinkers and philosophers as
the sole foundation of Hindu philosophy.
- Spirit of tolerance and willingness to understand and appreciate the
opponent's point of view based on the realization that truth was
many-sided.
- Acceptance of great world rhythm, vast period of creation, maintenance
and dissolution, follow each other in endless succession, by all six
systems of Hindu philosophy.
- Acceptance by all systems of Hindu philosophy the belief in rebirth
and pre-existence.
- Recognition of the fact that the means or ways to salvation are many.
- Realization of the truth that Gods to be worshipped may be large, yet
there being Hindus who do not believe in the worshipping of idols.
- Unlike other religions or religious creeds Hindu religion not being
tied-down to any definite set of philosophic concepts, as such.
Geographic explanation of the word
Hindu would amount to whatever method or worship people followed are
whomsoever they followed as the founder of the religion to live in India they
should be called Hindu an equivalent to the word American. That means all
ancient religions Buddhism, Jainism etc., come under present Hindu Religion. This
may be acceptable within Hinduism as they have umpteen numbers of traditions
and religious practices, yet live together in harmony but not to others who
define the religion named after their follower under the Indian fold. Christianity
was already there in 54 A.D. in Kerala along with Jews and they should also be
then called Hindus. By extension of this logic all Muslims should also belong
to a Geographical group called Hindus. Why then they needed partition? Did
these people separate on political grounds owing to their allegiance to Arab Sunni
or Shia rulers and not Islam religion? On the basis of my Vedic understanding
Pakistanis do not come under the definition of Hindu. It would also mean words Hindu and Indu are synonymous and “Indian” is a Tamil version of Indu. In order not to confuse Indu in Sanskrit
meaning moon, they often times use “Indy” or “Indi” as origin for India.
In some Hindu American temples you may find sanctums for
Buddha, Vardhamana, Saibaba, Swami Narayan and others. They are all considered
popular sacred deities along with the 330 million Hindu deities though they do
not fall into the tradition of Siva, Vishnu or Sakta traditions or Shanmatas
established by Sankara in the orthodox worship.
Rigveda describes
several mythical rivers including one named "Sindhu". The Rigvedic "Sindhu" is in the
opinion of many to be the present-day Indus River and is attested 176 times in
its text – 95 times in the plural, more often used in the generic meaning river.
In our purification sloka used by priests the name of Sindhu is
mentioned after Narmada and before
Cauvery. Here the word Sindhu may
mean more the generic name, river than proper name Indus River.
Rigveda
mentions three groups of seven wandering rivers (trih sapta sasra nadiyah) and also 99 rivers in RV 10.64.8 and Nadisthuti sookta 10.75. Historians say the Sapta Sindhu region was
bound by Sarasvati in the East and by the modern Indus in the West which region
covered the five rivers Satudri, Vipasa, Asikni, Parushni and Vitasta four of
which are tributaries of Sindhu mentioned among the ten rivers as identified by
them. May be they are all mythical as several other rivers mentioned in
Rigveda. It may be noted here that the
ancient-most Rishis in Sarasvati Valley prayed on mystical Ganga and Yamuna
which they had not discovered then. Unfortunately
the Word Sindhu as proper name is missing in the ancient mantra which leaves us
for speculation as to Sindhu being amid seven holy rivers, real or mystical. To
Vedic people number seven was more important than actual identification of the
seven members. How could they have missed such a mighty river Sindhu if it was
then called by the proper name Sindhu? It may not be out of place to recall
here Saptarishis of the Avesta and also seven seas and seven climes as to the
importance of seven. The lands of Sapta
Saindhavah are often equated with Avesata’s Hapta hendu and fifteenth and
sixteenth land created by Mazda. It is however logical to conclude the proper
name Sindhu was neither known to Rigvedic people nor was named by them to relate to the present Indus
River.
In his book Land of the Seven Rivers, writer
Sanjiv Sanyal has argued that the Sapta Sindhu refers only to the Sarasvati and
its own tributaries. The Sapta Sindhu
region then only refers to a small area including Haryana and a part of north
Rajasthan but leaving out most of Pakistan.
Could this be the basis on which Indians agreed for partition? According to his interpretation, Saptasindhu
is only a small subset of the Rig Vedic terrain and its disproportionate
importance derives from it being the original homeland of the victorious
Bharata Trutsu tribe. The Sapta Sindhu region we referred in the above
paragraph cover the land located in East Pakistan and North India of present
days (land of Nadisookta ten rivers).
It is strange Brahmaputra,
Krishna and Tapti are not included in the list of seven holy rivers in the
religious hymn later composed (Gange cha Yamune chaiva) for rituals after Vedic mantras.
In the Rigveda, notably in the later hymns, the meaning of the word is
narrowed down to be the proper name as Indus River in particular, as in the
list of rivers mentioned in the hymn of Nadisthuti sookta, probably a later insertion. The
Rigvedic hymns apply a feminine gender to all the rivers mentioned therein but for
"Sindhu". “Brahmaputra” is
another male river. Sindhu is seen as a strong warrior amongst
other rivers which are seen as goddesses and
compared to cows and mares yielding milk and butter. Brahmaputra is self-evident as the name means
it is the son of Brahma. This proper name to a portion of the mighty river
flowing through many lands should have been given later. In all
probability Sarasvati is so named because Vedas are often referred to as Lakes
(Saras) implying flow of thoughts. Hence they named their first river of
acquaintance as Sarasvati to worship it almost like Vedas. I have explained in
detail how Gayatree, Savitree and Sarasvati are deified in Sandhyavandana
Mantras. When the Vedic culture forced by the drying of the Sarasvati River crossed
the presently called Indus River they should have just called it a river. Later when they moved further driven by
foreign invaders they should have named each river by a feminine name and
deified them which were then glorified by Puranas. This Sindhu meaning river
was pronounced as Hindu by Persians who probably thought it to be a proper
name.
Nadisthuti Sookta is hymn 10.75 in
Rigveda. According to linguistic
research Book 6 of the Rigveda is the oldest and the Book 10 is the
newest. The mantra contained in Rigveda
Book Ten describes ten sacred rivers in verse 5 of Nadi Sthuti hymn about which
we will talk soon. The Rishi also describes these ten rivers as moving
westwards beginning with Ganges which is not a fact. It is
more logical to go with the general meaning of the word
Sindhu meaning a river than a specific name based on Sapta-Sindhu which does
not include Sindhu. Only Yaska feels Sushomaa deified in the
Rigveda Mantra is modern Indus which seems to be highly speculative about which
Max Mueller and other Indian commentators like Sayana are silent. Indian historians identify Sushomaa with Sohan
River. Sayana takes the word Sindhu to
mean Nadi or river. The rivers Sarasvati, Ganges and Yamuna were there in the
minds of Vedic people as female water spirits even before they moved to Gangetic
Valley but not Sindhu to figure in the mantra among ten.
In the
Indian Constitution the word "Hindu" has been used in instances to
denote persons professing any religion originated in India (i.e. Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism or Arya Samaj). Further, the terms Hindu or Hindi are also
used as a cultural identity to denote people living on the other side of the River Indus. In literature we often find many poets (like
Iqbal) and Politicians (like M.C. Chagla) using the term Hindu to represent any person living on the other
side of the Indus River irrespective of religion. The term Hindu then was a geographical
term and did not refer to a religion. Towards the end of
the 18th century, the European merchants and Colonists began to refer to the
followers of religions of Indian origin collectively as Hindus. The term
Hinduism was introduced into the English language in the 19th century to
denote the religious, philosophical, and cultural traditions native to India. To them anything other than Abrahamic
religions practiced in India was Hinduism practiced by Natives. The suffix
-ism added to Hindu denotes
doctrine, philosophy or cult. More often
than not Christianity and Islam refer to Hinduism as cult or pagan religious
practices. With more than a billion adherents, Hinduism is the world's third largest religion after Christianity and Islam. The vast majority of Hindus, approximately
940 million, live in India. Other countries with large
Hindu populations include Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Suriname, Guyana, Trinidad
& Tobago, United States, Fiji, United Kingdom, Singapore, Canada and the island of
Bali in Indonesia. Fiji Hindus have
their own Hindu Temple (Sacramento Fiji Hindu Temple) for worship and do not
join the main stream of Hindus in USA while others are seen visiting Hindu
American Temples. I have not seen their worship or mantras they employ. It is
also strange in Indonesia many ballets performed have Ramayana themes played by
Muslim actors.
“Research
scholars of Indian thought have discovered the influence of Upanishads on
religious-cultural life of other nations far beyond the boundaries of India.
Gleaning through the Upanishads it is possible to have a fairly good idea of
the type of society that existed during the period of Upanishads. The country extended up to Gandhara
(Afghanistan) in the north-west, and included several kingdoms like Madra (Sailkot),
Kuru (Delhi), Kekaya (Punjab), Paanchaala (Bareilly, Kanauj
in Uttar Pradesh), Kosala (Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh), Videha (Tirhut in Bihar).
Kausaambi (Kosam in Uttar Pradesh) and Kaasi (Varanasi)” says Swami Harshananda.
I always
think of finding a remedy instead of finding fault. I know it is not possible to change the world
concept of Hindu and Hinduism. For a
while I thought why the word Sindhu should not be Sanskrit word though Swami
Shraddhnanda said it is not. Why did he
say so? These and other thoughts made me
focus on specific mantras I routinely chant as part of my Veda Parayana
(scriptural recitation). Here is a Veda
Mantra from Rigveda:
Yaddaaru plavate sindhoh
paare apoorusham |
tadaarabhasva durhano tena gachcha parastaram || (Rigveda
10-155-3)
Saayana, the famous commentator of Vedas gives the following
meaning to this verse. Here he translates Sindhu as Sea. Here Sindhu is not a
proper name or river by that name but a vast water of endless source.
“Oh Unconquerable! You follow the log of wood that comes
afloat on the sea which has not been created by any human being and worship it
all the way. Following it reach the
yonder shore of Paramapada (Abode of Vishnu)” This Veda Mantra supports the
Puranic story of Indradyumna and the origin of Puri Jagannatha Temple.
Here is a
Veda Mantra from Mahanarayana Upanishad (MNU):
Atah samudraa
girayascha sarve asmaat syandante sindhava swaroopaah |
Atahscha viswaa oshadhayo rasaascha yenaisha bhootastishthati
antaraatma ||
From him (Brahman) are born all oceans and mountains. From
him flow rivers (syandante
Sindhavah) of all forms.
From him are produced all herbs and
juices because of the fact that this Parmaatman abides as inner-self of all (MNU).
The above Mantra is also found in Mundaka Upanishad. Bhattabhaskara, well-known commentator of
Upanishads Sayana takes the word Sindhu
as denoting all sources of water
found in wells, tanks and rivers. The purpose of this whole mantra is to the
necessity of knowing Supreme as the
only source of the Universe in whatever form it exists. Contrary to our thinking Sindhu means Indus
River, presumed to be a proper name from which we got our religion named ignorantly
by Arabs and Greeks as Hindu, Sindhavah (Sindhuh Sindhoo Sindhavah) means rivers in general. Upanishads say rivers
such as Ganga, Yamuna and others flow from Brahman
alone. It may be asked how this is possible, as we perceive that they are
produced from their respective sources that are non-sentient. The answer to
this question is in the last quarter of the mantra, this Parmaatman is the
inner-self of even those non-sentient entities and so it is said that they are
produced out of those respective forms of Parmaatman. As a result we may call ourselves as Children
of Immortal Bliss (mamaivaamso Jeevabhootah).
Madhu mantras in MNU mentions “Madhu ksharanti
Sindhavah” meaning let
the rivers run sweetly. This is a prayer for acquiring power of Intelligence and for the environment conducive to the
attainment of supreme knowledge and the realization of Divine truth for which
rishis always sought rivers and their cool atmosphere. Here sindhavah is in plural meaning rivers.
We have another mantra in MNU as follows describing the
various rivers on whose banks these Rigveda scholars and their followers settled
and continued their Austerity (Tapas) and Sacrifices (Yajnas):
Imam may Gange Yamune Saraswati Sutudri Stoma(ga)m sachataa
Parushniyaa |
Asakniyaa Marudvridhe Vitastaya-Arjakeeye
srinuhyaa Sushomayaa ||
Oh Ganga, Oh Yamuna, oh Sarasvati, Oh Sutudri, Oh Marudvridhaa, Oh Aarjakeeyaa come
together and listen to this hymn of mine along with Parusni, Asakni, Vitasta
and Sushoma. [With simplicity of a guileless child they prayed to these liquid
divinities to be present in their own bodies through their daily needs of
worship.]
This Mantra is a Jagatee
stanza from Rigveda for the invocation of the Regents of various holy rivers in
connection with purification rites. It mentions ten deified names of rivers
among which no proper name Sindhu River is
mentioned. How could they have missed the name of such a
great river Sindhu? Therefore the word should
be a generic name meaning river in general in the previous mantra and not the proper
name of present day river Indus. Vedas do not mention about all the sindhus (rivers)
in the world and they have only mentioned about the rivers on the banks of
which Vedic rishis settled in Bharata Khanda, deified them and so Indus river should have been missed whose
generic name in Sanskrit foreigners should have thought as proper name and christened
it Sindhu river which Greeks called Indus.
Of course Jagadguru Chandrasekaharendra Sarasvati briefly mentions Sage Kapila lived in California
and its name came from Kapilaaranaya. In
our Sankalpa priests refer to USA as Aindra Khanda. If that is so, why we do
not find the sacred names of rivers in USA and elsewhere in Vedas? These are
all speculations.
Vedic Rishis often expressed their devotion and gratitude to
their life-sustaining and purifying rivers they used by proper invocations.
Their descendants even when they had emigrated from the banks of those rivers
prayed to the river goddesses
to be present in any water which they used for their daily needs and worship.
Indians are well aware of Sindhi community amidst them and Sindhi
is a recognized language named after them. Sindhu was a kingdom of Bharata Khanda mentioned
in the Epic Mahabharata and in Harivamsa. It stretched along the banks of river
Sindhu (Indus) in the ancient era which is now part of modern Pakistan. It is
believed that Sindhu kingdom was founded by Vrisadarbh, one of the sons of
Sivi. According to the "Glimpses of Ancient Sindh" its
capital known as Vrisadarbhapura with Tulsianis, known as Sindhu, was located
at or near the location of the present town of Mishicot in Southern Punjab. The inhabitants
of the kingdoms were called Sindhus or Saindhavas. According to the Epic
Mahabharata, Jayadhratha
(the husband of Duryodhana’s
sister) was the king of Sindhus, Sauviras and Sivis.
Probably Sauvira and Sivi were
two kingdoms close to the Sindhu kingdom and Jayadratha conquered them, holding them for some period
of time. Sindhu and Sauvira seem to be two warring states fighting each other.
The inhabitants of these kingdoms were called Sindhus or Saindhavas. Sindhis of present days belong more to Sufi
culture than Sanatana Dharma predominantly to which they should have been
converted over a period while a few held on to Sanatana Dharma as Hindus. Some of the popular cultural icons are Raja
Dahir, Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, Jhulelal, Sachal
Sarmast and Shambumal Tulsiani. After independence of Pakistan in
1947, most Hindu and Sikh Sindhis migrated to India and other parts of the
world, though, in 1998, Hindus still constituted about 16% of the total Sindhi
population in Pakistan.
Sindhi Hindus also believe in tenets of
Sikhism but are predominantly Sahajdhari. As a
result, this group of Sindhis can be regarded as concurrently following both
Hinduism and Sikhism.
It is therefore clear the proper name for Indus River came
into being only during Puranic period influenced by Sindhu kingdom and not during
Vedic period. The kingdom should have
given the name to the river as Sindhu which was later called as Indus by
Greeks. The Sindhu mentioned in Vedas
may be a mythological river like the many mentioned in Vedas. This is obvious
because its name does not figure in the sacred rivers mentioned in MNU while
Gang-Yamuna-Sarasvati is mentioned repeatedly even though the Sarasvati valley
people have not seen these rivers. It is
logical to conclude that the insignificant number of Sindhis amongst Hindu
population, though some of them or Hindus or Sikhs, do not represent the
majority of the followers of Sanatana Dharma. They may at best be called
Sindhus coming from the ancient Kingdom of Sindhu of Jayadratha. This
inglorious kingdom cannot be the cause of Hinduism. So it is also reasonable to conclude Sindhu or
Hindu simply means man of the river referring to people of Vedic culture. The inhabitants of Sindhu kingdom were called
Saindhavas and not Sindhus. Since rivers on which Vedic culture people lived always
deified the rivers they are Children of River or Children of Immortal Bliss or
Brahman. It is also questionable that Saindhavas
did not know to pronounce the name of their
kingdom as Sindhu and their lot as Sindhi properly. It is obvious the name Sindhu has originated
from the historic Kingdom of Sindhu mentioned in Puranas. This is what the learned Swami Shraddananda
says as geographic and not being Sanskrit. Brahamputra to-day is not a holy
river for Hindus (not being in seven rivers of prokshana mantra). This river is
known by its name Brahmaputra below Lohit River which joins the main river with
its different name in different countries unlike Indus in Asia or Danube in
Europe which have the same name in all the countries they pass through. Brahmaputra is called Burlang Bhuthur by Bodo
people and Yarlang Tsangpo in Tibet. It is surprising that both Indus and Brahmaputra
are male rivers and their name does not prominently figure out as rivers
deified and worshiped as water spirits! All water spirits in Vedas seem to be
female deities.
Students of
Indian history find in Vedas (MNU) ten names of these sacred
rivers on the banks of which Rigvedic period people settled at a very remote
period. Evidently they seemed to have just crossed
present day Indus which they called just a male river but moved away from it to
the banks of its tributaries to settle down.
Scholars identify Sushomaa with Sohan, Vitastaa with Jhelum, Asakni with
Chinab, Marudvridhaa with Maruwaardwaan, Parusni with Rabi and Sutudri with
Sutlej. Only Arjikiye among them seem to be mystical. This Sarasvati may be the
namesake river near Badrinath in Himachal Pradesh which is called even today so.
It is strange there is no mention of Sindhu or Indus River as such in the
Mantra.
Some believe ‘Sapta Sindhu’ mentioned in Rigveda refers to the rivers Sarasvati, Sutudri
(Sutlej), Vipasa (Beas), Asikni (Chenab), Parosni (Ravi), Vitasta (Jhelum) and
Sindhu (Indus). Among these, the Sarasvati and the Sindhu (located
in Rajasthan) were the most popular and sacred rivers that
flowed from the mountains right up to the sea. The hymns in praise of the Sarasvati
are probably some of the oldest, composed more than 8000 years ago. The
5 rivers Sutudri, Parusni, Asikni, Vitasta, Vipasa all were tributaries of Sindhu
River. Could it be with Sarasvati and Sindhu, these 5 rivers constituted the
Sapta Sindhu? The other possibility is Sarasvati, Yamuna and Ganga with four
tributaries of present day Indus River. How can we ignore Ganga and Yamuna mentioned in ten
rivers not being among seven rivers (sapta sindhu)? Sushoma is identified with Sohan River by
many. The mystery is why the name Sindhu is not appearing along with Sarasavati
in the Mantra in MNU? Saptasindhu means
seven rivers which follows sindhu is not a proper name.
In 6.61.10,
Sarasvati is called "she with seven sisters" (saptasvaasa)
indicating a group of eight rivers, the number seven being more important than
the individual members. That excludes Sarasvati. In RV 10.64.8 and RV 10.75.1, three groups of
seven rivers are referred to--tríḥ saptá sasrâ nadíyah, thrice seven
wandering rivers as well as 99 rivers. It is safe to conclude the Saptasindhu
region was bounded by Sarasvati in the east, by the Sindhu in the west and the
five in between were Satudru, Vipasa, Asikni, Parusni and Vitasta where the
main river Sindhu is just mentioned as river. Probably Vedic scholars ignored Sindhu
as sindhu is a generic name in masculine gender. Probably the seven rivers in
saptasindhu were all proper feminine names and considered holy.
In his book Land of the Seven Rivers, writer Sanjeev Sanyal has argued that the Saptasindhu
refers only to the Sarasvati and its own tributaries. Then the Sapta Sindhu
region only refers to a small area including Haryana and a part of north
Rajasthan but leaves out most of Pakistan. According to his interpretation,
Saptasindhu is only a small subset of the Rig Vedic terrain and its
disproportionate importance derives from it being the original homeland of the
victorious Bharata Trutsu tribe. This justifies India’s partition agreement in
1947.
Probably because of these disturbing facts and
speculations the sloka used in present
day use considers the seven modern accepted names as Sapta Sindhus (Ganga,
Yamuna, Godavari, Sarasvati, Narmada, Sindhu
and Cauvery) mentioned below. Godavari is glorified in Puranas to be Ganges brought from the matted locks of
Lord Siva. Narmada and Cauvery are also mentioned only in Puranas. Evidently river by name Sindhu never
existed then and so the present river Indus got its name only during Puranic
period. You please recall here the popular verse our
priests use for invoking various River divinities to water they use in worships
(Punyahavarchana, Kalasa-sthaapana etc.) given below.
Those Rig Vedic people who were adventurous should have
migrated down further and discovered many more river banks for settlement
deifying them which made later religious writers to come up with the hymn:
Gange cha yamune chaiva
Godaavari Saraswatee | Narmade Sindhu Kaveree jale-asmin sannidhim kuru ||
[Oh waters of Ganges, Yamuna, Godavari, Sarasvati, Narmada
and River Cauvery please make your holy
presence in these waters!] Evidently
this is not a Vedic Mantra but a prayer introduced by Aagamas or religious
authorities.]
Here from Vedic point of view Sindhu should mean river only
and not Indus. Probably Aagamas wanted
to give Cauvery also same status (calling it Sindhu Cauvery), as other sacred
rivers, the place of settlement of Vedic culture
population. Those people were quite familiar with the river valleys from which
they came down further South and so they constantly paid respect to Ganga,
Yamuna and Sarasvati as observed in the purification hymn. Notably there is no mention of Brahmaputra
anywhere though it carries the name of Brahma as a male river, Tapti and also
Krishna named after most popular Avatar which is considered holy by present day
Hindus besides many smaller sacred rivers like Tungabhadra.
“Our ancestors always lived on the
banks of the rivers. They started their lives on the banks of Sarasvati River
which is mentioned in Vedas. When it
dried out they crossed the river Sindhu and settled on the land to the east of
it covered by its tributaries near various river beds. “They
often expressed their devotion and gratitude to these life-sustaining and
purifying rivers by proper invocations. Their descendants even when they had
emigrated from the banks of those rivers prayed to the river goddesses to be
present in any water which they used for their daily needs and worship. With
the simplicity of a guileless child they prayed these liquid divinities to
be present in their own bodies through
the connection of water which they used (prokshana). They also entreated them
to purify their bodies and minds to vouchsafe them safety and welfare” says
Swami Vimalannda reviewing the commentary of Saayana on MNU. Driven by foreign
invaders, they moved further and settled on Ganges-Yamuna-Sarasvati Rivers
(Triveni) and later to other river banks as they expanded. Probably Sarasvati was always there in their
mind though it dried out or may be the small river Sarasvati near Badrinath
which they thought made its way to Prayaag. No such religious thought existed
on Sindhu and most of them called it just a river though they had sacred names
for its five tributaries. Perhaps later
Aagamas in their mantra wanted to christen it as Sindhu and Deify (Narmade
Sindhu Kaveri) based on occasional reference to Sindhu as proper name in
Vedas. I believe conceiving Sindhu in Vedas as proper name was a later thought
or insertion along with Nadee sookta.
Our sages were Braahmanas, meaning
seekers of Brahman and are not the present day Brahmin caste that claim their
title by birth-right. “Braahmanaah santu nirbhaayah”—May the Braahmanas live without fear
is the popular benediction prayer. Here Braahmanas referred to are those who
study Vedas and seek Brahman. They
performed their daily rituals of Sandhyavandana standing in knee deep waters
and practiced Aasanas, Pranayama and Samadhi on the banks of the cool rivers as
a part of their Rajayoga practices contemplating on Brahman. To them “Aapah
sarvaa devataa aapo bhoor bhuvah suvah aapah
om” --all deities are
water. The three worlds denoted by Bhuh, Bhuvah and Suvah are Water. The source of all these is the Supreme,
denoted by the syllable Om (MNU). Thus the sages eulogized Supreme Being as Water alone
(please recall my discourse Water is verily Brahman). “Yo maam pasyati sarvatra
sarvam cha mayi pasyati”
says Bhagawaan in Geeta—He who sees me
everywhere and sees me in everything existing in Me, I am never out of sight
for him. Sages thus visualized Brahman looking at the river and living by the
river practicing Yoga, tapas (austerity) and Yajnas (sacrifices) seeking
Brahman. They attained Brahman through body cleansing, Yoga and meditation
practicing Self-control (dama), Compassion (daya) and Charity (daana). River was verily Brahman to them and so they
called themselves Sindhus, progeny of river and their ethics was therefore Sindhu tattva or Sidhutttva meaning
riverine theology which later got corrupted to Hindu and the following
to Hinduism or Hindu doctrine. I use the
word theology because “Theology” means the study of religious/spiritual faith,
practice and experience as well as the Study of God and his relation to the
world. I still recall my little
ancestral abode on one of the banks of the River Cauvery in the small township
called Nadipuram from which I derive my family name implying I am son of the
soil Nadipuram which in turn derives its name from River Cauvery which means I
am Son of the River. You know why Bhishma was called Gangeya because he was
born to Spirit Ganga or Gangadevi. I am
thus doubly blessed to be Hindu. My ancestors were Vedic scholars and priests
who practiced Tapas and performed Yajnas on the banks of Cauvery
though I am a prodigal son of the soil having moved away from it attracted by
worldly pains and pleasures.
It is surprising that in Hindu Culture when we
prostrate before elders we only announce our lineage as belonging to ancient
sages, Gotra and our Vedic branch of study and not our family name or parents to
identify ourselves. That constantly connects us to our ancestral sages of
Sindhu origin and Sindhuttva. My Gotra
is from Atreya Rishi; I am a descendant of Atreya, Aarchanaanasa and Syaavasva Rishis-lineage
and a student of Yajurveda and follower of Aapastambha
sootra. That takes my heritage back to Sindhuttva
or Hinduism. It is in the Hindu
tradition to link only with the ancient past the present and not family. That
is why we held on to the word Sindhu though our traditions multiplied and
varied as days advanced. Hinduism is thus a way of life and not any religious
following though others force that title on us as belonging to Hindu Religion
and also blame us often for our multifarious ethical, religious and spiritual
pursuits. May be Sindhuism is the source and an amalgam of all religions.
My own thoughts on the subject are as follows: “Sarasvati is
the power (Sakti) aspect of Brahma the creator and therefore she is the one who
materializes the conceptualization of Brahma. In Vedas she is projected as
water spirit and her name Saras suggests she is the “Flowing One”. The earliest human
creation took place on the banks of River Sarasvati and so the four sages were
the sons of Sarasvati. She was affectionately called Sindhu. When Sarasvati dried up, humanity moved to the
banks of the river Indus, which they also called affectionately as Sindhu. Then the humanity moved to Gangetic plain and
there they found number of rivers which they called by several names. In
Sarasvati Sahasranama, found in Rudra Yamala Tantram, Sarasvsati is addressed
as Ganga, Chandravati, Gomati, Yamuna Nadi, Vipasa, Sarayu Thapti, Vitasta,
Gandaki, Narmada, Kaveri etc.,
referring to Sarasvati of Vedas as water deity with several names as is for
Vishnu in Vishnu Sahasranama. Sarasvati
thus manifested in all rivers. They were
all addressed as Sindhu and the word Sindhu became generic for all rivers. Then
on, Sindhu meant all waters that flow specifically referred to river. Humanity
wholly depended on rivers for their
lives and they were all called Children of River or Children of
Sarasvati or Parasakti or Goddess or Sindhus which later was mispronounced as
Hindu.”
The above explanation would give us
mental satisfaction as to why we are called Sindhus. We can also pride on our religion as Sindhuism.
Sindhuism would then mean people who
practice tapas and sacrifices directed to Brahman settled on river banks. Tapas come from the root tap means heat and light meaning to give
heat and light. It is an activity of mind or body which demands keen
concentration of thought or effort requiring unusual and continuous physical
strain and heat. Therefore they always went in search of an ideal place for
such an endeavor. Cool and calm river
banks were ideally suited. Our religion
can also console to the name better knowing that we are a group of people
disposed towards ancient Vedic Tradition later called Santana Dharma who always
worshiped waters, as Vedas proclaim Aapo vaa idam Brahma water is Verily Brahman. It is called Sanatana (ancient and
eternal) because Sanatana Dharma was the fore-runner of all traditions and
religions later. We have thus
satisfaction for our spiritual following being called followers of Hinduism for
our theology and ethics and not religion when being addressed as Hindus in complementary or derogatory sense of Pagans and as recognized
by all in the world including India to come under the concept of world
religions to identify as a major group. Probably that is why we always run with a
water bottle as Hindu Americans! It is
called Hinduism because it still
allows free flow of thoughts as a
perennial river.
Others may ask how we can identify
ourselves with river and our ethics as riverine theology. Who is a Christian? Christian means anointed. “I am the Resurrection and Christ sayeth the Lord for whosoever
believeth in me though he is dead yet shall he live” says Jesus in the Holy
Bible. I am Christ echoes like Vedic maxim “Aham brahmaasmi”.
Christianity is INRI
Religion. (Iesus=Jesus of; Nazarenus=Nasareth: Rex=King of the; Iudaeorum=Jews). Islam means submission which is extrapolated to
mean
submission to the will
of Allah. This is otherwise Saranagati submission to the Supreme Being. If Christianity can be defined as “Christ the
King Religion” and Islam as “Submission to Allah Theology” then the theology of
Sindhus can be Sindhuttva (Sindhu Tattva), meaning Sindhuism, Riverine Theology
used in its corrupted (by others) form as Hinduism. Sindhu could also mean blessed by the river
or Brahman and so we are all Children of Immortal Bliss for Vedas say Aapo
vaa idam Brahma--water
is verily Brahman. It could mean our dedicated submission to water element from
all sources which we consider as Brahman alone. You are well aware how Siva is
worshiped as water element. The ethics we practice is then Sindhuism or Riverine
doctrine. The terms Sidhu and Sindhuism later got corrupted to Hindu and
Hinduism. This leaves the terms India and Indian as geographical terms, identification as a Nation and its citizen.
In the light of the above I may not
be wrong if I say Hinduism can be summed
up as “Riverine Philosophy (Sindhu tattva or Sindhu Philosophy)”. It has symbolic significance to mean to attain
salvation. This refers to the acts of purification
or cleansing (body and mind), meditation, surrender and merging with the
Supreme. In practical terms a seeker symbolically purifies himself in running water, meditates
with free flow of thought on the river
banks in cool and calm atmosphere (Tapas and Yajna), takes a dip in the water (Saranaagati or surrender), completes his Soorya
Namaskar and loses his individual
identity when liberated. I here recall a
pun-loaded hymn from the famous poet Kalidasa glorifying sacred Ganga which in
the mind of a pleasure seeker can be wrongly translated to suit his animal taste
which I avoid:
Vesyaastree
darsanam punyam sparsanam paapanaasanam |
chumbanam
kaamitaarthaaya maithunam Mokshasaadhanam ||
The very sight of Ganges brings
religious merits; coming in contact with its water will wash off sins;
Aachamanam or sipping will yield desired results: and dip in it is highway to
heaven.
In support of Sindhuism (Hinduism),
Riverine Theology I draw my support further from the very
popular and oft quoted Veda Mantra:
Yathaa
nadyah (sindhavah) syandamaanaah samudre astam gachchanti naamaroope vihaaya | tathaa
vidwaan naama roopaat vimuktah paraatparam purusham upaiti divyam. ||
(Mundakopanishad III-ii-8)
As flowing rivers get themselves
disappeared in the ocean losing their special names and distinct forms, so the
wise man free from all his identifications with names and forms goes
unto the highest of the high—the Supreme Divinity. (The other name for Nadi is Sindhu).
A wise man (Pundit) through Saadhana
Chatushtaya (fourfold practice) of Purification, Praayaschitta (atonement),
Upaasana (Meditation), Nyaasa or Saranagati (submission) attains Mukti
(liberation). This is the Universal path ( of Dharma) open to all mankind and does not fall under
the definition of Religion but a Theology
and that is what Hinduism is, which
is symbolically called Sindhu Tattva or
Sindhuttva (Hinduttva in its anglicized form) or Riverine Theology. You know British anglicized many names
Chattopadhyaaya as Chatterjee.
Based on this Sindhuttva Philosophy
Bhagavad Gita says all religions lead to the same Universal One Source that is
Paramaatman, Cosmic Soul, just as all
rivers lead to same Ocean. The aim of the Gita doctrine is to lead one
to tranquility, happiness and equanimity (as experienced while doing
penance on river banks). It therefore
prescribes no rituals. Gita says, world needs different religions, cults and
deities to meet the vastly different needs of individuals. We need many rivers
to live on. These religions merge
ultimately with Sanatana Dharma. Sindhuttva known
as Sanatana Dharma by the ancients is beyond Religious and National boundaries.
Sanatana Dharma now called Hinduism but
not aptly followed is without beginning or end and is a continuous process even
preceding the existence of Earth and the many other worlds beyond. That is why
it is called Sanatna or Eternal. It is in the culture of Hindus to stay ever
connected to the past as could be learnt from their present religious practice
of taking a religious resolution (Sankalpa) before any worship or ritual. The
Sankalpa connects the date of performance to the beginning of
creation, the position of stars in the sky at the time of performance, one’s origin (gotra) and also
say how long present cycle of cataclysm will last. Have you ever thought of it when you take
Sankalpa before any worship? It is because we mechanically do things without
understanding!
Hinduism as we practice today is a more
recent nomenclature given to conglomeration of heterogeneous traditions of
plurality of beliefs and worship with a long list of development from
the Vedic sacrificial religion through the worship of epic and Puranic heroes
and personal deities, cults and sects, as well as philosophical systems rather
than to a monolithic tradition or theology based on single system of belief and
worship or a single text as scripture. You see how complicate we have made the
Eternal Concept of Sanatana Dharma! We are adding more and more to these complications. Are we confusing ourselves without convincing
ourselves which needs study of Vedas which most of us have long back given up?
“By definition,
Hinduism is Vedic Agamic. The Vedic Rishis spoke of the river Sindhu, and it is
best to retain the word ‘Hindu’ (the Persians having changed the word slightly)
so that the historically grounded origins of Hinduism are preserved and do not
get lost in a refined Vedantism” says an article “Punya Bhumi—The Homeland of Vedic Agamic
Hinduism by Vijaya Rajiva in IndiaDivine.Org May 2013”.
In my desire to know
truth, I went deep into Vedas to find the Truth about Hindu and Hinduism not
believing in Geographical and Historical Explanations. I came with the
Revelation that Hinduism is Riverine Theology which tells me that all religions
(rivers) lead to One Source (ocean) Tadekam and contributes to the Universal
Oneness and Sanatan Dharma which is again universal and beyond all boundaries
of Nations and Religions and even beyond the world we live in called Mother
Earth. Even Devas were bound by Sanatana Dharma. It also calls for no rituals or deity worship
to achieve the goals though they serve as inspirations. It also brings home two
facts how important Vedic studies are and how in Vedas we can find an answer
even to our present day puzzling problems.
We often address good Lord as
Dayaasindhu and Jnaanasindhu meaning Ocean of compassion and Ocean of
Knowledge. This is based on Saayana’s commentary on the word Sindhu found in
Veda Mantra. Sindhu could mean well, lake, river or ocean (Koopa, Saras, Nadi
or Saagara). So Sindhuja or Sindhu in its anglicized form HINDU means Children
of River or God. Sindhu Tattva (Sindhttva) in its anglicized form Hinduttva or
HINDUISM means Riverine Theology. Hindu (Sindhu) is one who seeks Brahman
(Saagara) which is the tenet of Sanatan Dharma.
India has developed
its civilization not out of mere human invention or according to any special
historical revelation, but from the concept of dharma, recognition of cosmic law as the prime
factor in life. India has remained a land of both nature and the spirit, a land
of the Gods and the yogis, not simply a place of human habitation or a ground
for worldly progress. Sindhu meaning
river (water spirit), however, is not simply the outer river but represents the
inner stream of wisdom and inspiration, what was later called the Sushumna or
central channel of the subtle body. That
is why we are called Sindhus or Hindus.
Probably there is no
Hindu house without a picture of Sarasvati hanging in the house. Sarasvati as
the power of Brahma is the creator and
was responsible for the earliest human life that sprung on the Sindhu, the
river. They were thus children of Sarasvati. Goddess Sarasvati is a river or
Sindhu in Sanskrit worshiped as Water Deity.
It is no wonder Hindus are children of Sindhu and hence called Sindhus
which Arabs mispronounced as Hindu. This
is not abnormal while Puranas talk about Bhishma as Gangeya or the Son of River
Ganga. We are called Sindhus because that was the only River (Sindhu) known to
humanity at that time that was Sarasvati also called Sindhu which means River.
Philosophically Sarasvati means “the flowing One” which means she is
responsible for the human flow (moving of Praana in the Nadis) that lead
to Saagara (Brahman), ocean for ultimate merger. In Vedas Sagara is
glorified as Brahman (Vyaahriti) which I have described in detail. All rivers flow towards Sagara the ONE Source
to merge with it and lose their identity. All religions lead to One Source
called Saagara or Tadekam. So we are all children of God or Children of the
River or Sarsvati, Parasakti.
Hinduism (Sindhu Tattva) is a
perennial (Sanatana) river (Sindhu) that floods all religious and spiritual
thoughts and carries with it all of them to join the Ocean of Universal Oneness
(Supreme Being).
People must learn to
let their inner rivers, the channels, currents and naadis (rivers) of the soul
flow again with all their vibrancy to call themselves as Hindus. Unless our
inner rivers are flowing, our outer lives will remain dry and empty, dependent
upon an external world of want to sustain a mirage of happiness. Let us join together in creating a
harmonious, conscious and spiritually evolved existence through awakening the
higher Self, empowering the divine grace within, and embracing the Inner World
of Shakti!
[The
Sanskrit word naadi derives from the root nad, which means “flow,” “motion,” or
“vibration.” The word itself suggests the fundamental nature of a naadi: to
flow like water, finding the path of least resistance and nourishing everything
in its path. The naadis are our energetic irrigation system; in essence, they
keep us alive. They are the body rivers of energy.]
Mahidasa
was denied the privilege of sitting on the lap of his father Itaraa, the
mother, who was perhaps from the potter community. She noticed the sad plight
of her son and prayed to her Ishta Devata, Goddess Earth, who appeared in a
divine form, placed Mahidasa in a celestial seat and imparted unrivaled
Wisdom. Thus was born, out of the potter Mahidasa, the Proletarian Rishi, the
sage of the Laborers, and Son of the Soil, Seer Aitreya, who attained God-hood
and authored the scripture of the common-man, and sang the song of Sindhu
Culture from a hut of the “slum”. Let us develop that Sindhu Culture!
Even the Creator is not free to
create a world He likes. We with our actions--known and unknown—are making the
blue-prints of our future. The Lord is but a contractor, who executes our
plans, as we give it to Him, asserts Swami Chinmayanada. We alone are responsible for the miseries in society. Let us build a culture of Peace, Harmony and Universal Oneness to fulfill His wish of "Sarve Janaah Sukhino Bhavantu!"
India has been changing the old names correcting Apabrahmsas
(wrongly pronounced names) of late--Calcutta to Kolkata, Baroda to Vadodara,
Madura to Madurai etc., and getting it
accepted by all Nations in the world.
Based on the detailed studies above it would be proper to call ourselves
as SINDHUS and our following SINDHUTTVA (Sindhu Taattva) and India to SINDHU
RAASHTRA. (We call international as Antar-raashtra already) The word Sindhu should be acceptable to all
religions in India as Sindhu means river which may mean Land of Many Rivers.
Please go through the article on Ujjain, the Strolling City in Mdhya Pradesh reproduced in the Appendix. The article says originally Harappans migrated to this city and were responsible for its ancient culture. It also says Harappans were Riverine People or River Valley Cultured people as analysed above and not histoic Aryan Migrants settled on Indus River Valley from whom we inherit our name Hindu.
It may be Sindhu could be interpreted as Sagra or Ocean. I have come across following interpretation from an article on Yoga “The word Hindu comes from a geographical location. The people who lived
within the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean or the Hindu Sagara were
called Hindu. Anything born in this region is Hindu. An earthworm born
here is Hindu, as an elephant born in Africa is African. If yoga is
Hindu, then gravity is Christian.” Evidently he implies Patanjali was not called a Hindu then which word was coined later for those who lived on the land enclosed by Sindhu Sagara and Himalayas and therefore Yoga is not exclusive to Hindus but Indians including those that opted out of India.
REFERENCES:
1.
Swami Vimalananmda, Mahanarayana Upanishd, Ramakrishna Math, Chennai, India.
2. Anantarangacharya, Principal
Upanishads, Bengluru, India.
3. Ed Viswanathan, Am I A Hindu? Rupa
& Co., Delhi, India.
4. Swami Harshananda, Ten Cardinal
Upanishads, Ramakrishna Math, Chennai, India.
5. Wikipedia and other Internet
sources as well as comments received from scholars.
6. Shakuntala Jagannathan, Hinduism, Vakils,
Feffer and Simons Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai India.
7. Harry Bhalla, Bhagavad-Gita, International Gita Society,
Freemont, CA, USA.
8. Vradaraja Thirumale, Veda Maarga,
Sri Lakshmi Hayagreeva Trust, Bengaluru,
India.
9. Swami Chinmayananda, Aitreya Upanishad, Central Chinmaya Mission Trust, Mumbai, India
Hinduism is an open Faith and Source;
The God Project
( Courtesy: The Editor, IndiaDivine.org)
Trying
to explain what is Hinduism and the core beliefs of “Hinduism” to
an interested observer can be challenging to say the least. It is often stated
that the word “Hinduism” itself is a total misnomer, as it basically refers to
the sum total of spiritual and religious thought and practice that has taken
place on the Indian subcontinent over the past 5,000 years. And let us just say
it’s been a busy 5,000 years.
The
sheer volume of spiritual literature and doctrine, the number of distinct gods
worshiped (over 330 million, according to some sources), the breadth of
distinct philosophies and practices that have emerged, and the total
transformation over time of many of the core Hindu teachings and beliefs can be
disconcerting to those raised in monotheistic cultures, as we are used to each
faith bringing with it a defined set of beliefs that — with the exception of
some denominational rifts over the centuries — stay pretty much consistent over
time.
However,
the key point of differentiation between Hinduism and these other faiths is not
polytheism vs. monotheism. The key differentiation is that “Hinduism” is Open
Source and most other faiths are Closed Source.
“Open
source is an approach to the design, development, and distribution of software,
offering practical accessibility to a software’s source code.”
If
we consider god, the concept of god, the practices that lead one to god, and
the ideas, thoughts and philosophies around the nature of the human mind the
source code, then India has been the place where the doors have been thrown
wide open and the coders have been given free rein to craft, invent, reinvent,
refine, imagine, and re-imagine to the point that literally every variety of
the spiritual and cognitive experience has been explored, celebrated, and
documented.
Atheists
and goddess worshipers, heretics who’ve sought god through booze, sex, and
meat, ash covered hermits, dualists and non-dualists, nihilists and hedonists,
poets and singers, students and saints, children and outcasts … all have
contributed their lines of code to the Hindu string.
The
results of India’s God Project — as I like to refer to Hinduism — have been
absolutely staggering. The body of knowledge — scientific, faith-based, and
experience-based — that has been accrued on the nature of mind, consciousness,
and human behavior, and the number of practical methods that have been
specifically identified to work with one’s own mind are without compare. The
Sanskrit language itself contains a massive lexicon of words — far more than
any other historic or modern language — that deal specifically with states of
mental cognition, perception, awareness, and behavioral psychology.
At
the heart of the Indic source code are the Vedas, which immediately establish
the primacy of inquiry in Indic thought. In the Rig Veda, the oldest of all Indic
texts (and possibly the oldest of all spiritual texts on the planet), God, or
Prajapati, is summarized as one big mysterious question and we the people are
basically invited to answer it.
“Who
really knows?
Who will here proclaim it?
Whence was it produced?
Whence is this creation?
The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.
Who then knows whence it has arisen?”
While
the god of the Old Testament was shouting Commands (Commandments), Prajaapati
was asking: “Who am I?”
Since
opening the floodgates on the divine question, Indic thought has followed a
glorious evolutionary arc from shamanism, nature worship and sacrifice through
sublime and complex theories on mental cognition, the nature of consciousness,
and quantum physics.
Through
tracing the subcontinent’s relationship with the deities of the Vedas, we can
trace the course of Indic thought over the centuries. One of the first things
we notice is that not only does the people’s relationship to god change over
the centuries, the gods themselves change. Shiva, for example, appears in the Vedas
as Rudra, the howler, god of storms, still something of a lesser deity, reappearing
over the centuries as Bhairava — he who inspires fear — Pashupati, lord of
beasts, the god of yogis, and the destroyer, Shiva finally, by the 9th century,
achieves status in Kashmir as the fundamental energetic building block of the
entire universe--Neat trick.
But
as much as the gods change and the evolution of Indic thought leads us to
increasingly modern and post-modern views of the nature of reality, the old
Vedic codes still remain front and center. One of Hinduism’s defining factors
is that the historic view of god, the nature worship and shamanism, never went
away, so that god as currently worshiped exists simultaneously as symbol and
archetype as well as literal embodiment. That Shiva, for instance, could
simultaneously be the light of ultimate consciousness and an ash-smeared madman
who frequents cremation grounds is a delight to us spiritual anarchists, while
mind numbing to most Western Theologizes.
Western
and Middle Eastern monotheistic faiths have simply not allowed such liberal
interpretation of their God. They continue to exist as closed source systems.
“Generally, [closed source] means only
the binaries of a computer program are distributed and the license provides no
access to the program’s source code. The source code of such programs might be
regarded as a trade secret of the company.”
One
of the defining facts of Christian history is that access to God has been
viewed — as in most closed source systems — as a trade secret. The ability to
reinterpret the bible, or the teachings of Christ, or the Old Testament or to
challenge the basic fundamental authority of the church has been nonexistent for
most of the church’s history. Those who dared to do so were quite often killed.
In
Indic thought, there is no trade secret. The foundation of yoga is that the key
to god, or the macrocosm, or the absolute … lies within the individual and can
be accessed through a certain set of practices. It’s a beautifully simple but
ultimately profound concept that has been allowed to flourish unchecked for
millennia. The process of discovering and re-imagining the divine is in your
hands--The God Project.
What is the Antiquity of Indians
What is the Antiquity
of Indians? Dravidians had a big Kingdom long before we hear of so called
Aryans. Harappa and Mohenjo-doro were twin Capital Cities of
Dravidian Kingdom. It is these people and on their cities and on their forts
history found the Aryans whom they conjectured as invaders. Now that Sarasvati
is no longer a myth these Dravidians are the migrants from Sarasvati
valley who developed Vedic culture and were called by the respectable term
Aryans. They migrated because the River Sarasvati dried up and they went in
search of greener pastures on River banks.
Please
refer to my earlier talks on the subject. The Vedas however speak of the
Sarasvati as a very large and flowing river. If the dating of the Vedic
literature is correct, then there is a discrepancy because the Sarasvati River
dried up before the Vedas were supposed to have been written. This is an
interesting situation. It might seem possible then, that with other evidence
showing that there was no influx of an invading people, that the Vedas were
then written by the people of the Indus Valley.
Another
point that speaks against Aryan Invasion Theory is
finding of Altars at several Indus Valley Civilization sites. Fire
rituals and sacrifice were an important part of Vedic religious practices. But
what was significant about these alters, is that they were aligned and
constructed in the same manner as later discovered altars were. The fire altars
were then Vedic in construction indicating that the Harappan's were a Vedic
culture.
The
idea that there wasn't in fact an Aryan invasion is supported on many levels,
including the present day legacy of these Indus cities in the traditional
arts and crafts, and in the layout of houses and settlements in India. Please
go through a very detailed report by IndiaDivine.org on the subject. I
have circulated previously an E-mail on Indus Valley civilization:
"In
his Discourse on Sanskrit and Its Literature, given at the College of France,
Professor Bournouf states, “We will study India with its philosophy and its
myths, its literature, its laws and its language. Nay it is more than India, it
is a page of the origin of the world that we will attempt to decipher.”
In
History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, Max Mueller observed, “In the Rig-veda
we shall have before us more real antiquity than in all the inscriptions of
Egypt or Nineveh. The Veda is the oldest book in existence”
On
a more personal note, another famous German thinker, Schopenhauer, remarked in
his book, The Upanishads, “In the whole world there is no study so beneficial
and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life
(and) it will be the solace of my death.”
What are the Vedas?
Before
beginning our discussion on the antiquity of the Vedic civilization, we should
first of all understand what the Vedas are. The Sanskrit root vid means ‘to
know’. Hence Veda means knowledge. The term Vedic refers to the literature and
teachings of the Vedas. The Vedic scriptures are the spiritual literature of
the ancient Indian culture, written in the Sanskrit language. They comprise of
a huge collection of books which include material (mundane), religious
(ritualistic) as well as spiritual (monotheistic) knowledge.
The
Vedas are immense in both their size and scope. Quantitatively, the Bible and
the Koran do not compare , and the Vedas easily surpass the lengthy ancient
works such as Homer’s epics and the sacred cannon of China. For example,
Mahabharata, one of the Vedic Historical texts, has 110,000 four line stanzas,
making it the world’s largest poem – approximately eight times as old as Iliad
and Odyssey combined. Ramayana, another Vedic history, on the other hand,
consists of 24,000 couplets. The Vedic literature comprise not only of the Rig,
Yajur, Atharva and the Sama Vedas but also of Upanishads, Puranas, Bhagavad
Gita and itihasas like Ramayana & Mahabharata. It encompasses all
literature that up-hold the Vedic tradition and culture.
Talking
about the Vedic scope, it includes the nature, the universe, and a grand
hierarchy of living beings – nonhumans, humans & humanoids. There is a
large section of the Vedic literature , dealing with the detailed descriptions
of the non-material worlds beyond the entire fabric of time and space.
For
the earthly humans, however, the Vedas prescribe a balance between their
spiritual and material lives. The Vedic social system combines the material
impetus with the spiritual dynamics, and places a great emphasis on
civilization as a precise tool for both material and spiritual upliftment.
Digging
into the Past: A City Dating Back to 7500 BC
As
was announced on January 16, 2002 from New Delhi, that the Indian scientists
found pieces of wood, remains of pots, fossil bones, etc. near the coast of
Surat, Indian Science and Technology Minister Murli Manohar Joshi told a news
conference. He said, “Some of these artifacts recovered by the National
Institute of Ocean Technology from the site, such as the log of wood date back
to 7500 BCE which is indicative of a very ancient culture in the present Gulf
of Cambay, that got submerged subsequently.” Current belief is that the first
cities appeared around 3500 BCE in the valley of Sumer, where Iraq now stands.
“We can safely say from the antiquities and the acoustic images of the
geometric structures that there was human activity in the region more than
9,500 years ago (7500 BC),” said S.N. Rajguru, an independent archaeologist.
Michael
A. Credo, historian of archeology, claims that all the history textbooks would
have to be rewritten if this ancient find proves to be of Vedic origin.
According to Credo, “The ancient Sanskrit writings of India speak of cities
existing on the Indian subcontinent in very primeval times. Although historians
tend to dismiss such accounts as mythological, these new discoveries promise to
confirm the old literary accounts.”
Discovering River Sarasvati
The
legend of the mighty Sarasvati River has lived on in India since time
immemorial. The Vedic scriptures are full of tantalizing hymns about it being
the life-stream of the people.
An
Indian and French archaeological field team on the ground, coordinating with a
French SPOT satellite in space, has ascertained that the Sarasvati River , as
described in the Vedas, is fact, not mythology. Vividly exposing the signatures
of old rivers and their branches data from SPOT shows that the Sarasvati did
exist. The Satellite’s sensors and pointed optics reveal the dried bed of a
river extending from the present Gagger River and flowing four miles wide, in
the region of India, west of what is now Delhi. In what is now Punjab, the
Satellite imagery has shown the Sarasvati’s bed to be twelve miles wide. From
space, researchers can detect that Sarasvati had several tributaries, watering
an immense area of fertile soil. Traces of artificial canals watering remote
agricultural locations are also visible.
Ancient
Hindu Temples Found worldwide
A
Siva Lingam monument, a relic from the lost Champa Kingdom, stands proudly at
the My Son site in Vietnam. Images depicting the Yoni and Lingam can be found
in Hindu-influenced cultures across the entire Asian region.
A
Chankiang villager hunting for termites under a tree discovered a sharp
hand-carved stone. Further investigation revealed that the location was the
site of an ancient Vedic/Hindu temple. Only Djubiantono, head of West Java’s
Bandung Archeology Agency says, “Based on a preliminary finding of various
remains there are indications that this is a Hindu temple built in the seventh
or eighth century.”
The
ancient Nandeeshwara Temple (dedicated to lord Shiva) at Mallesvaram was
discovered only three years ago, but it has stood for 7,000 years on that spot.
Being buried over the years hasn’t diminished its aura at all. The temple was
discovered recently when the land was being dug up and it was found that the
temple had remained untouched over the years.
Nearly
40 kilometers from the Thai-Cambodia border the Chen Saran temple has been
discovered in the jungle of the northern Praha Vehar province. It was built in
the ninth or tenth century, and is dedicated to the Vedic tradition. The temple
stands 15 meters tall, and is 150 meters in length by 100 meters wide. Nearly
50 percent of the structure is damaged and most of its artifacts have been
plundered, even though there is no decent road to the temple.
Archaeologists
have found a statue of Nandi, the sacred bull that carried the Hindu god Shiva,
among the ruins of what is believed to be an ancient temple at an excavation
site in Yogyakarta in Indonesia.
In
south Germany, a prehistoric idol of “lion-man” has been discovered which has
caused amazement to scientists around the world. It is made out of tusk of a
mammoth in the form of a human body with a lion head. Amazingly it is dated to
be 32000 years old. The artifact was discovered in a cave named Stadel-Höhle am
Hohlenstein in the Lonetal of the Schwab
Alps, Germany. The figure was found exactly at the place in the cave
where day and night meet, about 20 meters away from the entrance and buried
1.20 meter deep under the ground. The Vedic scriptures tell us that Krishna
appeared in the divine form of a half-man, half-lion with a lion face, to
protect His devotee Prahlad and to stop irreligion, personified by the demon
Hiranyakasipu. A description of a standing Deity form of Nrisimha Avatara of
the Lord is found in the agama Silpa Shastra, and is referred to as
Kevala-Narasimha.
Major Anthropology Find Reported in India
Scientists
report they have found evidence of the oldest human habitation in India, dating
to 2 million years, on the banks of the Subarnarekha River. The 30-mile stretch
between Ghatshila in the province of Jharkhand and Mayurbhanj in Orissa has
reportedly yielded tools that suggest the site could be unique in the world,
with evidence of human habitation without a break from 2 million years ago to
5,000 B.C. which makes it more important than even the Adonaii Gorge in East
Africa, the Somme Valley of France, Stonehenge in England or the Narmada basin
in Madhya Pradesh.
Anthropologist
S. Chakraborty told the Calcutta Telegraph: “There are no signs of terra
incognito (a break in the continuum) in the Subarnarekha valley, unlike any
other site in India. Some of the heavier tools resemble those found in the East
African stone-age shelters, used by the Australopithecus.”
Ancient
Vishnu Deity Found in Russia
An
ancient Vishnu idol (Vishnu is an incarnation of the Supreme God, as mentioned
in the Vedas) has been found during excavation in an old village in Russia’s
Volga region, raising questions about the prevalent view on the origin of
ancient Russia.
The
idol found in Strays (old) Maine village dates back to VII-X century AD. Strays
Maine village in Ulyanovsk region was a highly populated city 1700 years ago,
much older than Kiev, so far believed to be the mother of all Russian cities.
“We
may consider it incredible, but we have ground to assert that Middle-Volga
region was the original land of Ancient Rus. This is a hypothesis, but a
hypothesis, which requires thorough research,” Reader of Ulyanovsk State
University’s archaeology department Dr. Alexander Koshering told state-run television
Vesta.
Dr.
Koshering, who has been conducting excavation in Strays Maine for last seven
years said that every single square meter of the surroundings of the ancient
town situated on the banks of Samara, a tributary of Volga, is studded with
antiques.
Prior
to unearthing of the Vishnu idol, Dr. Koshering has already found ancient
coins, pendants, rings and fragments of weapons. (Times of India, Dec 2006)
Tamil Brahmi Script Found in Egypt
A
broken storage jar with inscriptions in an ancient form of Tamil script, dated
to the first century BCE has been
excavated in Egypt.
Dr.
Roberta Timbre, a pottery specialist at the British Museum, London, identified
the fragmentary vessel as a storage jar made in India. Airavatham Mahadevan, a
specialist in Tamil epigraphy, has confirmed that the inscription on the jar is
in Tamil written in the Tamil Brahmi script of about the first century. (The
Hindu, November 2007)
Vedic Culture and Today’s World
The
above evidences clearly hint at the existence of a worldwide flourishing Vedic
civilization, not so long ago, signifying the importance and authenticity of
the Vedic scriptures. It shows that our
forefathers walked the Vedic path to attain the higher essential spiritual goals
of life.
As
a matter of fact, the Vedic civilization, being the oldest , has influenced
every major culture and religion around the world that we know today, and can
be declared as the parent of humanity.
The
philosopher and researcher Edward Pococke also wrote about this conclusion in
his book India in Greece (page 251). He states: “Sir William Jones concluded
that the Hindus had an immemorial antiquity with the old Persians, Ethiopians
and Egyptians, the Phoenicians, Greeks and Tuscans, the Scythians or Goths, and
the Celts, the Chinese, Japanese and Peruvians.”
Pococke
continues in his observation: “Now the whole of the society of Greece, civil
and military, must strike one as being eminently Asiatic, much of it especially
Indian. I shall demonstrate that these evidences were but the attendant tokens
of Indian colonization with its corresponding religion and language. I shall
exhibit dynasties disappearing from India, western India, to appear again in
Greece, clans who fought upon the plains of Troy.” Therefore, since Greece is
supposed to be the origins of European culture, and since Greece displays much
of the same culture as India, we can say that the pre-Christian culture of
Europe was Vedic.
William
Durant, author of the 10-volume Story of Civilization, wrote, “India was the
motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of European languages. She was
the mother of our philosophy, of our mathematics, of the ideals embodied in
Christianity, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways
the mother of us all.”
The
above quotes would indicate that the Vedic culture was a global faith, a world
influence. This may be given further credence in the remarks of Ectasias, the
Greek writer that “The Hindus were as numerous as all the other nations put
together.”
This
is further corroborated in P. N. Oak’s World Vedic Heritage (p. 506) in which
he presents evidence that, “In pre-Christian times the temples of Vedic Deities
such as Vishnu, Shiva, the Mother goddess, Rama, Hanuman, and Krishna used to
abound in all regions of the world. Evidence of this is found in the works of
ancient authors such as Megasthenes, Strabo, and Herodotus. All those names are
of Vedic origin, too. The term Megasthenes is Megh-Sthan-eesh, i.e. the Lord of
the Region of the clouds. The name Herodotus is Hari-dootas, i.e. Messenger of
[Hari] God.”
In
Some Missing Chapters of World History P. N. Oak also explains that Shiva was
worshiped all over the world, even in the Vatican. The word Vatican comes from
the Sanskrit word Vaatika, which means a bower or sylvan hermitage. He explains
that even the premises of the Vatican have many Shiva emblems buried in their
walls and cellars. Many such emblems have been dug up in other parts of Italy
as well. And some of those found in the Vatican are still preserved in the Vatican’s
Etruscan museum.
Similarly,
there is striking similarity in all major religions in the world and by careful
comparison we can trace back the essence
in all of them to the teachings of the Vedic literature. We can understand how
the Vedic culture influenced Zoroastrianism, which influenced Judaism, which
influenced Christianity, which influenced Islam. However, each succeeding
religion became more distant from the original spiritual teachings and
understanding, until each one thought that, rather than offering truths and
processes to be followed, they promoted the idea that they were the only way,
superior to all else. This topic however is outside the scope of this article
and I shall deal with it some other day.
The Universal Message of the Vedas
The
Vedas are compared to a desire tree because they contain all things knowable by
man. They deal with mundane necessities as well as spiritual realization. The
Vedas contain regulated principles of knowledge covering social, political,
religious, economic, military, medicinal, chemical, physical, metaphysical
subject matter and above all specific directions for spiritual realization.
The
real essence of Vedic literatures can be categorized into three headings:
Sambandha: Understanding
the answers to the questions, “Who am I? Who is God? What is my relation with
God?”
Abhideya:
The process of reviving our relationship with God
Prayojana:
The mature result: attainment of love of God.
Thus
the three subject matters described in the Vedic literature are: the Supreme
Personality of Godhead is the central point of all relationships,
acting
in devotional service to Him is one’s real occupation and attainment of love of
God is the ultimate goal of life.
Further
the Bhagavad Gita (4.34) enjoins the sincere seekers to approach a bonafied
spiritual master for this purpose and “Inquire from him submissively and render
service unto him. The self-realized soul can impart knowledge unto you because
he has seen the truth.”
Is it wrong to say India is a Hindu
Country?
May
I draw your kind attention to my discourses Why I am called a Hindu and Vedanta
Religion is everlasting, universal and unifying spirituality. In this context it is worth going
through the write up by Maria Wirth who lived for long in India:
"Though
I have lived in India for a long time, there are still issues here that I find
hard to understand. For example, why do so many educated Indians become
agitated when India is referred to as a Hindu country? The majority of Indians
are Hindus. India is special because of its ancient Hindu tradition. Westerners
are drawn to India because of Hinduism. Why then is there this resistance by
many Indians to acknowledge the Hindu roots of their country? Why do some
people even give the impression that an India which valued those roots would be
dangerous? Don’t they know better?
This
attitude is strange for two reasons. First, those educated Indians seem to have
a problem only with “Hindu” India, but not with “Muslim” or “Christian”
countries. Germany, for example, is a secular country, and only 59 percent of
the population are registered with the two big Christian churches (Protestant
and Catholic). Nevertheless, the country is bracketed under “Christian
countries” and no one objects. Angela Merkel, the Chancellor, stressed recently
the Christian roots of Germany and urged the population “to go back to
Christian values.” In 2012 she postponed her trip to the G-8 summit to make a
public address on Katholikentag, “Catholics Day.” Two major political parties
carry Christian in their name, including Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic
Union.
Germans
are not agitated that Germany is called a Christian country, though I actually
would understand if they were. After all, the history of the Church is
appalling. The so-called success story of Christianity depended greatly on
tyranny. “Convert or die” were the options given—not only some five hundred
years ago to the indigenous population in America, but also in Germany, 1,200
years ago, when the emperor Karl the Great ordered the death sentence for
refusal of baptism in his newly conquered realms. This provoked his advisor
Alkuin to comment: “One can force them to baptism, but how to force them to
believe?”
Those
times, when one’s life was in danger for dissenting with the dogmas of
Christianity, are thankfully over. Today many in the West do dissent and are
leaving the Church in a steady stream. They are disgusted with the
less-than-holy behavior of Church officials and they also can’t believe in the
dogmas, for example that “Jesus is the only way” and that God sends all those
who don’t accept this to hell.
The
second reason why I can’t understand the resistance to associate India with
Hinduism is that Hinduism is in a different category from the Abrahamic
religions. Its history, compared to Christianity and Islam, was undoubtedly the
least violent as it spread in ancient times by convincing arguments and not by
force. It is not a belief system that demands blind acceptance of dogmas and
the suspension of one’s intelligence. On the contrary, Hinduism encourages
using one’s intelligence to the hilt. It is an enquiry into truth based on a
refined character and intellect. It comprises a huge body of ancient
literature, not only regarding dharma and philosophy, but also regarding music,
architecture, dance, science, astronomy, economics, politics, etc. If Germany
or any other Western country had this kind of literary treasure, it would be so
proud and highlight its greatness on every occasion. When I discovered the
Upanishads, for example, I was stunned. Here was expressed in clear terms what
I intuitively had felt to be true, but could not have expressed clearly.
Brahman is not partial; it is the invisible, indivisible essence in everything.
Everyone gets again and again a chance to discover the ultimate truth and is
free to choose his way back to it. Helpful hints are given but not imposed.
In
my early days in India I thought every Indian knew and valued his tradition.
Slowly I realized I was wrong. The British colonial masters had been successful
in not only weaning away many of the elite from their ancient tradition but
even making them despise it. It helped that the British-educated class could no
longer read the original Sanskrit texts and believed what the British told
them. This lack of knowledge and the brainwashing by the British education may
be the reason why many so-called “modern” Indians are against anything Hindu.
They don’t realize the difference between Western religions that have to be
believed (or at least professed) blindly, and which discourage, if not forbid,
their adherents to think on their own, and the multi-layered Hindu Dharma which
gives freedom and encourages using one’s intelligence.
Many
of the Indian educated class do not realize that those who dream of imposing
Christianity or Islam on this vast country will applaud them for denigrating
Hindu Dharma, because this creates a vacuum where Western ideas can easier gain
a foothold. At the same time, many Westerners, including staunch Christians,
know the value of Hindu culture and surreptitiously appropriate insights from
the vast Indian knowledge system, drop the original Hindu source and present it
either as their own or make it look as if these insights had already been known
in the West. As the West appropriates valuable and exclusive Hindu assets, what
it leaves behind is deemed inferior. Unwittingly, these Indians are helping
what Rajiv Malhotra of Infinity Foundation calls the digestion of Dharma
civilization into Western universalism. That which is being digested, a
deer for example, in this case Hindu Dharma, disappears whereas the digester (a
tiger) becomes stronger.
If
only missionaries denigrated Hindu Dharma, it would not be so bad, as they
clearly have an agenda which discerning Indians would detect. But sadly, Indians
with Hindu names assist them because they wrongly believe Hinduism is inferior
to Western religions. They belittle everything Hindu instead of getting
thorough knowledge. As a rule, they know little about their tradition except
what the British have told them, i.e., that the major features are the caste
system and idol worship. They don’t realize that India would gain, not
lose, if it solidly backed its profound and all-inclusive Hindu tradition. The
Dalai Lama said some time ago that, as a youth in Lhasa, he had been deeply
impressed by the richness of Indian thought. “India has great potential to
help the world,” he added.
When
will the Westernized Indian elite realize it?
~
Maria Wirth (freelance writer who has lived in India"
Can anybody question
why statue of Jesus Christ with the Epitaph INRI and Kaba the Blackstone in
Mecca are venerated? Which Religion has proclaimed loudly "Eko Vipraah
bahudaa vadanti" "aatmavat
sarvabhooteshu" "sarvejanah sukhino bhavantu"
"Krinvanto Viswamaryam" and all souls can be liberated and each
one has to work it out to exhaust one's own Karma and there is nosavior?
Sindhu Tattva wrongly Spelt as Hindu Tattva is all-inclusive and Universal.
NS
Essay - How the British invented Hinduism
[By
“reviving” the Hindu religion, the middle classes of India hope to turn their
country into a world]
BY PANKAJ MISHRA
Earlier
this year, I was in Rishikesh, the first town that the River Ganges meets as it
leaves its Himalayan home and embarks upon its long journey through the north
Indian plains. The town’s place in Indian mythology is not as secure as that of
Hardwar, which lies a few miles downstream and which periodically hosts the
Kumbh Mela festival of Hinduism; nor is it as famous as Allahabad or Benares,
even holier cities further down the Ganges. People seeking greater solitude and
wisdom usually head deep into the Himalayas. With its saffron-robed sadhus and
ashrams, its yoga and meditation centers, and its internet and dosa cafes,
Rishikesh caters to a very modern kind of spiritual tourist: the Beatles came
here in the Sixties to learn from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Their quick
disillusionment seems not to have deterred the stylishly disaffected members of
the western middle class who can be found wandering the town’s alleys in
tie-dye outfits, trying to raise their kundalini in between checking their
Hotmail accounts.
I
was in Rishikesh to see my aunt, who has just retired to one of the riverside
ashrams. She has known a hard life: widowed when she was in her thirties, she
worked in small, badly paid teaching jobs to support her three children. In my
memory, I can still see her standing at exposed country bus stops in the middle
of white-hot summer days. She had come to know comfort, even luxury, of sorts
in later life. Her children travel all over the world as members of India’s new
globalized corporate elite; there are bright grandchildren to engage her at
home. But she was happiest in Rishikesh, she told me, living as frugally as she
had for much of her life, and devoting her attention to the end of things.
True
detachment, however, seemed as difficult to achieve for her as for the
spiritual seekers with e-mail. I had only to mention the political situation -
India was then threatening to attack Pakistan - for her to say, angrily: “These
Muslims need to be taught a lesson. We Hindus have been too soft for too long.”
In
the past decade, such sentiments have become commonplace among the upper-caste
Hindus, both in India and abroad, who form the most loyal constituency of the
Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). They were amplified most
recently in Gujarat during the BJP-assisted massacre of more than a thousand
Muslims; they go with a middle-class pride in the international prominence of
Indian beauty queens, software professionals and Bollywood. Perhaps I wouldn’t
have found anything odd about my aunt’s anti-Muslim passions had I not later
gone up to her monastic cell and noticed the large garlanded poster of a
well-known Sufi saint of western India.
Did
she know that she revered someone born a Muslim? The folk religion to which the
Sufi saint belongs, and which millions of Indians still practice, does not
acknowledge such modern political categories as Hindu and Muslim. The
discrepancy between the narrow nationalist prejudices my aunt had inherited
from her class and caste and the affinities she generously formed in her inner
world of devotion and prayer is not easily understood; but it is part of the
extraordinary makeover undergone by Hinduism since the 19th century, when India
first confronted the west and its universalist ideologies of nationalism and
progress.
Although
it contains the world’s third-largest population of Muslims, India, for most
people outside it, is a country of “Hindus”; even a “Hindu civilization”, in
Samuel Huntington’s millenarian world-view. Yet Hinduism was a 19th-century
British invention. Even the word Hindu itself is of non-Hindu origin. It was
first used by the ancient Persians to refer to the people living near the River
Indus (Sindhu in Sanskrit). It then became a convenient shorthand for the
rulers of India; it defined those who were not Muslims or Christians.
The
persistence of such labels in the west is due not just to ignorance, or to some
lingering Christian fear of heathens. Perhaps the urge to fix a single identity
for diverse communities comes naturally to people in the highly organized and
uniform societies of the west, where cultural diversity now usually means the
politically expedient and hardened identities of multiculturalism. Perhaps
people who themselves are defined almost exclusively by their citizenship in
the nation state and the consumer society cannot but find wholly alien the
pre-modern world of multiple identities and faiths in which most Indians still
live.
Certainly,
most Hindus themselves felt little need for precise self-descriptions, except
when faced with questions about religion on official forms. Long after their
encounter with the monotheistic religions of Islam and Christianity, they
continued to define themselves through their overlapping allegiances to family,
caste, linguistic group, region and devotional sect. Religion to them was more
unselfconscious practice than rigid belief. Their rituals and deities varied
greatly. Both snakes and the ultimate reality of the universe were worshipped
in the same region, sometimes by the same person. Religion rarely demanded, as
it did with many Muslims or Christians, adherence to a set of theological ideas
prescribed by a single prophet, book or authority.
This
is why a history of Hinduism, no matter how narrowly conceived, has to describe
in effect several very parochial- seeming Indian religions, almost none of
which contained the evangelical zeal to save the world. The first of these -
the Vedic religion - began with the nomads and pastoralists from central Asia
who settled north India in the second millennium BC. It was primarily created
by the priestly class of Brahmans, who conducted fire sacrifices with the help
of the Vedas, the earliest known Indian scriptures, in order to stave off
drought and hunger. But the Brahmans, who also formulated the sacred and social
codes of the time, wished to enhance their own glory and power rather than
propose a new all-inclusive faith; they presented themselves as the most
superior among the four caste groups that emerged during Vedic times and which
were based upon racial distinctions between the settlers and the indigenous
population of North India, and then upon a division of labor.
A
new religion was also far from the minds of the Buddhists, the Jains, and other
philosophical and cultural movements that emerged in the sixth and fifth
centuries BC to challenge the power of the Brahmans and of the caste hierarchy.
People dissatisfied with the sacrificial rituals of the Vedic religion later
grew attracted to the egalitarian cults of Shiva and Vishnu that became popular
in India around the beginning of the first century AD. However, the Brahmans
managed to preserve their status at the top of an ossifying caste system. They
zealously guarded their knowledge of Sanskrit and esoteric texts, and their
expertise in such matters as the correct pronunciation of mantras. Their
specialized knowledge and pan-Indian presence gave them a hold over ruling
elites even as the majority of the population followed its own heterodox cults
and sects. Their influence can be detected in such Indian texts as the Bhagavad-Gita which, though acknowledging the
irrelevance of ritual sacrifices, made a life of virtue inseparable from
following the rules of caste.
But
India remained too big and diverse to be monopolized by any one book or idea.
The Hindu nationalists present the Muslims who ruled India for eight centuries
as the flag-bearers of an intolerant monotheism. Yet there was even more
religious plurality during that period. Sufism mingled with local faiths; the
currently popular devotional cults of Rama and Krishna, and the network of
ashrams and sects, expanded fast under the Moghul Empire. Medieval India
furnishes more evidence of sectarian violence between the worshippers of Shiva
and Vishnu than between Hindus and Muslims.
In
the 18th century, the British were both appalled and fascinated by the excess
of gods, sects and cults they found in India. It was similar to the pagan chaos
that a Christian from the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire might have
encountered in the west just before Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.
Like the powerful Christians in Rome, the British in India sought and imposed
uniformity.
Early
18th-century British scholars of India were familiar at home with the
monotheistic and exclusive nature of Christianity. When confronted by diverse
Indian religions, therefore, they tended to see similarities, even though these
were usually as superficial as those between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The
British assumed that different religious practices could exist only within a
single overarching tradition. Equally - because they came from a society that
had a relatively high level of literacy - they thought that Indian religion
must have canonical texts, just as Christianity did. Their local intermediaries
tended to be Brahmans, who alone knew the languages - primarily Sanskrit -
needed to study such ancient Indian texts as the Vedas and the Bhagavad-Gita. Together, the British scholars and their
Brahman interpreters came up with a canon of sorts, mostly Brahmanical
literature and ideology, which they began to identify with a single Hindu
religion.
The
Brahmanical literature so systematized later created much of the appeal of
Indian culture for its foreign connoisseurs, such as the German Romantics,
Schopenhauer, Emerson and Thoreau. It also provided the British with the
standards by which to judge the state of contemporary religion in India. As few
Indians at the time seemed capable of the sublime sentiments found in the Bhagavad-Gita and the Rig-Veda, Hinduism began to seem a degenerate religion,
full of such social evils as widow-burning and untouchability, and in desperate
need of social engineering: an idea that appealed both to British colonialists
and their Brahman collaborators, who had long felt threatened by the
non-Brahmanical forms of religion that most Indians followed. It was equally
convenient to blame the intrusion of Islam into India for Hinduism's fallen
state, even for the caste system, and to describe Hindus as slaves of Muslim
tyrants: a terrible fate from which the British had apparently rescued them in
order to prepare their path to a high stage of civilization.
These
ideas about the Muslim tyrants, Hindu slaves and British philanthropists were
originally set out in such influential books as James Mill's History of British India, which now tell you more about
the proselytizing vigor of some Enlightened Scots and utilitarian than about
Indian history. Nevertheless, they had a profound impact on a new generation of
upper-caste Indians who had enjoyed a Western-style education. They wished to
imitate the success of the British; do for India what a few enterprising men
had done for a tiny island; and they found a source of nationalist pride in the
newly minted "Hinduism".
Only
a tiny minority of upper-caste Indians had known much about the Bhagavad-Gita or the Vedas until the 18th century,
when they were translated by British scholars and then presented as sacred texts
from the paradisiacal age of this "Hinduism". But in the 19th
century, movements dedicated to reforming "Hinduism" and recovering
its lost glory grew rapidly, inspired by the ideas of progress and development
that British utilitarian and Christian missionaries aggressively promoted in
India. Intellectuals in Muslim countries that were exposed to European
imperialism also absorbed Western influences, but their distrust of the
Christian and secular West was deeper. Unlike Muslims, the Hindus tended to borrow
more than they rejected. Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1832), who is often called the
"father of modern India", was a Unitarian. He founded the Brahmo
Samaj, a reformist society that influenced Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit
Ray, among other leading Indian intellectuals and artists, as part of an
attempt to turn Hinduism into a rational, monotheistic religion. The social
reformer Dayananda exhorted Indians to return to the Vedas (which contained,
according to him, all of modern science), and echoed British missionary
denunciations of such "Hindu superstitions" as idol-worship and the
caste system. Even the more secular and catholic visions of Gandhi and Nehru -
the former a devout Hindu, the latter an agnostic - accepted the premise of a
"Hinduism" that had decayed and had to be reformed.
Gandhi
drew his political imagery from popular folklore; it made him more effective as
a leader of the Indian masses than the upper-caste Hindu politicians who relied
upon a textual, or elite Hinduism. But it was Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) who
was mostly responsible for the modernization of Hinduism. Vivekananda was the
middle-class disciple of the illiterate mystic Ramakrishna Paramhansa; but he
moved far from his guru’s inward-looking spirituality in his attempt to make Hinduism
intellectually respectable to both Westerners and Westernized Indians. In his
lectures in England and America, where he acquired a mass following, he
presented India as the most ancient and privileged fount of spirituality. At
the same time, he exhorted Hindus to embrace Western science and materialism in
order to shed their backwardness and constitute themselves into a manly nation.
Vivekananda
borrowed from both British-constructed Hinduism and European realpolitik, and
thus articulated the confused, aggressive desires of a Westernized Indian
bourgeoisie that was trying to find its identity. But his ambition of
regenerating India with the help of Western techniques did not sunder him
entirely from folk religious traditions. He remained a mystic; and his
contradictory rhetoric now seems to prefigure the oddly split personality of
the modern Hindu, where devotion to a Muslim saint can coexist with an
anti-Muslim nationalism.
The
marriage of Indian religiosity and Western materialism that Vivekananda tried
to arrange makes him the perfect patron saint of the BJP, a party of mostly
upper-caste, middle-class Hindus that strives to boost India’s nuclear and
information technology capabilities and also reveres the cow as holy. A hundred
years after Vivekananda’s death, the BJP has come closest to realizing his
project of Westernizing Hinduism into a nationalist ideology: one that has
pretensions to being all-inclusive, yet demonizes Muslims and seeks to pre-empt
with its rhetoric of egalitarianism the long-overdue political assertion of
India’s lower-caste groups.
Vivekananda’s
modern disciples are helped by the rise of the Indian bourgeoisie. Affluent,
upper-caste Indians, in India and abroad, largely bankrolled the rise of Hindu
nationalists, and long for closer military and economic ties between India and
Western nations; globalization helps them work faster towards Vivekananda’s
desired alliance between an Indian elite and the modern West. As a global
class, they are no less ambitious than the one which in the Roman Empire
embraced Christianity and made it an effective tool of this-worldly power.
Hinduism in their hands has never looked more like the Christianity and Islam
of popes and mullahs, and less like the multiplicity of unselfconsciously
tolerant faiths it still is for most Indians. Their growing prominence suggests
that Vivekananda may yet emerge as more influential than Gandhi, Nehru or
Tagore - the three great Indian leaders, whose legacy of liberal humanism
middle-class India seems to have frittered away. Their quest for Western-style
machismo, for economic and military muscle, seems to be taking India towards
times as intellectually and spiritually oppressive as those the West
experienced after its elites chose a severe monotheism as their official
ideology.
[This discourse material is a compilation from the reference above as well as other sources for a prepared
lecture for delivering at Vedanta Class of Sri Ganesha Temple which is
gratefully acknowledged. I do not claim anything as original though I have included
my explanations and comments elaborately suitably editing. Anybody is free to
download partly or fully this discourse, modify and redistribute this as well
as other discourses from the blog Hindu
Reflections <nrsrini.blogspot.com> for spreading the wisdom of Vedas and
scriptures further. These lectures are
posted on the blog for the benefit of those who are not able to attend
my lectures personally due to personal reasons or due to not living in
Nashville or able to go through the various sources as I have done.]