‘Hindu’ is the Persian name for India (Persia and India are next door to each other and have traded for thousands of years). Our society borrows the term from the British, who get the term from the Persians. As we read in the Vedas, Hinduism brought together many traditions from many regions with many gods, but there are three levels that are equally interchangeable and separable. First, each can have a particular god that is the emphasis of one’s particular branch of the tradition. Second, the many gods are each one aspect of a single god, often the great father and creator, named by most traditions Brahma. Third, there is a philosophical monism that goes beyond god or not god, living or dead, conscious or unconscious, that is the One, called Brahman, different from the personified Brahma.
There are three paths of worship in Hinduism. First, there is devotional worship, known as Bhakti Yoga (‘Yoga’ means ‘discipline’, or practice). In Bhakti devotional worship, the devotee prays, sings hymns, lights incense, and performs rituals to gain favor with the gods and heavens. It is impossible not to notice that most of what we call ‘religion’ the world over is in fact forms of Bhakti practice, devotion to particular gods and ancestral spirits. The two most populous forms of Bhakti Hinduism are Shaivism, the worship of Shiva (the transformer and destroyer) and his incarnations such as Ganesh (the elephant headed god), and Vaishnavism, the worship of Vishnu (the savior or preserver) and his incarnations such as Krishna. Worship is often called ‘darshana’, or seeing/experiencing, and Hindus will say, I am going to the seeing, meaning I am going to see and be seen by the god. Another common form of Bhakti devotion is worship of a particular goddess such as Kali. Notice that, like a scientist, Bhakti practitioners also believe in learning by experience and seeing, but their subject matter is quite different.
Raja yoga, the second path, is worship by meditation and asceticism (living in isolation, standing in place for days, fasting chanting the names of gods for hours, sitting on spikes, and other means of hard activity) meant to gain a meditative state of insight. Raja means ‘force’ or ‘effort’, and India is famous for its forest sages practicing these techniques.
Jnana yoga (“zshna-na”), the third path and my personal favorite, is worship by acquiring knowledge, wisdom and understanding the order of things through study and philosophizing. This class itself could be seen as a form of Jnana yoga, designed to bring you closer to the core by studying the ways of the world. All three paths, or any mixture of the three, are understood to work towards the same goal: liberation from the bonds of attachment and desire, rising into enlightenment and release from the constraints of identity to join together with the whole.
There is an ultimate goal to this process. Initially, there is hope for a better next life. Many are familiar already with the Hindu idea of reincarnation. This is not a form of afterlife particular to India, but in fact there is evidence that many tribal cultures and early Egypt believed that one’s present life will be reincarnated in another life on earth based on one’s actions and intentions. This interconnection is called ‘Karma’, which simply means ‘action’ in Sanskrit. Interestingly, physical causation is ‘karma’, just as metaphysical causation (next life physics) is ‘karma’, same word and understanding of cause and effect applied to a different sphere of existence. If you punch someone in the head, it is karma that makes their head reel backward, and karma that also weighs down your chance for a favorable life after death in the Hindu tradition.
Beyond better lives, there is hope for release, for freedom from rounds of rebirth on earth. This can be thought of as dwelling in a heaven with one’s personal or family god, but also as a dwelling with the order of things without residing in any particular place. Bhakti yoga tends to favor the dwelling with a lord, while Raja and Jnana tends to favor the dwelling with the universe as a whole, however it is important to remember that some Hindus believe that both amount to the same exact thing (while others will insist that their school’s truth is ‘more true’, the same variation one finds in any religion and in our own culture). This release is also called Moksha and Samadhi, but in America we know this first and foremost by the same name as the famous grunge band, Nirvana.
While moksha is the ultimate goal, via the more immediate goal of positioning oneself favorably for moksha either in this life (dwelling in the forest or a monastery) or in a next life, there are three other goals that Indian philosophy points to as desirable making four in total. In addition to moksha/nirvana, there is law or morality, ‘dharma’ (the term Jains and Buddhists use to describe their traditions and rules), pleasure, ‘kama’ (as from the Kama Sutra), and material wellbeing, ‘artha’. Clearly, the overall idea is that pleasure and comfort (kama and artha) are not in themselves evil, but one should pursue liberation through discipline (moksha through dharma).
Ancient India saw a great deal of development in science and technology. They observed the natural world and put phenomena into families and categories as did the ancient Greeks and as we still do today. The Romans would trade Germanic and Celtic slaves to India in exchange for Indian wootz, the metal most prized for weapons in the ancient world. In mathematics the Indians were unsurpassed by ancient civilizations, developing the base ten system and the Indian-Arabic numerals we use today. They laid down the basics of symbolic equations, the concept and symbolization of zero, and invented the variable (originally a thick dot). All of this got picked up by the Muslims, who turned it into algebra, which then got picked up by the Europeans, who turned it into Calculus. Typically, we learn about Euclid and the Greeks doing geometry as the source of the Western mathematical tradition. Muslims were influenced by the Greeks and Euclid, but Euclid argued about lines drawn in sand and did not use equations. It was the Indians who invented the sorts of mathematical symbolism that the Muslims turned into step by step symbolic mathematics as we know it today and teach it up through high school.
The Upanishads (beginning in 800 BCE, most having been written by 600 BCE) were philosophical teachings about the soul/self (atman) and how to release the soul from desire and identity to merge with the great One and All (the goal of moksha or nirvana, discussed last time). The Upanishads frequently interpret the stories of the Vedas as metaphoric teachings, instructions for the truly wise on how to develop the mind/soul/self. The self (atman) was to be united with the supreme reality, oneness, and spirit of all, Brahman. ‘Upanishad’ means “sitting down near/beside”, (upa, ‘near’, ni, ‘down’, sad, ‘sit’) as these are the close teachings of the priest, philosopher or master who has taught the Vedas for a long time and knows their secret and hidden ‘inner’ meaning. The students who were talented and advanced would sit down beside the teacher after the normal lecture to get the advanced, inner teaching that the normal students were not ready to hear. Unfortunately, there are no authors to which the texts are ascribed, having been lost to history. Perhaps some of these teachings are as old as the Vedas, and were only written down after 800 BCE. There are over 200 Upanishad texts, though there are 10 central Upanishads.
One of the most famous sayings from the Upanishads is Tat Tvam Asi, “That is you”. No matter what “that” you are looking at, it is in fact your own self because all is one and there are no complete or permanent separations between any two things. This means there is no complete distinction between any ‘this’ or ‘that’, and thus no complete distinction between atman and Brahman, or between any of the gods and Brahman. This is similar to another passage of Zhuang Zi the Daoist, one of my favorite skeptical passages of philosophy, which says, “A sage too has a this and a that, but his that has a this, and his this has a that”. Notice the monism that unites all connecting not only the various Hindu gods together but all individuals in the singular One of reality.
Just like the unorthodox systems of Jainism and Buddhism would do later, the Upanishads point beyond particular duties to ritual, sacrifice, caste or class to the supreme goal of self-liberation. This had a great appeal to those who were not Brahmins, the priests who formed the top level of the caste system. While the Upanishads did not say to abandon the caste system, the teachings were applicable to all. As we will see, Mahavira who founded Jainism and the Buddha both had great appeal as they openly said that one did not need to be reborn as a priest to have a shot at nirvana. Rather, one could have it in this very life and not need to reposition oneself for a better life through karma. Both Mahavira and Buddha were warrior’s sons and so were second class themselves. We can see that, as the Upanishads caught on and became one of if not the most influential source in the further developments of Indian thought, people increasingly questioned the Vedas and the caste system even as they continued to retain them as many still do today.
In the Katha Upanishad, a dialog between the sage Naciketas and Yama, god of death, the good is praised above the pleasant. As the sourcebook points out, this is very similar to what Socrates argues in dialogues written by Plato. The highest mind is to be pursued, rather than the simple passing pleasures. Naciketas says to Death, after being taught: “Ephemeral things! That which is a mortal’s, O End-maker, even the vigor of all the powers, they wear away. Even a whole life is slight indeed. Yours are the vehicles! Yours is the dance and the song!”. This passage uses ‘vehicles’ as vessels or individual things that convey pleasure or anything else. The vehicle is a popular metaphor for teaching or school in Indian thought, and as we will see the various schools of Buddhism are known as vehicles.
Yama replies that those who teach that reality is some part rather than the whole are blind men led by a blind man. This is, in fact, the origin of the phrase, “blind leading the blind”. Yama says, “Him who is the bodiless among bodies, stable among the unstable, the great, all-pervading self, on recognizing him, the wise man sorrows not”. Yama uses a metaphor used by Plato through the mouth of Socrates, the self as charioteer, the body as a chariot, and the senses and passions as the horses. Yama tells of a complex stack of higher and truer selves: “Higher than the senses are the objects of sense. Higher than the objects of sense is the mind, and higher than the mind is the intellect (buddhi, also ‘consciousness’ or ‘awareness’, just as the Buddha is the ‘awakened one’). Higher than the intellect is the great self. Higher than the great is the un-manifest. Higher than the un-manifest is the great person. Higher than the person is nothing at all. That is the goal. That is the highest course.”
In a hilarious passage of the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, a student questions that master about how many gods there are repeatedly, and the master keeps changing his answer. At first, he says that the Vedic hymn to all the gods says there are 303 and 3003, which would be 3306 all together. Then he says there are 33, then 6, then 3 (likely Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma), then 2, then one and a half, and finally one, which is breath and Brahman.
In the Maitri Upanishad, we read, “In this cycle of existence I am like a frog in a waterless well…In thinking ‘This is I’, and ‘That is mine’, one binds oneself with oneself, as does a bird with a snare…Therefore, by knowledge (vidya), by austerity (tapas), and by meditation (cinta), Brahman is apprehended…For thus has it been said: He who is in the fire, and he who is here in the heart, and he who is yonder in the sun – he is one”. This is again very similar to things we will read in the Daoist Zhuang Zi.
Next class, we will study Jainism and Buddhism, two of the non-Hindu unorthodox schools of Indian thought.
