THE HINDU TRADITION(S)
Hinduism is the oldest and in
some ways the
most complex tradition of the seven world religions we look at in this
course. To complicate matters even more, we need to make a sharp
distinction between specifically religious views shared by most Hindus
and the more elaborate expressions of Hindu philosophy (the so-called six schools)
that are usually unfamiliar to the ordinary person and whose
distinctions are presently downplayed by Indian teachers. You are not
expected to have the same awareness of what each position teaches as I
might expect were you to be taking a course dealing specifically with
Asian philosophy, but you should try to understand why typically Indian
philosophy is considered to be idealist (in the
special sense of this term used in philosophy to mean any approach in
which "mind" or consciousness is more "real" than the physical
world). The review questions that I have for the web lecture
should guide you to what you need here.
What I do want to stress is the connection between a strict asceticism (physical denial of various sorts) and a point of view such as that shared by the schools of Samkhya and Yoga in which the "true" self must be liberated from everything that is "natural," including the mind itself. Yoga, as most Americans think of it, is a set of practices to make someone feel better both physically and mentally. To the extent this is still about "me" (the personal self) it is not at all the spiritual vision that originated in India, where the goal was to escape the wheel of reincarnation by ending the connection between "me" and something more real that is not "me" at all even though it makes "me" possible. (Confusing enough?)
What you need to see right off is that we are working with completely different ways of seeing things, not only when we talk about the individual's place in society (as with the caste system with its restrictions) but what we think of as real about our own selves. We are used to talking about ourselves as having a soul (something entirely supernatural) and a body (something entirely a part of nature). In a sense, we talk about owning both in such a way that our notion of life after death is about how the mind, as part of the soul, will continue to have some type of experience. In the Hindu perspective, the mind (in the sense of whatever we think we are as persons) is on the same side of the page as the body, something which is part of the natural world. The soul, in the sense of something completely supernatural (atman or purusha), makes both mind and body work yet is not the same as either. Instead it is better understood to be the same as what we might otherwise want to say we mean by the term "God" (the point of the phrase tat tvam asi). Contrasting with the Western view of God as "transcendent," this is a vision of God as "immanent" (sometimes also the Hindu outlook is described as "pantheist," meaning everything is God).
Turn this around and you should be able to see that the Hindu outlook closes any gap between God and the self. If we are already God in some sense (but just do not know it yet), then the meditative practices characterizing Vedanta and the asceticism of Yoga are not at all like what we mean by prayer in the West. But remember also that
this
is an outlook that in its origins was meant to be something of a
secret, passed on to the student by his teacher (guru). For
everyone else
there were the religious practices invoking the favor of the gods in
the Hindu pantheon (such as devotion to the elephant-headed Ganesha,
a figure associated with success and venerated in an annual ten-day
festival).
The gap between a polytheism not that different from the religions of ancient Greece and Rome and a more sophisticated vision in which the gods of India are not necessarily "real" but symbolic is not something we are used to in Western religious traditions. In Asia, however, this idea of there being two levels of truth--one for the ordinary person and one for the individual initiated into a more spiritual outlook--is easily accepted, at least by the latter. The philosopher Shankara, who formulated the Vedantist teaching standard today, used the following story to explain it. Imagine someone walking along a jungle trail who sees what he takes to be a giant snake hanging from a branch. Even though he is terrified, he keeps on, but as he gets closer he realizes that this was only a vine and nothing to be scared of. There was nothing wrong with his initial response, even though later he can see that he had been caught up in an illusion (maya). In the same way, Shankara argued, the ordinary person following traditional religious practices was doing as he should, even though the "insider" has a truer vision of the way things really are.
As you go through the material on Hindu traditions, I suggest organizing your notes into three categories: social relationships (caste distinctions, marriage and family patterns), religious observances (especially key festivals), and philosophical or theological concepts (reincarnation, the idea of atman or purusha).
Below are additional links to Internet materials, including YouTube videos recommended by previous students in this course. Some you will maybe only want to look at briefly, others you should study more closely. (Look also at additional links indicated in your text, if you are using one.) Use the questions on your checklist as a general guide.
photo credit: z.about.com/d/hinduism/1/0/N/8/ganesha.jpg
What I do want to stress is the connection between a strict asceticism (physical denial of various sorts) and a point of view such as that shared by the schools of Samkhya and Yoga in which the "true" self must be liberated from everything that is "natural," including the mind itself. Yoga, as most Americans think of it, is a set of practices to make someone feel better both physically and mentally. To the extent this is still about "me" (the personal self) it is not at all the spiritual vision that originated in India, where the goal was to escape the wheel of reincarnation by ending the connection between "me" and something more real that is not "me" at all even though it makes "me" possible. (Confusing enough?)
What you need to see right off is that we are working with completely different ways of seeing things, not only when we talk about the individual's place in society (as with the caste system with its restrictions) but what we think of as real about our own selves. We are used to talking about ourselves as having a soul (something entirely supernatural) and a body (something entirely a part of nature). In a sense, we talk about owning both in such a way that our notion of life after death is about how the mind, as part of the soul, will continue to have some type of experience. In the Hindu perspective, the mind (in the sense of whatever we think we are as persons) is on the same side of the page as the body, something which is part of the natural world. The soul, in the sense of something completely supernatural (atman or purusha), makes both mind and body work yet is not the same as either. Instead it is better understood to be the same as what we might otherwise want to say we mean by the term "God" (the point of the phrase tat tvam asi). Contrasting with the Western view of God as "transcendent," this is a vision of God as "immanent" (sometimes also the Hindu outlook is described as "pantheist," meaning everything is God).
Turn this around and you should be able to see that the Hindu outlook closes any gap between God and the self. If we are already God in some sense (but just do not know it yet), then the meditative practices characterizing Vedanta and the asceticism of Yoga are not at all like what we mean by prayer in the West. But remember also that
this
is an outlook that in its origins was meant to be something of a
secret, passed on to the student by his teacher (guru). For
everyone else
there were the religious practices invoking the favor of the gods in
the Hindu pantheon (such as devotion to the elephant-headed Ganesha,
a figure associated with success and venerated in an annual ten-day
festival). The gap between a polytheism not that different from the religions of ancient Greece and Rome and a more sophisticated vision in which the gods of India are not necessarily "real" but symbolic is not something we are used to in Western religious traditions. In Asia, however, this idea of there being two levels of truth--one for the ordinary person and one for the individual initiated into a more spiritual outlook--is easily accepted, at least by the latter. The philosopher Shankara, who formulated the Vedantist teaching standard today, used the following story to explain it. Imagine someone walking along a jungle trail who sees what he takes to be a giant snake hanging from a branch. Even though he is terrified, he keeps on, but as he gets closer he realizes that this was only a vine and nothing to be scared of. There was nothing wrong with his initial response, even though later he can see that he had been caught up in an illusion (maya). In the same way, Shankara argued, the ordinary person following traditional religious practices was doing as he should, even though the "insider" has a truer vision of the way things really are.
As you go through the material on Hindu traditions, I suggest organizing your notes into three categories: social relationships (caste distinctions, marriage and family patterns), religious observances (especially key festivals), and philosophical or theological concepts (reincarnation, the idea of atman or purusha).
Below are additional links to Internet materials, including YouTube videos recommended by previous students in this course. Some you will maybe only want to look at briefly, others you should study more closely. (Look also at additional links indicated in your text, if you are using one.) Use the questions on your checklist as a general guide.
| Social Relationships and Customs India--Caste and Class Hindu Family Life (talk by Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami) Gaining A Better Understanding of Hinduism Educational Video NATURE "Holy Cow" | Hinduism's Sacred Animal | PBS |
Religious Observances Festivals Festivals in India Hare Krishna 1967 |
Philosophical or Theological Concepts Karma and Liberation The Story of Hinduism Nondualism (Advaita) in Vedanta and Yoga Meditation Swami Prabhavananda: Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali |
photo credit: z.about.com/d/hinduism/