Around B. Rituals, such as sacrifices and chanting, were common in the Vedic Period. Hindus began to emphasize the worship of deities, especially Vishnu, Shiva and Devi. The concept of dharma was introduced in new texts, and other faiths, such as Buddhism and Jainism, spread rapidly.
Hinduism and Buddhism have many similarities. Buddhism, in fact, arose out of Hinduism, and both believe in reincarnation, karma and that a life of devotion and honor is a path to salvation and enlightenment. But some key differences exist between the two religions: Buddhism rejects the caste system of Hinduism, and does away with the rituals, the priesthood and the gods that are integral to the Hindu faith. The Medieval Period of Hinduism lasted from about to A.
New texts emerged, and poet-saints recorded their spiritual sentiments during this time. In the 7th century, Muslim Arabs began invading areas in India. During parts of the Muslim Period, which lasted from about to , Islamic rulers prevented Hindus from worshipping their deities, and some temples were destroyed. Indian statesman and activist Mahatma Gandhi, Between and , the British controlled India. At first, the new rulers allowed Hindus to practice their religion without interference.
But later, Christian missionaries sought to convert and westernize the people. Many reformers emerged during the British Period. The partition of India occurred in , and Gandhi was assassinated in British India was split into what are now the independent nations of India and Pakistan , and Hinduism became the major religion of India.
Starting in the s, many Hindus migrated to North America and Britain, spreading their faith and philosophies to the western world.
An early 18th century depiction of Devi revered by Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. However, the Hindu belief system includes a complex structure of deities that is not easily categorised.
Hinduism includes an abundance of deities, each one representing a certain aspect of the Supreme Absolute, which is known as Brahma, because they are all manifestations of the same divine spirit.
There are deities represented in the family, the community, and the region of the country. There are deities recognised in the plants, the stars, the rivers, the mountains and the planets. We worship the divine in the form that each individual belief system supports, which are suitable and inspiring to the individual. Hindu Dharma recognises the divine is infinite. That embraces all creation, all of the worlds and something beyond. We honour the divine which is intimate to ourselves.
Hindu gods and goddesses, when they descend to Earth, take the form of avatars "incarnations" or "manifestations". Avatars are most often mentioned in connection with Vishnu, who, according to the Bhagvand Gita, took on different forms to perform certain tasks on earth.
The actual content of this canon, however, is unknown to most Hindus. No prohibition is made against improvising variations on, rewording, or challenging the Smriti. The Smriti includes the two great Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana ; the many Sanskrit Puranas , including 18 great Puranas and several dozen more subordinate Puranas; and the many Dharmashastras and Dharmasutras textbooks on sacred law , of which the one attributed to the sage Manu is the most frequently cited.
The two epics are built around central narratives. The Mahabharata tells of the war between the Pandava brothers, led by their cousin Krishna , and their cousins the Kauravas. The Ramayana tells of the journey of Rama to recover his wife Sita after she is stolen by the demon Ravana. But these stories are embedded in a rich corpus of other tales and discourses on philosophy, law, geography, political science, and astronomy, so that the Mahabharata about , lines long constitutes a kind of encyclopedia or even a literature, and the Ramayana more than 50, lines long is comparable.
Although it is therefore impossible to fix their dates, the main bodies of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana were probably composed between BC and AD Both, however, continued to grow even after they were translated into the vernacular languages of India such as Tamil and Hindi in the succeeding centuries.
The Puranas were composed after the epics, and several of them develop themes found in the epics for instance, the Bhagavata-Purana describes the childhood of Krishna, a topic not elaborated in the Mahabharata. The Puranas also include subsidiary myths, hymns of praise, philosophies, iconography, and rituals. Most of the Puranas are predominantly sectarian in nature; the great Puranas and some subordinate Puranas are dedicated to the worship of Shiva or Vishnu or the Goddess, and several subordinate Puranas are devoted to Ganesha or Skanda or the sun.
Philosophy Incorporated in this rich literature is a complex cosmology. Hindus believe that the universe is a great, enclosed sphere, a cosmic egg, within which are numerous concentric heavens, hells, oceans, and continents, with India at the center. They believe that time is both degenerative—going from the golden age, or Krita Yuga, through two intermediate periods of decreasing goodness, to the present age, or Kali Yuga—and cyclic: At the end of each Kali Yuga, the universe is destroyed by fire and flood, and a new golden age begins.
Human life, too, is cyclic: After death, the soul leaves the body and is reborn in the body of another person, animal, vegetable, or mineral.
This condition of endless entanglement in activity and rebirth is called samsara see Transmigration. The precise quality of the new birth is determined by the accumulated merit and demerit that result from all the actions, or karma , that the soul has committed in its past life or lives.
Hindus may thus be divided into two groups: those who seek the sacred and profane rewards of this world health, wealth, children, and a good rebirth , and those who seek release from the world.
The principles of the first way of life were drawn from the Vedas and are represented today in temple Hinduism and in the religion of Brahmans and the caste system. The second way, which is prescribed in the Upanishads, is represented not only in the cults of renunciation sannyasa but also in the ideological ideals of most Hindus.
To the first three Vedas was added the Atharva-Veda. The first three classes Brahman, or priestly; Kshatriya, or warrior; and Vaisya, or general populace were derived from the tripartite division of ancient Indo-European society, traces of which can be detected in certain social and religious institutions of ancient Greece and Rome.
To the three classes were added the Shudras, or servants, after the Indo-Aryans settled into the Punjab and began to move down into the Ganges Valley. The three original ashramas were the chaste student brahmachari , the householder grihastha , and the forest-dweller vanaprastha.
They were said to owe three debts: study of the Vedas owed to the sages ; a son to the ancestors ; and sacrifice to the gods. The three goals were artha material success , dharma righteous social behavior , and kama sensual pleasures.
Shortly after the composition of the first Upanishads, during the rise of Buddhism 6th century BC , a fourth ashrama and a corresponding fourth goal were added: the renouncer sannyasi , whose goal is release moksha from the other stages, goals, and debts. Each of these two ways of being Hindu developed its own complementary metaphysical and social systems.
Svadharma comprises the beliefs that each person is born to perform a specific job, marry a specific person, eat certain food, and beget children to do likewise and that it is better to fulfill one's own dharma than that of anyone else even if one's own is low or reprehensible, such as that of the Harijan caste, the Untouchables, whose mere presence was once considered polluting to other castes.
The primary goal of the worldly Hindu is to produce and raise a son who will make offerings to the ancestors the shraddha ceremony. The second, renunciatory way of Hinduism, on the other hand, is based on the Upanishadic philosophy of the unity of the individual soul, or atman , with Brahman, the universal world soul, or godhead. The full realization of this is believed to be sufficient to release the worshiper from rebirth; in this view, nothing could be more detrimental to salvation than the birth of a child.
Many of the goals and ideals of renunciatory Hinduism have been incorporated into worldly Hinduism, particularly the eternal dharma sanatana dharma , an absolute and general ethical code that purports to transcend and embrace all subsidiary, relative, specific dharmas. The most important tenet of sanatana dharma for all Hindus is ahimsa, the absence of a desire to injure, which is used to justify vegetarianism although it does not preclude physical violence toward animals or humans, or blood sacrifices in temples.
In addition to sanatana dharma, numerous attempts have been made to reconcile the two Hinduisms. The Bhagavad-Gita describes three paths to religious realization.
To the path of works, or karma here designating sacrificial and ritual acts , and the path of knowledge, or jnana the Upanishadic meditation on the godhead , was added a mediating third path, the passionate devotion to God, or bhakti , a religious ideal that came to combine and transcend the other two paths. Bhakti in a general form can be traced in the epics and even in some of the Upanishads, but its fullest statement appears only after the Bhagavad-Gita.
It gained momentum from the vernacular poems and songs to local deities, particularly those of the Alvars, Nayanars, and Virashaivas of southern India and the Bengali worshipers of Krishna see below.
Therefore, most Hindus are devoted through bhakti to gods whom they worship in rituals through karma and whom they understand through jnana as aspects of ultimate reality, the material reflection of which is all an illusion maya wrought by God in a spirit of play lila.
Gods Although all Hindus acknowledge the existence and importance of a number of gods and demigods, most individual worshipers are primarily devoted to a single god or goddess, of whom Shiva, Vishnu, and the Goddess are the most popular.
Shiva embodies the apparently contradictory aspects of a god of ascetics and a god of the phallus. Shiva is also the deity whose phallus linga is the central shrine of all Shaiva temples and the personal shrine of all Shaiva householders; his priapism is said to have resulted in his castration and the subsequent worship of his severed member.
In addition, Shiva is said to have appeared on earth in various human, animal, and vegetable forms, establishing his many local shrines. To his worshipers, Vishnu is all-pervasive and supreme; he is the god from whose navel a lotus sprang, giving birth to the creator Brahma. Vishnu created the universe by separating heaven and earth, and he rescued it on a number of subsequent occasions. Several of these are animals that recur in iconography: the fish, the tortoise, and the boar.
Others are the dwarf Vamana, who became a giant in order to trick the demon Bali out of the entire universe ; the man-lion Narasimha, who disemboweled the demon Hiranyakashipu ; the Buddha who became incarnate in order to teach a false doctrine to the pious demons ; Rama-with-an-Axe Parashurama, who beheaded his unchaste mother and destroyed the entire class of Kshatriyas to avenge his father ; and Kalki the rider on the white horse, who will come to destroy the universe at the end of the age of Kali.
Most popular by far are Rama hero of the Ramayana and Krishna hero of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata-Purana , both of whom are said to be avatars of Vishnu, although they were originally human heroes. Along with these two great male gods, several goddesses are the object of primary devotion.
They are sometimes said to be various aspects of the Goddess, Devi. In some myths Devi is the prime mover, who commands the male gods to do the work of creation and destruction. As Durga, the Unapproachable, she kills the buffalo demon Mahisha in a great battle; as Kali, the Black, she dances in a mad frenzy on the corpses of those she has slain and eaten, adorned with the still-dripping skulls and severed hands of her victims. The Goddess is also worshiped by the Shaktas, devotees of Shakti, the female power.
This sect arose in the medieval period along with the Tantrists, whose esoteric ceremonies involved a black mass in which such forbidden substances as meat, fish, and wine were eaten and forbidden sexual acts were performed ritually. In many Tantric cults the Goddess is identified as Krishna's consort Radha.
More peaceful manifestations of the Goddess are seen in wives of the great gods: Lakshmi, the meek, docile wife of Vishnu and a fertility goddess in her own right; and Parvati, the wife of Shiva and the daughter of the Himalayas. The great river goddess Ganga the Ganges , also worshiped alone, is said to be a wife of Shiva; a goddess of music and literature, Sarasvati, associated with the Saraswati River, is the wife of Brahma.
Many of the local goddesses of India—Manasha, the goddess of snakes, in Bengal, and Minakshi in Madurai—are married to Hindu gods, while others, such as Shitala, goddess of smallpox, are worshiped alone.
These unmarried goddesses are feared for their untamed powers and angry, unpredictable outbursts. Many minor gods are assimilated into the central pantheon by being identified with the great gods or with their children and friends. Hanuman, the monkey god, appears in the Ramayana as the cunning assistant of Rama in the siege of Lanka.
Skanda, the general of the army of the gods, is the son of Shiva and Parvati, as is Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of scribes and merchants, the remover of obstacles, and the object of worship at the beginning of any important enterprise. Worship and Ritual The great and lesser Hindu gods are worshiped in a number of concentric circles of public and private devotion.
Because of the social basis of Hinduism, the most fundamental ceremonies for every Hindu are those that involve the rites of passage samskaras. These begin with birth and the first time the child eats solid food rice. Later rites include the first haircutting for a young boy and the purification after the first menstruation for a girl ; marriage; and the blessings upon a pregnancy, to produce a male child and to ensure a successful delivery and the child's survival of the first six dangerous days after birth the concern of Shashti, goddess of Six.
Last are the funeral ceremonies cremation and, if possible, the sprinkling of ashes in a holy river such as the Ganges and the yearly offerings to dead ancestors. The most notable of the latter is the pinda, a ball of rice and sesame seeds given by the eldest male child so that the ghost of his father may pass from limbo into rebirth.
In daily ritual, a Hindu generally the wife, who is thought to have more power to intercede with the gods makes offerings puja of fruit or flowers before a small shrine in the house. She also makes offerings to local snakes or trees or obscure spirits benevolent and malevolent dwelling in her own garden or at crossroads or other magical places in the village.
The temple is also a cultural center where songs are sung, holy texts read aloud in Sanskrit and vernaculars , and sunset rituals performed; devout laity may be present at most of these ceremonies. In many temples, particularly those sacred to goddesses such as the Kalighat temple to Kali, in Kolkata , goats are sacrificed on special occasions.
The sacrifice is often carried out by a special low-caste priest outside the bounds of the temple itself. Thousands of simple local temples exist; each may be nothing more than a small stone box enclosing a formless effigy swathed in cloth, or a slightly more imposing edifice with a small tank in which to bathe. When God has form, He is referred to by the term Paramatma. This is almighty God, whose three main forms are Brahma; the creator, Vishnu, the sustainer and Shiva, the destroyer. Hindus believe in many Gods who perform various functions; like executives in a large corporation.
These should not be confused with the Supreme God. The unique understanding in Hinduism is that God is not far away, living in a remote heaven, but is inside each and every soul, in the heart and consciousness, waiting to be discovered.
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