Hinduism

While it is difficult to list doctrines that all Hindus and Hindu traditions would accept, there is a group of core beliefs that come close to being universally shared by all those called "Hindu."

Karma and Rebirth.

The original meaning of the word karma is "work," and the earliest application of the term in Vedic texts is "ritual action or labor"—that is, correctly and precisely executed activity that will have a salutary effect on the participants of the ritual and on the universe as a whole. Rituals beginning with the samskara s, rites of passage performed at critical junctures in the life of a youth, had as their purpose to repair the imperfections of birth. Ritual work thus also consisted of the construction of a religiously viable self, and while Vedic fire sacrifices tended to be eclipsed by other forms of religious practice in later Hinduism, the performance of the samskara s has continued to the present day and is done for much the same reason. Finally, already in the Vedic period, ritual work was also the means for creating a desirable afterlife for oneself. A divine, or heavenly, self is "born out of the sacrifice"—that is, it is the product of one's ritual résumé, of the work one has done throughout one's lifetime.

The notion that one's own ritual acts (for in Vedic times these were the only acts that really mattered) had consequences—in the future as well as the present—is one of the possible sources for a doctrine that was to have huge implications for the Hindu religious worldview: the notion that all actions produced fruit, good or bad, that determined the quality of one's life. This causal and moral law of karma first appears in the early Upanishads and also features as a prominent doctrine in the new religions that arose in India at this time, Buddhism and Jainism. From this time forward, the nature of one's actions—and the attitude with which actions were performed—was believed to have determinative consequences over one's future, both in this lifetime and in future rebirths.

This concept of a "law of karma"—whereby good acts result in good results, bad in bad—extends the Vedic notion of consequential action from the confines of the ritual to the whole of life. Just as in the Vedic period one's future life is the product of one's activity, here too one's rebirth is directly correlated to actions performed in this life. But the law of karma also presupposes a series of past lives; the deeds done in those lives determine the circumstances of one's present existence. And the theory assumes future lives, not just in heavens or hells but in this world or any of a potentially infinite number of world systems. Finally, it presupposes that one may be reborn in any of these locales as any number of entities, ranging from gods to inanimate objects; good karma obviously would entail a better rebirth, bad karma results in a worse existence.

Dharma and the Varnashrama Dharma system.

Another key concept of Hinduism, and one that is closely connected to those of karma and rebirth, is dharma, a multivalent term that includes within its semantic range religion or righteousness, but also duty. Doing one's dharma means not only remaining ethical but also assuming the duties that are proper to the class or caste one is born into (due to one's past karma), and to the stage of life one is presently in. Performing one's own duty (svadharma), as it has been assigned to by birth and by the stage of life, has traditionally been an important Hindu ideal: "Your own duty done imperfectly is better than another man's done well. It is better to die in one's own duty; another man's duty is perilous" (Bhagavad Gita, 3.35).

The doctrine of svadharma, backed up by the concepts of karma and rebirth, underlies one of the most important and enduring institutions of Hindu India, the caste system. Inequalities in the present life are regarded as a result of differing past karma, and the inequalities of a projected future will reflect the rewards and punishments of actions done in the present: "Now people here whose behavior is pleasant can expect to enter a pleasant womb, like that of a woman of the Brahman [the priestly class], the Ksatriya [the warrior class], of the Vaisya [agriculturalist and trader] class. But people of foul behavior can expect to enter a foul womb, like that of a dog, a pig, or an outcaste woman" (Chandogya Upanishad, 5.10.7).

From the time of the Veda onward, the four basic classes of Hindu society—Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras (servants)—were assigned specific roles and functions and urged not to deviate from such in-born duties. The naturalness of this arrangement—or even its divine sanction—was asserted in part by integrating the origins of the social classes within stories about the cosmos's origins. The most famous of the texts in which the social classes are depicted as part of the original creation is Rig Veda 10.90, which tells of the universe originating from a primordial sacrifice of God, here called the Cosmic Man. From that sacrifice and dismemberment, the various elements of the cosmos came into being: the worlds, the sun and moon, the seasons, the various types of supernatural beings, the animals, and so forth. The social classes originated then, brought forth from the parts of the body of the creator god: "When they divided the Cosmic Man, into how many parts did they apportion him? What do they call his mouth, his two arms and thighs and feet? His mouth became the Brahmin; his arms were made into the Kshatriya; his thighs the Vaishya; and from his feet the Shudras were born" (Rig Veda, 10.90.11–12).

Such is the basic outline of the caste system: four principal classes, each with its own assigned occupation, hierarchically ranked (and correlated with the appropriate body part of the creator god). At the top is the class whose job concerns the religious sphere; the Brahman priest is, according to the texts (not coincidentally composed by members of this class), to be regarded as a kind of human god. The Kshatriyas are to be rulers and warriors and engage in the activities appropriate to their birth. As for the commoners, they are to pursue occupations concerned with wealth and prosperity, tending to livestock and trade. The servants' duties and occupations are straightforward: to humbly serve members of the higher classes and hope for a better rebirth. Finally, there are the occupations of those who live below this hierarchy, the so-called untouchables, who are below even the servants.

Dharma, or proper duty, is thus differentiated according to class and caste but also according to stage of life. The first stage in the ideal structure laid out in Hindu texts is that of a student. A young boy is given over to a teacher, or guru, with whom he lives and serves for a period of many years while studying the sacred Veda under the teacher's guidance. The lifestyle assigned to this stage of life is one of austerity, asceticism, and discipline. Among the other duties laid out for those in the student stage of life are chastity, study of the sacred texts, and obedience to the teacher.

The next stage of life, that of the householder, begins when the student leaves his teacher's home, marries, and takes up his proper profession. In the householder stage of life, he properly pursues not only dharma (used here in the specific sense of religious duties) but also the human ends of artha—private gain, understood as material prosperity, self-interest, political advantage, and in general getting ahead in the world—and kama or pleasure. The householder is charged with supporting not just his household but also other community members through alms and other gifts to those in other stages of life.

After having raised a family as a householder, a man may enter the third stage of life as what is called a forest-dweller. This stage is characterized by ascetic practices and gradual detachment from the world, including the renunciation of cultivated food (he should live on food that grows in the jungle) and of "all possessions":

After he has lived in the householder's stage of life in accordance with the rules in this way, a twice-born Vedic graduate should live in the forest, properly restrained and with his sensory powers conquered.… When a householder sees that he is wrinkled and gray, and (when he sees) the children of his children, then he should take himself to the wilderness. Renouncing all food cultivated in the village and all possessions, he should hand his wife over to his sons and go to the forest—or take her along.… He should eat vegetables that grow on land or in water, flowers, roots, and fruits, the products of pure trees, and the oils from fruits.… He should not eat anything grown from land tilled with a plough, even if someone has thrown it out, nor roots and fruits grown in a village, even if he is in distress [from hunger]. (Manu, 6.1–3, 13, 16)

The final stage of life is that of the world-renouncer, who continues and furthers the ascetic practices of the forest-dweller. In this stage, the wandering hermit should live entirely detached from the things of this world, alone and without companionship, perfectly content and in a state of equanimity. He should beg but once a day, and not be "addicted to food," hope for lots of alms, or be disappointed should he receive nothing:

He should always go all alone, with no companion, to achieve success; realizing that success is for the man who is alone, he neither deserts nor is deserted. The hermit should have no fire and no home, but should go to a village to get food, silent, indifferent, unwavering and deep in concentration. A skull-bowl, the roots of trees, poor clothing, no companionship, and equanimity to everything—this is the distinguishing mark of one who is freed. He should not welcome dying, nor should he welcome living, but wait for the right time as a servant waits for orders.… He should live here on earth seated in ecstatic contemplation of the soul, indifferent, without any carnal desires, with the soul as his only companion and happiness as his goal.… He should go begging once a day and not be eager to get a great quantity, for an ascetic who is addicted to food becomes attached to sensory objects, too.… He should not be sad when he does not get anything nor delighted when he gets something, but take only what will daily sustain his vital breath, transcending any attachment to material things. (Manu, 6.42-45; 49; 55; 57)

Samsara, liberation, and the ways to attain liberation.

Yet another central concept in Hinduism is the notion that perpetual birth, death, and rebirth occur not just at the level of human beings but of the universe as a whole. The Sanskrit name for this theory is samsara, a word that literally means to wander or pass through a series of states or conditions. Samsara describes the beginningless and endless cycle of cosmic or universal death and rebirth; all of phenomenal existence is transient, ever-changing, and cyclical. Correlative to this understanding of the world is belief in the fundamentally illusory nature of the world of appearances—a concept known in Hinduism as maya. It is because one is ignorant of reality's true nature that one perceives a world of differentiation and change; and it is through our own ignorance that we suffer and produce karma.

Samsara is contrasted to an unconditioned, eternal, and transcendent state that is equated with freedom or liberation from such ignorance, transience, suffering, and rebirth. All Hindu traditions posit an alternative to karma and rebirth and the wheel of samsara. This state of release, freedom, or liberation from karma and rebirth is called moksha. To obtain this liberation, most Hindu traditions believe that one must find a way to stop the workings of karma and the ignorant desire that motivates ordinary action. Among the various groups of world-renouncers that have arisen in the history of Hinduism, a kind of pessimism surrounds the value of worldly life. Release from the wheel of phenomenal existence among these groups often entails eliminating desire through ascetic practices and renouncing the world of ordinary activity:

On knowing him [the true self], one becomes an ascetic. Desiring him only as their home, mendicants wander forth. Verily, because they know this, the ancients desired not offspring, saying: "What shall we do with offspring, we whose is this Soul, this world?" They, verily, rising above the desire for sons and the desire for wealth and the desire for worlds, lived the life of a mendicant. For the desire for sons is the desire for wealth, and the desire for wealth is the desire for worlds; for both these are desires. (Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, 4.4.22)

Another strategy for eliminating karma and its bonds to samsara was the development of the discipline called yoga. Yoga was intended to calm the mind and body, obtain equanimity and tranquility, by ceasing to act ("curbing his movements," as the text below states) and focusing the mind:

When he keeps his body straight, with the three sections erect, and draws the senses together with the mind into his heart, a wise man shall cross all the frightful rivers.… Compressing his breaths in here and curbing his movements, a man should exhale through one nostril when his breath is exhausted. A wise man should keep his mind vigilantly under control, just as he would that wagon yoked to unruly horses. (Svetesvatara Upanishad, 2.8–9)

Yet another method to final liberation within the traditions that comprise Hinduism is the development of wisdom, or jnana. The path of wisdom requires, first and foremost, that one understand properly the nature of the universe. In the monistic philosophy first encountered in the Upanishads and later forming one of the principal schools of Hindu philosophy, jnana means penetrating the illusory appearance of the world as differentiated, and attaining a mystical wisdom of the unitary true nature of the universe and all that is in it. Attaining such transformative wisdom is itself equated with moksha, or liberation—liberation from ignorance, and also liberation from karma.

True knowledge is the knowledge of the true self's unity and identity (the atman) with the cosmic One, the brahman. Both the real self (which is not the individual ego but one's changeless true nature) and the cosmic One are depicted as unborn, unchanging, and therefore not affected by karma: "Verily, he is the great, unborn Soul, who is this [person] consisting of knowledge among the senses. In the space within the heart lies the ruler of all, the lord of all, the king of all. He does not become greater by good action nor inferior by bad action" (Brhadaranyaka Upanisad, 4.4.22). Wisdom acts as a kind of fire that burns up the individual's accumulated past karma, and uproots desire, which is the very source of karma and the rebirths it provokes.

Another strand within the Hindu tradition also accepts the necessity for wisdom and self-discipline to attain the final goal but denies that action can simply be avoided or somehow arrested. The point is not to renounce society and duty but rather to attain a desireless state within the world of activity. Although upholding the doctrine of duty, or svadharma, The Bhagavad Gita also teaches that such actions should be performed without desire. Since desire is the root cause of karma, desireless action in accordance with one's dharma will have no karmic consequences. Such a person is said to be truly wise, like the world-renouncers, but unlike them does not abandon action but rather performs it in the right way.

Also in The Bhagavad Gita are found the earliest expressions in the Sanskrit texts of what would become an enormously influential movement in Hinduism, that of devotion to a personalized deity. The theistic strains within Hinduism emphasize a different method to liberation, that of bhakti, or devotion to and faith in God. In the Gita, desireless action is also represented as sacrificial action, with the karmic fruits of all acts being given up to God. It is, finally, devotion, or bhakti, to Krishna that the Gita teaches is the way to salvation:

Whatever you do—what you take, what you offer, what you give, what penances you perform—do as an offering to me, Arjuna! You will be freed from the bonds of action, from the fruit of fortune and misfortune; armed with the discipline of renunciation, your self liberated, you will join me. (Bhagavad Gita, 9.27–28)

The devotionalistic wings of Hinduism, with their array of deities, each one regarded by devotees as supreme, all assume that it is by God's grace that suffering can be overcome and salvation made possible. In some of its forms, the bhakti movement seems to have attracted many low caste followers and others who had been left out or diminished by caste-oriented Hinduism. The movement's emphasis on simple devotion, humility, and the power of God's grace to redeem even the sinner had obvious appeal, and the power attributed to bhakti to short-circuit the karmic process is often said to be enormous and unfathomable. The bhakti movement also reinterpreted a long-standing Hindu belief that desire was the product of ignorance and the root of karma, rebirth, and suffering. For in devotionalistic traditions, longing for God—often portrayed in erotic terms—and the pain of separation from the object of desire become the emotional means for ratcheting up one's devotion to fever pitch. At the same time, most devotionalistic cults eschewed the goal of merging with or achieving identity with the object of their devotion, for that would preclude the bliss of remaining distinct while basking in God's love.

The set of traditions collectively termed Tantrism likewise reworked desire from its conceptualization as the ultimate source of human suffering into a religious tool. Esoteric tantric groups gained notoriety for their radical and transgressive methods, often arguing that the best way to attain liberation from suffering and its causes was not to renounce but rather to confront them and, under ritual conditions, engage in practices that for the uninitiated would result in the most disastrous karmic ends. Through various meditative and ritual techniques, the tantric practitioner could practice what others prohibited and could eradicate desire by means of desire.

For some tantric groups, methods to liberation included antisocial ascetic practices such as eschewing clothing and ordinary hygiene, meditating in cemeteries, carrying human skulls as begging bowls, practices involving human corpses, and the worship of deities in gruesome, terrifying forms. For others, it has meant engaging in ritualized sex and exchange of bodily fluids, or rituals that call for the ingestion of otherwise prohibited substances. In all cases, the purpose of such antinomian behavior seems to have been in one way or another to transcend the world of dualities (including pure/impure, good/bad) and achieve the liberation from samsara all Hindu groups posit as the highest goal.

For most Hindus, however, final liberation seems to be out of reach in this life. The vast majority, past and present, simply try to live virtuously and obtain, as a result, a pleasant life here on earth and a better rebirth in the future. From Vedic times to the present, rituals such as sacrifice and the worship service known as puja (performed either in the temple or at home), whereby one ritually honors the deity in the form of an image, had pleasing the gods as their goal in the hopes that the gods would protect and aid the worshipper. Festivals, pilgrimages, and lifecycle rituals are also popular among ordinary Hindus, as they are among religious practitioners the world over. Although religious virtuosi may follow the various methods laid out to attain the highest ends of Hinduism, the vast majority of Hindus content themselves with more modest goals.