Rethinking Hinduism

(This essay is a work in progress.)

What is Hinduism?

As a Hindu, I have found that this question cannot be answered in the usual way. We must instead unravel the question itself and untangle the knots that make it seem sensible. As the knots dissolve, our perception becomes clear enough to make sense of what we are.

These words may come as a surprise to those who think they know what Hinduism is already. The default view of Hinduism, both in the West and among Westernized Indians, is that it is a religion in the same way that Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism are religions. It is characterized by beliefs like karma, reincarnation, and liberation from the cycle of birth and death; practices like family rituals and the worship of various gods; social customs like the caste system; and scriptures like the Bhagavad Gītā.

Some thoughtful Hindus are well aware that this simple picture is misleading and locate the problem in using Western terms to describe Indian experience. According to this view, Hinduism should be instead called sanātana dharma, and it should be categorized as a dharma rather than as a religion. While this response improves our situation somewhat, it still contains subtle confusions of its own. Moreover, this response is not helpful to people who don’t know what these Sanskrit words mean.

So, what is Hinduism? My current answer, and the answer I will explore in this essay, is that Hinduism is the Western experience of certain Indian traditions. Broadly, the Indian traditions focus primarily on practice and ritual, and they aim at both worldly success and lasting happiness. Worldly success comes from intelligently working with the natural world, which includes the world of human nature. But since the world is impermanent and beyond our full control, we may also seek lasting happiness by gaining inner freedom from the world’s constant change. The Indian traditions provide a vast ocean of methods for attaining this freedom, and we can make use of them according to our temperament and ability.

While this answer is compact, the nuances within it are profound and deserve careful attention. For that reason, I will use the rest of this essay to untangle some of the conceptual knots that make the default view plausible and obscure the alternative view I offer instead. Specifically, I will untangle these knots by exploring three broad questions and their answers:

1. What is Hinduism? — The Western experience of certain Indian traditions, and the identity those traditions share today.

   “Hinduism” as a concept comes from the British experience of colonial India. Letting go of “Hinduism” is an unsettling thought, but it is a crucial first step if we want to see the Indian traditions as they really are.

2. What is tradition? — That which the generations pass down.

   Once we set aside “Hinduism,” we must also re-examine the conceptual universe that gave rise to it, a universe full of terms like religion, belief, scripture, worship, and morality. These terms have precise and coherent meanings in Western experience but are poor fits for Indian experience. As we find better terms and language, we gain more clarity on what these traditions are like.

3. What do the Indian traditions offer? — A radically different way of being, and a path to lasting happiness.

   With enough knots untangled, we can intelligently state what these traditions offer us here and now. If we who cherish these traditions do not speak for them, outsiders will presume to speak for us and distort and trivialize what we are, as they have done for centuries.

Before we begin, two caveats are necessary. First, my answer has its own limitations, since I too am a Westernized Hindu who cannot see my traditions exactly as my ancestors did. Second, my goal here is not to give a rigorous argument, since I would just be repeating the work of S. N. Balagangadhara and the other scholars whose research has informed this essay. Instead, I want to offer my own view of Hinduism as plainly as I can and show how it both makes sense of Hindu practice and cuts through a stubborn tangle of conceptual problems.

The root of the problem

The default view of Hinduism creates many conceptual problems that frustrate our efforts to make sense of ourselves. The more apparent these problems are, the clearer it becomes that a different view is necessary.

For example, let’s return to the idea that Hinduism is a religion. As a religion, Hinduism is quite unusual. It has no single founder, text, doctrine, or practice; its numerous texts contradict each other constantly; and in the opinion of Shashi Tharoor and many other Hindus, it is “a religion without fundamentals.” Popular statements among Hindus are that anyone can be Hindu no matter what they believe and that all religions are valid. But if anyone can be a Hindu no matter what they believe, and if all religions are valid, one wonders why being a Hindu matters at all. Partly because of this confusion, the skeptical outsider sees Hinduism as little more than caste.

Another basic issue is the matter of what Hinduism should be called. “Hindu” is derived from the river Sindhu and was simply the word that the Persians used to describe the Indian people. Since this word was created by outsiders, many Hindus prefer an insider’s term instead and will say that they follow sanātana dharma, the eternal dharma or way. But this name became popular only in the 19th century or so, and we can rightly ask what names people used before. One candidate for an older name is vaidika dharma, the dharma that follows the ancient Sanskrit texts known as the Vedas. But there are various traditions that we call Hindu today that are either indifferent to the Vedas or opposed to them. Examples include the ancient sāṅkhya tradition, which Adi Shankara, the great exponent of the Advaita Vedanta tradition, criticized for being veda-bāhya or not rooted in the Vedas; the yoga tradition, whose philosophical root is sāṅkhya; the Lingayat tradition founded by Basavanna; and several other Shaiva traditions, including many kinds of Shaiva tantra.

Another issue regards what kind of thing Hinduism is, whatever name we might use for it. For example: is Hinduism a religion? On the one hand, yes. Swami Vivekanda, for instance, calls Hinduism a religion many times in his writing. The Times of India likewise describes Hinduism as “the world’s oldest religion,” and similar language is used by the Hindu American Foundation (“the world’s oldest living religion”) and Reddit’s /r/hinduism forum (“the oldest living religion in the world”). So, there is a popular understanding that Hinduism is a religion. But on the other hand, no. The Supreme Court of India has said that Hinduism is “a way of life and nothing more,” language echoed by popular figures like Narendra Modi and Sadhguru. Sringeri Sharada Peetham likewise talks instead of the “sacred tradition of Sanatana Dharma,” and the same Reddit forum as before also calls Hinduism a “way of life.” So, there is also a common understanding that Hinduism is not a religion. The same puzzles occur in a host of related matters regarding Hinduism: what Hindus believe, how Hindus worship, what scriptures Hindus use, what moral laws Hindus follow, and so on.

Continuing on, we find a more fundamental puzzle: where did “Hinduism” as an idea even come from? This question is deeply contentious in modern India, as are all matters that touch on India’s past. The secular left says that Hinduism is a 20th century construct, that the Hindu claim to India’s civilizational heritage is a political falsehood, and that India can thrive only if Hinduism is eradicated. The Hindu right says instead that Hinduism is the ancient and eternal religion that grounds Indian civilization, that Hindus are in the best position to properly uphold that civilization, and that if Hinduism fades, India will fade with it.

With all of this in mind, let us come to the core of our problems: what has happened to us that we no longer understand what we are? How is such an ancient culture so confused on such fundamental questions?

The colonial period, while real and damaging, is sometimes a scapegoat for explaining away India’s modern problems. But colonialism’s invisible and insidious legacy is that it distorts and shatters the lenses of the colonized and replaces them with its own ways of seeing. Suppose, for example, that a parrot is tortured into believing that it is a fish. At first, it is ashamed of its large and clumsy fins and that it can’t swim as well as other fish can. Over time, it may defend itself by saying that its fins and scales are quite wonderful and that swimming slowly on the water’s surface is better than swimming swiftly and deeply as other fish do. It might even brag that it follows the way of the Ancient Parrot who was the first to teach the world how to swim. But none of this fixes the parrot’s fundamental confusion. Even talking about birds and wings and feathers won’t help because the parrot no longer understands what these words mean. Instead, it must change its entire frame of reference. As long as this does not happen, the parrot will be trapped in endless discussions about fish and fins and scales, none of which have anything to do with what it is.

This is the situation for Hindus today, or at least the Westernized Hindus who dominate the Indian intellectual class and the Indian diaspora. We see through a mix of Indian and Western lenses, and when these lenses misalign, what we see is incoherent. We can’t agree on what to call Hinduism, we can’t agree on if it is a religion, we can’t agree on if it is a modern construct, we don’t have the lenses to make sense of this situation, we don’t know how to tell others what we are, and we don’t have the intellectual tools to untangle ourselves. The Hindu reactions to this situation are tragic but predictable: alienation, stupefaction, dogmatism, and rage.

But if what we see is incoherent, perhaps the problem is not in what we see but in the lenses through which we see it. With these problems in mind, let’s start to untangle what we can, starting with the concept of “Hinduism” itself. If we have the courage to set it aside, we will find a deeper and more profound unity that makes better sense of what we are.

1. What is Hinduism?

“Hinduism” is the name the British gave to what they saw in India. To understand what they meant by this term, we must have some understanding of how the British saw India during the colonial period.

In the British understanding, “religion” was a universal human category of which Protestant Christianity was the highest and most perfect example. Christianity generally is characterized by adherence to a specific set of beliefs that form a doctrine or creed. Such beliefs include:

• the existence of God;
• the nature of Jesus as the one and only Son of God;
• the death and resurrection of Jesus as an objective historical event;
• affirmation of the divinely inspired Bible as the source of both divine law and objective and universal moral standards;
• the falsehood of other religions, which have different doctrines of varying levels of depravity;
• implicitly, a God-given duty to bring the followers of these depraved religions into the Christian fold.

Protestant Christianity in particular emerged as a repudiation of the Catholic Church and its emphasis on tradition, ritual, and the role of the priesthood. Indeed, Protestantism is characterized by skepticism of tradition and its priestly guardians, emphasis on scripture as the sole authority of the religion, and valorization of personal experience of the divine unmediated by any authority.

Through these lenses, the British perceived the various things they saw in India as manifestations of a religion they called Hinduism and structured what they saw according to their understanding of Protestant Christianity. Hinduism’s authoritative scriptures were the Vedas, its book of laws was the Manusmṛti, its corrupt priests were the Brahmins, its degenerate practices were caste and sati, its depraved teachings were its contradictory texts, its distorted histories were the Puranas, and its true essence could be rediscovered by carefully studying its most ancient texts independent of their traditional reception. Along similar lines, the British also conceived of Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism as separate religions. In this view, Buddhism became the Protestant reform movement to Hinduism’s Catholic corruption.

Seeking to defend themselves from colonial attacks, Indians made use of this conceptual structure and tried to position themselves as followers of an ancient and universal religion. Some also tried in response to create rational and purified forms of Hinduism, the results of which are still alive in groups like the Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj. But over the course of decades of engaging with this hegemonic British discourse, Indians assumed the truth of British lenses without considering where these lenses had come from or what other lenses they might use instead.

Today, we avoid the most obvious legacies of the colonial period but still retain this basic conceptual structure. We debate whether to call it Hinduism or sanātana dharma, but we affirm that “Hinduism” as a concept is meaningful and important. The West thinks of Buddhism as the secular and universal alternative to superstitious Hinduism, echoing the colonial views from centuries ago. In India, debates on whether Hinduism is a timeless religion or a modern construct assume the necessity of “Hinduism” as a category, even though it is an imposition from a foreign conceptual frame and a perennial source of confusion.

So, what is Hinduism? It is simply the Western experience of certain Indian traditions. This imposed category has today become a shared identity for these traditions, and the past millennium of Hindu history has shown why a shared identity is politically necessary.

But this answer is incomplete because it doesn’t make sense of the heart of the question, which is to understand what Hindus do and think. To address this, we must first untangle a few more knots. Only then can we speak about what these traditions offer us now.

2. What is a tradition?

If we set aside the category of “Hinduism,” we must still describe what we see and what we meant by that category in the first place. Is it a religion? What do Hindus believe? What scriptures do Hindus use? How many gods do Hindus worship? What does Hindu morality look like?

As neutral as these questions sound, they are all embedded in a Western conceptual framework that derives from Christianity. For example, all of the words below have specific connotations and relationships that the West intuitively grasps:

• God, creation, monotheism, polytheism, atheism
• religion, faith, doubt, creed, doctrine, belief, conversion, profession, true, false
• scripture, revelation, law, commandment, rights
• soul, heaven, hell, angel, devil
• morality, good, evil, sin, penance, heresy
• priest, idol, worship, faith, church, ritual, sacrifice
• freedom, will, agency, individual, universal, mysticism
• history, tolerance, sacred, spiritual, secular, rights

This conceptual structure is alien to the Indian traditions and cannot make sense of them. Naturally, the Indian traditions have their own conceptual structure, which is embedded in Sanskrit and other Indian languages. Some suggest we should leave Indian terms untranslated and speak of dharma, karma, and all the rest when explaining Indian experience. By all means, let us use Indian terms where we can. But the problem is that Indian terms make sense only to those who already understand them. The West does not understand these terms, and Westernized Indians increasingly do not understand them either.

While we may need to use Christian terms for reasons of pragmatism and Indian terms for reasons of precision, what is most useful is to find reasonable translations that make sense of native terms without either committing to the assumptions of Christian theology or demanding a deep knowledge of Indian culture. The more we can find such translations, the more we can clearly talk about the Indian traditions and make ourselves understood.

Below, I explore five of the terms we commonly use to talk about “Hinduism”: religion, belief, scripture, worship, and morality. I show that what these terms mean in Western experience makes them a poor fit for Indian experience and suggest alternate ways of talking about what the Indian traditions do. While there are many other Western terms that are a poor fit for Indian experience, these five are especially important, and clearing up additional terms beyond these five gives us only marginal insight.

For the sake of concision, I will speak of Western and Christian experience in the general sense without teasing out its nuances and exceptions, which naturally arise in any community as large as the West or Christendom. But I believe that anyone familiar with either the West or with Christianity will recognize the major themes at play here.

Religion

Is “Hinduism” a religion?

In the Western understanding, to be religious is to believe in and live by certain statements that form a creed or doctrine. Belief is also necessary for fully joining a religious community. That is, a person who thinks that God does not exist or that Jesus was simply a wise teacher would not be recognized as a Christian. In the Christian perspective, religious beliefs are universal, meaning that they are appropriate to all people at all times. Furthermore, it is the duty of the religious person to make others share these beliefs through evangelism, conversion, polemics, colonization, and other forms of social action. Additionally, all people have religion, but all religions other than Christianity are depraved, Satanic, and so on. Since religious doctrines are incompatible, at least some religions must be false. (To the atheist, all of them are false.)

In comparison, let’s consider some phenomena from the Indian world:

• Hindus generally have no problem with calling themselves Hindu atheists, Hindu Christians, Hindu Muslims, or Hindu Buddhists, and such designations have been accepted by the community.

• A Hindu who embraces their family customs without believing anything specific about them is accepted as a Hindu.

• A person born in a Hindu family who practices yoga without believing anything specific about their practice is accepted as a Hindu.

• A person born in a non-Hindu family who does the same is usually accepted as a Hindu.

• To Hindus, it is baffling that a person’s practices could be “true” or “false”; instead, we can only say that some are more or less useful.

• Likewise, Hindus historically have little concept of conversion. There is a constant sense in Hindu thought and history that people should live by their own ways and customs.

• Within Hindu families, observing certain practices around diet, festivals, marriage, etc. is much more important than believing certain things about God, reincarnation, etc.

• Despite many changes in Hindu practice over the centuries, Hindus feel connected to an ancient tradition and revere the Vedas along with other ancient material.

• Buddhists in Thailand venerate “Hindu” gods like Ganesha, and some Hindus venerate the Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu.

If religion is about belief, it cannot make sense of these Indian phenomena. If religion is not about belief, it cannot make sense of the Western phenomena described earlier. In the academic literature, “religion” has become so vague and contested that some scholars have suggested throwing out the category altogether. Even so, we default to calling what Indians do “religion” because we have inherited the assumption that all people have religion, an assumption that comes directly from Christian theology.

So, is “Hinduism” a religion? No. “Tradition” makes more sense of what we see and better accounts for the constant flow of practices, languages, and customs that characterizes Indian culture. As a translation of the Sanskrit word dharma, it also conveys the sense in which tradition upholds the customs passed down to us.

Belief

What do Hindus believe?

In the Western understanding, to be Christian is to believe and live by a specific set of claims that constitute a creed. Such claims include that God exists, that Jesus is the Son of God, and that the resurrection occurred as a historical event. The most central teachings of Christianity inevitably touch on core beliefs like God, Jesus, the resurrection, and how we should relate to them as disciples of Christ. I mentioned above what some of the dynamics of these beliefs are: that they are universally true, that they should be spread by proselytism and conversion, etc.

When we ask what Hindus believe, we ask by analogy with Christianity and seek a unified belief system by which we can decide if Hinduism is true or false. But this is not how the Indian traditions think about belief at all:

• The Indian traditions are traditions that pass down a way of being and acting in the world. While beliefs are part of the tradition, they are not its central components in the way that a creed or doctrine is to Christians. In general, nobody would be excluded as Hindu simply for rejecting certain Hindu beliefs about God, reincarnation, and so on.

• Where the West tends to see beliefs as universal propositions about the world, India tends to see beliefs as contingent and partial expressions of truth that make sense to different people in different contexts. That is, beliefs are models, not truths in themselves. While it certainly matters that a belief is sound, what is equally important is that it is useful to a particular person and context. Therefore, there is no requirement that Hindus share the same models.

• In many Indian traditions, anything that can be cognized or put into words is not the ultimate truth. Beliefs and language are simply ways of orienting ourselves to that which is beyond words.

• This all does not mean that beliefs are irrelevant; various Indian traditions have argued bitterly for centuries about the superiority of their own doctrines and positions. But the goal of the argument is not to show that one doctrine is false and the other is true. Rather, the goal is to show that one doctrine is inferior and the other is superior. This dynamic is akin to debates on scientific theories, where the better theory aims to subsume its opponents rather than show that they are “false.” Scientific debates are often bitter and vicious, but the nature of the debate is fundamentally different from a dispute between religious claims.

• A text like the Māṇḍūkyopaniṣat, which to many is the highest and most perfect expression of Hindu thought, has nothing to say about “Hindu” beliefs like God or reincarnation. Its concerns are entirely different. Likewise for a text like the Heart Sutra, which to many is the highest and most perfect expression of Buddhist thought.

So, what do Hindus believe? All kinds of things; but this question puts too much emphasis on belief and assumes that a tradition is akin to a religion. What is more important is what Hindus do.

Scripture

What are the Hindu scriptures, and how do Hindus read them?

In the Western understanding, scripture is the infallible and divinely revealed Word of God. It contains objective moral laws in the form of commandments, and these commandments apply to all people at all times. Scripture also reveals the true history of the world, and in the Christian context this specifically means the lives of the prophets and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the Protestant understanding, scripture alone (as opposed to the church or the weight of tradition) is the sole authority over religious life, and we engage with scripture by reading it for ourselves, contemplating its message, and listening to sermons and other commentaries. Scripture is absolutely central to what it means to be Christian because it establishes divine history, objective morality, and the one path to salvation.

This is not at all how the Indian traditions think about their texts:

• The Bhagavad Gita says that the worth of the Vedas to the sage is like the worth of a well amidst the flood. That is, the Vedas have no worth to such a person.

• The Vivekacūḍāmaṇi says that texts are fruitless both to the fool and to the sage. The fool cannot make use of them, and the sage has no need of them.

• In the Buddhist traditions, the Pali Canon is venerated not because it is a revelation but because it records the words of the Buddha, the most excellent teacher in the Buddhist tradition.

• Accomplished teachers and sages regularly create new texts of their own, which often gain equal or superior status to the texts that came before.

• In the Indian traditions, serious practice begins not by reading a text but by finding a teacher who can serve as a spiritual master. Texts are useful only insofar as they help the student gain knowledge about his own experience and practice.

• Authoritative texts regularly state that their counsel is contingent, time-bound, and subordinate to the judgment of a wise person.

• Although the Manusmṛti is treated by some as an authoritative Hindu law code, it is one of twenty such texts that have survived to the present day.

• Before the colonial era, the historicity of Hindu texts was never a concern or a point of debate. What mattered was if they were true in the sense of speaking to the realities of human experience and acting intelligently in the world.

So, what are the Hindu scriptures, and how do Hindus read them? Rather than speak of scriptures, it is more useful to think of texts whose role is secondary to experience and the counsel of the wise. While texts are certainly important to the Indian traditions, they do not play the central and supreme role that texts have in Christianity or Islam. That role is instead held by the sages, whether ancient or modern.

Worship

What do Hindus worship?

In the Western understanding, worship has various shades of meaning. But in general, it means the adoration of a supreme and superior entity from an inferior position. Professor of theology Mark Miravalle teases out this specifc meaning as it appears in the Catholic tradition:

As St. Thomas Aquinas explains, adoration, which is known as latria in classical theology, is the worship and homage that is rightly offered to God alone. It is the manifestation of submission, and acknowledgement of dependence, appropriately shown towards the excellence of an uncreated divine person and to his absolute Lordship. It is the worship of the Creator that God alone deserves.

The key words here are submission and dependence. This sense also matches how we use “worship” in idioms like “worship the ground he walks on.” This sense also matches the Anglican understanding of worship. In the words of the C. S. Lewis Institute:

When we worship God, we actively recognize Him as our Creator, Savior, and King.

Such is the deeper meaning of worship, which goes beyond mere veneration or respect. In comparison, consider some phenomena from the Indian world:

• In traditional rituals at home and in the temple, parents usually teach their children the form of the ritual without emphasizing a particular attitude or belief one should have when doing it.

• In the ritual view, it is totally consistent and reasonable to perform a ritual with sincerity without knowing what it means or why it should be done. One can even perform a ritual sincerely while viewing it as totally meaningless.

• “Worship” is often used to translate one of three different Sanskrit verbs, none of which have the sense of submission and dependence. The first is pūjayati (“venerate”), which is performed for gods, sages, guests, cows, cars, and all manner of venerated people and things. The second is namati (“bow”), which is used for gods, sages, or any person we show respect, as in the phrase namaste. The third is vandate (“hail”, “salute”), which is used for gods or any honored person or thing, as in the song Vande Mataram or the train Vande Bharat.

• A common motif in Indian stories is the sage whose meditation is so powerful that even the gods tremble. This motif appears repeatedly in the Upanishads, as in the Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣat (“Even the gods cannot prevail against him, for he becomes their very self”) and the Kaṭhopaniṣat (“On this point even the gods have doubted formerly; it is not easy to understand.”).

• There is a type of poem called nindā-stuti in which the poet teases and adores the deity in the same verse. For example, a poem might venerate Shiva while mocking him for his family problems. This kind of poem does not make sense through the lens of worship.

• Hindu devotional practices cultivate one of five basic attitudes toward the deity: placid love, the love of a servant, the love of a friend, the love of a parent, and the love of a lover. Only the love of the servant corresponds to what we conventionally call worship.

• Nisargadatta Maharaj, the great 20th century sage, once said that “God is my devotee.” This attitude is incomprehensible in Western experience but perfectly clear in an Indian context.

So, what do Hindus worship? Generally, we don’t. Hindu traditions focus on ritual and veneration, not on worship in the Christian sense.

Morality

What is the Hindu view on morality?

In the Western understanding, scripture is the source of objective and universal moral laws that apply equally to all people and define the scope of good and evil. Many of these laws take the form of commandments, commands given by God Himself. Christian and Muslim apologists commonly argue that morality is subjective and arbitrary unless it has a transcendent grounding in the word of God. In a secular Western context, moral philosophy explores issues like whether morality is subjective or objective, how we can discover moral laws, and so on.

In comparison, consider some phenomena from the Indian world:

• Dharma, or the rules of conduct, is mostly particular to specific people and contexts. There is varṇāśrama-dharma based on social class and stage of life; yuga-dharma based on the norms of the era; sva-dharma specific to a person’s character; āpad-dharma permitted in times of adversity; and so on.

• The Āpastamba Dharmasūtras famously say that “dharma and adharma do not go around and say ‘here we are,’ nor do the gods, nymphs, and ancestors say ‘This is dharma and this is adharma.’” The idea is that these things must be inferred from what works in practice as well as the conduct of wise and intelligent people.

• Principles like truthfulness, nonviolence, and self-control are justified primarily on pragmatic grounds, namely that they lead to happiness both for oneself and for others.

• Additionally, core principles always have exceptions and limitations in certain contexts. The Mahābhārata features various stories where telling the truth and other high-minded actions lead to disaster and death. The Pañcatantra is especially full of such stories.

• Indian texts rarely speak in terms of good and evil. In the Rāmāyaṇa, the demon king Ravana is portrayed not as evil but as ignorant and short-sighted. Duryodhana and other wicked characters in the Mahābhārata are portrayed in the same way. Truly wicked people are understood to act the way they do due to their past conditioning, which can be mitigated through instruction and training.

So, what is the Hindu view on morality? There isn’t one, or at least not in the sense of universal moral laws emerging from God or revelation. Hindus instead speak of pragmatic principles that are conducive to human happiness then apply these principles through context-specific rules.

Other terms

Exploring other terms beyond these five brings us only marginal insight. But for the sake of the curious reader, here are my brief notes on some other terms and concepts:

• The Indian traditions are not interested in questions of meaning or purpose. I believe that such questions are artifacts of Western experience and do not constitute a universal human concern.

• The Indian traditions are not interested in the historicity of figures like Rama, Krishna, etc. In the Abrahamic view, history is important to establish the veracity of specific events that have cosmic and universal importance: the resurrection of Jesus, the revelations given by Muhammad, etc. To the Indian traditions, what is more important is whether something is true to experience and helps us live well. India’s modern preoccupation with the historicity of its stories arose under colonial pressure and misses the point entirely.

• The Indian traditions do not conceive of human beings as a supreme creation distinct from the rest of nature. Rather, human beings are embedded in nature like everything else. Accordingly, the Indian traditions are not preoccupied with questions of agency, free will, etc, which arise due to specific theological assumptions from Abrahamic religion. Generally, they share the view that human behavior is influenced by various causal factors, all of which are grouped together under the general term karma.

3. What do the Indian traditions offer?

The default view of Hinduism is that is a religion like any other and is charactered by specific beliefs, practices, and social customs. But the more we scrutinize this view, the more it falls apart. Hinduism seems to be a religion where anyone can believe anything and major texts and practices are free to contradict each other. Seemingly innocuous terms like religion, belief, worship, scripture, and morality confuse the matter and make Hinduism into a heap of colorful idiocies. A different way of seeing is necessary.

Here I have argued for an alternate view: Hinduism is the Western experience of certain Indian traditions. As a whole, the Indian traditions focus on practice and ritual and aim at lasting happiness by providing a path to inner freedom from the world’s constant change. Their beliefs are models by which we go about the world, and their attitude toward beliefs is that reality cannot be captured in thought and language and that different models are useful to different people in different contexts. The rules of conduct these traditions uphold are likewise highly context-dependent and vary widely by era, social class, and situation.

(This view of Hinduism is not my own invention and is heavily indebted to the research of scholars like S. N. Balagangadhara. What I have written here is simply my interpretation of this research as tempered by my own experience and understanding.)

This alternate view immediately makes sense of various puzzles and questions. A Hindu is someone who practices or upholds one of the Hindu traditions. All religions are not the same because to the extent that a religion has a specific doctrine, these doctrines inevitably conflict. However, all traditions are potential paths to lasting happiness, and there is a mutual respect among traditions for this reason. Indian texts seemingly contradict because they offer models that are contextually useful for specific people and circumstances. Pointing out a contradiction or moral outrage in these texts is not interesting because the ancient world and our modern world are different contexts. There is no reason to expect that all ancient observations are appropriate for us now, and the ancients were well aware of this fact and said it themselves many times.

As for Indian politics, this alternative view affirms that Hinduism is a modern category but also recognizes the deeper unity that the Indian traditions share. Concretely, their unity is in their shared grammar of languages, goals, practices, methods, symbols, geography, stories, deities, art, and all the rest. But their deeper unity is that despite the inevitable conflicts that arise in human communities, these traditions respect each other as traditions, as distinct ways of going about the world and relating to experience. There is therefore no conflict in a Hindu learning from a Buddhist or Muslim, or in a Jain including Hindu deities in their temple. This deeper unity includes Christianity and Islam to the extent that they view themselves as traditions, and it likewise excludes Hindu traditions to the extent that they view themselves as religions.

But what do these traditions offer us now? This question deserves an essay of its own, but I will make a brief case in a few paragraphs.

In conventional terms, the Indian traditions offer a distinct and sophisticated way of going about the world that is comparable to the ways proposed by any other great civilization. In particular, they have thoroughly explored what it means to live harmoniously in a highly pluralistic society where every community has its own distinct norms. While this essay has explored a few of the ways that the Indian traditions have enabled and embraced this plurality, it is difficult to give a full assessment of how they saw the world because our understanding of them is still marred with colonial-era distortions. Much more research is necessary.

But beyond these conventional terms, I believe that the diagnosis that the Indian traditions make of our human condition is as true now as it was millennia ago: the world is a place of constant change, and we cannot find lasting happiness in things that don’t last. Nearly every human culture has noticed this fact, but what distinguishes the Indian traditions is their startling claim that we can have lasting happiness here and now, if only we know how to realize it. In total, what they offer is the most ancient and sophisticated inquiry into consciousness and experience that the world has ever known. Modern yoga and mindfulness meditation are two of its more famous global exports, but there is much more for the world to discover.

If we who cherish these traditions cannot articulate what they are and intelligently explain why they matter, others will take it upon themselves to do so. Sadly, the idea that we can all relate to reality in our own way and live by our own customs is treated with deep hostility by the three universalist ideologies that dominate our world today. To mainline Islam, Hinduism is little more than pagan idolatry, the greatest and most hated of sins. To mainline Christianity, Hinduism is depraved, Satanic, and a final frontier for modern missionary work. To secular modernity, which is largely a form of secularized Christianity, Hinduism is the root cause of all of India’s social problems and must either reform or perish. I welcome sincere criticism no matter where it comes from, but I find it suspicious that all three ideologies uphold the same argumentative frame: “since the Indian traditions are obviously backward and depraved, we have the right and obligation to dismantle them.”

While many Hindus today have internalized the colonial-era view that their traditions are depraved and inferior, times are changing, and there is a new surge of interest in both understanding the Indian traditions on their own terms and taking their civilizational perspective seriously. It is time for Hindus to know themselves and to speak intelligently on what they offer to the world.