Through "Hinduism" to the Greeks

Here’s the takeaway point of the month on Hinduism. But first, a bit of background.

As a westerner, it is hard to get your mind around the concept of Hinduism because it all slips through your fingers. There’s no Pope, no creed, no council of elders, and there certainly isn’t one God. Read introductions to Hinduism and you find accounts of “the Hindu Trinity”—Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer. But it is hard to find anyone who really thinks of it this way. For one thing, there are hardly any Brahma temples, And Shiva and Vishnu rarely turn up together as a team.

What you find on the ground is a riot of diversity and almost infinite tolerance and/or capacity to assimilate (the caste system is the gorilla at the picnic, but we leave that for another time). It helps to grasp that the very name “Hindu” isn’t “Hindu”—it’s a British, or maybe Mughal characterization, to describe what the outsiders saw when they got there. Hinduism, to exaggerate only slightly, seems best defined as "anything religious in India that is not specifically something else."

For anyone from a culture of monotheism, this is all disorienting. Even Buddhism, though hardly monotheistic (and perhaps not even a religion) has a single sage at the center. To find anything like Hinduism, you’d have to go back before Christianity, to the Romans or (even better) the Greeks.

Which brings me to the takeaway point: if you want to understand (classical) Greek religious life, go to India. India is what Greece might have been had Christianity not cut it off.

[None of this is original with me. Credit George Michell, cicerone extraordinaire, and I hope I haven’t misunderstood him.]

Fn. All this may be changing as the nationalists in Indian politics try to suss up a unified Hinduism as an engine of ethnic conflict. In politics, they’ve had some success, but in religion, I suspect it doesn’t go very deep.

Fn to fn: Five years ago in South India, I remember finding bound volumes of “Hindu scripture” in hotel rooms, easy to mistake for a Gideon Bible—sometimes also “Buddhist scripture,” but ironically, I don’t remember finding a Koran. I didn’t see any of this in North India last month. An accident? An artifact of geography? A trend?