HINDUISM IN WESTERN LANGUAGE: A PANEL DISCUSSION

      On Tuesday, March 1, 2011 Ramesh made a presentation on Hinduism at the Great World Religions Program of Centerville Library in Centerville, Ohio.  On April 5, 2011 there was a panel discussion of all the weekly presenters at the Program.  Ramesh and his co-panelists were asked seven questions on the religions they represented.  Ramesh's Hindu responses to the questions are presented below.

GREAT WORLD RELIGIONS

PANEL DISCUSSION:

A HINDU RESPONSE

Ramesh N. Patel

Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religion

Antioch College

Centerville Library

Centerville-Washington Diversity Council

Hithergreen Center

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Question 1:  Does your faith believe in God and if so, how would you describe him or her?

Hinduism is “my faith” just in the sense in which I articulated it in my talk on March 1, which I would call a moderate version of Hinduism for today.   For more details please visit my website at www.hinduismfortoday.com.

This Hinduism does believe in God.  It also has its own concepts of God, often overlapping but not always coinciding with those in other religions.  Basically, it recognizes a single infinite, ultimate and intimate spiritual being underlying the whole universe.   Humans with their limited means are incapable of describing this being with accuracy and completeness.  No bird can fly to the end of the sky and yet each likes to fly according to its bliss.  We humans too seek to describe God, each in its salient way.  It should be our pride that we can think of God and try to describe him or her.  But it should also make us humble that even collectively we can never reach the end of such an infinite being.

Those who have experienced this being or God are called sages in Eastern faiths and prophets in Western faiths. Their descriptions of God carry more weight than of others.  Their intimations, though, understandably vary because of the differences in their backgrounds and approaches.  However, a threefold core emerges when we look for similarities in their descriptions.  It is that this cosmic spiritual being is existence, consciousness and bliss in their pure, ultimate, infinite and intimate forms.

This being, called Brahman in Hinduism, is envisaged in both personal and impersonal forms.  Its impersonal form transcends gender distinction.  But its personal forms embrace both male and female forms.  So, God is viewed as male and also as female.  And this in many different forms.  Though being one without a second, God can appear to its devotees in their desired forms.   Don’t you appear as fatherm mother, brother, sister, friend, son or daughter to others, not to speak of rival or benefactor to some? 

Also, Hinduism believes that God can incarnate in times of utter human need.  Hindus, however, do not limit such incarnations to an exclusive single instance.  For, many such incarnations are accepted as having occurred inside and even outside the Hindu fold.  Hinduism has accepted even Mahavira and the Buddha as divine incarnations even though they opposed Hindu scriptures.  Many Hindus accept Jesus Christ as an incarnation of God even as missionaries keep insisting that they should admit him alone and throw all others out.

The apparent diversity of God’s forms should not be misunderstood as polytheistic.  If anything, this God is panentheistic, being both within us and beyond.  Hinduism does not confine itself to the internal diversity of God’s forms.  For, it has no problem in recognizing Jewish Yahweh, Christian Trinity, Muslims’ Allah, Buddhist Shunya or Tathagata, Lao Tzu’s Wu-wei or Dao and Confucian Heaven as eminently divine.

It should be noted that belief in God is not an absolute necessity to achieve the highest spiritual experience.  The spiritual paths of knowledge, selfless service and meditation can be practiced without belief in God.  Only the path of devotion requires belief in God.  Still, belief in God can greatly facilitate all four spiritual paths.

Question 2:  Does your faith have an end time and can you describe what that would entail?

Anyone or anything that is born in time will have a time when he, she or it will end.  Just as the earth goes through its daily rounds of days and nights, the cosmos also does the same.  The cosmic days and nights of the universe, however, are huge in length, stretching over billions of years. Hindu sages describe the universe as lasting billions of years after a Big Bang.  The universe experiences a Big Crunch at the end and will remain dormant for an equally long period.  It will manifest again at the new daybreak and this cycle of universal origination, sustenance and deconstruction continues indefinitely.

Besides, our universe is not the only universe.  There are numerous and potentially different universes.  Each one is called a brahmanda.  Our present universe that we see around us is also very vast with both superior and inferior species inhabiting it.  If we envisage a mammoth cosmic tree with its roots deep in the space and leaves all around beneath, we can picture ourselves as living on just one branch of the cosmic tree.  This branch has five orb-like junctures called mandalas.  Total dissolution will end the entire branch.  Partial dissolutions, which are more frequent, would have just three orbs left in the branch.

In this light, the end time, which will end the present universe, is just relative.  Over zillions of years there is continuity of the cycle.  But for the next millions of years there is no danger of dissolution.  While total dissolution occurs over billions of years, partial dissolutions take millions.  We are not close to even a partial dissolution for the next millions of years.  Sorry to disappoint those looking for an imminent apocalypse!

Incidentally, the late Carl Sagan, the creator of the celebrated series called Cosmos, called Hinduism as the religion that comes closest to science in delineating its theory of the origin of the universe.

Question 3:  What about people who have never been exposed to your faith?  Are they simply lost and condemned to being outcast?

Anyone who deems life as nothing but self-aggrandizement and pursuit of selfish pleasures of the flesh is doomed to being born again and again, chasing material consumption and suffering karmic consequences of actions that hurt other people in his or her pursuit of the hot chase.  This happens to Hindus and others in equal measure.

It is said that even if you win the rat race, you still remain a rat.  But one can get out of this rat race or vicious cycle, regardless of whether one is a Hindu.  Recognizing the futility and transience of the materialistic chase is not a monopoly of the Hindus.  In fact, many Hindus who remain captive of the chase are doomed too.  But those thoughtful and sensitive individuals, Hindu or otherwise, who turn a spiritual page in their life can overcome the vicious cycle and be released from it.  The blissful state of this liberative experience is called moksha in Hinduism.  But its glimpse is found in other religions under terms such as nirvana, kaivalya, salvation, redemption, jannat, heaven or the like.

Hinduism recognizes many paths to such terminal experience, which it regards as the final goal of human life.  These paths are basically focused on intellect, will, emotion and direct consciousness.  So, they are universal and are made available in other religions in various combinations and emphases.  One can follow a path that suits one’s personality.

But mere belief in the goal or the path is never enough.  Belief is just the first step in a thousand mile journey.  One needs to practice the arduous path to the end in order to find the terminal bliss.  Belief by itself, however strong, is just the first step, albeit an important first step.

It should be remembered that all paths are not spiritual paths and all concepts are not divine.  There are fakes and traps within Hinduism, because of charlatans wanting to take advantage of the careless and gullible.  The same goes for all religions.  As they say, buyer beware!  No one is doomed by not being exposed to some belief structure, even the Hindu belief structure.  Turning to any spiritual path is enough to avert doom.  How to recognize a spiritual path?  Every spiritual path, at the minmum, helps to conquer the ego and expand one’s identity.

Question 4:  Is war ever justified?

If “war” must include large-scale wrongful violence, it can never be justified.  But then war would be wrong because it is defined to be wrong.   Often it is not possible to determine the goals and motivations behind a war, at least not to the satisfaction of all involved.   Even historians may take years to decide if a war was just on a particular side.  So, a general formula to determine the justness or unjustness of all wars is not attainable.

That does not mean that no war can be just.  Wars in measured self-defense are generally just and those in wanton aggression are patently unjust.  France declaring war against German occupation is justified; so also Nelson Mandela’s followers waging war against apartheid in former South Africa.

In sum, wars against injustice are justified, specially if they involve atrocities on civilian population and if all peaceful alternatives have been tried and have failed.  A good example of a just war is Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent war of civil disobedience against the British rule in India.

Question 5:  With the advents of high technology and space travel, what happens if life is discovered on other planets?  Does this concept work with your faith?

As indicated in preceding responses, Hinduism has no problem with discovery of life forms in outer space.  Not only that spiritual paths of knowledge, devotion, selfless service and meditation will always be relevant.  We should have an open mind to learn something about spiritual ways from possibly more advanced species outside the earth.

Hinduism’s comfort with this question is because of its thoughtful inclusivism and basic openness.  A self-righteous exclusivism based on nothing but a narrow creedal dogma would of course have a hard time with the question.

Question 6:  Could you talk about the role of women in your faith?  Are they allowed in leadership positions?  Why or why not? 

After gaining independence in 1947 India has had a woman prime minister, a woman president, a Muslim president and several Muslim vice-presidents.  It also had former untouchables as cabinet position holders and as vice-presidents.  We here yet have hard time electing a woman vice-president, let alone even nominating a woman president after more than two hundred years from independence. 

However, women still have ways to go to achieve full equality.  Hindu scriptures praise women and their roles but also traditionally have not allowed them to hold many religious positions usually held by men.  Things are changing slowly.  But similar situations prevail in all other religions and their cultures.

To Hinduism’s credit, many customs and laws, which were patently discriminatory against women, have been changed.  More reform is due but Hindu women are also debating whether a blind imitation of Western norms about gender roles is what is needed.  A healthy questioning of Western feminism and white feminism, together with greater sensitivity toward Hindu culture and its values and needs is leading to more thoughtful exploration of alternatives and options.

Western experience with pushing individual freedom to licentious levels and then struggling with easily foreseeable consequences like high rates of divorce, child abuse, broken families, drug abuse and the like is not a tempting achievement in the eyes of Hindu men and women of the twenty-first century.  Hence, they are reassessing Western values at the same time that they are reconsidering their own traditional values.

Many Hindus increasingly believe that a time tested practice of individual responsibility in the style of traditional Hinduism should not be thoughtlessly diluted away in favor of a Western style worship  of rampant individual freedom without regard to its actually producing sufficient good to justify all the heavy price that the West does not mind paying for it yet.  In other words, respect for duties and obligations must find some place in our values, to balance overindulgence in the name of rights and freedoms.

Question 7:  Please take a moment to talk about how your faith relates to those of other faiths.  Does your faith have a specific doctrine about those of different faiths?  Accepted or lost?  All part of the body of the faithful if they strive to be close to God?  To be defeated?  Please try to explain.

The preceding responses already speak to this question.  A careful look at the four major spiritual paths accepted by Hinduism shows that the spiritual paths in other religions are, largely speaking, combinations of these paths.  For example, Judaism, Christianity and Islam seem to be advocating combinations of what Hindus call the paths of devotion to God and selfless service of humanity.  Path of meditation, on the other hand, seems to combine well with the path of selfless service in Buddhism and, to an extent, Daoism.

Hinduism has historically underplayed mere creedal structure and doctrinal differentiation.  It has always emphasized spiritual cultivation instead.  In this vein it has no problem recognizing, validating and appreciating the spiritual content of other religions.  Its doctrinal repertoire, on the other hand, is vast and diverse, making room for all kinds of religious beliefs.  Hinduism is sometimes regarded as a congragaton of religions than a single religion.  That is because it has room for almost all categories of religious belief unless, of course, they are scandalously particular, tribal, personalistic or cultish.

Moral and spiritual values of Western religions do not bewilder Hinduism.  In fact they reinforce its adoption of perennial philosophy, which holds that all major time tested religions of the world contain valid spiritual paths whose differences enrich and similarities reinforce. 

But one thing that dismays Hindus is exclusivism in any religion, even if it shows up uncharacteristically and rarely in some corrupt forms of Hinduism itself.   We can reach the top of a mountain in many ways. There are many ways to reach Dayton, Ohio, even from the same place.  There are many ways two numbers can add up to twelve.  Why then in God’s name there should be just one way to spiritual truth and bliss?  If God really wanted us to have only one faith, he could have easily arranged it.  On top, when such a way happens to be a convenient and self-righteous claim with little spiritual content and plenty of doctrinal baggage in it, it creates even greater suspicion about its validity.  If a religion is great, it will spread by its own merit and example.  Surely not by tooting its own horn loudly, which any pedestrian can do with gusto.

What is really involved is a confusion between two aspects of every world faith. One aspect, to be called spirituality, is the inner, individual, uplifting and blissful aspect of faith.  It consists of being good, doing good and finding bliss for an individual.  A good Hindu in this regard is not very different from a good Jew, Christian, Muslim or Buddhist. 

The other side of the coin of faith, however, is its opposite in many respects.  It can be called religion and it consists of outer, social, legalistic, invasive, doctrinal aspect which has done more harm than good.  Good Hindus will censure it in Hinduism itself as in other religions.  Generally it is not prominent in Eastern religions as much as it is in Western religions.  This is due to the tendency in Eastern faiths to emphasize spirituality and in Western religions to emphasize religion.  It appears that the outer or religious aspect of faith is more emphasized in Western faiths and the inner or spiritual is more emphasized in Eastern faiths. 

Hence it is that Hinduism suffuses all aspects of individual life with spiritual seeking and cultivation and because of this it tends to accept and tolerate doctrinal differences with unusual ease and obvious openness.  Orthodox and fundamentalist Hindus even decry the too-familiar feature of a Hindu saying “all religions are same”. 

Different faiths may not be saying exactly the same thing.  But they help us reach the same place, even as people keep describing the place in different words from their different perspectives.  Much harm is done trying to find differences among faiths.  It’s time to find similarities instead. 

Hinduism is confident that a friendly dialog of world religions will find that all faiths are saying different things about the same spiritual place and trying to reach the same place through apparently different routes and pathways.  And this profound underlying unity of all faiths is one great testimonial for the deep and identical humanity throbbing in all human hearts.   Or, is it the same divinity calling all of us?

Ramesh N. Patel

www.hinduismfortoday.blogspot.com