Insightful as always. One of the interesting connections that outsiders might not notice is the way in which American Christianity has gone sideways in the two aspects which you distinguish as Hindu: individual purity and devotional rituals over theological dogma. Theology plays almost zero role in the life of the average zealous Christian in America. Praise and worship music + living "pure" is most, if not all, of what it means to be a Christian nowadays. This is not what Christianity was for thousands of years. Receiving blessed bread and wine from a priest is what it meant to be a Christian. What is considered "traditional" in America today--heartfelt devotion as a method of personal purification, primarily accomplished through long singing sessions where devotees sing repetitive songs that circle endlessly--basically became the default in the late 20th Century.
Wow, that's such good insight! Yeah I've been really into people on Substack who can talk about American Protestant Christianity practice in a way that's intelligible to me as a non-Christian person. I know a lot about Catholicism, because I went to Catholic school, so I have some sense of how Catholicism works in practice (for instance, once I mentioned to my mom that I was reading the Bible, and she said "Didn't you read that in school?" And I said no! Catholics don't really read the Bible! Which is something that seems so strange to me, but is just how it is, I guess. We had SEVEN YEARS of religion classes. In one of the religion classes we literally read Aristotle, but we never read the Bible.)
There was significant controversy during the mid-2nd Millennium when vulgate-language Bibles first began to be popularized. Selfish reasons certainly played their part, but there was also genuine concern that the masses would badly misinterpret the Word of God and inflict horrors upon the Earth beyond imagination as a result. Sadly, this ended up being exactly what happened. The forefathers of the Amish, to take one of many examples, were militant communists who laid seige to the city of Münster, and it took a union of Catholics and Lutherans to put an end to their madness. Nor were such things limited to the Occident. Hong Xiuquan, the Chinese Christian cultist, started the bloodiest war of the 19th Century based on his heretical interpretations of the Bible.
It was probably inevitable that vulgar Bibles would predominate after the advent of the printing press, but the spread of ideas is sadly not an unalloyed good. They pick up corruptions along the way with frightening ease.
Important points. I have tended to find "Hinduism" a concept that obscures more than it reveals, though I wobble on that sometimes. (Why I Am Not A Hindu is a very helpful book.) I find that with complex concepts (whether or not they are ultimately helpful) it's usually good to go back to the concept's history - how did we get this word in the first place? - and "Hinduism" is no exception: https://loveofallwisdom.com/blog/2009/08/did-hinduism-exist/
Yes I've always been struck by how many qualities Judaism shares w polytheist religions (for example, most polytheistic religions don't spend a lot of time worrying about what happens after death and/or don't promise rewards after death)!
This connects to one of my pet peeves which is that "spirituality"-centered spaces, projects, publications, etc, will inevitably assume a very irritating default Christianity even though the language will be on the face of it vague and inclusive. Like—Unitarian Universalists might be Christian heretics… but emphasis really belongs on _Christian_ there.
There's just a lack of curiosity about what "religion" even means, how other traditions and practices conceive of themselves, etc. Everything just becomes flavors of Christianity. It drives me crazy!
I am very interested in this because someone said the exact same thing. I dont know very much about Christianity, so I am fascinates by the particulars and how new age spirituality is still just Christianity. Do you recommend any writing that addresses this specifically??
I too get frustrated by the lackadaisical blending of religious concepts in contemporary "spiritual" spaces, but I think the reality is that most people seek in spirituality some form of consolation - and the messy details tend to get in the way.
Well, I'm thinking mostly here of people who set themselves in a position of being a teacher or running a space. As individuals, people can magpie together whatever they want—that doesn't bother me.
"It’s actually quite shocking how marginal Buddhism is in India! Before the neo-Buddhist movement, the level of Buddhist practice in India was virtually nil."
Isn't this primarily due to the Muslim conquests? India was the birthplace of Buddhism, and the Indo-Gangetic Plain which was the site of the wanderings of Siddhartha Gautama was also the heart of every Muslim conquest into the region from the 8th through 18th centuries.
Not really! I mean yes the Muslim conquest is very implicated somewhat because if there was ever going to be a Buddhist revival it would've come from royal support and Muslims obviously weren't going to do that, but Muslims didn't really conquer much of India proper until about the 13th century, and Buddhism was already almost extinct in India by then. It's mostly because of brahmins. Buddhism was a reform movement that was hostile to caste. Brahmins fought back vigorously against it for fifteen hundred years and eventually they simply...won.
How can you speak so wrongly. The famous Nalanda University that Buddhist scholars travelled to across the world were razed to the ground by turkic muslim tribes which spelled to the end of buddhism in the subcontinent. The modern day region of pakistan and afghanistan were majority buddhists before being converted to islam.
Yes it is true. The famous Nalanda University that Buddhist scholars travelled to across the world were razed to the ground by turkic muslim tribes which spelled to the end of buddhism in the subcontinent. The modern day region of pakistan and afghanistan were majority buddhists before being converted to islam.
I wonder sometimes about when and how Hindu practices diverged from those we now call Hellenic, or pagan more broadly. And the Hindu nationalists attempting to unify Hinduism reminds me of Julian the Apostate trying to create a Hellenic church, which neither pagans nor Christians respected.
They're very similar. Just as they're pretty similar to the Mongol pagan religion. If you look at Indian and Persian Achaemenid practices, there's even more similarity. Whether it's Zeus or Indra or Tengri, it's all the same angry sky-god (who is noticeably different from the Egyptian and Sumerian Gods!)
"Hindu nationalists, aligned to right-wing movements in India, who have a vested interest in white washing every aspect of India’s past and history. To them, India has the oldest civilization in the world, it invented all the greatest stuff, it’s the most egalitarian, the wisest, etc. There’s no critical thinking at all." very ironically Indian right wing accuse Indian leftist of same
In a post about whether Hinduism exists or not you discussed how some don't adhere to vegetarianism. If someone wrote a post saying that Christianity doesn't exist, pointing out that many eat meat on Fridays wouldn't be evidence for that.
Strangely enough, I had just started to listen to the audiobook of the Hindus, but I was wondering if it was the "right" book on the subject! I always worry that if a book takes an alternative approach to something I know very little about, I'll end up getting sent in the completely wrong direction. Probably because I read Robert Grave's The White Goddess when I was a teenager and absorbed very wrong ideas.
Very excited to read more from you on the Mahabharata!
The more I learn about faith, the less I feel Christianity, especially Protestabt Christianity, is remotely representative of other creeds. Arguably the only reason any of the Dharmic faiths are considered religions at all is as a 19th Century anticolonial cudgel. Nor are you the first author I've read who's hit upon this observation:
This is great! Selections from the Mahabharata are part of my Decade Project, but I've put it off because I don't know how to make a good selection. The ten-volume Debroy translation is a couple hundred dollars in paperback, so I hesitate to get the whole thing at once. But I could start somewhere and see how it goes. Are you beginning with volume one? And how far along are you? I would love to try following.
Thanks, too, for the recommendation of the Doniger book. Looks ideal.
The Mahabharata is so long! It's so intimidating! The version I first read was this English prose translation I found at my grandmother's flat in Mumbai. I was like 11. Even that condensed version was an extremely long book. The thing is, there's a core Mahabharata story that every Indian person knows, and I think any abridged version will tend to have that. I remember when I first heard that the Mahabharata is actually TEN TIMES LONGER than the extremely long book I'd read in my youth, and I was like...excuse me? How is that possible? What else could there possibly be in it?
There's a lot. It's pretty indescribable. Like in the first volume--I mean it's sort of like reading Tristram Shandy--the main -people from the Mahabharata don't even get born until like halfway through the first volume! Most of it is about this snake sacrifice that some king undertakes to kill all the snakes in the world (which seems so comical, now that I'm writing it down). But the snakes don't want to be killed! And they know there's gonna be a snake sacrifice in the future, because I dunno, everything is kind of like Norse mythology, where everybody sort of knows exactly what's gonna happen (but they also kinda don't know). So they ask a god to save them, and the god is like okay, you need to have this sage sleep with a snake and have a kid who can save you from the sacrifice. But he's a sage, so he doesn't WANT to sleep with anyone. So now you've got to kind of trick / persuade him into sleeping with someone, so they can have a kid, who'll then, years later, will halt this snake sacrifice. And every sentence of this description is AN ENTIRE STORY.
And if you were to ask any Indian about the snake sacrifice they'd be like WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? Like if I was to go around asking Indian people what's in the Mahabharata, they'd be like Arjunas and Pandavas, the Kurukshetra war, etc. If I was then to be like...what about the snake sacrifice, they'd say...huh? I mean I'm reading the thing after a lifetime of being Indian, and I have never even heard of this sacrifice or of any of these people in my life! I mean what if you just started reading the Iliad and you open it up, and suddenly there's just this whole other group of people. Achilles, Hector, Paris, fuck those guys--we've got some OTHER GROUP OF PEOPLE doing this whole other story! It's so wild! For hundreds of pages!
But it's a good story! I enjoy reading it, and it has similar themes as the regular story in terms of following your dharma, etc. My understanding is that later volumes of the Mahabharata have all this advice on kingship and stuff that can go on for hundreds of pages, but as I think this description will tell you, I quite literally have no idea what's in this book! Like I assume that most of the traditional stories are in there somewhere--I've already seen a few of them. But there's so much other stuff!
You've inspired me. My copy of the Mahabharata came in, and I'm taking the first few baby steps. Garuda has just stolen the amrita... So far it reminds me of Memento, where every scene is followed by the scene that led up to it.
It's the class or caste aspect of Hinduism that is hardest to swallow for non-Hindus, and in the hands of ardent nationalists like Modi's BJP looks quite sinister and retrograde.
So my question is - has there ever been an overtly egalitarian form of Hinduism that outright rejects caste?
Yeah, Buddhism. There are also bhakti movements that deemphasize caste, in America the most prominent one is ISKCON (IE the Hari Krishna)
But really what we call Hinduism is inextricable from caste. There is no having one without the other. Without caste there would quite literally be nothing left.
The thing is any devotional movement that calls on ppl to explicitly and unequivocally reject caste will be unpopular in India bc if you are upper caste and join then you will lose caste! So there are lots of movements that are like "caste is bad" but don't explicitly call on worshippers to break caste taboos.
Interesting piece. Calls to mind the enigmatic figure of Tulsi Gabbard, long described as one of the few Hindu members of Congress, and for that reason I suspect widely assumed to be Indian, even though she in fact receives her Hinduism (or perhaps, per your argument, "Hinduism"--though I myself hesitate on this point) from her white mother, while her Samoan father is Catholic!
Yes, my understanding is that Tulsi's Hinduism is sort of an off-shoot of ISKCON, which is the American Hindu movement that is most akin to the Hinduism of, say, my grandmother. But ISKCON is already quite different--it's a bhakti sect, focuses on devotion over dharma, and doesn't (as I understand it) practice much caste separation. ISKCON is recognizably Hindu though, and I once met a white American ISKCON cleric (he'd been raised in the temple) who kind of complained that Indian-Americans had taken over the ISKCON temples and turned them into more traditional Vaishnavite temples. But I think Tulsi is already several steps removed from ISKCON. Still, she's pretty Hindu! About as Hindu as non-Indian can be!
Insightful as always. One of the interesting connections that outsiders might not notice is the way in which American Christianity has gone sideways in the two aspects which you distinguish as Hindu: individual purity and devotional rituals over theological dogma. Theology plays almost zero role in the life of the average zealous Christian in America. Praise and worship music + living "pure" is most, if not all, of what it means to be a Christian nowadays. This is not what Christianity was for thousands of years. Receiving blessed bread and wine from a priest is what it meant to be a Christian. What is considered "traditional" in America today--heartfelt devotion as a method of personal purification, primarily accomplished through long singing sessions where devotees sing repetitive songs that circle endlessly--basically became the default in the late 20th Century.
Wow, that's such good insight! Yeah I've been really into people on Substack who can talk about American Protestant Christianity practice in a way that's intelligible to me as a non-Christian person. I know a lot about Catholicism, because I went to Catholic school, so I have some sense of how Catholicism works in practice (for instance, once I mentioned to my mom that I was reading the Bible, and she said "Didn't you read that in school?" And I said no! Catholics don't really read the Bible! Which is something that seems so strange to me, but is just how it is, I guess. We had SEVEN YEARS of religion classes. In one of the religion classes we literally read Aristotle, but we never read the Bible.)
There was significant controversy during the mid-2nd Millennium when vulgate-language Bibles first began to be popularized. Selfish reasons certainly played their part, but there was also genuine concern that the masses would badly misinterpret the Word of God and inflict horrors upon the Earth beyond imagination as a result. Sadly, this ended up being exactly what happened. The forefathers of the Amish, to take one of many examples, were militant communists who laid seige to the city of Münster, and it took a union of Catholics and Lutherans to put an end to their madness. Nor were such things limited to the Occident. Hong Xiuquan, the Chinese Christian cultist, started the bloodiest war of the 19th Century based on his heretical interpretations of the Bible.
It was probably inevitable that vulgar Bibles would predominate after the advent of the printing press, but the spread of ideas is sadly not an unalloyed good. They pick up corruptions along the way with frightening ease.
Important points. I have tended to find "Hinduism" a concept that obscures more than it reveals, though I wobble on that sometimes. (Why I Am Not A Hindu is a very helpful book.) I find that with complex concepts (whether or not they are ultimately helpful) it's usually good to go back to the concept's history - how did we get this word in the first place? - and "Hinduism" is no exception: https://loveofallwisdom.com/blog/2009/08/did-hinduism-exist/
Judaism tends to emphasize orthopraxy over orthodoxy, rendering it a bit of an outlier among monotheistic religions.
Yes I've always been struck by how many qualities Judaism shares w polytheist religions (for example, most polytheistic religions don't spend a lot of time worrying about what happens after death and/or don't promise rewards after death)!
This connects to one of my pet peeves which is that "spirituality"-centered spaces, projects, publications, etc, will inevitably assume a very irritating default Christianity even though the language will be on the face of it vague and inclusive. Like—Unitarian Universalists might be Christian heretics… but emphasis really belongs on _Christian_ there.
There's just a lack of curiosity about what "religion" even means, how other traditions and practices conceive of themselves, etc. Everything just becomes flavors of Christianity. It drives me crazy!
I am very interested in this because someone said the exact same thing. I dont know very much about Christianity, so I am fascinates by the particulars and how new age spirituality is still just Christianity. Do you recommend any writing that addresses this specifically??
I don't unfortunately! It's just something I've noticed.
I too get frustrated by the lackadaisical blending of religious concepts in contemporary "spiritual" spaces, but I think the reality is that most people seek in spirituality some form of consolation - and the messy details tend to get in the way.
Well, I'm thinking mostly here of people who set themselves in a position of being a teacher or running a space. As individuals, people can magpie together whatever they want—that doesn't bother me.
"It’s actually quite shocking how marginal Buddhism is in India! Before the neo-Buddhist movement, the level of Buddhist practice in India was virtually nil."
Isn't this primarily due to the Muslim conquests? India was the birthplace of Buddhism, and the Indo-Gangetic Plain which was the site of the wanderings of Siddhartha Gautama was also the heart of every Muslim conquest into the region from the 8th through 18th centuries.
Not really! I mean yes the Muslim conquest is very implicated somewhat because if there was ever going to be a Buddhist revival it would've come from royal support and Muslims obviously weren't going to do that, but Muslims didn't really conquer much of India proper until about the 13th century, and Buddhism was already almost extinct in India by then. It's mostly because of brahmins. Buddhism was a reform movement that was hostile to caste. Brahmins fought back vigorously against it for fifteen hundred years and eventually they simply...won.
How can you speak so wrongly. The famous Nalanda University that Buddhist scholars travelled to across the world were razed to the ground by turkic muslim tribes which spelled to the end of buddhism in the subcontinent. The modern day region of pakistan and afghanistan were majority buddhists before being converted to islam.
Why do you think it was so much more successful in Sri Lanka?
Buddhism just got there first before Brahminism took root
Yes it is true. The famous Nalanda University that Buddhist scholars travelled to across the world were razed to the ground by turkic muslim tribes which spelled to the end of buddhism in the subcontinent. The modern day region of pakistan and afghanistan were majority buddhists before being converted to islam.
I wonder sometimes about when and how Hindu practices diverged from those we now call Hellenic, or pagan more broadly. And the Hindu nationalists attempting to unify Hinduism reminds me of Julian the Apostate trying to create a Hellenic church, which neither pagans nor Christians respected.
They're very similar. Just as they're pretty similar to the Mongol pagan religion. If you look at Indian and Persian Achaemenid practices, there's even more similarity. Whether it's Zeus or Indra or Tengri, it's all the same angry sky-god (who is noticeably different from the Egyptian and Sumerian Gods!)
I'm excited to read what follows this prologue!
I don't think it is hard for Westerners to understand, because Jews work largely the same way.
"Hindu nationalists, aligned to right-wing movements in India, who have a vested interest in white washing every aspect of India’s past and history. To them, India has the oldest civilization in the world, it invented all the greatest stuff, it’s the most egalitarian, the wisest, etc. There’s no critical thinking at all." very ironically Indian right wing accuse Indian leftist of same
Only 44% of Hindus identify as vegetarian https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/religion-and-food/
What's your point?
The majority aren't vegetarian. That means vegetarianism should not be regarded as the norm among Hindus.
Did I say it was the norm?
In a post about whether Hinduism exists or not you discussed how some don't adhere to vegetarianism. If someone wrote a post saying that Christianity doesn't exist, pointing out that many eat meat on Fridays wouldn't be evidence for that.
Strangely enough, I had just started to listen to the audiobook of the Hindus, but I was wondering if it was the "right" book on the subject! I always worry that if a book takes an alternative approach to something I know very little about, I'll end up getting sent in the completely wrong direction. Probably because I read Robert Grave's The White Goddess when I was a teenager and absorbed very wrong ideas.
Very excited to read more from you on the Mahabharata!
The more I learn about faith, the less I feel Christianity, especially Protestabt Christianity, is remotely representative of other creeds. Arguably the only reason any of the Dharmic faiths are considered religions at all is as a 19th Century anticolonial cudgel. Nor are you the first author I've read who's hit upon this observation:
https://vividness.live/the-king-of-siam-invents-western-buddhism
This is great! Selections from the Mahabharata are part of my Decade Project, but I've put it off because I don't know how to make a good selection. The ten-volume Debroy translation is a couple hundred dollars in paperback, so I hesitate to get the whole thing at once. But I could start somewhere and see how it goes. Are you beginning with volume one? And how far along are you? I would love to try following.
Thanks, too, for the recommendation of the Doniger book. Looks ideal.
Correction. There is a boxed set of the Mahabharata for only $75. So I'm reconsidering.
The Mahabharata is so long! It's so intimidating! The version I first read was this English prose translation I found at my grandmother's flat in Mumbai. I was like 11. Even that condensed version was an extremely long book. The thing is, there's a core Mahabharata story that every Indian person knows, and I think any abridged version will tend to have that. I remember when I first heard that the Mahabharata is actually TEN TIMES LONGER than the extremely long book I'd read in my youth, and I was like...excuse me? How is that possible? What else could there possibly be in it?
There's a lot. It's pretty indescribable. Like in the first volume--I mean it's sort of like reading Tristram Shandy--the main -people from the Mahabharata don't even get born until like halfway through the first volume! Most of it is about this snake sacrifice that some king undertakes to kill all the snakes in the world (which seems so comical, now that I'm writing it down). But the snakes don't want to be killed! And they know there's gonna be a snake sacrifice in the future, because I dunno, everything is kind of like Norse mythology, where everybody sort of knows exactly what's gonna happen (but they also kinda don't know). So they ask a god to save them, and the god is like okay, you need to have this sage sleep with a snake and have a kid who can save you from the sacrifice. But he's a sage, so he doesn't WANT to sleep with anyone. So now you've got to kind of trick / persuade him into sleeping with someone, so they can have a kid, who'll then, years later, will halt this snake sacrifice. And every sentence of this description is AN ENTIRE STORY.
And if you were to ask any Indian about the snake sacrifice they'd be like WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? Like if I was to go around asking Indian people what's in the Mahabharata, they'd be like Arjunas and Pandavas, the Kurukshetra war, etc. If I was then to be like...what about the snake sacrifice, they'd say...huh? I mean I'm reading the thing after a lifetime of being Indian, and I have never even heard of this sacrifice or of any of these people in my life! I mean what if you just started reading the Iliad and you open it up, and suddenly there's just this whole other group of people. Achilles, Hector, Paris, fuck those guys--we've got some OTHER GROUP OF PEOPLE doing this whole other story! It's so wild! For hundreds of pages!
But it's a good story! I enjoy reading it, and it has similar themes as the regular story in terms of following your dharma, etc. My understanding is that later volumes of the Mahabharata have all this advice on kingship and stuff that can go on for hundreds of pages, but as I think this description will tell you, I quite literally have no idea what's in this book! Like I assume that most of the traditional stories are in there somewhere--I've already seen a few of them. But there's so much other stuff!
You've inspired me. My copy of the Mahabharata came in, and I'm taking the first few baby steps. Garuda has just stolen the amrita... So far it reminds me of Memento, where every scene is followed by the scene that led up to it.
It is kind of odd that the Illiad doesn't contain the Trojan Horse. It just ends with Achilles handing over Hector's corpse to Priam.
I know right! When I read it I was like wtf where's the horse?
It's the class or caste aspect of Hinduism that is hardest to swallow for non-Hindus, and in the hands of ardent nationalists like Modi's BJP looks quite sinister and retrograde.
So my question is - has there ever been an overtly egalitarian form of Hinduism that outright rejects caste?
Yeah, Buddhism. There are also bhakti movements that deemphasize caste, in America the most prominent one is ISKCON (IE the Hari Krishna)
But really what we call Hinduism is inextricable from caste. There is no having one without the other. Without caste there would quite literally be nothing left.
Well I'm a zen Buddhist so I guess that makes me a westernised denaturalised desacralised kind of post-Hindu.
Maybe this is the nothing left that would be left after all the cultural accretions are stripped away?
The thing is any devotional movement that calls on ppl to explicitly and unequivocally reject caste will be unpopular in India bc if you are upper caste and join then you will lose caste! So there are lots of movements that are like "caste is bad" but don't explicitly call on worshippers to break caste taboos.
this rocks, I really look forward to your posts about the Debroy Mahabharata (which I have vague ambitions of someday reading)
(what would be really awesome would be to learn Sanskrit but there's no way I'm smart enough!)
Interesting piece. Calls to mind the enigmatic figure of Tulsi Gabbard, long described as one of the few Hindu members of Congress, and for that reason I suspect widely assumed to be Indian, even though she in fact receives her Hinduism (or perhaps, per your argument, "Hinduism"--though I myself hesitate on this point) from her white mother, while her Samoan father is Catholic!
Yes, my understanding is that Tulsi's Hinduism is sort of an off-shoot of ISKCON, which is the American Hindu movement that is most akin to the Hinduism of, say, my grandmother. But ISKCON is already quite different--it's a bhakti sect, focuses on devotion over dharma, and doesn't (as I understand it) practice much caste separation. ISKCON is recognizably Hindu though, and I once met a white American ISKCON cleric (he'd been raised in the temple) who kind of complained that Indian-Americans had taken over the ISKCON temples and turned them into more traditional Vaishnavite temples. But I think Tulsi is already several steps removed from ISKCON. Still, she's pretty Hindu! About as Hindu as non-Indian can be!
Interesting! Thank you for this insight!