Hinduism is not monotheistic

I went to Catholic school from Grades 6 to 12. It was a school run by Benedictine monks in Washington, D.C. Most of the classes were taught by lay teachers, but every year we had to take a Religion class, and this class was generally taught by an actual monk. It also tended to be amongst the better classes of the year. One of our religion classes, Church History (8th grade, Fr. George) was amongst the best classes I ever took: we learned all the dirt; everything about the development of Catholicism and Catholic doctrine as a historical entity (for instance, we learned that until something like the 11th century, priests could still legally marry and have kids!).

World Religions (10th grade, Fr. James) wasn’t as good, but I appreciated the effort! Fr. James was very interested in other faiths, and he liked to talk to me about Hinduism. Once he said to me, “I learned that all the different Gods and Goddesses in Hinduism are just aspects of one universal divine, so really at its core Hinduism is monotheist.’

I was like…no. That is not the case.

But I couldn't make him believe me, because I was only 15 and not quite able to articulate the way in which this was false. That's because even at the time I knew that what Fr. James was saying was a real thing! Most Hindus, if you were to ask them, “Do Shiva and Vishnu and Brahma fundamentally flow from the same Godhead”, they’d be like, yeah, sure. I’ve heard that!

This is an outgrowth of Vedanta, which were this set of philosophical schools that arose around 6th century AD in the post-Vedic period (i.e. after the composition and dissemination of the original Vedic texts). Vedanta reached its peak in the 13th and 14th centuries, after large swathes of North India fell under Muslim control. Because Islam was monotheistic and, moreover, was just so fundamentally different from Hinduism, suddenly there was this an added impetus amongst Hindu philosophers to be like, “Well, what do we believe? What are the philosophical underpinnings of all this stuff, all these Gods, all these rituals?”

There are six schools of Vedanta, but my understanding is that most of them believe that the various Gods are truly one. Where they differ is in their understanding of the difference between the Godhead and the human soul. Vedanta schools tend to be either monist or dualist. Monists believe human beings and the Godhead are ultimately one; dualists believe they’re separate.

Vedanta nowadays dominates both Indian and Western understanding of what Hinduism is. It’s exactly like how the early Church Fathers put forward an intellectual framework that dominates our understanding of Christianity. When Christ tells people the first will be last, and the last will be first, what does that mean? When he says he will rise again, and he’s come to bring us the Kingdom of God, what does that mean?

Early Christians understood this in a very eschatological sense: they thought Christ would literally come back during their lifetime and give them control of the Earth! The Kingdom of Heaven was a quite literal Kingdom that would soon exist!

As time passed, the Church Fathers put their theology on a more metaphysical footing. They introduced this idea of Heaven and the afterlife, and the notion that the reward won’t be earthly, but in the world to come, etc. St. Augustine put the best gloss on the subject in City of God (which I highly recommend) in which he finally unpicks the idea that Christians can ever expect to receive an earthly reward.

Even today most Christians believe in Heaven, but their understanding of Heaven varies wildly. The vast majority of Christians still believe in bodily resurrection. Many also think that Christ will literally return to Earth, and Christians will be literally resurrected, in their bodies, here on Earth, and will reign in a Heavenly Kingdom that, if you or I are around, we could still visit! And yet if some Hindu was to study Christianity in a fancy school in India, they’d likely be told something very different—their teacher would say oh the Christian Heaven is just like our own belief that at some point the soul reunites with the Godhead.

And yes you could say that. But it's also not quite true! In practice, most Christians believe that their personal identity will survive death. That when they die, someone with their name and memories and body will still exist somewhere for all eternity (in contrast this survival of the personal identity is something relatively few Hindus believe in).

It’s hard to talk about the essence of a religion, when in every religion we’re talking about (at least) two different things. There’s what the philosophers say about it, and then there’s what people actually believe. And there’s some relation between those two things, but there are also lots of differences.

Hinduism is even more difficult to describe, because we know so little about the circumstances under which most Hindu texts were composed and disseminated. The earliest literature on the Indian subcontinent, the Rig Veda, is a collection of about a thousand hymns that were probably composed, like…between 1500 and 1200 BC? Then they were disseminated orally for at least a thousand years before being written down.

The earliest Vedas are such a large corpus of work that they're impossible to fully describe. It's easiest in fact to say what they're not. They're not really either mythology, theology or philosophy. They're a set of hymns, used to conduct various rituals and sacrifices, along with a corpus of knowledge about what those sacrifices mean and how to conduct them. The most famous Vedic sacrifice was the horse sacrifice, where a ruler releases a horse to wander around freely, and then the ruler conquers all the territory that the horse crosses in the course of a year, and then the ruler ritually kills the horse (there’s also a portion where the ruler’s wives and/or concubine feign having sex with the horse beforehand).

I’ve tried so many times to read (selections from) the Vedas, and it’s just too overwhelming. It’s completely meaningless to me. Hegel is easier to understand than the Vedas. You don’t read the Vedas, you study them, and you only study them if you’re a Brahmin studying under a guru (most Hindus would tell you that Hinduism is a living tradition, and you can’t really understand it without a guru to explain it to you).

So…Hinduism is a religion that is based, notionally, on what’s in these books, the Vedas, that very few people read, because they’re written in such an odd, allusive way, and for purposes very foreign to those for which we generally turn to a religious text. They’re like if you were reading the manual that the priests at Delphi used to prepare themselves to consult the Oracle.

So when we’re talking about Hinduism, often we’re talking about what the gurus claim that these books, the Vedas, really mean.

And, sure, if they say it, then it’s true. Most of the gurus these days say that all the Gods are one. And most people take their word for it. But Vedanta isn’t really meant for the average person. There are some Hindu practices that are truly only meant for people who are done with human existence, either because they’ve already achieved such power that there’s nothing left for them in the mortal world or because they’re sick and tired and old. These are people like Tolstoy and Gandhi, who are tormented by the falseness of existence and the universality of sin. It’s no surprise that a Catholic monk like Fr. James, himself a renunciant of worldly pleasures, would be drawn to similar strands in Hinduism.

But where Hinduism differs from Christianity is that Hindus understand that most people aren’t renunciants. For most Hindus, the individual Gods are much more alive than the abstract Godhead. Few people have a relationship with the Vedas, whilst almost everyone has a relationship with the stories in The Mahabharata, The Ramayana, and The Puranas. You can actually read the epics, in some form, whereas in practice it’s almost impossible to have a relationship with the Vedas. And I think that for most Indians, the stories plus their traditional practice are mostly enough. The theology is nice. It’s good to know it’s there. Everyone intends to study up on it sometime (and some, like my grandmother, actually manage to do it!) but it doesn’t feel pressing or necessary.

Personally, I don’t think that the mythological stories really happened on this plane of reality, but I do think there is truth to them. Which is to say, I don’t think The Mahabharata is just metaphor, or that it can all be reduced to one formless Godhead. I think that, in some sense, there really was a Pandu and a Dhiritrashtra, and that their kids did really have these properties and did really go to war. They’re not mere representations or symbols—they do exist, albeit in some other world—a higher, more perfect world—a world of forms. And when you study or invoke them, you are learning something about a reality that goes beyond empirical reality. Hinduism is different from Christianity in that the gods do grant earthly good fortune. It's not a religion where your only reward comes in the next life. Which is to say, I do not think that the Godhead is going to give good luck on a test, but I do think Ghanesh might! I do not think the Godhead will appear to you in a moment of despair, but Krishna might! I do not think the Godhead will bring you up into the gardens of heaven, but Vishnu might! Now we can definitely create some theology around this, but I’m not sure there’s a need: I think it’s intuitively obvious that the Godhead doesn’t really have a form, and that what we live and value in real life is, you know, form—the concreteness and specificity of things. The Godhead is power and passion, but without any direction.

So, to me, it feels a bit dry and lifeless to dwell on the Godhead—I’d much rather talk about Rama and Vishnu and Shiva and Brahma and Krishna and Hanuman and Sita and Arjuna and all those other guys.

Addendum

As I’ve mentioned in prior posts, I’m not a materialist: I think there’s more to reality than what we can see and measure. But since I don’t believe my personal identity will survive my death, I’m not particularly concerned with my personal purity or with securing my own salvation. It’s not that I think religion is untrue, it’s that I feel like the best religion for an individual is the religion that’s most natural to your time and place. And in my time and place, a vague quasi-secular spirituality is the most appropriate form of religion.

This pragmatism is a very Hindu attitude. At the end of the first section (the Adi Parva) of The Mahabharata, there’s a part where the ‘villains’, the Kauravas, discover that the good guys, the Pandava brothers, are actually still alive. And Dhiritashtra, the father of the Kauravas, calls his advisors together to ask what they should do. Crown Prince Duryodhana recommends that they embark upon schemes to split apart the Pandavas and make them jealous of each other and sap their strength. The King’s uncle Bhishma and his brother Vidura recommend conciliating with the Pandavas and offering them land and territory.

But I think the most useful advice comes from Karna, the best friend of Duryodhana. He says,

“O Duryodhana! In my view, your opinions are not distinguished by wisdom. O extender of the Kuru lineage! The Pandavas cannot be overcome through trickery. O brave warrior! In the past, you have used subtle tricks to suppress them, but you did not succeed. O king! Then they lived near you and were children who had not developed friends and allies. But you could not hold them down. They now live far away and have grown up. They have developed friends and allies. It is my firm conviction that Kunti’s sons cannot be injured through trickery….

‘“O bull among men! But today, this is what is good and advisable for us. O lord of the earth! The Pandavas can be struck down as long as they have not established their roots. O lord! Agree to smite them with arms. As long as our side is strong and that of the Panchalas is weak, we should strike them with arms, without hesitation. O son of Gandhari! Strike them with arms quickly and with valour, before their chariots, their friends and their relatives gather.

I think this is great advice! A Kingdom cannot truly be divided. We see it in history all the time: Charlemagne divided his kingdom between his sons, and they immediately went to war with each other. The Mongols did the same thing, with the same result. Constantine the Great did the same thing, with the same result. Kings always want to expand and control more territory. War between these rival kings is inevitable. Karna is saying, “Look, we are warriors. Why not just fight it out?”

And ultimately that is what happens, and it’s a heroic struggle and everyone goes down in history forever.

In some different era of history, the result would be different. Peace would be possible, and war could be averted. But at this time and place, that’s simply not a realistic outcome.

Similarly, if my life was different, I would probably practice Hinduism to a greater degree than I do. Conversely, if I had a different life and lived in a different place, I can imagine being a Christian or a Muslim. But in my own time and place, I am basically agnostic—because that’s more or less what people like me are meant to be.