Some Food For Thought:

Some Characteristics Of Indian Religions:

It is odd to read today of "Hindu fundamentalism," because Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals; no organized church, no compulsory beliefs or rites of worship, no single sacred book. The name itself denotes something less, and more, than a set of theological beliefs. In many languages - French and Persian among them - the word for "Indian" is "Hindu." Originally, Hindu simply meant people beyond the river Sindhu, or Indus. But, as noted, the Indus is now in Islamic Pakistan; and to make matters worse, the word Hindu did not exist in any Indian language till its use by foreigners gave Indians a term for self-definition.

Hinduism is thus the name others applied to the indigenous religion of India. It embraces an eclectic range of doctrines and practices, from pantheism to agnosticism and from faith in reincarnation to belief in the caste system. But none of these constitutes an obligatory credo for a Hindu; there are no compulsory dogmas.

I grew up in a Hindu household. Our home (and my father moved a dozen times in his working life) always had a prayer room, where paintings and portraits of assorted divinities jostled for shelf and wall space with fading photographs of departed ancestors, all stained by ash scattered from the incense burned daily by my devout parents. Every morning, after his bath, my father would stand in front of the prayer room wrapped in his towel, his wet hair still uncombed, and chant his Sanskrit mantras. But he never obliged me to join him; he exemplified the Hindu idea that religion is an intensely personal matter, that prayer is between you and whatever image of your maker you choose to worship. In the Indian way, I was to find my own truth.

Like most Hindus, I think I have. I am a believer, despite a brief period of schoolboy atheism (of the kind that comes with the discovery of rationality and goes with an acknowledgment of its limitations - and with the realization that the world offers too many wondrous mysteries for which science has no answers). And I am happy to describe myself as a believing Hindu, not just because it is the faith into which I was born, but for a string of other reasons, though faith requires no reason. One is cultural: as a Hindu I belong to a faith that expresses the ancient genius of my own people. Another is, for lack of a better phrase, its intellectual "fit": I am more comfortable with the belief structures of Hinduism than I would be with those of the other faiths of which I know. As a Hindu, I claim adherence to a religion without an established church or priestly papacy, a religion whose rituals and customs I am free to reject, a religion that does not oblige me to demonstrate my faith by any visible sign, by subsuming my identity in any collectivity, not even by a specific day or time or frequency of worship. As a Hindu, I subscribe to a creed that is free of the restrictive dogmas of holy writ, that refuses to be shackled to the limitations of a single holy book.

Above all, as a Hindu I belong to the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. I find it immensely congenial to be able to face my fellow human beings of other faiths without being burdened by the conviction that I am embarked upon a "true path" that they have missed. This dogma lies at the core of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism - "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life; no man cometh unto the Father [God], but by me" (John 14:6), says the Bible; "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet," declares the Koran - denying unbelievers all possibility of redemption, let alone of salvation or paradise. Hinduism, however, asserts that all ways of belief are equally valid, and Hindus readily venerate the saints, and the sacred objects, of other faiths. - Pages 54-56

Quoting From Swami Vivekanand's Chicago Address:

"Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has recognized it. Every other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas and tries to force society to adopt them. It places before society only one coat which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike. If it does not fit John or Henry, he must go without a coat to cover his body. The Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be realized, or thought of, or stated through the relative, and the images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols - so many pegs to hang spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for everyone, but those that do not need it have no right to say that it is wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism. ... The Hindus have their faults, but mark this, they are always for punishing their own bodies, but never for cutting the throats of their neighbors." - Page 130

Science, Medicine And Literature In Ancient India:

While some of the more extravagant claims by Indian chauvinists about the achievements of the ancient Hindus - such as that India invented flying vehicles and hydroplanes around 2000 B.C., or anticipated the Darwinian theory of evolution - have been understandably ridiculed, there is evidence to suggest that extraordinary insights into atomic theory and into the physiological (and alchemical) properties of mercury existed in ancient India and were lost in later times. There is no doubt at all about the accomplishments of the astronomer Aryabhatta, who proved that the earth is round and revolves around the sun, a thousand years before Galileo was censured for arguing the same; about Bhaskaracharya's understanding of gravitation a millennium before Isaac Newton; about the invention, credited largely to Gritasamada, of the zero and the entire system of decimal numbers (which was learned by the Arabs and thence reached the West, giving the world "Arabic numerals.") The Arabs themselves referred to mathematics as Hindsat, "the Indian science." Nor do scholars contest India's claim to have produced the first surgeon, Susruta, whose methods (and tools) of surgery, including plastic surgery and prostheses for amputees, pioneered the field; to have given the world quadratic equations and trigonometry; to have set out the principles of grammar and phonetics; to have raised questions of philosophy and psychology in the Upnishads a thousand years before they had occurred to anyone in the West; and to have developed an imaginative literature, from the animal fables of the Panchatantra to the sophisticated dramas of Kalidasa, that inspired - according to the Chinese scholar Lin Yutang - Aesop, Boccaccio, Emerson, Goethe, Herder, Hesse, Schopenhauer, and the Arabian Nights. - Page 300

Quoting Amartya Sen:

The economist Amartya Sen made a related point in regretting

"the neglect by the Hindu leaders of the more major achievements of Indian civilization, even the distinctly Hindu contributions, in favor of its more dubious features. Not for them the sophistication of the Upnishads or the Gita, or of Brahmagupta or Sankara, or of Kalidasa or Sudraka; they prefer the adoration of Rama's idol and Hanuman's image. Their nationalism also ignores the rationalist traditions of India, a country in which some of the earliest steps in algebra, geometry, and astronomy were taken, where the decimal system emerged, where early philosophy - secular as well as religious - achieved exceptional sophistication, where people invented games like chess, pioneered sex education, and began the first systematic study of political economy." - Page 134

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