God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (22 page)

There is a Jewish tradition of mourning for apostates—sitting shivah for them for seven days as if they were actually dead. In the Hindu tradition, renouncers die socially too. Their marriages are legally terminated, they no longer answer to their birth names, and the possessions they abandon as they go on their spiritual quest are distributed to their heirs. But what really distinguishes these renouncers from the priests who exemplified Vedic religion is not just their withdrawal from the dharma world of work and family but also their withdrawal from the karma world of fire and sacrifice. While Vedic priests trafficked in karma, or action, these new exemplars focused on jnana, or wisdom. Whereas Vedic religion was a tradition of priests performing fire sacrifices in order to keep chaos at bay, early Hinduism was a tradition of renouncers cultivating knowledge in order to liberate themselves from samsara.

Some renouncers rejected the Vedas outright, but most did not. In keeping with Hinduism’s absorptive sensibility, they reinterpreted Vedic sacrifice instead. Focusing on this ritual’s inner meaning rather than its outer performance, they asserted that fire sacrifice happens not just on an altar but inside us too. They referred to their ascetic austerities as
tapas
, which means heat, and they came to believe that they could carry this sacred fire inside them wherever they went. And where they went was far and wide, wandering homeless and alone, never staying long in any one village except during the four months of the monsoon, subsisting (barely) at the margins of society, sleeping in mountain caves and at river banks, accomplishing nothing other than their own austerities, seeking nothing less than spiritual liberation.

These renouncers referred to themselves by many names:
sadhus
(holy men),
shramanas
(strivers),
munis
(silent ones),
parivrajakas
(wanderers),
bhikshus
(beggars). As a rule, they were homeless and celibate and begged for food. Some took vows of silence. Today the most notorious are the Nagas (“Naked Ones”) who clothe themselves in nothing more than the ashes of cremation grounds. But the most audacious are the Aghoris, devotees of Shiva who have been known to eat excrement, drink urine, and use human skulls as begging bowls. All this was catnip to nineteenth-century missionaries and ship captains who saw in these practices further evidence of the superiority of Christianity to the inanities of “Hindooism.” But these renouncers knew what they were doing: smashing social taboos in order to experience the mystical reality of nondual awareness. If everything is one, what is the difference between following social conventions and breaking them?

Together these renouncers gave the world a new understanding of the human being and a new diagnosis of the human problem. Because they were philosophers, everything turned for them on foolishness and wisdom. The problem was no longer chaos but samsara. What got us into this mess was
avidya
(ignorance), so what would get us out would have to be
jnana
(wisdom).

This wisdom begins with the fact that we humans are essentially spiritual. Inside each of us, these philosophical Hindus argued, there is an unchanging and eternal soul. And we are that soul. But our souls are trapped in the prisons of our bodies and in the illusions (
maya
) these bodies are forever conjuring up. As long as we inhabit flesh and bones, we are destined to suffer. Yet death offers no release either because, after we die, we will be reborn in other bodies and repeat again and again the sorrowful cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

Whereas Vedic sacrifice was fueled by fire, this cycle is fueled by karma (literally, “action”), which used to refer largely to ritual action but refers here to moral action and its consequences. In the ethical monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, human beings are rewarded and punished for their good and bad deeds by a good and just God. In Hinduism, however, consequences follow from actions without any supernatural intervention. Just as, according to the law of gravity, what is dropped from a tree will fall to the ground, according to the law of karma, evil actions produce punishments and good actions produce rewards. Karmic law explains why human beings keep migrating from death to life and back again. When you die, you die with a combination of good and bad karma—
punya
(merit) and
papa
(demerit). If that were the end of it, however, justice would not be upheld, because there would still be good actions awaiting reward and bad actions awaiting punishment. Therefore you must be reborn into another body, and the cycle of samsara continues apace. The circumstances into which each of us is born, therefore, have nothing to do with luck. They are a result of the good and bad actions we took in our prior lives. Or, as the Shvetashvatara Upanishad puts it, we wander in the cycle of transmigration according to our deeds (5:7).

To end this wandering is moksha—liberation from ignorance, karma, and rebirth alike. But how to achieve this goal? According to philosophical Hinduism, moksha came not through the external revelation of the Vedas but from within, not by the secondhand ministrations of priests but through your own efforts and by your own experience. But renouncers were not left entirely to their own devices. They accepted guidance from gurus. In fact, they insisted on it. The main method for the transmission of learning in early Hinduism was from guru to student. But what these gurus transmitted was not so much knowledge itself as techniques for arriving at that knowledge on your own.

Yoga is now a popular pastime in the West, employed by millions for such thisworldly aims as stress reduction and weight loss. But yoga in its original sense of discipline means “to yoke” one thing to another, and the things being yoked in the yogas practiced by philosophical Hindus were the self and reality, the self and divinity, the self and immortality. The secret knowledge that gurus whispered to those who sat at their feet was how to use body and breath to transport yourself from ignorance to wisdom, from illusion to reality, from humanity to divinity, from samsara to moksha.

Around the time the Upanishads were taking shape, Socrates gave the world his famous Allegory of the Cave: People imprisoned in this cave see only shadows cast on a wall before them, so they are forever mistaking appearance for reality. The renouncers of early Hinduism made a similar observation: the world is not as we see it; we are not who we think we are. Every day, we look at ourselves and the world through a veil of illusion called maya. To be wise is to lift that veil, to see self and world not as they seem to be but as they really are. And how they really are is one. Yes, human beings appear to be different from divinity, but appearances can be deceiving, and here they most certainly are, because once you drill down past the inauthentic to the authentic—past caste and job and gender and race and ethnicity and nationality and language group and height and weight and name and birth date and serial number—you will see that you, too, are divine. Our sense of separateness from God is but a shadow cast on the wall of the cave. The sacred is inside us. The essence of the human being is the same as the essence of divinity.

Hindus refer to the essence of the human being as
Atman
, which is typically translated as “self” or “soul.” The essence of divinity they refer to as
Brahman
. And the liberating wisdom of Hindus who walk this jnana path is as simple and complicated as this: The individual soul is divine. The essence of each of us is uncreated, deathless, and immortal. Atman and Brahman are one and the same.

To know this is to achieve moksha. But it is not enough to believe in the Atman-Brahman equivalence. You must experience it. Neither book learning nor secondhand transmission will do. Shankara (788–820), considered by many to be the greatest Hindu philosopher, was emphatic on this point. Ritual cannot get you to moksha, he argued, but neither can yoga or philosophy or good works or scriptural study. “When a man has been bitten by the snake of ignorance he can only be cured by the realization of Brahman,” he wrote. “A sickness is not cured by saying the word ‘medicine.’ You must take the medicine. Liberation does not come by merely saying the word ‘Brahman.’ Brahman must be actually experienced.”
¹²

In one of the Upanishads’ most famous stories, a boy named Svetaketu has just returned home after years of studying the Vedas at the feet of his guru. He is an A+ student, filled to the brim with book learning, and proud of it. But his father, Uddalaka, is not so easily impressed. Have you ever pondered, he asks Svetaketu, how to “hear what cannot be heard . . . perceive what cannot be perceived . . . know what cannot be known?” But Svetaketu’s training has taught him nothing of such mysteries. So one evening Uddalaka gives his son some salt and tells him to put it in a container of water. The next morning he asks his son to give him back the salt. But the salt has dissolved in the water. So Uddalaka tells him to taste the water. “How is it?” his father asks. “It is salty,” the son replies. Atman and Brahman, the father says, are like that salt and that water.
¹³

This dialogue concludes with one of the most famous quotations of philosophical Hinduism. “
Tat tvam asi
,” the father tells his son: “You are that.” Precisely what this simple formula means is, like so many things in Hinduism, up for grabs. Clearly, Uddalaka is equating Atman and Brahman. But what does this mean? Some believe it means that Atman and Brahman are identical—the essence of the human being is the same as the essence of God. Others claim that Brahman and Atman are different but indivisible. There is no disagreement, however, about the importance of attaining this liberating wisdom by experience. In this classic story, the son does not just sit at the feet of his father. He tastes the water, and the salt, for himself.
¹⁴

Devotional Hinduism

If you are confused at this point, you are not alone. This third geological layer of philosophical Hinduism is rock hard—both difficult to practice and difficult to understand. It requires extraordinary austerities and extraordinary insight. Historically, most renouncers have come from the upper castes, and almost all have been men. But what about the rest of us? By doing our duty both morally and ritually, we can accumulate good karma so that one day we might be reborn into circumstances conducive to a life of renunciation and release. But in the meantime the ultimate goal of moksha is out of reach. All we can hope for is the proximate goal of a better rebirth.

As Hinduism developed, ordinary people decided that this was not enough. Women and lower-caste men wanted to reach out and grab the brass ring of moksha. They wanted it in this lifetime, and they did not want to be forced to give up families and friends, sex and success to get it. So beginning around the time of Jesus, Hinduism moved in a more popular direction referred to today as
bhakti yoga
or the discipline of devotion. The quest for spiritual liberation shifted from a one-man drama of utmost seriousness to a playful musical with a colorful cast of thousands, and devotional Hinduism was born.

While the jnana-style Hinduism of the philosophers was expressed in Sanskrit in the difficult disputations of the Upanishads and embodied in the austerities of wandering ascetics, this fourth layer in the geology of Hinduism was expressed in vernacular songs, poems, dramas, and dances, and embodied in heartfelt worship of one’s chosen deity. Instead of controlling their bodies and emotions through meditation and yoga, devotional Hindus let both bodies and emotions go. Instead of sneering at the body as a prison, they celebrated the body as a temple of their chosen god. When it comes to revelation, wrote the fifteenth-century North Indian poet Kabir, Sanskrit is like the still water of the well, while vernacular languages such as Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, and Marathi are like the living water of an everflowing stream.

Philosophical Hindus had understood God as something beyond our ken—
nirguna Brahman
, God without attributes. The only words they were willing to attach to God were
sat
(existence),
chit
(consciousness), and
ananda
(bliss). Devotional Hindus, however, happily described their chosen deities as male or female, four-armed or eight-armed, wild or mild. And they worshipped their unapologetically personal divinity—
saguna Brahman
(God with attributes)—with relish.

As if to illustrate that no religion can live by philosophy alone, devotional Hindus emphasized their tradition’s narrative dimension over its doctrinal and experiential dimensions. They recited intimate poems about their overflowing love of the god of their choosing. They sang
kirtans
(devotional songs) reminiscent of the praise songs so popular today in evangelical Christian circles. And they listened to epic stories of gods and heroes, conveyed through puppeteers, folk singers, and street-corner poets. Whereas renouncers spoke of Atman and Brahman and samsara and moksha, these artists and their audiences spoke of hunting and fighting and lovemaking. Their ecstasies were for this world.

The ecstasies of bhakti-style worship were particularly emphasized by the Hindu reformer Caitanya (1485–1533), whose singing and dancing to Krishna live on today in the International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON, or the Hare Krishnas), which sees Krishna not as one god among many but as the Supreme Lord of the universe. Another great figure in bhakti-style Hinduism was the seventeenth-century poet (and contemporary of Milton) Tukaram (1608–50), who gave voice to many of the great themes of this Hindu revolution in a short poem devoted to Narayana, another name for Vishnu. “I have been harassed by the world,” he begins, “I am bound fast in the meshes of my past . . . I have no power, O God, to end my wanderings.” After remarking on just how endless his wanderings are, he asks, “Who will finish this suffering of mine? / Who will take my burden on himself?” The answer, of course, is Narayana: