God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (24 page)

Hindu worship, however, is first and foremost about sight. Whereas Protestants go to church to hear the gospel reading and the sermon, Hindus go to temple to see and be seen—to gaze at their beloved gods and to be gazed at lovingly in return. Worshippers build up to this key moment in puja by circumambulating the temple itself and then the image of their god. Only then do they take
darshan
by engaging their deity in an intimate, eye-to-eye encounter. “When Hindus go to a temple, they do not commonly say, ‘I am going to worship,’ but rather, ‘I am going for
dars´an
,” writes Harvard professor Diana Eck in her book on this “religious seeing.” Not without reason have Eck and others referred to
darshan
as “the central act of Hindu worship.”
¹⁸

Hindu Storytelling: The Mahabharata

As much as ritual, however, devotional Hinduism is about stories. In fact, just as story and law are two sides of the same coin in Judaism, story and ritual are integrated in Hinduism. At Passover, Jews listen to the Exodus story and reenact it; in Hinduism’s
Vrat Katha
tradition, Hindus listen to a story of a fast and then vow to fast themselves.

The key repositories of Hindu stories are the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Although these epics are technically classified as
smrti
, and are therefore supposedly of secondary importance (to
sruti
), they are actually more influential among devotional Hindus than the Vedas. Classically, these stories, which take place in mythic time, have been handed down orally through parents or gurus or dancers or singers or puppeteers. Nowadays young people also learn them through comic books, television, or the Internet. When I was living in India in the late 1980s, almost everyone who had access to a television seemed glued to it each afternoon as a lavishly produced Hindi miniseries on the Mahabharata unfurled over ninety-four episodes.

The Bible has been billed as “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” but the Mahabharata, which means “Great India,” is at least as dramatic and far, far longer. At one hundred thousand verses and roughly 1.8 million words, it dwarfs the Bible, the
Iliad
, and the
Odyssey
combined. But the Mahabharata is also remarkable for its longevity. Composed between 400
B.C.E.
and 400
C.E.
, the Mahabharata has been popular entertainment for roughly two millennia. Its scenes were carved into reliefs at Angkor Wat in Cambodia in the twelfth century, and in 1985 Royal Shakespeare Company director Peter Brook produced a nine-hour-long stage version that toured the world for four years to rave reviews before finding a second life in 1989 as a six-hour miniseries.

Duty is the Mahabharata’s central preoccupation, but drama is its draw. Its scenes are the stuff of Shakespeare’s plays and America’s soap operas, combining heroism and holiness with betrayal, lechery, murder, adultery, and lust for both body and blood—all on a stage where gods and humans walked the same Earth.

The Mahabharata tells the story of a family feud that makes the troubles of
West Side Story
and
Romeo and Juliet
look like child’s play. On the one hand there are the righteous sons of King Pandu, the Pandavas; and on the other there are the evil sons of a blind king, Dhritarashtra, the Kauravas. Both clans are descended from a king called Bharata (a term used today to refer to India itself). The start of this epic concerns the winning, losing, and dividing of a kingdom, but the first major plot point comes when the Kauravas win this kingdom in a dice game. As a result, the Pandavas are set to wandering, but it is agreed they can return after thirteen years to reclaim their kingdom from their cousins. Upon their return, however, the unrighteous Kauravas go back on their word. So a battle ensues that puts the charioteering of
Ben Hur
to shame. The deus ex machina arrives in the form of Krishna, who takes the side of the righteous Pandavas, who after eighteen days of carnage win a great victory.

Today the most beloved portion of the Mahabharata is the Bhagavad Gita (“Sacred Song“), a dialogue on the ethics of war that since the nineteenth century has functioned like something of a Hindu New Testament—the Hindu holy book par excellence. The central problematic of the Gita, as it is popularly known, is
dharma
, a Sanskrit term variously translated as duty, law, justice, truth, order, righteousness, virtue, ethics, and even religion. The root of the word
dharma
is the Sanskrit term
dhr
, which means hold or support, so dharma is whatever upholds cosmic order and supports what is right.

The Gita gets going just as the bloodletting in the Mahabharata is about to begin. As Arjuna of the Pandava clan approaches the battlefield, a crisis of conscience comes over him. The householder tradition of caste says it is Arjuna’s duty to fight. He is, after all, a
Kshatriya
(warrior). But householder ethics tells him not to kill his kinsmen, and he knows that if he goes into battle, he will kill them by the score. What is a dutiful Hindu to do?

In the Gita, Arjuna seems to be talking with his charioteer, but his charioteer turns out to be Krishna in disguise. In this discussion two great tectonic plates in Hindu history start to rub against each other. Krishna offers a creative new synthesis of the devotional traditions of the householder and the philosophical traditions of the renouncer—a synthesis that would determine the shape of popular Hinduism from this moment forward. Do your dharma and fight, he tells Arjuna, but act without attachment to the fruits of your actions. Renounce any desire for reward. Fear no punishment. Devote your actions and their consequences alike to God. And remember that even the fiercest warrior cannot actually kill anyone, since we are not our perishable bodies but our immortal souls.

As this dialogue continues, Krishna lays out for the first time Hinduism’s three different paths to moksha. In addition to the karma yoga of ritual and ethical action (the sacrificial religion of Vedic religion) and the jnana yoga of asceticism and renunciation (the philosophical religion of early Hinduism), there is now a third option: the bhakti yoga of love and grace (the devotional religion of popular Hinduism). It is now possible to achieve the religious goal of moksha by other power rather than self-effort, by entrusting the fruits of your actions to the grace of God. “In whatever way people approach me,” Krishna tells Arjuna, “in that way I show them favor.”

There are as many ways to read the Gita as there are ways to read the gospel of Mark or the book of Job. Most Hindus read it as a spiritual allegory of sorts. Like those Muslims who understand the concept of jihad to refer not to the outer struggle against flesh-and-blood enemies but to the inner struggle against spiritual temptations, most Hindus understand the lessons of the Gita to be spiritual rather than military (or even ethical): the real struggle is not for kingdoms and cash but for the liberation of your soul. Reformation-era Protestants championed the “priesthood of all believers.” Everyone, they argued, is a priest. The Gita also blurred the distinction between householders and renouncers. We can all be renouncers of a sort, it argued—even women, servants, and outcastes. It was no longer necessary to choose between doing your duty and pursuing spiritual liberation. It was now possible to have both.

Hindu Storytelling: The Ramayana

Almost as popular as the Mahabharata is the Ramayana (“Story of Rama”). Here the central themes are more personal—not war and heroism and fidelity to the ethics of caste but love and longing and fidelity to the ethics of marriage. The Ramayana, which probably came into its current form between 200
B.C.E.
and 200
C.E.
, extends to seven books and twenty-four thousand verses, making it far shorter than the Mahabharata but still about twice as long as the New Testament.

This scripture tells the story of a demon, a kidnapping, and the trials and tribulations of a virtuous prince named Rama and his faithful wife, Sita. The action begins when Rama’s father banishes him on the eve of his coronation to fourteen years of wandering in the forest. There Sita (who insists on accompanying her husband into exile) is captured by the ten-headed demon king, Ravana, and stolen away to his home in Lanka (now Sri Lanka), only to be freed through the cunning of the monkey god, Hanuman (who builds a bridge from India to Sri Lanka), the assistance of Rama’s brother, Lakshmana, and the courage of Rama himself, who kills Ravana in battle. But this is not the end of the story, because no sooner is Sita liberated than Rama banishes her on suspicions of adultery. Sita in turn throws herself onto a funeral pyre but, like the burning bush of the Bible, she is not consumed, because Agni, the god of fire, knows she is innocent. So Rama and Sita are reconciled, and together they return to Ayodhya, where Rama reigns as king. But this is not the end of the story either, because after Sita becomes pregnant, Rama (who apparently has some trust issues) becomes suspicious once again, worrying this time that her offspring may not be his. So again he banishes Sita, who gives birth to twin boys at the hermitage of the poet seer Valmiki, to whom the Ramayana is traditionally ascribed. When the twin sons grow up, all can see that they are the spitting image of Rama, so innocent Sita is once again called home. This time Sita refuses, however, disappearing into the earth. As for Rama, he gives his earthly kingship to his sons and assumes his rightful place in the cosmos as the seventh incarnation of Vishnu.

Because it is revered not only by Hindus but also by Jains, Buddhists, and even Muslims, the Ramayana stands alongside the Bible, the Quran, and the Analects of Confucius as one of the four most influential books ever written. Originally told in Sanskrit, it has been retold over the centuries in many different languages and from many different perspectives. The
Sitayana
, for example, tells the tale from Sita’s perspective, and
Sita Sings the Blues
, a humorous full-length animated feature film with a 1920s jazz music score, bills itself as “The Greatest Break-up Story Ever Told.”
¹⁹
Diwali, the pan-Indian festival of lights, celebrates Rama’s return to rule in the kingdom of Ayodhya. And one of India’s greatest spectacles is the
Ram Lila
, a weeklong performance of the Ramayana staged annually in Ramnagar (“Rama’s City”) across the river from Varanasi. Like the Mahabharata, this story has been a magnet for allegorical interpretations. Many Hindus see Sita as the soul captured by the body (Ravana) only to be rescued by God (Rama).

In 1987 and 1988, a Hindi version of the Ramayana was serialized in seventy-eight television episodes in India, and “Ramayana fever” afflicted some hundred million viewers. The success of this series led to a remake, also in Hindi, in 2008 and 2009. A more modest and condensed English-language version of this “spiritual tale of romance,” billed as a cross between the
Odyssey
,
Romeo and Juliet
, and
Star Wars
, took to the stage in 2001 at the National Theatre in London.
²⁰
And in 2006 Virgin Comics debuted a comic book series called
Ramayan 3392
A.D.
billed as “the greatest legend relived—a saga of duty, bravery, loyalty, revenge, and redemption.”

In the Mahabharata and Ramayana and their contemporary retellings, we see the playfulness of Krishna and the bravery of Rama, but we also see the Hindu sensibility at work—its preference for stories over dogmas, its reveling in mystery and paradox, and its aversion to fixed boundaries and settled borders. At least for those who grew up under the impress of the Western monotheisms, the porous borderland in these stories between the animal, human, and divine worlds is striking. It is often remarked that Hinduism divinizes human beings, but as the epics demonstrate it also humanizes the gods. In Hindu temples and scriptures, we are miles away from the transcendent God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, who may have desires but is a stranger to need. Hindu deities are more like us. In this tradition, human beings need the gods, and the gods need human beings.

Modern Hinduism

The last layer in Hinduism’s geology begins as a response to British and American criticisms of Hinduism as idolatrous and polytheistic—“a vast museum of idols,” in Mark Twain’s words, “and all of them crude misshapen, and ugly.”
²¹
The British arrived in India in 1757 via the ministrations of the East India Company and stayed for almost two centuries, until Indian independence in 1947. Modern Hinduism bent Hinduism’s bhakti path in the direction of the Western monotheisms, and especially toward Anglo-American Protestantism. It also brought Hinduism into conversation with the Enlightenment—with science and reason, liberty and equality. Focusing more on the Upanishads than the epics, this movement accented the ethical and doctrinal dimensions of the religion over its ritual and narrative dimensions. In keeping with the ways and means of Victorianism, it downplayed Hindu eroticism, all but purging the tradition of Tantrism and creating generations of Hindus (including many of my students) who see nothing sexual in the phallus and yoni of the Shiva lingam. Modern Hinduism also aimed to undercut Christian missions by positioning Hinduism as a world religion equal (or superior) to Christianity. Also referred to as the Indian Renaissance, this movement had two main impulses, both visible in Indian religion and politics today.

The first impulse emphasized the unity of all religions. Its key figure was Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), a Brahmin from Bengal whose studies at a Muslim university and employment with the East India Company had familiarized him with Sufism, Unitarianism, and Deism. Under the auspices of the Brahmo Samaj, which he founded in Calcutta in 1828, Roy rejected bhakti-style polytheism as irrational and puja as “idol worship.” There is only one God, he argued, and that God is beyond description. Therefore, no one religion has a monopoly on religious truth. All religions are flawed human efforts to capture the elusive divine. In ethics, Roy and the Brahmo Samaj argued against caste, child marriage, and widow burning. They even rejected karma and reincarnation as affronts to rationality and impediments to social reform.