IB World Religions 1.2.1. Hinduism in Context: Origins, Spread and Diversity Notes

1.2.1. Hinduism in Context: Origins, Spread and Diversity

The name and the tradition

1. The word Hindu began as a geographical label rather than a religious one. Persians used it for the people living beyond the Sindhu, the river now called the Indus, and the religious sense of the word grew up much later.
2. Many Hindus prefer their own term, sanatana dharma, usually translated as the eternal teaching or the eternal way. It presents the tradition as something discovered rather than founded.
3. There is no founder and no single creed. Hindus recognise no prophet, no council that once fixed belief, and no single authority whose ruling binds everybody.
4. What holds the tradition together is practice more than agreement. Scholars describe Hinduism as orthopraxy, right practice, rather than orthodoxy, right belief, so a family's rites and duties carry more weight than a checklist of doctrines.
5. Belief therefore varies enormously. Hindus may worship one deity, many deities, or an impersonal absolute beyond all description, and each of these counts as Hindu.
6. Some scholars consequently describe Hinduism as a family of traditions rather than one religion. Hindus differ over that description, and many hold that shared texts, deities and duties make it a single tradition with many forms.

Origins and early layers

1. Hindu practice is best understood as layers laid down over several thousand years. No layer replaced the one beneath it, and material from each is still visible in worship today.
2. The oldest layer is pre-Vedic. Excavations of the Indus Valley cities have produced bathing tanks, seated figures and seals that some scholars read as early ritual bathing and as a deity later associated with Shiva, though the evidence is contested.
3. Dravidian traditions of southern India contributed further material. Goddess worship and much of the temple practice Hindus use today are traced to this layer.
4. The Vedic layer arrives with Sanskrit-speaking peoples in northern India from roughly 1500 BCE. It brought the Vedas, fire sacrifice and a priestly class, the Brahmins.
5. A philosophical layer follows in the Upanishads, composed from about 800 BCE. These turn attention away from sacrifice and towards the self and Brahman, the ultimate reality.
6. Narrative and devotion complete the picture. The Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Puranas carried the tradition into ordinary households, and the bhakti movements from about the sixth century CE made loving devotion to a personal deity available regardless of caste or gender.

The major traditions

1. Most practising Hindus belong to one of four broad traditions, each defined by how the divine is approached. They are usually named Vaishnavism, Shaivism, Shaktism and the Smarta tradition.
2. Vaishnavas worship Vishnu and his avatars, above all Krishna and Rama. This is the largest of the four and the most strongly devotional.
3. Shaivas worship Shiva, often through the lingam rather than a human form, and their traditions carry the strongest ascetic and yogic strands.
4. Shaktas worship the Goddess as Shakti, the divine feminine creative power, in forms such as Durga, Kali and Parvati.
5. Smartas treat five or six deities as equal forms of one reality. Their approach sits closest to the philosophical claim that every deity points to a single Brahman.
6. A household normally has an ishta-devata, a chosen deity for personal devotion, without denying any other. This is why Hindus can be described as worshipping many deities and one reality at the same time.

Schools of interpretation

1. Hindu philosophy is organised into six classical darshanas (viewpoints), among them Samkhya, Yoga, Mimamsa and Vedanta. Vedanta has shaped later belief more than any of the others.
2. Within Vedanta, Hindus disagree sharply about how the self stands to ultimate reality. That disagreement is the clearest illustration of diversity inside the tradition.
3. Shankara, teaching in about the eighth century CE, set out Advaita Vedanta, non-dualism. On this account the self and Brahman are finally one, and the appearance of separateness belongs to maya.
4. Ramanuja, in the eleventh century, set out Vishishtadvaita, qualified non-dualism. Selves and the world are real and form the body of God, so devotion to a personal Lord is the point rather than a lower stage.
5. Madhva, in the thirteenth century, set out Dvaita, dualism. God and the self remain permanently distinct, so worship never dissolves the worshipper into what is worshipped.
6. These schools coexist rather than cancelling one another. A Hindu may follow a bhakti tradition in daily practice while accepting an Advaita account when the question is put philosophically.

Spread and the diaspora

1. Hinduism spread first through trade and royal courts rather than mission. Hindu kingdoms and temple culture shaped Southeast Asia for centuries, and Angkor Wat in Cambodia was built as a temple to Vishnu.
2. Some of that presence survives as living religion. Bali remains a Hindu society outside India, with its own ritual calendar and its own forms of worship.
3. The modern diaspora begins largely with indentured labour under British rule in the nineteenth century. Hindu communities were carried to the Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius, South Africa and East Africa, and many have been there for six generations.
4. Later migration for work and study built large communities in Britain, North America, the Gulf and Australasia. A mandir abroad often serves several regional traditions at once, which produces combinations of practice not found in any one Indian region.
5. Reform and missionary movements shaped the modern picture too. The Arya Samaj, founded in 1875, called for a return to Vedic religion and rejected image worship, while ISKCON, founded in 1966, has carried Krishna devotion worldwide.
6. Hindus number roughly 1.2 billion, the great majority of them in India and Nepal. Hindus have generally held that one is born into the tradition rather than converted into it, though ISKCON and the Arya Samaj have both accepted incomers.