IB World Religions 4.4.1. Where the Doctrines Came From: Layers of Indian Religious History Notes

4.4.1. Where the Doctrines Came From: Layers of Indian Religious History

A tradition without a founder

1. Hinduism has no founder, no single moment of revelation and no council that fixed its doctrines, and Hindus generally treat this as a feature rather than a gap.
2. What Hindus hold today accumulated in layers across several thousand years, with older material staying in use as newer material was added on top of it.
3. The word Hindu started as a geographical term. It reaches English through Persian from Sindhu, the river Indus, and named the people living beyond it before naming any religion.
4. Hindus wanting a name from inside the tradition use sanatana dharma, the eternal teaching, a phrase that claims what is taught has always been so rather than that it developed.
5. Both descriptions run through this topic. Historians describe a layered development while the tradition describes an eternal dharma repeatedly recovered.
6. With no creed to subscribe to, belonging is shown mainly through orthopraxy, doing what family, jati and stage of life prescribe, rather than through orthodoxy, holding agreed beliefs.

The Indus valley evidence

1. The oldest material evidence comes from the Indus valley civilization, whose cities at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro were at their height roughly between 2600 and 1900 BCE.
2. Excavators found a large brick tank at Mohenjo-daro, usually called the Great Bath, along with terracotta female figurines and carved stamp seals.
3. One seal shows a horned figure seated with the legs drawn in, which John Marshall in the 1930s identified as an early form of Shiva as Pashupati, lord of animals.
4. It has been contested since. Scholars including Doris Srinivasan argue the figure need not represent a deity at all, and a buffalo divinity has been proposed instead.
5. The Indus script remains undeciphered and its inscriptions are very short, so nothing these cities believed can be read directly.
6. Continuity with later Hindu practice is therefore an inference from material resemblance, and scholars weigh it very differently.

The Dravidian layer

1. Dravidian is first of all a language family, taking in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and some twenty smaller languages of southern India.
2. Scholars also use it for a stratum of religious practice reconstructed as older than, or separate from, the Vedic material, arguing from language, early Tamil poetry and practice observed today.
3. Features commonly assigned to it include worship of village goddesses (grama devata), possession and oracular mediumship, veneration of ancestors and heroes, and shrines using no Vedic sacrifice.
4. The oldest Tamil literature, the Sangam poems, describes deities including Murugan, a young god of the hills and of war who was later identified with the Sanskrit Skanda.
5. Goddess worship of the kind that becomes Shakta devotion is often traced here, though scholars disagree over how much can be demonstrated.
6. The outcome was not replacement in either direction. Village goddesses gained Sanskrit names and Vedic-style rites, while Sanskritic deities gained local shrines, myths and festivals.

Aryan migration and its debate

1. Arya is a word the Vedic texts apply to themselves, meaning something close to noble, and it is the source of the modern scholarly term.
2. The language of the Vedas belongs to the Indo-European family, so Vedic Sanskrit is demonstrably related to Avestan, Greek, Latin and most modern European languages.
3. The mainstream scholarly account holds that speakers of Indo-Aryan moved into the subcontinent during the second millennium BCE, bringing the language and the sacrificial religion the Vedas record.
4. Other writers, among them Shrikant Talageri and David Frawley, argue Indo-Aryan speech is indigenous to India and spread outward, a position called Out of India.
5. Ancient DNA studies published in 2019, including work led by Vagheesh Narasimhan, report steppe-related ancestry entering South Asia in the second millennium BCE. Supporters of migration read this as confirmation, while critics dispute what genetics can establish about language.
6. The question carries real political weight in India, since who counts as indigenous bears on present-day argument, which is a further reason to attribute each account.

Vedic gods and local deities

1. The deities who dominate the Rig Veda are largely not the deities Hindus worship now, which is among the clearest signs of layering anywhere in the tradition.
2. Indra receives more hymns there than any other god, and Agni, Varuna and Soma are prominent alongside him, yet none of the four is significant in temple worship today.
3. Vishnu and Rudra appear in the Rig Veda only as minor figures, and both become central afterwards, Rudra under the name Shiva.
4. Local deities have travelled the other way. Jagannath at Puri, Vithoba at Pandharpur, Murugan in the Tamil country and Ayyappan at Sabarimala began as regional gods and now draw pilgrims nationally.
5. The avatar doctrine has been the main means of absorption, since naming a local god a form of Vishnu or Shiva ties a regional cult to a pan-Indian one without abolishing either.
6. The sociologist Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas named the movement running the other way Sanskritization, in which a community takes up Sanskritic rites, deities and dietary rules to raise its standing.

Orthopraxy and Hindu belonging

1. Because the doctrines arrived in layers, Hindus have never held a single statement of belief that all of them accept.
2. The disagreements are deep rather than cosmetic. Advaita Vedanta holds the self and Brahman to be without difference, Dvaita Vedanta holds them permanently distinct, and both count as Hindu.
3. Classical Mimamsa gives no role at all to a creator god, and it remains one of the six orthodox systems, because orthodoxy here is measured by acceptance of the Vedas rather than by belief in God.
4. What holds the tradition together instead is practice: the samskaras performed at the proper times, the family deity honoured, the festivals kept and the duties of varna and jati discharged.
5. This is why Hinduism has generally not sought converts and why conversion sits awkwardly within it, since belonging follows birth and practice rather than assent.
6. Reform and missionary movements of the last two centuries push the other way. The Arya Samaj and organizations such as ISKCON define membership far more by doctrine and do receive converts.
7. The older pattern still dominates. A Hindu who doubts a great deal is ordinarily counted as belonging so long as the family rites are kept.