IB World Religions 4.4.2. Statements of Belief: Sanatana Dharma, Saguna and Nirguna Notes

4.4.2. Statements of Belief: Sanatana Dharma, Saguna and Nirguna

Sanatana dharma without a creed

1. Hindus have no creed to recite and no council that ever fixed one, so a statement of belief in this tradition describes what is widely held rather than what is required. Most Hindus call their own tradition sanatana dharma, the eternal teaching or eternal law.
2. The word Hinduism came from outsiders naming the peoples beyond the Indus river. Sanatana dharma names something Hindus hold to be beginningless, discovered by sages rather than founded by anyone.
3. What holds the tradition together is a shared inheritance of texts, duties and practices rather than agreement on doctrine. A Hindu who worships Vishnu and one who worships Shiva may say very different things about God and both remain inside sanatana dharma.
4. The one claim running through nearly all of it is belief in a supreme being. The live disagreement is over how that being may be described, not over whether it is there.
5. Because the tradition is plural, every doctrinal statement below belongs to a school or a devotional community rather than to Hinduism as a whole.
6. Statements of belief still carry real weight. They shape which deity a family worships, which texts a school treats as decisive, and what a devotee hopes for at the end of the road.

Saguna and the personal God

1. Saguna means with qualities. Hindus who speak of the supreme being this way hold that it has form, name and character, and can be approached in relationship.
2. On this account Brahman, ultimate reality, makes itself available in describable shape so that human beings can praise it, love it and look at it.
3. Saguna belief is what makes puja intelligible as worship. A devotee offers light, flowers and food to a murti because the deity is held to be genuinely present and genuinely receptive.
4. Most Hindus keep an Ishta-Devata, a chosen deity for personal devotion, without denying that neighbours worshipping other forms are reaching the same reality.
5. Bhakti traditions press this furthest. Teachers such as Ramanuja hold that God possesses an eternal personal form, and that loving devotion is the highest activity a human being can undertake.
6. Saguna language is therefore the everyday language of Hindu life, assumed by temple worship, household shrines, festivals and pilgrimage alike.

Nirguna and formless Brahman

1. Nirguna means without qualities. Hindus who speak this way hold that the supreme being lies beyond form, gender, name and every description human language can supply.
2. The Upanishads give the classic formula neti neti, not this, not this, which sets aside each proposed description of Brahman as inadequate rather than as false.
3. On this account Brahman is not one object among others that could be examined and reported on, so any positive statement reveals more about the speaker than about Brahman.
4. Advaita Vedanta, the school associated with Shankara, treats nirguna Brahman as the higher truth and treats saguna worship as a real and useful approach for people still living in ordinary awareness.
5. Nirguna belief has a devotional life of its own. The Sant poets of north India, Kabir and Ravidas among them, sang of a God with no image and no temple.
6. Most Hindus move between the two languages without any sense of contradiction, bowing before a murti in the morning and affirming a formless absolute in meditation.

The Trimurti and the consorts

1. Saguna belief divides Brahman into the Trimurti, three great works carried by three deities: Brahma who creates, Vishnu who preserves and Shiva who destroys.
2. Hindus state that these are not three gods competing for control. They are one reality performing the three tasks any cycling universe requires.
3. Worship is not shared evenly between them. Vaishnavas hold that Vishnu is the supreme being, and Shaivas hold the same of Shiva, each treating the remaining works as carried out under their own deity's authority.
4. Brahma receives strikingly little worship for a creator, with only a handful of temples in his name, the best known at Pushkar in Rajasthan.
5. Each god is paired with a goddess who carries his active power: Saraswati with Brahma, Lakshmi with Vishnu and Parvati with Shiva.
6. Hindus insist the consorts are not ornamental. Shakti, the divine feminine creative power, is what makes a deity effective, and Shaktas worship the Goddess as the supreme being rather than as anyone's partner.

Varnas sustaining the eternal order

1. Sanatana dharma is held to be sustained by people doing their duty rather than by anyone holding the correct opinions.
2. Hindus have traditionally stated this through the four varnas: Brahmins who teach and perform ritual, kshatriyas who rule and protect, vaishyas who trade and farm, and shudras who serve.
3. The doctrinal claim is that the eternal order holds together when each group performs its own sva-dharma, its proper duty, instead of somebody else's.
4. The Bhagavad Gita puts this bluntly when Krishna tells Arjuna that one's own duty done badly is better than another's duty done well.
5. This is why Hindus are often described as valuing orthopraxy, right practice, above orthodoxy, right belief.
6. Many Hindus today reject the social hierarchy that grew out of varna while keeping the underlying claim that dharma is upheld by ordinary duty faithfully performed.

Maya, jiva and atman

1. Hindus state the human situation like this: people live inside maya, the provisional and illusory appearance of the created world, and take it for the whole of reality.
2. Inside maya each person appears as a jiva, the individual living being bound up with body, mind and ego.
3. Within the jiva is the atman, the self, which Hindus hold was never born and will never die.
4. The statement of belief that follows is that the religious task is to release the atman from its identification with the jiva.
5. That release is moksha, and the schools describe its content differently, some as union or intimate nearness with a personal God and others as the ending of any sense of separateness at all.
6. Hindus also disagree over how much maya unmakes. Advaita treats the world's independent existence as finally illusory, while Vishishtadvaita and Dvaita treat the world as genuinely real though wholly dependent on God.