Hindu scriptures and holy persons

Overview

Recall questions on shruti and smriti, the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana and the Manusmriti, sadhus, yogis, gurus and sannyasis, initiation, holy persons and the four stages of life, and whether scripture or holy people carry authority in Hinduism.

What you need to know

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Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Why do Hindus have so many scriptures rather than one holy book?

   Model answer

   Because Hindu authority was never centralised. No council ever closed a canon, and each of the major traditions and philosophical schools built up its own authoritative literature while continuing to acknowledge the older Vedic material. The result is a library rather than a book: Vedic hymns, ritual manuals, Upanishads, the two great epics, eighteen major Puranas and many minor ones, law and duty texts, sectarian scriptures such as the Vaishnava Samhitas and Shaiva Agamas, philosophical aphorisms with their commentaries, and vast devotional poetry in regional languages. Hindus therefore ask which texts an individual tradition treats as binding, not which book Hinduism has.

2. 2

   Explain the distinction Hindus draw between shruti and smriti.

   Model answer

   Shruti means what was heard. These texts are held not to have been composed by anyone, human or divine, but to have been perceived by ancient seers and transmitted unchanged; they are eternal, and their authority cannot be revised. The four Vedas with the Upanishads are shruti. Smriti means what was remembered: literature of acknowledged human authorship, authoritative and revered but secondary, open to interpretation and to being weighed against other texts. The epics, the Puranas, the law and duty literature and the sectarian scriptures are smriti. Where the two conflict, the classical rule is that shruti prevails.

3. 3

   Which texts are agreed to be shruti, and which are disputed?

   Model answer

   There is broad agreement across Hindu traditions that the four Vedas and the Upanishads attached to them are shruti. Dispute arises over the sectarian revelations. Vaishnava traditions treat the Vaishnava Samhitas, the Pancharatra literature, as revealed by the Lord himself, and Shaiva traditions make the same claim for the Shaiva Agamas, in each case arguing that revelation did not stop with the Vedic seers and that these texts supply what the Vedas leave out about temple worship and initiation. Other Hindus, and traditional Vedic scholarship in particular, treat them as smriti, on the ground that texts with a known sectarian provenance cannot be authorless. Some Hindus also give shruti-like standing to the Bhagavad Gita or to the Tamil devotional canon, which shows that the boundary is a live question and not a settled list.

4. 4

   What part do the Vedas actually play in Hindu life?

   Model answer

   Their role is more liturgical and legitimating than devotional. Vedic mantras are recited at the samskaras that mark birth, initiation, marriage and death, so most Hindus encounter them at the decisive moments of a life without studying them. Brahmin priests train in their recitation, and the sound itself is held to be effective. Accepting Vedic authority has historically been the test of orthodoxy that distinguished Hindu schools from Buddhism and Jainism, so a school could innovate freely provided it could show its teaching in the Vedas. Reform movements have also invoked them directly, arguing that returning to the earliest texts removes later abuses.

5. 5

   Why is the Bhagavad Gita so widely used when it is only smriti?

   Model answer

   Because it is short, accessible, and addresses a problem anyone recognises: what to do when duty itself seems to demand something terrible. It presents a personal Lord who responds to devotion, and it treats action, knowledge and devotion as compatible routes rather than rivals, so Hindus of very different persuasions can each find their own path endorsed. Every founder of a Vedanta school wrote a commentary on it, which gave it philosophical standing, and modern figures used it as the text through which Hinduism could be explained to the world. Its smriti status has not prevented many Hindus treating it as the essential summary of their religion.

6. 6

   What is the religious importance of the Ramayana?

   Model answer

   It carries Hindu ethics in narrative form. Through Rama, Sita, Lakshmana, Hanuman and Ravana it presents models of the ideal king, the ideal devotee, the ideal brother and the ideal wife, and it puts duty, loyalty and honour under pressure in ways that generate argument rather than closing it. Because it is performed, sung, dramatised at Ramlila and now televised, it reaches Hindus who read nothing, and its festival of Diwali marks Rama's return. Its treatment of Sita has also become a focus of criticism, with many Hindu women reading her ordeal and banishment as a story about what the tradition has demanded of wives.

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