Origins and diversity in Hinduism

Overview

Recall questions on why Hinduism has no clear date of origin, the Indus Valley civilisation and its evidence, the Vedic period and the four Vedas, Vedic religion, Vaishnavism, Shaivism and Shaktism, the paths to liberation, and whether Hinduism's diversity undermines its coherence.

What you need to know

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Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Why is it so difficult to give Hinduism a date of birth?

   Model answer

   Hinduism has no founder, no single moment of revelation and no council that fixed its beliefs. What is now called Hinduism grew out of several streams that merged over many centuries: the religious life of the Indus cities, the hymns and sacrifices of the Vedic peoples, and local and regional cults across the subcontinent. Because there is no origin event, Hindus more often speak of sanatana dharma, the eternal order, which by definition was never founded at all. Scholars therefore describe a long convergence rather than a beginning.

2. 2

   Explain what the Indus Valley civilisation was and why accounts of Hindu origins begin there.

   Model answer

   It was a large urban culture in the north-west of the subcontinent, flourishing roughly from 2600 to 1900 BCE, with major sites at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. It had planned cities, drainage, standardised weights and a script. It is the earliest layer available to anyone asking where Hindu practice came from, and several of its material remains resemble things that matter in later Hindu religion, so it is the natural place to begin the question even though it cannot settle it.

3. 3

   What has been found in the Indus cities that might be evidence of religious practice?

   Model answer

   Four kinds are usually cited. A seal showing a horned figure seated in what looks like a yogic posture and surrounded by animals, sometimes called the Pashupati seal after a title of Shiva. Large numbers of terracotta female figurines, read by some as goddess figures. The Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro and the elaborate water systems, suggesting ritual bathing and concern with purity. And stone objects of phallic and ring shape that some compare with the later lingam and yoni, together with tree and animal imagery that recurs in Hindu iconography.

4. 4

   To what extent does Indus religion survive inside Hinduism?

   Model answer

   The case for it is that ritual bathing, sacred trees, goddess worship, animal symbolism and meditative posture are all central to later Hinduism and all appear to be present in the Indus material, which would explain features that the Vedic hymns do not account for. The case against is that the Indus script is undeciphered, so every religious reading is inference from objects alone; the seated figure may be a chieftain or a bull deity rather than a proto-Shiva; the figurines may be toys or fertility charms rather than cult images; and around a thousand years separate the end of the cities from the texts that would show continuity. What turns on it is whether Hinduism is fundamentally indigenous to the subcontinent and older than the Vedas, or fundamentally Vedic with local material absorbed later, and that question is politically charged in India today.

5. 5

   Explain what is meant by the Vedic period and why it is treated as formative for Hinduism.

   Model answer

   It is the era, conventionally around 1500 to 500 BCE, in which the Vedic hymns were composed, transmitted and elaborated. It matters because it produced the texts that Hindus still treat as the highest authority, the priesthood and ritual grammar that later temple worship inherited, the Sanskrit language of Hindu learning, the sacrificial cosmology in which the world is sustained by ordered ritual action, and, in its closing phase, the Upanishadic turn to inner knowledge that made Brahman and atman the central problem of Hindu philosophy.

6. 6

   Name the four Vedas and explain how they were preserved.

   Model answer

   They are the Rig Veda, the collection of hymns to the gods; the Sama Veda, the same material arranged for chanting; the Yajur Veda, the sacrificial formulae; and the Atharva Veda, which includes healing, domestic and magical material. Each grew a body of attached literature: the Brahmanas on ritual, the Aranyakas or forest texts, and the Upanishads. They were transmitted orally for centuries by trained brahmin families using elaborate memory techniques that preserved pitch and syllable exactly, and were committed to writing comparatively late. Hindus regard them as shruti, that which was heard rather than composed.

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