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Well written, I am on my personal journey to discover what being a Hindu means. I am appalled by the fact that the true knowledge and the diversity of different

Well written, I am on my personal journey to discover what being a Hindu means. I am appalled by the fact that the true knowledge and the diversity of different schools and line of thoughts has been dissolved and sublimated into a crude understanding of what Hinduism means. I have thought about it a lot, and I think the main reason is that there is no single doctrine / school that everyone agreed upon in the past. I see this is as the pinnacle of free-thinking. The seeming consensus among people who follow Abrahamic religions has provided the functionality to conserve itself in some tangible form. Whereas the meaning of Hinduism is just lost, because there is no religion single religion as such. Nothing comes close to the deep thought and inspection that philosophers (sages/rishis whatever you want to name them) of the ancient India. All their "work" has been hidden under layers of what people assume is just religious "stuff". Carl Jung, Nikola Tesla and innumerable people have invested time in discovering their true essence. The concept of "religion", "spirituality", "god" carry a lot weight, especially in the modern world. I myself (being a Hindu), assumed that all that was present in Vedic texts was just references to god, different kinds of gods, different rituals etc. And as a modern day human, I just assumed that these are just things of the past and now we are evolved enough to ignore these concepts and move towards the future. And I was proved entirely wrong when I started reading The Upanishads, which are part of the Vedic literature. The concepts are so abstract that different schools/sub-religions spawned just on the basis of different interpretations. Roughly dualistic and non-dualistic interpretations. I can go on and on about my discovery. In fact I am writing about this here: https://pulkitsharma07.github.io/2020/06/25/source-0/ https://pulkitsharma07.github.io/2020/06/25/source-0/ I am really happy to see this post on HN, hoping this doesn't get flagged.

Florin_Andrei 6y ago
> I am appalled by the fact that the true knowledge and the diversity of different schools and line of thoughts has been dissolved and sublimated into a crude understanding of what Hinduism means. Well, that's always a given when you look at a culture from outside. It takes time to uncover the details and the diversity.
- naravara 6y ago
  > Well, that's always a given when you look at a culture from outside. It takes time to uncover the details and the diversity. In this particular case, everyone is looking from "outside." Contemporary Hindus' own understandings of the religion are largely filtered through the modernist interpretations of reformers in the 19th and 20th centuries. They're somewhat divorced from the classical bardic and collegiate traditions that the various Hindu practices were originally developed through. It's not quite as divorced from the source as things like pagan reconstructionist movements trying to rebuild druidic practices, but it's not entirely an organic and internally driven process of evolution either. Western colonialism and the the disruptive Islamic conflicts that preceded it all have an impact. The modernist reformers were mostly trying to condense Hinduism into a format that made sense to Abrahamic religions, so a lot of nuance got lost in the overall understanding of it. There are still plenty of local temples and village/caste traditions that are practiced they're not really systematized or written down for people to study and understand and they're usually ignored in discussions of the overarching concepts of what "Hinduism" is for that reason.
  - Florin_Andrei 6y ago
    > the modernist interpretations of reformers in the 19th and 20th centuries E.g. Brahmo Samaj, that sort of thing? What other reformers you have in mind? I'm curious where would you put Aurobindo in this context. He's definitely "modernist", but he stuck to the Vedas quite a lot.
    - naravara 6y ago
      Even people like Ramakrishna and Vivekananda had a lot of Theosophist influences. And much of the English translated works from people like Radhakrishnan were notable for speaking to Western audiences too. Then there is the whole VHP take on things which is a purely modernist (nationalism) prism.
      - Florin_Andrei 6y ago
        Ramakrishna is surprising to me. He literally grew up in a small village. Are you saying he was influenced later?
danans 6y ago
> And I was proved entirely wrong when I started reading The Upanishads, which are part of the Vedic literature. Their being classified a part of the "Vedic" literature is not borne out by linguistic analysis, even though tradition claims it to be. They post-date the actual Vedas themselves by centuries. The language used in most of them does not contain nearly as much irregularity as the Vedic language nor its pitch accent system - it's on its way to being a refined liturgical language, not a common man's language as the Vedic language was. And the subject matter contained in them reflect that of the elites of a far more settled and stratified society (vs the more nomadic tribal culture of the Vedas). They are no more representative of Hinduism than their contemporary folk traditions, just as St. Augustine is no more representative of Catholicism than folk Catholicism where blessings are sought for mundane topics like health and prosperity. No doubt, both groups of literature are incredible, but to lump them into one is incorrect, even if that is the tradition.
- svat 6y ago
  This argument is circular: it is only Western indology that defines “Vedic” as referring to “the actual Vedas” by which it means only the saṃhitā portion of the texts. The traditional Indian understanding of “Veda” is indeed that it includes both mantra (saṃhitā) and brāhṃaṇa — the latter including āraṇyaka and upaniṣad. Yes it's true that sometimes when (say) “Ṛgveda” is mentioned, in that context it may refer only to the ṛk saṃhitā, etc — but the narrow meaning is only contextual; in general one talks of which brāhmaṇa-s / āraṇyaka-s / upaniṣad-s belong to which Veda, etc. More generally the Vedāṅgas are also considered part of the Veda, etc. When Pāṇini (whom you allude to in one of the replies here) distinguishes the older language, he uses terms like “chandasi” not "in the Vedas”. Even today when a certain practice or person is called “Vaidika” obviously it doesn't mean a certain time period, belonging to several centuries BCE. Ultimately, to consider linguistic analysis relevant to the definition of “Vedic” and to say “to lump them into one is incorrect, even if that is the tradition” is simply saying “let's make up a definition of ‘Vedic’ different from the traditional definition, under which the traditional definition can be termed incorrect” — no traditional scholar thinks of “Vedic” as referring to “the Vedic language” as referring to the language of the saṃhitās. Edit: I have a theory for how this state of affairs came about: Western interest in Sanskrit texts took off in a big way after William Jones's (much-quoted) pronouncement of the relation between Sanskrit and Persian and Greek and Latin. So the interest started with linguists and philologists, who were naturally more interested in the oldest texts / the texts whose language was closest to the rest of the Indo-European family, and that has become the frame by which these texts are still talked about (rather than say the framing used by traditional Vaidika paṇḍita-s). This is why we see someone confidently deciding that linguistic analysis can tell us something about what “Veda” means or should mean, rather than only telling us about the language of a certain subset of texts.

Florin_Andrei 6y ago

> I am appalled by the fact that the true knowledge and the diversity of different schools and line of thoughts has been dissolved and sublimated into a crude understanding of what Hinduism means. Well, that's always a given when you look at a culture from outside. It takes time to uncover the details and the diversity.

naravara 6y ago
> Well, that's always a given when you look at a culture from outside. It takes time to uncover the details and the diversity. In this particular case, everyone is looking from "outside." Contemporary Hindus' own understandings of the religion are largely filtered through the modernist interpretations of reformers in the 19th and 20th centuries. They're somewhat divorced from the classical bardic and collegiate traditions that the various Hindu practices were originally developed through. It's not quite as divorced from the source as things like pagan reconstructionist movements trying to rebuild druidic practices, but it's not entirely an organic and internally driven process of evolution either. Western colonialism and the the disruptive Islamic conflicts that preceded it all have an impact. The modernist reformers were mostly trying to condense Hinduism into a format that made sense to Abrahamic religions, so a lot of nuance got lost in the overall understanding of it. There are still plenty of local temples and village/caste traditions that are practiced they're not really systematized or written down for people to study and understand and they're usually ignored in discussions of the overarching concepts of what "Hinduism" is for that reason.
- Florin_Andrei 6y ago
  > the modernist interpretations of reformers in the 19th and 20th centuries E.g. Brahmo Samaj, that sort of thing? What other reformers you have in mind? I'm curious where would you put Aurobindo in this context. He's definitely "modernist", but he stuck to the Vedas quite a lot.
  - naravara 6y ago
    Even people like Ramakrishna and Vivekananda had a lot of Theosophist influences. And much of the English translated works from people like Radhakrishnan were notable for speaking to Western audiences too. Then there is the whole VHP take on things which is a purely modernist (nationalism) prism.
    - Florin_Andrei 6y ago
      Ramakrishna is surprising to me. He literally grew up in a small village. Are you saying he was influenced later?

danans 6y ago

> And I was proved entirely wrong when I started reading The Upanishads, which are part of the Vedic literature. Their being classified a part of the "Vedic" literature is not borne out by linguistic analysis, even though tradition claims it to be. They post-date the actual Vedas themselves by centuries. The language used in most of them does not contain nearly as much irregularity as the Vedic language nor its pitch accent system - it's on its way to being a refined liturgical language, not a common man's language as the Vedic language was. And the subject matter contained in them reflect that of the elites of a far more settled and stratified society (vs the more nomadic tribal culture of the Vedas). They are no more representative of Hinduism than their contemporary folk traditions, just as St. Augustine is no more representative of Catholicism than folk Catholicism where blessings are sought for mundane topics like health and prosperity. No doubt, both groups of literature are incredible, but to lump them into one is incorrect, even if that is the tradition.

svat 6y ago
This argument is circular: it is only Western indology that defines “Vedic” as referring to “the actual Vedas” by which it means only the saṃhitā portion of the texts. The traditional Indian understanding of “Veda” is indeed that it includes both mantra (saṃhitā) and brāhṃaṇa — the latter including āraṇyaka and upaniṣad. Yes it's true that sometimes when (say) “Ṛgveda” is mentioned, in that context it may refer only to the ṛk saṃhitā, etc — but the narrow meaning is only contextual; in general one talks of which brāhmaṇa-s / āraṇyaka-s / upaniṣad-s belong to which Veda, etc. More generally the Vedāṅgas are also considered part of the Veda, etc. When Pāṇini (whom you allude to in one of the replies here) distinguishes the older language, he uses terms like “chandasi” not "in the Vedas”. Even today when a certain practice or person is called “Vaidika” obviously it doesn't mean a certain time period, belonging to several centuries BCE. Ultimately, to consider linguistic analysis relevant to the definition of “Vedic” and to say “to lump them into one is incorrect, even if that is the tradition” is simply saying “let's make up a definition of ‘Vedic’ different from the traditional definition, under which the traditional definition can be termed incorrect” — no traditional scholar thinks of “Vedic” as referring to “the Vedic language” as referring to the language of the saṃhitās. Edit: I have a theory for how this state of affairs came about: Western interest in Sanskrit texts took off in a big way after William Jones's (much-quoted) pronouncement of the relation between Sanskrit and Persian and Greek and Latin. So the interest started with linguists and philologists, who were naturally more interested in the oldest texts / the texts whose language was closest to the rest of the Indo-European family, and that has become the frame by which these texts are still talked about (rather than say the framing used by traditional Vaidika paṇḍita-s). This is why we see someone confidently deciding that linguistic analysis can tell us something about what “Veda” means or should mean, rather than only telling us about the language of a certain subset of texts.