Hinduism - Lesson 1

Dr. Timothy Tennent
Hinduism
wm645-01
Hinduism as a World Religion
Lesson Transcript

Greetings. Hinduism is such an important religion to study because it comprises, it's the third largest religion in the world. In fact, Hinduism is also the oldest world religion, if by world religion we count those religions that are over five percent of the world.

In fact, this in the month of June 2021, Hinduism joins the billion club, which means those that have more than one billion followers. So that's a very significant achievement for Hinduism and so we want to give a lot of consideration to it. I do want to take some time at the beginning just to look at kind of the numerics of the whole thing and explain why it is we talk about growth in two different ways when we discuss world religions.

One way to discuss growth is just purely in terms of numerical growth. And you compare religion, what was it in 1900 versus what was it in 2021. So for example, Hinduism in the turn of the 20th century was 202 million people were Hindus in the turn of the 20th century.

The turn of the 20th, 21st century was 822 million and today, as I said earlier, is now over one billion. So you can just track, like with any religion, the growth or decline of a religion in pure numerical terms. Now, what I argued in my other lectures is that this is helpful, but not particularly helpful when it comes to understanding the growth rate of a world religion.

And the reason for that is because we live in a world that itself is growing significantly at the world population. Now, that means that if you have a population growth, for example, just look at the current population growth of the world, there's 140.5 million people every year being born in the world. It comes down to 285,000 people per day.

Now, if you take, in fact, 150,000 die per day, you have a net over a period of a year of 85 million more people every year. When you net out the 140.5 million births, 35 million deaths, you have 85 million net gain that the world has every year. So if you have a world religion that is not growing by 85 million members per year, it will actually be declining as a percent of the world.

So I think a more helpful way to look at the world's population of a religion is to compare it with the population of the world as a percent of the world. For example, let's take Christianity as a starting point. Christianity at the turn of the 20th century, 1900, there are 558 million Christians in the world.

That was half a billion. Now, if you go to translate that to today, we have 2.5 billion Christians in the world today. So from a half a billion to 2.5 billion.

So it's a tremendous growth in terms of numerics. And yet, Christianity in 1900 was 34.4% of the world. Right now, Christianity is 32.3% of the world.

This means despite the fact of the church going from a half a billion to two and a half billion, just a tremendous growth, the church nevertheless slightly declined as a percent of the world because it simply could not keep up with that 85 million person net every single day. Now let's take a look at Hinduism and then we'll do another comparison with Islam to give you some comparison. Hinduism started the century with 202 million people who were Hindus in the world.

Okay. You go to 2021, again, 1 billion. All right.

So again, a big, big shift. But look at it in Hinduism to go from 202 million, which was a lot less than our 558 million to 1 billion, they actually went from 12.5% of the world to 13.6% of the world. So though they grew in less numbers as a percent of the world, because they were growing by ratio faster, they actually grew by over a percent of the world.

They grew faster than world population during the 20th century and into the early 21st century. Now, so basically what we have essentially is Christianity as a percent of the world is basically flat, maybe slightly declining. Hinduism basically flat, but slightly increasing.

But look at Islam. Now this is what's so interesting to give you a comparison. In the turn of the 20th century, 1900, Islam was 200 million people.

Hindus were 202 million. So it gives you a pretty almost even comparison. So Islam and Hinduism were basically the same at the turn of the 20th century.

Hinduism slightly ahead by 2 million. If you fast forward to the end of the beginning of the 21st century, Hindus had grown from as we saw 202 to 822 million. Islam had gone to 1.2 billion by the end of the 20th century.

And today they're at 1.9 billion people in 2021, June of 2021. So here is Islam is going to the world in turn of the 20th century, 12.3% and today 24.4%. That is stunning. That means Islam has grown so quickly that is not only has it grown faster than world population, but in the last 121 years, it has doubled its growth rate over population.

It's gone twice as fast as world population net growth. That is a significant growth of Islam. And that's why Islam is clearly the fastest growing religion in the world.

So Hinduism is one of the few religions that is growing, which means it's growing faster than world population growth. And it's mostly because Hinduism is located primarily in the great population belt of India. So I'll give you an example.

Hinduism globally, we already saw this is currently at over 1 billion, 73 million to be exact. But of the 1 billion Hindus, 966.3 million of them are in India. This means that here's a religion with a billion followers, but over 950 million of them are in India, 966.

So this shows you that Hinduism is really very dramatically located inside the Indian subcontinent. And therefore, that being a very high population zone of the world, maybe it fuels the population of Hinduism very, very strongly. So those are some statistics that will help you.

India, in addition to having one of the fastest growing religions in the world, but it also has the most unreached people groups in the world. If you look at the diversity of not only linguistically, but socially, the world is divided not simply into political countries, but ethnic nations, the biblical use of the word people group. And even though there's only 200 some odd nations in the world politically, there are thousands of people groups in the world, different numbers, of course, different estimates based on how you define a nation, but somewhere around 10,000, 12,000 nations globally.

And of those, there's over 3,000 of the unreached people groups or ethnic groups located in India. So if you look at the global six or 7,000 unreached groups, half of those are in India. So India continues to remain a huge challenge ideologically because of the cultural, social, linguistic caste barriers which are present in India.

Now we come to the next point, which is the challenge of defining Hinduism. Hinduism is extremely difficult to define, and this has been something which will elude us. And over the years, I've struggled a lot with how to best define Hinduism to students who want to study Hinduism because it seems pretty natural to expect and hope for and think it's natural to get a definition of Christianity or Buddhism or Islam.

And it's pretty easy to do that with most religions in the world. But with Hinduism, it is much more challenging because when you look at how the word Hinduism is used and how it developed, it developed various strands. And so truly, the word Hinduism has come to mean different things.

In fact, Nehru, the first prime minister, famously said, Hinduism is all things to all men, meaning that it depends on what he will say. It has all kinds of meanings. The word Hindu actually comes from the inability of the British to actually pronounce the Indus River, which was the Hindus River.

Sounds like Hindu. So because of that, you have a geographic boundary to the word Hindu that those people who migrated and were part of that original civilization around the Indus River. And then all through Indian history, throughout the 19th century, you have people who are arguing that Hinduism represented not simply a religion, but a culture.

For example, I'll just give you one quotation from a 19th century Indian leader. He says, does the word Hindu denote a religion or a nationality? Does it belong to the category of names like Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, etc., or to the category of names like German, Afghan, or Chinese? That's a really important question. Which categories then? He said it belongs to the first category.

A Hindu ceases to be a Hindu if he becomes a Christian because it's in the category of names like Islam, Buddhism, but not if it belongs to the second one. As little as a German ceases to be a German by becoming a Buddhist. We think we're able to prove that a Hindu is a national name.

There's no such thing as a Hindu religion. Now, this is written from a well-known Bengali theologian named Brahmavanta Upadhyaya, who argued that Hinduism was a cultural identification. And when he himself came from Hinduism into Christianity, he called himself a Hindu Christian, meaning what we would call today an Indian Christian, but he wanted to use that term Hindu.

This goes back into a lot of correspondence in the 19th century where this has been argued with quite a bit, that the word Hindu is primarily a religious cultural term. But the missionaries, when they came, they basically looked at a number of different religions in India, and there were hundreds of small religions. And there's a process in religious studies called reification.

Reification is where you look at a religious practice and you try to find a way to coalesce it, or to make sense of it, or to explain it according to a larger structure or system. So what happened was these different religions in India, which were basically tribal religions in India, began to go through what's called a reification process, and they began to connect them to a larger system, and they eventually became known today as Hinduism. So it's actually a slow development.

The word Hinduism as a religious term really doesn't appear clearly and kind of consistently until the 19th century. So that means it's a late comer to the game, and yet today, clearly, the word Hinduism is clearly identified as a religious term about a religious block of people, as we did earlier in the statistics. So what I've decided to do in terms of discoursing with not only the literature historically, but also literature currently written in India, as well as our textbooks and other things that you may want to read, to say that actually what you find with Hinduism is not a single definition.

We have four classifications of definitions that are in each following the category. So first of all, there's a group of definitions which I would call cultural definitions or geographic definitions. So these cultural, ethnic, geographic definitions are ones which says a true Hindu is someone who lives in India.

So India becomes the galvanizing point for what it means to be a Hindu. This, by the way, is extremely resurgent today in the subcontinent, and the identification of Hinduism with the geographic land. If you belong here, you should be Hindu.

It's very much tied to that geography. So you have that whole kind of cultural definition of Hinduism, which is still very dominant today. But secondly, you do have another category, which I would call a common source of authority definition.

Like in Christianity, we talk about someone who believes the Bible, right? We have a authority definition of what it means to be defined as a Christian, as opposed to a cultural definition. In the same way, there are people who say to be Hindu means you must believe in the Vedas. Now the Vedas are the earliest strand of literature in Hinduism.

We'll look at this more later. But there are four early Vedic texts. The Rig Veda, the Sama Veda, the Arjuna Veda, and the Atharva Veda.

These four Vedas represent some very ancient material in India, and it's considered to be the foundation stone in terms of text for all that would later develop as Hinduism. So people who say, well, if you're a Hindu, you must quote, believe the Vedas. This is a reference to an earlier sacred source, and therefore it becomes an anchor for how you define Hinduism.

Because if you don't believe the Vedas, they say you can't be a Hindu. It's usually done in that kind of negative way. If you don't believe the Vedas, you can't be a Hindu.

In that sense, it's a shared authority definition. The other third category has specific kinds of beliefs. This will be the closest one to what we call a doctrinal consideration.

Not just a vague reference to a text, but specific doctrines. So doctrines especially would be high up on the list would be doctrines like karma, or transmigration. We would say reincarnation in the Western world.

Belief in Atman, the inner soul. Things like that are very, very important to the Hindu structure. So if someone says, oh, well, they can't be a Hindu.

They don't believe in reincarnation or transmigration of souls. That is a classic doctrinal definition where they are identifying a certain thing you must believe in if you are to be a Hindu. The final fourth category would be social practices.

This is the one that Gandhi especially propagated, but it's actually found all over India. What really ties Indians together into a force we call Hinduism is shared social practices. It's referred to in India as the Ashramadharma, the great social structure of India.

Now related to the caste system where you have a high caste Brahmins, you have Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras, which are the low caste and the outcaste today called Dalits. This is a social structure which is extremely important to many people in terms of their definition of Hinduism. If you don't believe in the caste system, you can't be a Hindu.

Despite all the movies and all the kind of glamorized Gandhi's view of a kind of modern lens, Gandhi actually was a fierce believer in the caste system and believed the structure was very, very important without which there would be no Hinduism. So these are really what we were actually kind of in a sense going back a bit rather than kind of stepping forward and defining Hinduism, we're stepping back and saying there's actually four different ways in which Hinduism is defined by those with whom you're talking or text that you're reading. So you'd be aware of all of these.

It could be very easily used as a cultural definition. It could be used as a general reference to the Vedas or a specific doctrinal or social practice. And you just have to accept the fact that there is not any single defining coalescing use of the word Hinduism within India today.

And that's part of the challenge of Hinduism in that respect. Now let's go back at this point and let's try to capture something of the prehistory of Hinduism and focus particularly on the origin of the Indus Valley civilization. And then it's the presence of the Aryans in India, which eventually comes to the modern day Hinduism.

If you look at the subcontinent in a map and you just forget about the current national lines of either Bangladesh, India, or Pakistan, what you actually have there, including Sri Lanka for that matter, that whole subcontinent represents kind of the ancient larger world of India. So today, unfortunately, the earliest Indian civilization is currently located in what is geographically today in the land of Pakistan. But that's where the Indus River is from.

I mentioned earlier that the word Indus was pronounced with an H, a Hindu sound, which is where the word Hindu comes from. But the people who migrated and dwelt along the Indus Valley and eventually became a full civilization. Now, before the 20th century, people had civilizations that were famous.

They talked about like obviously the Greco-Roman civilization or the Mayan civilization, other famous ancient civilizations all the way to China and Japan. But they didn't believe that it ever had been an Indian, an ancient Indian civilization. Well, that all changed in 1921.

A hundred years ago, there was an excavation led by Sir John Marshall, who discovered a huge civilization in that part of the world along the Indus Valley, today known as the Indus Valley civilization. Now, this team discovered two major city-states, one called Harappa, one called Mohenadaro. And these two major cities had many, many villages around them.

And they also had a port city called Lothal, which they used for shipping, etc. This is basically 750,000 square miles. They've now excavated over a thousand separate sites, so it's a huge area.

And what they discovered was a remarkable achievement, a full urban culture, walled cities. Some of these populations were over 40,000 in some of the urban areas. Bricks baked to standard measurement sizes.

They found granaries on the riverbanks. They found sewage beneath the streets, which was not developed until much later in modern India. It was already there.

Division of labor, writing, religious artifacts, a lot of things like that were found. And so, this is now a civilization we studied and learned in like any other civilization. But what was interesting was they found several artifacts, which later became significant in India.

I mentioned just three of them as an example, because this is a hot discussion within Indian studies, Indology. How far back does Hinduism go? Is it 3,000 years old or is it 4,000 years ago? So, this civilization basically flourished between 2800 BC to 1700 BC. So, there's a thousand-year period in there.

And this particular civilization developed religious activity around the river. And they found, for example, what's called a Trimurti. Now, a Trimurti is a really important religious artifact in India.

The word tri, of course, means three. The word murti means face, the three faces. And what it is, it's a religious god.

It's a deified figure with three separate faces. Now, today, even in modern-day Hinduism, it's often said that God has three faces, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. And all of Hinduism is divided between those who worship Vishnu and Shiva and all related to Brahma.

And so, in some ways, this Trimurti or three faces becomes a important feature within modern-day Hinduism. So, that artifact is found to the amazement of the archaeologists in the early civilization of the Indus Valley. They also found, secondly, they found what you would know pronunciation-wise as the swastika.

Now, the swastika is, of course, that symbol of what you become known as the Aryan symbol of the German Third Reich. But actually, the word swastika is a Sanskrit word. It goes back to ancient times, and it means it is well.

And it's actually, that symbol is a very ancient symbol for well-being. And so, it became a symbol of, later, it became a symbol of the Aryan race. We'll explain the Aryans later who picked up on the symbol and carried it into India.

So, if you go, even to this day, you go to very ancient Hindu sites that are ancient, old, all across, especially in South India, you'll see on the temples, you'll see carved in stone for hundreds of years, long before Hitler, you'll see the stone carvings of the swastika. This is a very ancient, auspicious symbol, they call it. It was found in these artifacts.

Another thing they found was, it's hard to say this, but this is just being accurate of what it is. They found many, many symbols of the erect male sexual organ, the phallus. This is a very, very important image in later Hinduism.

It's called the Shiva Lingam, and it was found in this artifact as well. And it's a symbol used for fertility, etc., very, very important to the early Indians. So, the question is, wow, if this is true, if you find some very distinctly Hindu objects in that civilization, could Hinduism go back that far? Well, later, and for a lot of reasons, which is probably tied to climate change and other kinds of reasons that go through the society, this culture began to migrate southward, and there was a group of people who came into India from the north known as the Aryans.

No one knows for sure the origin of the Aryans. Obviously, the Germans claimed that they were the Aryan race. It was part of the, I think, the Germanic background.

Clearly, lighter-skinned people. Others say it came from Iran. Iran or lighter-skinned people, the word Iran, Aryan, or even Ireland, the land of the Aryan.

There's all kinds of debates about the source of these Aryan peoples, but there are definitely lighter-skinned peoples that come into that part of India and gradually they displace and push down the darker-skinned residents of that period. And eventually, those people groups that were in that Indus Valley civilization, they end up getting pushed down into the very southern four states of India. That would be the Telanadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh.

So, those four states, of course, now Telanadu is now one of those states that's been divided. But those states, the traditional states of the south, become the place where you have the Indians from that Dravidian group, from the earliest civilization. And then the northern Indians are traditionally lighter-skinned from the Aryan civilization, though, of course, this has all been mixed up a lot in more recent days and years.

But that's the general structure of it. So, what we believe is that India's development into modern India happens after the Aryans really migrate into India. And they're the ones that really begin to develop sites along the riverbanks and begin to develop what today is recognizable as really proper Hinduism.

So, the Vedic period really starts around, they migrate 1500 BC, about 1200 BC to 400 BC is really the heyday of really the Hindu philosophical writings, and all of the early structure of Hinduism happens in that period. And that really becomes the source of what is, say, modern-day Hinduism. So, what you eventually have is four layers of material in India.

And we'll look at this in later lecture in more detail. But essentially, you have the earliest period, which is the Vedic material. These are called the Vedas.

And as before, there's Rig Veda, Sama Veda, Yajur Veda, Atharva Veda. Now, these Vedas are not four separate books. They're four recensions of the books.

So, you have the Sacred Manual, which is the first book, which is 1020 of hymns. And they rework those hymns, like terming the mantras and various things. And so, you have a lot of overlap between these.

So, these represent kind of the original core material, which is used in various ways. It's known as the four Vedas. And then you go to the Brahmanas, which are commentaries on that.

And then you go to the Aranyakas, which is a little more of reflections and philosophical treatises. And eventually, you have the Upanishads, which is the full-blown Hindu philosophical writings. But each of these are placed as appendices to the other.

So, you don't actually have, like today, to go to Amazon.com. You can order a copy of the Upanishad. You can order a copy of the Vedas. But in the traditional way it was done, it was an oral tradition.

And these Vedic writings were connected to the other writings directly. And so, you'd be as if someone took, like the Corinthians, recited 1 Corinthians 1, for example, or 1 Corinthians 1 to the end. And then at the end, they went right into a commentary by Craig Keener or somebody.

And they went from that right into some kind of philosophical reflections on it. These things began to be joined together so that the commentary was connected to not just the book, but even the individual chapters in various ways. So, it's a pretty interesting, unusual for us, complex set of how their religious documents developed.

And we'll examine this more later. But this gives you a little feel for it now. It's basically a multilayered, highly textual, connected appendices which create a sacred text over a long period of time.

So, we will stop there, and we will put a break on that point.