What is distinctive about being a Hindu?
It's like a mixture of religion, culture,
the arts. It's like this whole kind of cultural matrix I guess you could call it.
It's not like the so-called Abrahamic faiths, Christianity, Islam and
Judaism. Hinduism is a much more dispersed faith. You have different denominations which
may share overlapping features with other denominations, and they all combine to form
the Hindu tradition. And I would call this a form of polycentrism. Hinduism is an extraordinarily
visual faith, certainly through the temples and through the sacred texts and through the
images of Hinduism, all these different deities are expressed and manifested through colour,
through different shapes, different sizes and different features. One of the ways that
polycentrism manifests itself, expresses itself, is precisely in its regional variations.
So you may have a deity or a god described or expressed in a certain way in north India
which may not be the same in south India. So besides that visual dimension which Hinduism
is well-known for, Hinduism is fundamentally an oral tradition.
And this goes back to the time of the Vedas.
A puja involves a number of
stimulations to the senses, and to help the devotee focus onto the deity and to towards
the realisation of truth, or towards concentrating or knowing the truth. Bells for instance,
the ringing of a bell, is an auditory stimulation. The lighting of the lamp is a visual stimulation.
The Vedas are the canonical texts of Hinduism. Canonical in the sense that they
are at the foundation of the tradition. And they have been called Sruti. Sruti in Sanskrit
means that which is heard by the ancient sages.
There are several different
texts within the Vedas. What we have here is an example of a seventeenth-century palm
leaf manuscript that's written in Tamil. It is a Tevaram. Tevaram is a combination of
two words: Teva, meaning God, and Aram, meaning garland. So the songs are sung as veneration
to a deity, and they are sung as part of worship as part of adorning the deity with the songs.
Therefore it works the same way as a flower garland does.
Tamil Vedas are texts that are quite different, written in Tamil, but they're also
called Veda, therefore they are also supposed to give you saving knowledge. So this is what
I mean by polycentrism. You have two texts that on the face of it look very different
and they seem to teach different things. But in the hands of the theologians, that are
meant to be actually teaching the same body of saving literature. They give the same saving
message. Even though many of the scriptures are now written down, even the Vedas, it's
important how you say them, how you chant them, because that gives them effectiveness.
Up until the introduction of paper and printing this would have been how south Indians
would have written their sacred texts and many other different kinds of texts.
In reality Hindus in an everyday life do not read vedas, do not read the Upanishads, nevertheless
they will probably read some stories from the Ramayana or Mahabharata, or definitely
sing some devotional hymns.
So we have two kinds of texts, sruti
and smriti, the Vedas and then the non-Vedic texts, and both of them play a part in giving
a Hindu an idea of what it is to be a good person in the world, how to follow dharma,
how to avoid unrighteousness, by a combination of both these texts. The Ramayana and the
Mahabharata, texts like that, the great storytelling texts, are called smriti, and that has to do
with what has been remembered and passed down in tradition.
So these stories are obviously easier to pass down the generations, because
the previous generation can tell the next generation, and they can recite these stories,
the stories are easier to remember.
The Ramayana teaches how Rama, as king
of his kingdom Ayodhya, was present in human affairs, and it teaches about what it is to
be a righteous human being, not only a righteous king, which Rama is, Rama is a righteous king,
but also what it is to be righteous in human life.
We are looking at a manuscript produced in the Mewar, a region of nowadays
Rajasthan in the seventeenth century. The manuscript was a project with lasted many
years and involved many different artists and workshops. It contains more than five-hundred
different paintings illustrating the text. So we can see here Rama and Lakshmana, his
brother, and Sita, as they settle in the Citrakuta forest.
The other story that I like is of Hanuman, who had a monkey like form. There was a whole,
there were many monkeys who were devotees to Rama, and his greatest devotee was Hanuman.
He didn't have any care for worldly objects or materialistic belongings.
The storytelling through the great epics and the puranas and the other texts, have
many different versions, and these multiple versions give a sense of creativity and also
accommodate specific circumstances. So I can tell you a story in order to meet a particular
need, and I can then change the plot and some of the characters in order to meet another
need. Hindus are very comfortable with that.
Here we have a manuscript of the Bhagavad
Gita, a bound volume from Rajasthan, probably created in the eighteenth century. The manuscript
is illustrated by miniatures depicting stories from the life of Krishna.
The Bhagavad Gita is certainly one of the most famous devotional texts of Hinduism.
And so briefly, what happens are Arjuna is about to enter a fight with his cousins, it's
a fight between two groups of cousins. It's a kind of good versus evil story, but it's
not so black and white, there are many shades of grey in between as well. And as he's about
to fight, he kind of has a moment of doubt and confusion. He says to himself "how can
I fight? How can I fight against my own cousins? This is going to destroy a whole family. This
is going to cause destruction of the world.". And he puts down his weapons, essentially,
and he doesn't know what to do. And at that time his Lord, his God Krishna, says that
no, you must fight. And as he tells him, as he exhorts him to fight, he kind of gives
a whole sermon on the human condition, on why humans are here, what they have to do
in their lives, and the devotion that they have to offer. And so he links his condition
at that very moment to what he needs to do and to the overall human condition.
So devotees do read the Bhagavad Gita at home. That is the most widely read
as far as our younger generation are concerned. And one of our deities represents that: Lord
Krishna took one of his main disciples, Arjuna, into war, and that war brought out a lot of
lessons, which were depicted by Lord Krishna, and helps with examples of daily life.
In Hinduism, there is only one divine source, or one divine principle, but that principle
manifests in lots of different forms. The one source is like the sun, which emanates
lots of different rays, and these rays are rays of that one single source. Similarly
the different deities are emanations of the one source.