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Is Hinduism a Religion?
No! Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life. It is very difficult to separate religion and living in Hinduism.
Why the name Hinduism?
Hinduism never had any name. When aryans first arrived in India, they named the religion that people were following there as Hinduism after the river Sindhu (Indus), "Sind" "Hind".
Is Hinduism Polytheistic?
Gods are not idols or images. The term GOD would be best rendered as "Divine". There is no sense of any fixed multiplicity int he ancient meaning of GOD. Each GOD is GOD - the Divine in one form or aspect or another. The names of the Gods are not names of different Gods but different names for the Divine.
Each GOD is all Gods, as each God is an all-encompassing universal principle.
The diversity of the ancient Gods is not according to a real multiplicity or polytheism, but according to a universal creative vision that sees one in all and all in one, that comprehends unity into multiplicity and multiplicity into unity.
This comprehensive nature of Gods is wrongly interpreted as pantheism or polytheism!
Idolatry (Idol Worship) ?
The imagistic character of the ancient Gods, their human, animal or naturalistic forms, is similarly not any kind of idolatry. The Gods, though they have a human facet, are not anthropomorphic. Their human facet is intertwined with other forms and images and abstract senses. The Gods reflect not the Divine in the image of man but rather man in the image of the Divine, in the image of all CREATION. There are numinous psychic symbols of the powers of the universal life. For example the cosmic cow. Without a sense of these associations, what these terms evoked and connoted for the ancients, not just as concrete images, but as sound and idea forms. We will only superimpose upon them our much less sensitive sense of simple life and the natural world.
As another example, Agni, called the God of Fire, is not a fire in the sense we normally use the word. He is the energy of transformation, which is essentially the energy of consciousness. He is whatever burns, penetrates, perceives, labors, creates, envisions, wills, aspires and ascends with force.
Conclusion
The ancient multiplicity of Gods in every form was merely a device for teaching that everything is Divine, all life is sacred, that each thing is a shrine for the sanctity, the purity of awareness which is Being itself the Self of all creatures. It is this sense of the universality of the Divine that the ancient Gods were meant to instill, not some sectarian dogma, idolatry or superstition.
Hindus worship no Gods of superstition, idolatry or duality. They are not below a religion of monotheism but beyond it, in a religion of creative monism in which unity and multiplicity are harmonized by the sense of the Divine in all as the Self of all beings. This is the freedom not of egoistic achievement that leads to bondage and sorrow, but of self-knowledge and surrender to the divine in which we find our freedom as Life itself.
The universality goes beyond monotheism and is separation of creator and creation to pure monism, the oneness of the Godhead everywhere that is the culminating realization o the ancient path of light
Why the name Hinduism?
Hinduism never had any name. When aryans first arrived in India, they named the religion that people were following there as Hinduism after the river Sindhu (Indus), "Sind" "Hind".
Is Hinduism Polytheistic?
Gods are not idols or images. The term GOD would be best rendered as "Divine". There is no sense of any fixed multiplicity int he ancient meaning of GOD. Each GOD is GOD - the Divine in one form or aspect or another. The names of the Gods are not names of different Gods but different names for the Divine.
Each GOD is all Gods, as each God is an all-encompassing universal principle.
The diversity of the ancient Gods is not according to a real multiplicity or polytheism, but according to a universal creative vision that sees one in all and all in one, that comprehends unity into multiplicity and multiplicity into unity.
This comprehensive nature of Gods is wrongly interpreted as pantheism or polytheism!
Idolatry (Idol Worship) ?
The imagistic character of the ancient Gods, their human, animal or naturalistic forms, is similarly not any kind of idolatry. The Gods, though they have a human facet, are not anthropomorphic. Their human facet is intertwined with other forms and images and abstract senses. The Gods reflect not the Divine in the image of man but rather man in the image of the Divine, in the image of all CREATION. There are numinous psychic symbols of the powers of the universal life. For example the cosmic cow. Without a sense of these associations, what these terms evoked and connoted for the ancients, not just as concrete images, but as sound and idea forms. We will only superimpose upon them our much less sensitive sense of simple life and the natural world.
As another example, Agni, called the God of Fire, is not a fire in the sense we normally use the word. He is the energy of transformation, which is essentially the energy of consciousness. He is whatever burns, penetrates, perceives, labors, creates, envisions, wills, aspires and ascends with force.
Conclusion
The ancient multiplicity of Gods in every form was merely a device for teaching that everything is Divine, all life is sacred, that each thing is a shrine for the sanctity, the purity of awareness which is Being itself the Self of all creatures. It is this sense of the universality of the Divine that the ancient Gods were meant to instill, not some sectarian dogma, idolatry or superstition.
Hindus worship no Gods of superstition, idolatry or duality. They are not below a religion of monotheism but beyond it, in a religion of creative monism in which unity and multiplicity are harmonized by the sense of the Divine in all as the Self of all beings. This is the freedom not of egoistic achievement that leads to bondage and sorrow, but of self-knowledge and surrender to the divine in which we find our freedom as Life itself.
The universality goes beyond monotheism and is separation of creator and creation to pure monism, the oneness of the Godhead everywhere that is the culminating realization o the ancient path of light
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