And if we are asked,
“But after all what is Hinduism, what does it teach, what does it practise,
what are its common factors?” we can answer that Indian religion is founded
upon three basic ideas or rather three fundamentals of a highest and widest
spiritual experience. First comes the
idea of the One Existence of the Veda to whom sages give different names, the
One without a second of the Upanishads who is all that is and beyond all that
is, the Permanent of the Buddhists, the Absolute of the Illusionists, the
supreme God or Purusha of the Theists who holds in his power the soul and
Nature,—in a word the Eternal, the Infinite. This is the first common foundation; but it
can be and is expressed in an endless variety of formulas by the human
intelligence. To discover and closely approach and enter into whatever kind or degree
of unity with this Permanent, this Infinite, this Eternal, is the highest
height and last effort of its spiritual experience. That is the first universal
credo of the religious mind of India.
Admit in whatever
formula this foundation, follow this great spiritual aim by one of the thousand
paths recognised in India or even any new path which branches off from them and
you are at the core of the religion. For
its second basic idea is the manifold way of man’s approach to the Eternal and Infinite.
The Infinite is full of many infinities
and each of these infinities is itself the very Eternal. And here in the
limitations of the cosmos God manifests himself and fulfils himself in the world
in many ways, but each is the way of the Eternal. For in each finite we can
discover and through all things as his forms and symbols we can approach the
Infinite; all cosmic powers are manifestations, all forces are forces of the
One. The gods behind the workings of Nature are to be seen and adored as
powers, names and personalities of the one Godhead. An infinite
Conscious-Force, executive Energy, Will or Law, Maya, Prakriti, Shakti or
Karma, is behind all happenings, whether to us they seem good or bad,
acceptable or inacceptable, fortunate or adverse. The Infinite creates and is
Brahma; it preserves and is Vishnu; it destroys or takes to itself and is Rudra
or Shiva. The supreme Energy beneficent in upholding and protection is or else formulates
itself as the Mother of the worlds, Luxmi or Durga. Or beneficent even in the
mask of destruction, it is Chandi or it is Kali, the dark Mother. The One
Godhead manifests himself in the form of his qualities in various names and
godheads. The God of divine love of the Vaishnava, the God of divine power of
the Shakta appear as two different godheads; but in truth they are the one
infinite Deity in different figures.[1]
One may approach the Supreme through any of these names and forms, with
knowledge or in ignorance; for through them and beyond them we can proceed at
last to the supreme experience.
One thing however
has to be noted that while many modernised Indian religionists tend, by way of
an intellectual compromise with modern materialistic rationalism, to explain
away these things as symbols, the ancient Indian religious mentality saw them
not only as symbols but as world-realities,—even if to the Illusionist
realities only of the world of Maya. For between the highest unimaginable
Existence and our material way of being the spiritual and psychic knowledge of
India did not fix a gulf as between two unrelated opposites. It was aware of
other psychological planes of consciousness and experience and the truths of
these supraphysical planes were no less real to it than the outward truths of
the material universe. Man approaches God at first according to his
psychological nature and his capacity for deeper experience, svabhava, adhikara.
The level of Truth, the plane of consciousness he can reach is determined by
his inner evolutionary stage. Thence comes the variety of religious cult, but
its data are not imaginary structures, inventions of priests or poets, but
truths of a supraphysical existence intermediate between the consciousness of
the physical world and the ineffable superconscience of the Absolute.
The
third idea of strongest consequence at the base of Indian religion is the most
dynamic for the inner spiritual life. It is that while the Supreme or the
Divine can be approached through a universal consciousness and by piercing
through all inner and outer Nature, That or He can be met by each individual
soul in itself, in its own spiritual part, because there is something in it
that is intimately one or at least intimately related with the one divine
Existence. The essence of Indian religion is to aim at so growing
and so living that we can grow out of the Ignorance which veils this
self-knowledge from our mind and life and become aware of the Divinity within
us. These three things put together are the whole of Hindu religion, its
essential sense and, if any credo is needed, its credo. [emphases added]
(Sri Aurobindo,
CWSA, Volume 20, The Renaissance of India
(previously titled as The Foundations of
Indian Culture), pp 193-195)
[1]
This explanation of Indian polytheism is not a modern invention created to meet
Western reproaches; it is to be found explicitly stated in the Gita; it is,
still earlier, the sense of the Upanishads; it was clearly stated in so many
words in the first ancient days by the “primitive” poets (in truth the profound
mystics) of the Veda.
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