Hinduism

What is Hinduism?

Hinduism is the world's oldest continuously practised major religion. Its internal name is Sanātana Dharma, the eternal way. The English label covers a family of philosophical schools and devotional currents rooted in the Vedic literature of the Indian subcontinent, with origins reaching back at least 3500 years. It is less a single doctrine than a constellation of lineages. About 1.2 billion people practise some form of it today, mostly in India and Nepal.

Where the name comes from

The word Hindu is not what the tradition originally called itself. It comes from a Persian rendering of the river the Sanskrit-speakers called the Sindhu, now known as the Indus. It was a geographic label long before it became a religious one. The British colonial administration of the nineteenth century needed a single category for the bewildering plurality of practices it encountered, and Hinduism was the result. The internal name is Sanātana Dharma, the eternal way. It covers a range of schools, lineages and devotional movements that, in any other context, would be considered separate religions.

The six classical schools

Indian philosophical tradition recognises six darśanas: Sāṅkhya§, Yoga§, Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta§. Each is a complete system of metaphysics and method, with its own canonical texts and lineage of commentators. Each accepts the authority of the Vedas§. Each disagrees with the others, sometimes sharply, on the nature of reality and the path to liberation. The two most relevant to this index are Yoga, the eight-limbed practice codified by Patañjali§, and Vedānta. Within Vedānta, the non-dual sub-school known as *Advaita Vedānta*§ has had the longest reach outside India.

Advaita Vedānta and the path west

*Advaita Vedānta*§ was codified in the eighth century by Adi Śaṅkarācārya§ as a systematic reading of the Upanishads§. It holds that there is, ultimately, only *Brahman*§, one undivided absolute. The apparent multiplicity of the world, including the felt separateness of the individual self, is *māyā*§. That is a real appearance, not an illusion in the trivial sense, but not a separate reality either. This is the lineage that produced Ramana Maharshi§ and the modern exponents of non-duality§. It meets the Buddhist§ recognition of anattā and the Sufi recognition of fanāʾ as descriptions of one territory in three vocabularies.

Hinduism in the index

Sadhguru↗ is the index's most-present Hindu voice. He draws on the Śaiva yogic tradition of southern India. See Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy↗, the Inner Engineering Online↗ course, and short talks like Sadhguru on disability and spiritual practice↗ and Sadhguru on unlocking the mind's full potential↗. For the kriya yoga current, Paramahansa Yogananda's *Autobiography of a Yogi*↗ remains the classic Western entry.

For bhakti, the path of devotion and one of the four classical yogas§, Ram Dass↗ brought the teaching of his guru Neem Karoli Baba into American spirituality. His Maharaji story about *only God*↗ is the bhakti tradition rendered in an American voice. The jñāna current of non-dual enquiry runs through Nisargadatta Maharaj's *I Am That*↗ and on into the modern teachers gathered under non-duality§.

Hinduism vs adjacent traditions

Three sibling traditions share the dharmic family but are not Hinduism. Buddhism§, founded in the fifth century BCE by the Buddha, rejected the authority of the Vedas and the doctrine of a permanent self. It teaches anattā, non-self. Jainism§ emerged in roughly the same period and goes further than Hinduism in its commitment to non-violence (ahimsa), with its own canon and a strictly pluralist metaphysics. Sikhism§, founded by Guru Nanak in the fifteenth century in the Punjab, draws on both Hindu bhakti and Sufi Islam but rejects caste, image-worship and ritual priesthood. Sharing a vocabulary is not the same as sharing a religion.

What it isn't

Hinduism is not polytheism in the Greek sense. The many deities are typically understood as faces of one absolute. It is not a single doctrine. The schools disagree. It is not the same as Indian nationalism, though contemporary politics has frequently conflated the two. And it is not closed. The tradition has absorbed and been absorbed by Buddhist, Jain, Sufi and Christian elements over its long life, and continues to.