HINDUISM

HINDUISM

Hinduism integrates humanity, never divides it. It does not condemn races having other beliefs as worthy of subjugation, oppression or contempt. It accepts all paths to Truth as equally valid provided the means to approaching it are human and not injurious to any. It venerates the greats of all religions, provided they are pure and genuinely enlightened onstead of being arbitrarily so by self-proclamation going as divine sanction.

Hinduism is the science of the spirit. Its holy book, the Vedas, is the accumulation of spiritual laws discovered by scores of generations of Rishis (seers of Truth) much like modern science and its discoveries by its scientific community. Just like science is verified and is verifiable and is not an irrational imposition on humanity, so is Hinduism or the Sanatan Dharma which is the correct name for this pristine discipline of the human spirit. The name, Hinduism, is a linguistic aberration of later times, courtesy alien invasion and its inevitable cultural consequence.

Varnashram is a social institution and not a religious one. Although its corruption in later ages has adversely affected the lives of hundreds of millions of Hindus and needs even today its proper application instead of its perverse one, the institution as such has led to the conservation of Hindu society and the grand religion of the Vedas in the teeth of waves of barbarous invasion by the Arabs, the Turks, the Afghans, the Mongols, the Huns, the Kushans and the Europeans, any or all of which could have destroyed the spiritual culture of the Hindus were it not for the great power of conservation which was stored in the tight structuring of Hindu society in the form of the Varnashram.

Hindus have had their internal problems regarding social justice but they have never extended to enmity to other races, people belonging to other religions and have always extended their cordial hand of friendship to men of all faiths and cultures who have not only found safe refuge in this holy land of Bharatvarsh but have been welcomed to freely practise and even proselytise their faiths among the Hindus. Naive as the Hindus were in welcoming these proselytising people from the Middle East and Europe, they leant their bitter lesson once hundreds of millions of Hindus had been converted to Islam and Christianity and Bharatvarsh dismembered in that brutal act of Partition in 1947. But the forces of disintegration are still at work and keep threatening the fabric of Hindu society and the culture of India that is essentially and historically Hindu despite the tallest pretensions to the contrary.

Written by

Sugata Bose