SANATAN DHARMA SIMPLIFIED ... 3

SANATAN DHARMA SIMPLIFIED ... 3

The Sanatan Dharma is a highly complex system of spititual-philosophical thought. To simplify it is well nigh impossible. Swamiji did a marvellous job of it but even he has become rather complex for today's average Hindu who does little reading and less thinking. How far I shall succeed in this seemingly impossible task remains to be seen.

Hindus are called polytheists. This means that Hindus worship many Gods and Goddesses. This is true. But it does not prove Hindus to be polytheists in the sense implied by the Abrahamic monotheists, namely, the Jew, the Christian (despite the Trinity) and the Muslim. I'll presently explain.

You are an individual. I hope you have no objection to that. If so, then consider this.

You are the son of your father, the father of your son, the husband of your wife, the son-in-law of your father-in-law, the friend of your friend, the enemy of your enemy, the employee of your employer, the employer of your employee, the citizen of your country, and so on and so forth. Do so many aspects of your self make you multiple human beings or are they merely multiple aspects of the same person?

Now apply the same logic to Hindu Gods and Goddesses. We address them for linguistic convenience in the plural but philosophically we mean that they are all different aspects of the same God/Goddess. So, Hindus are not polytheists as such but they recognise the One eternal spiritual principle of the Brahman in the manifested Many in Maya. Brahman is the unmanifest substratum and Maya the apparent cosmic manifestation through and through which run the Gods and Goddesses (capitals used on purpose to emphasise the fundamental significance of the deities) and all sentience and insentience.

And why do Hindus worship idols? First tell me who does not? Does not the Christian worship the Son of God as God Himself, kissing the crucifix and venerating it? Does the Muslim not kiss the Kaaba out of supreme veneration? Does not the fanatical Muslim, enjoined by his Holy Book, denounce idolatry and destroy idols and their sacred shrines wherever he finds them, that is, whenever circumstance permits? Why break idols if you disbelieve them to be the representations of God? Surely you must be believing in them for a while which prompts you to defile them thus. Why do Muslims hyper-venerate their prophet, a human being (which Muslims admit) so much that Gustaq-e-Rasool suffers beheading by scriptural commandment? Although Muhammad was a fallible human being by self-admission, why have Muslims elevated him to such a divine status in practice that they must go on a rampage if any apparent indignity be heaped on him even if factually founded in Islamic scriptural texts? Is this not another form of man-worship which the Hindus have perfected in terms of worship of divine representations in the form of the idol and, better still, in the form of the living Guru, sage and Avatar?

So, image-worship and man-worship which Hindus do are constitutional to man. Sages in the Bharatiya tradition were of gigantic intellect and recognised this fundamental feature of the common mind. Whether it was originally there in the Vedic culture or came about later during the Buddhist period is immaterial. The human constitution required it for mass spiritual advancement and by the law of necessity it came into being. So, the so-called polytheism and idolatry by the Hindus is a Muslim misapprehension of the Hindu spiritual process which aims at the soul proceeding gradually from the Many to the One. This 'One' must not however be confused with Allah as it is the transcendental Reality far above all such dualistic, monotheistic Gods, call them by whatever name you please as per geocultural affiliation. 

Written by Sugata Bose