Religion: The Hindu Revival

Some of the world’s ancient faiths are having a rebirth—often to the discomfiture of an expanding Christianity. Perhaps the most spectacular renaissance is under way in Hinduism.

Older than recorded history, the religion of the Vedas and Upanishads has met religion after religion and welcomed them all. Buddhism sprang from its loins; Zoroastrians found a haven of tolerance in India; Christianity planted a seed there in apostolic times, perhaps with the coming of Doubting Thomas himself.* Even the first fierce followers of Allah’s Prophet Mohammed were allowed to build their mosques and say their prayers in peace among the Hindus.

But while Islam and Christianity waxed great and strong, the religion of Mother India, which worshiped God as One and as Three and as many, and saw in every faith a path to divinity, declined for a thousand years. Hinduism became a moldering mass of superstition and magic, social injustice and escape from the world.

To the British Raj and the missionary sahibs from the Christian West, Hinduism seemed a creed outworn, soon destined to disappear. But it was just this twin invasion of commerce and Christianity, say two eminent Indian leaders, that has stirred Hinduism to new life.

“Terribly Hindu.” In the current issue of Religion in Life, David G. Moses, Christian principal of Hislop College at Nagpur and a practiced interpreter between East and West, credits the British with opening “the whole wealth of Western inductive science and knowledge of Western political institutions to the wondering gaze and avid hunger of the Indian student.” At the same time, the Protestant missionaries attacked Hinduism’s most flagrant corruptions—caste system and child marriage, enforced widowhood, suttee (a widow’s suicide on the funeral pyre of her husband) and infanticide.

Under the impact of rationalism and religious competition, reform began. Its first leaders were Ramakrishna (1836-86) and his disciple, Vivekananda (1863-1902). Mystical Ramakrishna, who said he reached union with God through Islam and Christianity as well as Hinduism, presented Vedanta as a religion of direct experience rather than mere traditional observance. Vivekananda injected a new sense of social responsibility by stressing Hinduism’s teaching that God is in every man. Mahatma Gandhi (whom Agnostic Nehru once called “terribly Hindu”) showed India how practical and effective religion could be even in the field of politics. Nehru carried on Gandhi’s social reforms, introducing laws that sheared away the encumbrances of caste and custom that held Hinduism mired in the past. Thus freed, modern Hinduism is experiencing a new flowering of philosophical thought under the leadership of Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.

Cause & Effect. Oxford-trained Philosopher Radhakrishnan had behind him a career as vice chancellor of Benares Hindu University and professor of eastern religions and ethics at Oxford when he became India’s Ambassador to Russia in 1949. Today, at 68, he is his country’s Vice President. But Protestant Moses is sure he will be remembered far longer for his effect on Hinduism. His neo-Vedantism, says Moses, “has newly interpreted the basic conceptions of Hinduism.” Since the classic commentators of the 13th century and before, “we have not had anyone in the intervening centuries equal to this great Indian philosopher in depth of insight, profundity of scholarship, ease of illuminating exposition.”

One of the most important of these new interpretations is that of Maya. Reality, says the classic Vedanta doctrine, is one—hence all plurality (Maya) is illusion. And if all man experiences is illusion, why worry about anything? This interpretation is widely blamed for the traditional passivity of Indians and their unconcern with social injustice. Radhakrishnan argues, says Moses, that “the spatiotemporal world is no empty dream or inexplicable illusion. It is only a lower order of reality, an order which has no being in itself but only in God.” Consequently, this world becomes real, ethical behavior serious, and human history meaningful.

Radhakrishnan has also sharply revised the doctrine of Karma. This belief teaches that each man is bound to an endless series of reincarnated lives, in each of which he expiates the sins accumulated in the life before. It has been criticized, writes Moses, “as implying an inescapable fatalism, as not allowing for any real freedom or forgiveness, and as being at the root of the terrible evil of untouchability.” Radhakrishnan conceives Karma “as nothing more than the law of cause and effect in the moral world. ‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’ ” Karma, then, merely conditions a man’s life rather than determining it, as a card player may play the cards dealt him in a number of ways.

Radhakrishnan’s interpretation of Karma, says Dr. Moses, “is of tremendous practical significance. It comes to undergird the many efforts that are being made by the government and the people of India to lift the fallen, to remove untouchability and in general to help the less fortunate to help himself.”

Beyond the Signpost. Dr. Radhakrishnan himself turns his face to the West in a new book out next week—a series of lectures delivered at Montreal’s McGill University in 1954—under the title East & West, the End of their Separation (Harper; $2.50). To Westerners he stresses the movement of the heart rather than that of the head. “The essential religious experience is not a matter of belief in a set of propositions but is a movement of the whole self to the daily challenge of actual human relations.” True to the essence of Hinduism, he sees many ways to God. “The truth which is the kernel of every religion is one and the same; doctrines, however, differ considerably since they are the applications of the truth to the human situation . . . All are necessarily inadequate and if taken too literally lead to error. Every formula, every attempt to enclose reality within words and concepts, which is true within limits and is adapted to the time and occasion, will serve as a support of contemplation, an aid toward the understanding of that which can be enclosed in no formula, symbol or doctrine. The doctrines are not irresponsible. We cannot think as we like. Nor are they unnecessary. The language in which the truth is expressed consists of many dialects adapted to the needs of the different peoples . . .

“Rites, ceremonies, systems and dogmas lead beyond themselves to a region of utter clarity and so have only relative truth. They are valid so long as they are assigned their proper place. They are not to be mistaken for absolute truth. They are used to communicate the shadow of what has been realized. Every word, every concept is a pointer which points beyond itself. The sign should not be mistaken for the thing signified. The signpost is not the destination.”

-The Mar Thoma Syrian Church of Malabar, in South India (membership 250,000), claims the Apostle Thomas as its founder.