Professional Documents
Culture Documents
April 1990
Hinduism At Century's End
Subhash Kak
I
For two centuries Hinduism has exercised a powerful inhuence on the
West through its philosophy and literature. And tnrough Western
writers
impired by India, many aspects of its vision have been integrated
into the popular belief system. Having emerged from the salons of the
intellectuals and philosophers in the West, Hinduism is now truly a
world
religion. Hindu migrams from India and Indonesia, as well as new
converts, are to be found in all countries of the world. And the
universal message of the Eternal Law, together with the parallel
scientific method,
have led to the ascendancy in Asia and the West of a rational worldview
that is commonly called secular humanism. Meanwhile Hindu scientists,
engineers and philosophers have become a major force in the West,
especially in the U.S., where according to the last census report
Indians
were the most successful community. One would now expect the
interaction between Hinduism and other religions to become more
complex. Thus, it appears to be an appropriate time to do stocktaking
and review the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
II
The first issue that confronts the modern Hindu is that of self
image.
Due to an unfortunate posturing Hindus often claim that theirs is not
a
religion but rather a way of life and that Hindus do not believe in
conversion. Both these premises are false and indefensible, Hinduism
is a
religion based on the illuminations of the Vedic rishis, as expressed
in the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Shaivic
agamas. With its emphasis on self-knowledge the Hindu tradition
celebrates diversity,
but the unity underlying this diversity is apparent to each Hindu and
any
objective outsider. Even going beyond Hinduism an argument can be
made that there is less distance between Hinduism and its sister
religions of Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism that exists between
Catholicism and
Protestantism or even within some varieties of Prorestantism.
For all experiential systems the problem of definition is a complex
one. Thus while the grammar of English language has exceptions it
does
not follow that such a language does not exist. Likewise, science
deals
with a variety of models that may be deterministic or random or have
fundamental uncertainty, and it is the sum of all such investigations
that