WHAT IS HINDUISM?
how religious world-outlooks tend to invariably privilege or
‘valorise’ one pole of any given binary construct over
another. Thus in the context of Judaeo-Christian religious
discourse ‘good’ is clearly ‘better’ than ‘evil’, ‘God’ is clearly
‘higher’ than Man and Nature, the Judaeo-Christian God
‘superior’ to all previous gods (now spelled with a de-
Romanised small ‘g’) and its theology ‘truer’ than all pre-
Christian ones. Such a relatively simple (which is not to say
simplistic) deconstruction of the languages of the
Abrahamic religions (Islam included) is in no way as easy to
apply to those of Asia and the East – Hinduism, Taoism
and Buddhism in particular. For though they have an even
clearer exposition of their own understanding of divinity as
an ultimate or absolute reality, in the theological
philosophies or ‘theosophies’ of all the ‘Dharmic’ as
opposed to Abrahamic faiths we also find a more or less
explicit counterpart to the Dialectical thinking so central to
Marxism – hence what has come to be called Taoist or
Buddhist ‘dialectics’, itself historically rooted in the Indian
philosophy of ‘Advaita’ or ‘non-duality’. Recognising this,
we can begin to understand the very dichotomy or duality
which is the subject of this work – ‘Marxism’ and ‘Moksha’
- on a deeper level, one which hinges on the meaning and
relation not of two but of three distinct terms – ‘Dialectics’,
‘Advaita’ and post-modernist ‘Deconstructionism’. The
principal accusation levelled at the latter is one of totally
relativising the truth of the different terms and distinctions