WHAT IS HINDUISM?
recognition that both the Self and the Divine are already
and in themselves an all-expansive and all-encompassing
space of life-nourishing awareness – one that can not be
parcelled out, like land or territory, as the private property
of any person, clan, race or nation. It also ignores those
sections of the Gita in which Krishna himself paradoxically
affirms a stance of non-violence, both as an aspect of his
very being (10.5) and as an austerity of the body (17.14).
Both Buddhism and Krishnaism evolved from within
Hindu religious and cultural tradition, the former being, like
Hindu Samkhya philosophy, an apparently ‘atheistic’ world
view and the latter its mirror image – a type of pre- or
proto-Christian Hindu ‘theism’ based on worship of
Krishna. Yet within both contemporary Krishnaism and
the Jesus-worship of evangelical Christianity there is a
blurring or concealment of a fundamental distinction –
albeit one acknowledged in the Gita itself as Krishna’s
‘secret’. This is the distinction between identifying God
with a single divine person and the understanding of all gods
and god-images as personifications of the divine in its
ultimate, trans-personal dimension.
To some, the Gita appears to situate itself between the
declining ritualistic ‘polytheism’ of the Vedas and the
‘atheism’ of Buddhist philosophy through a ‘theism’ which
elevates Krishna to the position of supreme ‘personage’ of
God. As a result, they see it as a model for a type of