12. introduction
whole? The answer is not easy, but across the sweep of Indian religious history over
the past two millennia, one can settle on at least five elements that give shape to
Hindu religion: doctrine, practice, society, story, and devotion. None of these is uni-
vocal; no Hindu would claim that they correspond to the five pillars of Sunni Islam.
Still, there are real commonalities that make Hinduism cohere as a powerful and dis-
tinct religious tradition. Hindus tend to relate to one another as strands in an elab-
orate braid (a favorite Hindu metaphor), and each strand develops out of a history
of conversation, elaboration, and challenge. The last point deserves emphasis. In
looking for what makes the tradition cohere, we should not only seek out clear
agreements about thought and practice, but also pay attention to characteristic
points of tension—matters Hindus have thought sufficiently important that they
needed to be argued out.
doctrine
The first of the five strands in the braid of Hinduism is doctrine, as enunciated and
debated in a vast textual tradition anchored to the Veda (meaning “knowledge”), the
oldest core of Hindu religious utterance, and organized through the centuries pri-
marily by members of the scholarly Brahmin caste. Here several characteristic ten-
sions appear. One concerns issues of polytheism, monotheism, and monism—the
status of the One in relation to the Many, that is, or of supernal truth in relation to
its embodied, phenomenal counterpart. Another tension concerns the disparity be-
tween the world-preserving ideal ofdharma,proper behavior defined in relation to
the gods and society, and that ofmoksa,release from an inherently flawed world. A
third tension exists between one ’s individual destiny, as shaped by karma(action in
this and other lives), and any person’s deep bond to family and society. A fourth sep-
arates thinkers who insist on the efficacy of human action from those who empha-
size the power and wonder of divine grace.
practice
A second strand in the fabric of Hinduism is practice. Many Hindus, in fact, would
place this first. Despite India’s enormous variety, a common grammar of ritual be-
havior does connect various places, strata, and periods of Hindu life, and at various
points in time this grammar has also been exported—either within India itself, as
tribal regions were sought to be integrated into a larger fold, or abroad, as Hindus
moved overseas, and others came to embrace their religion. It is sometimes sug-
gested that these commonalities are Vedic, emanating from the earliest known core
of Indian religious practice. True, various elements of Vedic ritual do survive in