introduction. 11
the desire not to harm, tends to be qualified by a recognition that people in different
life-positions will need to address themselves to ahimsain different ways. In some
cases, perhaps reluctantly, they will need to abandon that ideal altogether.
More strikingly than any other major religious community, Hindus accept and in-
deed celebrate the complex, organic, multileveled, and sometimes internally incon-
sistent nature of their tradition and emphasize its desire to coexist peacefully with
other religious traditions. (Except when they don’t, as we have seen.) This expan-
siveness is made possible by the widely shared Hindu view that truth or reality can-
not be encapsulated in any creedal formulation. As many Hindus affirm through the
prayer “May good thoughts come to us from all sides” (Rg Veda1.89.1), truth is of
such a nature that it must be multiply sought, not dogmatically claimed.
On a Hindu view, anyone ’s understanding of truth—even that of a guru re-
garded as possessing superior authority—is fundamentally conditioned by the
specifics of time, age, gender, state of consciousness, social and geographic location,
and stage of attainment. People see things differently, which enhances the nature of
religious truth rather than diminishing it. It also suggests that people have much to
learn from one another, or at least that they should respect their differences; hence
there is a strong tendency for contemporary Hindus to affirm that tolerance is the
foremost religious virtue. On the other hand, even cosmopolitan Hindus living in a
global environment recognize the fact that their religion has developed in the spe-
cific geographical, social, historical, and ritual climates of the Indian Subcontinent.
Religious practices and ideological formulations that emphasize this fact affirm a
strong connection to the Hindu “homeland.” A dialectic between universalist and
particularist impulses has long animated the Hindu tradition. When Hindus speak
of their religious identity as sanatana dharma,a designation made popular late in the
nineteenth century, they emphasize its continuous, seemingly eternal (sanatana)ex-
istence. They also underscore the fact that it describes an organic net of customs,
obligations, traditions, and ideals (dharma),not just a system of beliefs, as recent
Christian and Western secularist thinking has led us to expect of a religion. A com-
mon way in which English-speaking Hindus distance themselves from that frame of
mind is to insist that Hinduism is not a religion at all, but a way of life.
FIVE STRANDS IN
THE LIFE OF HINDUISM
But if “Hinduism” is such a recent formulation, and if there is such breadth in
Hindu conviction and practice, then what gives coherence to the tradition as a