Hinduism
Hinduism is an umbrella term, and that single fact unsettles almost everything a newcomer expects from a religion. It has no founder. It has no central doctrinal authority. Many people who practice it do not claim any denomination at all. Mahatma Gandhi once said that a man may not believe in God and still call himself a Hindu. The word Hindu is not even a word Hindus invented for themselves. It began as a foreign label, an exonym, drawn from the name of a river. So how does a tradition with roughly 1.17 billion followers, about 15 percent of the world's people, hold together without a creed? What unites a polytheist, a monist, an atheist and a humanist under one name? And why does the religion, in the words of one scholar, defy our very desire to define and categorize it? The answers run through ancient texts, a sound change in a forgotten language, a goddess at the heart of the cosmos, and a quiet pilgrimage to bathe in a river before dawn.
The Indus River gave Hinduism its name long before anyone meant it religiously. The Sanskrit word Sindhu named both that river and the country of its lower basin, Sindh. A Proto-Iranian sound change turned the s into an h sometime between 850 and 600 BCE. So Sindhu became Hindu. The word surfaces in the Avesta as heptahindu, mirroring the Rigvedic sapta sindhu. A 6th-century BCE inscription of Darius I lists Hindush among his provinces. In all these ancient records the term is geographical, not spiritual.
Arabic writers used Hind for the land beyond the Indus, and so everyone living there became Hindus, according to historian Romila Thapar. The 7th-century Chinese travel account, the Record of the Western Regions by Xuanzang, holds some of the earliest known uses carrying a religious sense. By the 14th century the word appeared in Persian, Sanskrit and Prakrit texts inside India, often to contrast people with Muslims or Turks.
European merchants in the 17th century adopted the spelling Hindoo for the residents of India as a religious community. The word Hindooism appeared in a letter by Charles Grant in 1787. The first Indian to use Hinduism may have been Raja Ram Mohan Roy in 1816-17. By the 1840s the term belonged to Indians who opposed British rule and wished to mark themselves off from Muslims and Christians. Before the British sorted people strictly by religion, Indians defined themselves by locality, language, varna, jati, occupation and sect instead.
Scholars do not see a single origin moment when they look at Hinduism. They see a fusion of Brahmanical orthopraxy with a range of Indian cultures, with diverse roots and no founder. This Hindu synthesis emerged after the Vedic period, between roughly 500 to 200 BCE and about 300 CE, during the second urbanisation and the early classical period, when the epics and the first Puranas were composed. It flourished in the medieval period as Buddhism declined in India.
From the 12th century onward, the notion of common denominators across Indian traditions grew stronger. The scholar Lorenzen ties the rise of a Hindu self-identity to a process of mutual self-definition with a contrasting Muslim Other, arguing this presence of the Other was needed to recognise the loose family resemblance among the schools. The Indologist Alexis Sanderson notes that earlier Sanskrit sources distinguished Vaidika, Vaishnava, Shaiva, Shakta, Saura, Buddhist and Jaina traditions, yet had no single name binding the first five together against Buddhism and Jainism. By the late first millennium CE, that sense of greater unity came to be called Hinduism.
The Marathi poet Tukaram, who lived from 1609 to 1649, and Ramdas, from 1608 to 1681, glorified Hinduism and its past. Brahmins meanwhile produced eulogies and chronicles of sacred sites, the Mahatmyas, and compiled vast collections of quotations. Nineteenth-century missionaries and European Indologists then popularised Hinduism as a single world religious tradition, leaning on texts kept by Brahmin priests. The scholar Pennington agrees that its study as a world religion began in the colonial era, yet disagrees that the religion itself was a European invention.
Sanatana Dharma is how many Hindus describe the very thing scholars call a synthesis. The phrase means a timeless, eternal set of truths, and the usage is modern, resting on the belief that Hinduism's origins lie beyond human history. The Puranic chronology, as told in the Mahabharata, Ramayana and the Puranas, imagines a timeline of events starting well before 3000 BCE. To adherents, Hinduism is a traditional way of life, the eternal way.
The word dharma sits at the center of that claim. It names a cosmic order maintained through rituals and righteous living, as set out in the Vedas. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad states that nothing is higher than dharma, and that dharma is the truth, Satya, so that to speak the truth is to speak the dharma. Historically Sanatana Dharma named eternal duties binding regardless of class, caste or sect, such as honesty, ahimsa or non-injury to living beings, purity, mercy, patience, self-restraint, generosity and asceticism. These contrasted with svadharma, one's own duty according to one's varna and stage in life.
Others have called Hinduism the Vaidika dharma, meaning a code based on the Vedas. According to Klaus Klostermaier, that is the earliest self-designation of Hinduism. Arvind Sharma reads the historical evidence to show Hindus referring to their religion as vaidika dharma by the 4th century CE. Yet Julius Lipner cautions that many Hindus have never read a Veda, treat reverence to it as a mere raising of the hat in the words of Louis Renou, and may acknowledge its authority as little more than a declaration that they consider themselves Hindu.
Four proper aims structure a Hindu life, the Purusharthas. They are dharma, artha, kama and moksha. Dharma comes first, the pursuit of one's nature and true calling, one's role in cosmic concert. Artha is the virtuous pursuit of means and resources, including political life, diplomacy and material well-being, on the premise that every person should live a joyous and fulfilling life. Kama means desire and pleasure of the senses, the aesthetic enjoyment of life, considered healthy when pursued without sacrificing the other three goals.
Moksha is the ultimate goal, liberation from sorrow, suffering and, for many theistic schools, from samsara, the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. The meaning of moksha differs across schools. Advaita Vedanta holds that on attaining it a person knows their self to be pure consciousness, identical to Brahman. The monistic school treats moksha as something that happens during a person's lifetime, a psychological concept. The Vedantic school therefore splits the idea into Jivanmukti, liberation in this life, and Videhamukti, liberation after death.
Karma names a Vedic theory of moral cause and effect, joining causality, ethicisation and rebirth. It explains a person's present circumstances by their past actions, in this life or, for some schools, in past lives. Yet reincarnation is not mentioned in the early layers of the Rigveda. According to Sayers, those earliest layers show ancestor worship and rites such as sraddha, the offering of food to ancestors. The ideas of reincarnation and karma take root in the Upanishads of the late Vedic period, predating the Buddha and the Mahavira.
The Nasadiya Sukta, the Creation Hymn of the Rig Veda, wonders whether even The One knows how the universe came into being. The Rig Veda praises various deities, none superior nor inferior, in what scholars call a henotheistic manner, while repeatedly pointing to One Truth and One Ultimate Reality. That One Truth has been read as monotheism, as monism, and as hidden principles behind the processes of nature.
The atman, the Self believed to be eternal, lives in every creature. Non-dualist theologies such as Advaita Vedanta hold this atman to be indistinct from Brahman, the supreme spirit, so that all life is interconnected and one. Dualistic schools such as Dvaita and Bhakti understand Brahman as a Supreme Being separate from each individual Self, worshipped variously as Vishnu, Brahma, Shiva or Shakti. God is called Ishvara, Bhagavan, Parameshwara, Deva or Devi.
Atheism is no stranger here. The early Nyaya school was non-theist, and the Samkhya, Mimamsa and Carvaka schools argued that God was an unnecessary metaphysical assumption. The divine feminine runs strong. According to Graham Schweig, Hinduism holds the strongest presence of the divine feminine of any world religion, from ancient times to the present, paired in Shiva with Parvati, Vishnu with Lakshmi, Krishna with Radha and Rama with Sita. The word avatar does not appear in Vedic literature, surfacing as a noun in Puranic texts after the 6th century CE, with the Garuda Purana listing ten avatars of Vishnu and the Bhagavata Purana naming twenty-two while adding that they are innumerable.
Four denominations organise the scholarly map of Hinduism, though many Hindus claim none of them. Vaishnavism worships Vishnu and his avatars, particularly Krishna and Rama, drawing on the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana and the Vishnu-oriented Puranas. By a 2020 estimate from The World Religion Database, hosted at Boston University, it is the largest group at about 399 million Hindus. Its devotees lean non-ascetic and community-minded, singing Kirtans and Bhajans inspired by an intimate, playful Krishna.
Shaivism focuses on Shiva and counts about 385 million Hindus by the same estimate. Its followers are drawn to ascetic individualism and nondual schools such as Advaita and Raja Yoga. Some visualise god as half male and half female, the Ardhanarishvara. Shaivism has been more common in the Himalayan north from Kashmir to Nepal and in south India. Shaktism, with about 305 million Hindus, worships the goddess Shakti or Devi as cosmic mother, depicted gently as Parvati or fiercely as Kali and Durga, and is common in Assam and Bengal. Smartism worships Shiva, Vishnu, Shakti, Ganesha, Surya and Skanda together, aligns with Advaita Vedanta, and regards Adi Shankara as its founder or reformer.
Devotion itself, bhakti, is the underpinning of Hindu worship, loving devotion to a personal god. It stands as one path among several, beside Jnana-marga, the path of knowledge, Karma-marga, the path of works, and Raja-marga, the path of contemplation. Aarati offers a flame with a song of praise, as in Om Jai Jagdish Hare, a Hindi prayer to Vishnu, or Sukhakarta Dukhaharta, a Marathi prayer to Ganesha. In Swaminarayan temples, aarati is offered to Swaminarayan, considered by followers to be Supreme God.
Hindu scriptures were memorised and spoken aloud for many centuries before anyone wrote them down. They divide into Shruti, that which is heard and revealed to ancient sages, and Smriti, that which is remembered and manmade. The four Vedas, Rigveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda and Atharvaveda, form the earliest record. Each splits into Samhitas, Aranyakas, Brahmanas and Upanishads. There are 108 Muktika Upanishads, of which scholars count between 10 and 13 as Principal Upanishads, and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan says they have played a dominating role ever since their appearance.
The great Smritis are the epics and the Puranas. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana carry the stories, and the Bhagavad Gita sits inside the Mahabharata as one of the most popular sacred texts. The Puranas, composed from about 300 CE onward, hold vast mythologies. Rituals carry the texts into daily life through puja, arti and havan, with the chanting of Vedic mantras treated as primordial rhythms of creation. Life is marked by sanskaras, rites of passage. The Gautama Dharmasutras list 48 of them, while later texts list between 12 and 16, running from Garbhadhana at pregnancy to Antyeshti, cremation for an adult and burial for a child.
Pilgrimage carries the believer outward. The Skanda Purana names three kinds of Tirtha, including the Manas Tirtha of truth, charity, patience and compassion. Holy sites include Varanasi, Rameswaram, Dwarka, Puri, Haridwar and Ayodhya. The Kumbh Mela rotates every three years among Prayagraj, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nashik, drawing an estimated 40 to 100 million people who pray to the sun and bathe in the river, a tradition attributed to Adi Shankara. Hindu texts hold that the greatest austerity comes from travelling on foot, so that a conveyance is acceptable only when the pilgrimage would otherwise be impossible.
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Common questions
What is Hinduism and does it have a founder?
Hinduism is an umbrella term for a range of Indian religious and spiritual traditions unified by adherence to dharma, a cosmic order maintained through rituals and righteous living as set out in the Vedas. It has no founder. Scholars regard it as a fusion of Brahmanical orthopraxy with various Indian cultures, with diverse roots.
Where does the word Hindu come from?
The word Hindu is an exonym derived from the Sanskrit word Sindhu, the name of the Indus River and the country of its lower basin, Sindh. A Proto-Iranian sound change turned the s into an h between 850 and 600 BCE. In ancient records the term was geographical and did not refer to a religion.
How many followers does Hinduism have?
Hinduism has approximately 1.17 billion followers, around 15 percent of the global population, making it the world's third-largest religion and the largest ethnic religion. Hindus live largely in India, Nepal, Mauritius and in Bali, Indonesia, with communities across South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, the Middle East, North America, Europe, Oceania and Africa.
What are the four denominations of Hinduism?
Scholarly studies recognise four major denominations: Vaishnavism, which worships Vishnu, Shaivism, which focuses on Shiva, Shaktism, which worships the goddess Shakti or Devi, and Smartism, which worships Shiva, Vishnu, Shakti, Ganesha, Surya and Skanda together. A 2020 estimate from The World Religion Database put Vaishnavism largest at about 399 million Hindus, followed by Shaivism at 385 million and Shaktism at 305 million.
What are the four goals of human life in Hinduism?
Hinduism recognises four Purusharthas, or proper aims of human life: dharma, ethics and duties, artha, prosperity and means, kama, desires and sensory pleasure, and moksha, liberation from passions and ultimately from samsara. Dharma is considered the foremost goal and moksha the ultimate one.
What are the main scriptures of Hinduism?
Hindu texts are classified into Shruti, that which is revealed to ancient sages, and Smriti, that which is remembered and manmade. The major scriptures are the four Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas, the Mahabharata including the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana and the Agamas. The Puranas began to be composed from about 300 CE onward.
What is the Kumbh Mela in Hinduism?
The Kumbh Mela is a major Hindu pilgrimage on the eve of the solar festival Makar Sankranti, rotating every three years among four sites: Prayagraj, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nashik. It is one of the world's largest mass pilgrimages, with an estimated 40 to 100 million people attending to pray to the sun and bathe in the river, a tradition attributed to Adi Shankara.