How to Understand Hindu GodsPosted by Lau Dejesus on May 30th, 2021 One difficulty incidental to the treatment of Asiatic religions in European languages may be the necessity, or at any rate the ineradicable habit, of using well-known words like God and soul as the equivalents of Asiatic terms which have not precisely the same content and which often imply a different viewpoint. For practical life it really is wise and charitable to reduce religious differences and emphasize points of agreement. But this willingness to trust that others think once we do becomes a veritable vice if we are attempting an impartial exposition of their ideas. If the English word God means the deity of ordinary Christianity, who is much the same as Allah or Jehovah-that would be to say the creator of the world and enforcer of the moral law-then it could be better never to utilize this word in writing of the religions of India and Eastern Asia, for the idea is almost entirely foreign to them. Even the higher Hindu deities are not really God, for those who follow the bigger life can neglect and almost despise them, without, however, denying their existence. On the other hand Brahman, the pantheos of India, though add up to the Christian God in majesty, is really a different conception, for he is not a creator in the ordinary sense: he is impersonal and though not evil, yet he transcends both good and evil. He could seem only a force more suited to be the subject material of science than of religion, were not meditation on him the occupation, and union with him the goal, of many devout lives. And even when Indian deities are most personal, as in the Vishnuite sects, it will be generally found that their relations to the world and the soul are not those of the Christian God. Additional hints is because the conception of superhuman existence is so different in Europe and Asia that Asiatic religions often seem contradictory or corrupt: Buddhism and Jainism, which we describe as atheistic, and the colourless respectable religion of educated Chinese, become within their outward manifestations unblushingly polytheistic.Like it? Share it! More by this author |