Hi!

I'm John Green; welcome to Crash Course Religions.

So this is a Hindu celebration.

So is this, and this.

And so is this one, the Kumbh Mela,  which in 2019 drew 200 million people.

That’s like five Tokyos, or twenty-five  New York Cities, or 250 Indianapolises.

They came from all walks of life—with  diverse practices devoted to diverse gods.

And that raises a question  – with all those many ways   of doing Hinduism…what does it mean to be Hindu?

[THEME MUSIC] In Hinduism, the universe moves  in cycles, with room for multiple   universes and multiple lifetimes, where  multiple realities can be true at once.

Like, maybe the universe began with  the cracking of a great golden egg,   spilling life across the empty cosmos.

Or, perhaps a lotus flower grew  from a god’s belly button before   being pulled apart to create the  heavens, the Earth, and the sky.

In another origin story, the creator  was just lonely and wanted some friends.

Which is why I started playing  the Sims, and you know what?

Credit to this universe’s creator  because they’ve never, like, locked   me in a bathroom for the rest of my natural  life which I’ve definitely done to some Sims.

So, which of these creation stories is true?

Well, it’s kind of… all of the above.

In Hinduism, stories that seem  to contradict themselves are not   typically seen as a problem to be resolved,  but fragments of an infinite ultimate truth.

Hinduism is often called the  World’s Oldest Living Religion.

And it’s true that some of its texts  date back to over three thousand years   ago in the Indus River Valley.

But those early storytellers   didn’t call themselves Hindu.

That title came first from the   Persians, then the Greeks.

And originally it was mostly   a geographic and ethnic label, basically  meaning, “those people living by that river.” So how did the word Hindu go from a way to   identify your neighbors to a  collective religious identity?

Some scholars trace the vibe-shift to  the 19th century, when British colonizers   used the “Hindu” category on their census,  lumping together wildly diverse indigenous   communities with a catch-all term  that basically meant “not Muslim.” Others argue that “Hindu” was already taking  shape long before the British barged in,   as a religious identity shaped in  part by a centuries-long rivalry   between Muslims and those of  other faiths in South Asia.

Regardless: by the 19th century,  the English word “Hinduism” had   stuffed thousands of years of culture and  history under one complicated umbrella.

Today, Hindus are still as diverse as  ever, with no central creed or holy   figure uniting the different practices.

But, what Hindus do have is stories.

Lots of ‘em — designed for navigating  questions about the self, the cosmos, and life.

There are two kinds of Hindu stories.

First, the authorless, divinely revealed kind  known as “shruti,” Sanskrit for “what is heard.”  This includes the four vedas:  Rig, Sama, Yajur and Atharva.

The word Veda means “knowledge” or “wisdom” – and   these texts are full of it.

The oldest, the Rigveda,   contains over a thousand hymns and chants  with instructions for living a good life.

The second kind of story is “smriti,” or “what  is remembered” — the authored-by-a-human kind.

Smriti includes the Bhagavad Gita, one of the  most widely read Hindu scriptures in the world.

Like the vedas, these tales of  gods and goddesses model how to   navigate life’s responsibilities and challenges.

Because the smriti are designed to help  maintain society across time and space,   they’re flexible and adaptable, allowing  for several versions of the same story.

Let’s head to the Thought Bubble to learn more… For fourteen years, the god-prince  Ram was exiled to a forest with his   wife Sita and half-brother Lakshman.

One day, Sita was kidnapped by the   ten-headed demon-king Ravana.

So Ram and Lakshman teamed up   with a monkey-general named Hanuman  to take down the demon-king.

Together they triumphed over evil, rescuing Sita.

That’s how one version of the Ramayana goes,   according to an epic poem  composed sometime around 300 BCE.

But there’s a different version where  Ram banishes Sita after rescuing her.

Another where Lakshman is the hero.

Versions where Sita can fight   demons herself, thank you very much.

A version where Sita isn’t ever kidnapped.

And a really meta version where Ram is  like, “Sita, don’t join me in the forest,”   and Sita gets furious and says, “Countless  Ramayanas have been composed before this.

Do you know of one where Sita  doesn't go with Ram to the forest?” The Ramayana has been told for over two  thousand years in two-dozen languages.

By some counts, there are hundreds  of versions—even Jain and Muslim   ones— each one reflecting different  meanings in different times and places.

Thanks, Thought Bubble.

The Ramayana is just one   of many narratives starring the  Hindu pantheon: gods and goddesses   commonly understood as incarnations  of the ultimate reality, or Brahman.

Brahman transcends any single name or  form, yet has infinite names and forms.

It’s an infinity-for-one deal.

If that seems weird, well,   so does infinity.

So does consciousness.

Brahman is often understood through a trio  of major gods, each with multiple avatars,   or incarnations on Earth, all with  a role to play in the multiverse.

First, there’s Brahma — no  “n” — who has four heads,   four arms, and the task of creating the universe.

He’s the one who pulled apart Vishnu’s belly  button lotus flower to make the universe.

And speaking of Vishnu, he’s  the next god in the trio.

Vishnu is also four-armed, often blue, and  considered the preserver of the universe.

Which is an in-demand skill these days.

Last but not least is Shiva: also four-armed,  often blue, destroyer of the universe.

Which, according to some  interpretations, isn’t all bad.

Giving all of existence a bit  of spring cleaning every now   and then allows constructive change to happen.

In fact, you can’t have a multiverse without it!

I realize I’ve been using he/him  pronouns but that’s not exactly right.

Many Hindu texts frame the ultimate  reality as neither male nor female,   and each god in the trio  has a goddess counterpart.

In fact, one form of Hinduism, called Shaktism,   worships the divine feminine energy inherent  in Brahman named Devi, the supreme goddess.

Shakti, by the way, has  eight arms and rides a tiger.

Okay, now we’re entering the  word-nerd part of the episode.

Humor me while we explore some Hindu  terms… and I keep my 894-day streak.

Many Hindu stories ask questions like, “How does   Brahman — the ultimate reality of things  — relate to the atman, a person’s soul?” In other words, a question that’s asked  in so many religions: where do I fit in?

And Hindus have a lot of different takes on this.

One of them you may have heard of is karma.

In this view, your actions have an effect both  on the world and on your soul’s future path.

It’s all part of samsara, the cycle of  birth, life, death, and reincarnation.

Depending on if you earned good or  bad karma, you could be reincarnated   as a person, an animal, or an insect.

I would like to be reincarnated as a dog,   but I feel like my karma is for lack  of a better term house fly-ish.

For some Hindus, the goal is getting off  the samsara ride to become liberated from   existence — a state called mokṣa, which  some interpret as letting go of all desire.

But others view mokṣa as  only possible after death,   and only if you’ve cleared your karmic accounts.

For many Hindus, the aim is to fulfill dharma: the  duties of the social position you’re born into.

Dharma is what keeps traditions  going — it can impact how you   name your baby or send off  loved ones after they die.

And interpretations of dharma have also  been used to arrange social hierarchies.

Like the immensely complicated caste system,  which has been used throughout South Asia to   assign different levels of privilege based on  inherited social status, even among non-Hindus.

Scholar Isabel Wilkerson has noted that caste  functions similarly to race in the U.S.,   where the amount of respect and  resources, and social standing   a person has is determined, at  least partially, by their race.

There are actually two forms of caste.

One is varna, which refers to one of the four  categories of people named in the Rigveda.

The other is jati, which refers to  rankings of people based on their lineage.

Although castes have existed in some  form for around three thousand years,   they became a more rigid way of  organizing societies when British   colonizers kinda hijacked them, creating  deep and lasting social inequalities by   muddling the two forms of caste and  claiming that they were unchangeable.

And yes, a lot of this goes back  to those colonial census-takers.

In the centuries since this shift,  certain groups have weaponized caste   in order to maintain power, even using  physical and sexual violence to do so.

Caste divisions still cause significant  inequality; the Indian government has taken   steps to decrease it, to little effect,  and it plays a significant role in Hindu   nationalism, which we’ll get into in a later  episode…that I’m sure won’t be controversial.

Of course, simple categories fail to capture  the diversity of practices among Hindus.

See, for many practitioners, Hinduism isn’t  just something you are but something you   do, through rituals that express  bhakti, or devotion to the divine.

Rituals known as puja happen at home  or at temples, known as mandirs,   decorated with scenes from Hindu  stories and statues of popular deities.

It’s thought that ringing a bell and greeting  the deity respectfully makes it possible to   access dharshan, a state of seeing and being seen  by the divine – sort of a transcendental Facetime.

Often, temple-goers lay offerings of food, which  is then passed on to people in need as an act of   seva: giving without any expectation of return.

Okay word-nerd portion over.

So even though “Hindu” started as a geographic  label, Hinduism isn’t only in South Asia.

It’s spread to the Caribbean, South Africa,  Indonesia, North America, and Europe,   blending more diverse practices  into an already diverse tradition.

In fact, one of the most important Hindu holidays,   Diwali, is celebrated all over the world.

For some, it represents Ram’s triumph over Ravana.

For others, it’s Krishna’s  defeat of the demon Narakasura.

For still others, it’s about Vishnu  sending away the demon king Bali.

What’s constant, though, is the  hope of good winning out over evil,   with room for more than one story  in the glow of those lights.

Multiplicity is Hinduism’s beating  heart: many gods, yet only one.

More than one life, more than one  universe, more than one version of a story.

So it’s fitting, really, that a tradition  so at ease with more than one possibility   manages no straightforward answer to the  question, “What does it mean to be Hindu?”.

In our next episode, we’re going  to explore the ways Buddhists