A GOD OF MANY QUALITIES, Shiva grasps in two of his hands emblems of his diverse nature: the drum of creation and the flame of destruction. The dwarf under his foot represents the illusions that Shiva dispels.
Between the Fifth Century B. C. and the Fourth Century A. D., India brought into flower the great devotional religion of Hinduism. It is unlike any Western faith. It has gods that number in the millions, any of whom—from all to one or none—may be adored with equal propriety. It has no fixed system of worship: some Hindus pray, others meditate, others make sacrifices. It has no single prophet who codified and evangelized its beliefs; rather it developed from the primitive worship of the forces of nature and the Vedic philosophy of India's dim past. And yet underlying this strange assemblage of ideas and holy figures, combined and transmuted from several beginnings, is a solid foundation of commonly held belief to unify the diversity that is India.
In its very variety lay Hinduism's strength. By accommodating all classes, all intellects, all personalities, it became even more than a religion; it established the framework for the uniquely Indian society, in which people of widely varying backgrounds, beliefs, social standing and education go their own separate ways—together.
This great faculty for accommodating diverse inclinations caused Hinduism eventually to prevail over Buddhism in India. Early in the Christian era Buddhism reached its peak; then it began to wither in the soil from which it had sprung, as Christianity was to do, and take root abroad instead. For one thing, the brahman class had always led the social organization and intellectual life of India, even while Buddhism was in its ascendancy; given time, the brahmans reasserted themselves in the sphere of religion. In doing so they took advantage of the spirit of pre-Aryan India, which had never fully died out. Even before the rise of Buddhism, when the brahman philosophers were devising the concept of an impersonal world spirit that reigned supreme, the people at large continued to cherish the old gods that antedated the Aryan invaders. In time the brahmans found a way to accommodate the gods of the people with the brahman scriptures, the Vedas, and with the commentaries on them, the Upanishads, and with Buddhism as well. This reconciliation of worship, philosophy and ethical behavior produced Hinduism.
By the Fourth Century A. D. Hinduism had
Conceived the themes that make it what it is today. It went on from that time to expand, as it continues to do; but the essential principles had been laid, the principles on which its further growth was to depend. The Hindus had produced philosophers of extraordinary insight; they had established a pantheon of rich diversity; they had developed a comforting form of popular worship; they had written a great literature that nourished and taught the people.
Hinduism was then, as it is today, a multifarious and elusive complex. Together the Hindus have but one article of faith in common: that man will work out his destiny through the interaction of karma (the law of cause and effect that determines his station in life), dharma (the duties incumbent upon him in that station) and reincarnation (rebirth in another life). This theme is basic to all interpretations of the character, actions and meaning of the Hindu gods.
Of the millions of deities in the pantheon, five stand out, and most Hindus worship only one; they generally regard the millions of gods simply as different manifestations of the one deity whom they worship. In that respect the many gods are reconciled with Brahman, the supreme being that was conceived three millennia ago in the religious scriptures of the Upanishads. This all-pervading, allpowerful presence is the source from which Hindus derived the god Brahma, who in theory (though not in popularity) is first among the gods.
In modern form, Brahma is more of a god than the impersonal spirit of the Upanishads—he is considered to be masculine, for example—yet he is not quite anthropomorphized into an ideal human figure. His claim to first place in the pantheon rests on his role as creator of the universe. But he is not a creator in the sense of the Old Testament Jehovah, who willed the world into being at a given point in prehistory; rather, he generates a creation comparable to the renewal of the earth that comes repeatedly, like spring. Two other deities regulate this cosmic renewal process: Shiva, who destroys creation, as old age destroys youth and fall destroys the creation of spring; and Vishnu, who preserves the universe that Brahma has created, as life is preserved in fallow land or dry seeds. Although Vishnu and Shiva have abstract and impersonal functions like Brahma, they also have human attributes, which he does not. In their anthropomorphic roles they have become the most popular Hindu gods, exciting intense sects whose devotees worship their particular deity as a monotheistic god who grants or denies salvation.
Ranking behind Vishnu and Shiva in popularity, appearing now in the role of the latter's wife, now as the object of a cult in her own right, is a mother goddess called by several names—Kali, Durga, Par-vati, and Uma among them. She is a new version of the mother goddess common to ancient societies; such a goddess was worshiped in the Indus Valley before the arrival of the Aryans. Finally, there is the fifth of the important Hindu gods, Krishna, one of several human incarnations of Vishnu.
The concepts that these gods and their lesser companions represent can all be traced back to the Vedic Age and even before. The Vedas told that Vishnu took three giant steps by which he measured out the universe, then set it in motion and kept it going—a function he still performs as God the Preserver. But the Vedas gave no hint of the importance Vishnu was ultimately to have, for only six of the thousand Vedic hymns are devoted to him. He ascended in importance, however, with the receding of Indra, the early war-god and patron of the Aryans—probably a phenomenon that occurred as the conquering Aryans settled down in India, and the distinctions between conquerors and vanquished blurred. As Vishnu rose in importance and popularity, he took on various characteristics
Of the fading Indra—most notably his martial instincts and his love of worldly pleasures.
But bellicosity in Vishnu is offset by a primarily benevolent nature; he is essentially a god of compassion and mercy. When man gets himself in trouble, Vishnu appears on earth to help mankind. He is said to have had a number of incarnations in history, and many Hindus expect more to come. Some Hindus credit the Buddha as an incarnation of Vishnu, some accept Jesus as one, and all lovers of the great epic literature of India see its heroes as the god Vishnu in human guise.
The best-known, best-loved and most complex of Vishnu's manifestations is that of Krishna, who figures in a host of legends. The myths tell that he was born in a palace prison, where his mother had been confined because the king's seers had predicted that a child of his clan would slay the king. Mother and child escape, however, as they do in the similar legend surrounding Perseus in Greece;
And the king—echoing now the deed of the Biblical Herod—orders the slaying of all male children in the realm. Again the infant god foils the plot; he finds haven in the country, where, like Oedipus, he is brought up by a herdsman and his wife. As a child he is incorrigibly mischievous, but he more than atones for his pranks by slaying demons and miraculously saving the cowherds from calamity. As a youth he is irresistible; he courts and wins the love of countless peasant girls. Later he turns solemn and goes to war—and fulfills the prophecy of the seers by killing the king. He marries more than 16,000 wives, who bear him 180,000 sons. He founds his own kingdom—which, like the Greek Atlantis, is eventually swallowed by the sea. According to one legend, reminiscent of the Greek myth of Achilles, he dies when an arrow strikes his one vulnerable spot, his heel.
If Vishnu figures only slightly in the early Vedic literature, Shiva figures not at all—not, at least, by
Name. But of all the gods in India, he is among the oldest in origins, for his attributes combine those of at least three ancient deities—a Harappan fertility-god (whom the conquering Aryans had scorned), the ethical Varuna, who in the Vedas guarded the cosmic law, and finally Rudra, a wrathful Jehovah-like titan who in the Vedas punished and destroyed wrongdoers and anyone else that roused his displeasure. As the modern Shiva he is simultaneously the god of mystical stillness and the god of dance; the god of bounty and the god of wrath; the god of destruction and the god of fertility—a mythical acknowledgment of the fact that everything that comes to birth comes ultimately to death, and from death comes new life. He is cruel and tender, wrathful and merciful, unpredictable and ever the same. He is an ascetic who sits in towering meditation on the Himalayan Mount Kailas; he is also a reveler, a drunken Bacchus who thunders down the mountainside, dancing the world to destruction as he goes. Insofar as he punishes evil, he is moral; more often he is as impersonal as nature, inflicting terror and grief for no apparent reason. Yet despite his fearful aspects, Shiva evokes the intensest adoration from his devotees, for he fascinates even as he terrifies.
Some of Shiva's worshipers believe his driving power comes not from himself but from a feminine spirit called his shakti—his wife. Such worshipers belong to the so-called shakta cults, those that adore Shiva's wife in various manifestations.
Shiva's wife, like himself, is a composite of ancient and contradictory deities. She is kind and cruel, fearsome and beautiful; as a mother-goddess she has a hand in creation, but she feeds on blood. In her kindly aspects she is known as Parvati (meaning "Daughter of the Mountain") or Uma ("Light"); in her dreadful aspects she is Kali (the "Black One") or Durga (the "Inaccessible"). She has a score of other names as well. When she emerged as Shiva's wife, about the Fourth Century A. D., she gathered other goddesses into the pantheon with her, though few of them acquired her status. Vishnu took as a wife Lakshmi, the goddess of luck—a deity who, like the Greek Aphrodite, rose full blown out of the sea. Together with her husband she has had frequent incarnations—she is Radha, the favorite peasant girl of Krishna's philandering youth; she is Rukmini, chief queen of Krishna's 16,000 wives; she is Sita, the constant wife of Rama, hero of the epic called the Ramayana.
The characters of the gods and the ideas of Hinduism are developed in the great body of classic Indian literature, much of which is religious in intent or interpretation. The Vedas and the Upanishads are only part of this literature. Chief among the others are two epics—the Mahabharata, or "Great War," and the Ramayana, or "Story of Rama." They are at once heroic tales and moral lessons; on the one hand, they extol the deeds of antiquity, and on the other they have for Hindus a religious meaning so vital that they are revered as Biblical stories are in the West. As heroic tales they correspond to the Iliad and the Odyssey of ancient Greece; the Mahabharata is a tale of war, in which the gods fight side by side with mortals; the Ramayana is the tale of an exile and his patient, faithful wife. Like the Iliad and the Odyssey—like the folklore of all peoples—the Mahabharata and the Ramayana represent thousands of years of folk memory, and probably spring from a grain of historical truth. In their idealization of man and his virtues, and their insight into the universal human condition, they rank as great world literature.
The Ramayana begins as the tale of a golden age in the kingdom of Ayodhya, a time when Rich in royal worth and valor, rich in holy Vedic lore,
Dasaratha ruled his empire in the happy days of yore. . . .
Peaceful lived the righteous people, rich in wealth, in merit high;
Envy dwelt not in their bosoms, and their accents shaped no lie.
Fathers with their happy households owned their cattle, corn and gold;
Galling penury and famine in Ayodhya had no hold.
But affairs take a sorry turn when the jealous stepmother of the Crown Prince Rama reminds the king that he once promised her any favor she might ask. She wants Rama exiled; she has a son of her own for whom she covets the throne. Rama is a man of consummate honor, the soul of the Indian concept of dharma. Though his kin and countrymen beg him to stay, his dharma—that is, his sense of duty—and his respect for his elders require that he abide by his father's promise. Without a word of reproach, he prepares to set off. Such a prince, of course, must have a flawless wife, and Rama has one in Sita, a princess from a neighboring kingdom. She might have returned to her father's palace; instead she accompanies Rama into exile.
Rama and Sita go to live in a forest hut, where they lead an ascetic life—an existence that is held in high esteem by Hindus. Rama interrupts his meditations now and then to slay demons that abound in the woods, arousing the wrath of Ravana, the king of the demons. This evil creature, seeking revenge on Rama, steals into the prince's hut one day, abducts Sita and carries her off to his castle, where he does all in his power to win her affection. He has no luck; the faithful Sita resists his lures and remains true to Rama.
Rama, meanwhile, has not been idle; with the help of the gods he has raised a band of fighting men and an army of sacred monkeys. After a long search, they come upon Ravana's hideaway and rescue Sita. But finding his bride, Rama faces a dilemma. Being in love with her, he wants to take her back, but being bound by sacred law, he must cast her out for having lived under another man's roof. Sita does as her dharma demands; she throws herself onto a funeral pyre. But because she is innocent, the fire-god Agni refuses to take her, and she comes out of the fire unscathed. With this proof of her virtue, Rama takes her back.
When eventually he reinherits his rightful kingdom from his half-brother, who generously abdicates in his favor, his people receive his return with rejoicing. But after a time they begin to whisper about his wife. How can a woman who has dallied with another man properly reign as Rama's queen? So Rama, whose first duty is to please his subjects, sadly decides for the second time to send her away —and now no god like Agni comes to her defense. Rama rules without her for several years, then has a change of heart, and asks her back. But he has waited too long; Sita has been swallowed up by the earth of which she was born. Rama spends the rest of his days sad and alone, but a great hero for the noble spirit with which he executes his dharma.
The epic tale of Rama and Sita was composed about the Third Century B. C. In time, Rama came to stand for the model Hindu—he is chivalrous and devoted to his wife, but obedient to sacred law; he has forbearance in tribulation, but courage in adversity. Eventually he came to be seen as an incarnation of Vishnu, and his name is sometimes used as a synonym for God. Sita evolved with him. In her fidelity to Rama and her obedience to dharma, she stands for the divine ideal of the Hindu wife. And, as he is the god Vishnu, so she is an incarnation of Vishnu's wife, Lakshmi.
The Ramayana has been told and retold for more than 2,000 years, until it is deep in the bones of all Hindus. It provides more than entertainment for the people. Like the folklore of every civilization, it expresses the ideals dearest to the hearts of the culture that spawned it—ideals that are meant to be applied to daily life. The Hindu bride, for instance, cherishes the words that Sita spoke when she was about to follow Rama into exile:
Car and steed and gilded palace, vain are these to woman's life;
Dearer is her husband's shadow to the loved and loving wife.
Happier than in father's mansions, in the woods will Sita rove.
Waste no thought on home or kindred, nestling in her husband's love. . . .
And the wild fruit she will gather from the fresh and fragrant wood.
And the food by Rama tasted shall be Sita's cherished food.
And as the mythology of Greece and Rome has fed the arts of the West to the present day, so the Ramayana has fed the arts of India; Rama, Sita and their fellow-characters have figured again and again in the prose and poetry, painting and sculpture, dance and song that India has produced throughout her long history.
Equally influential, and more profound, is the other epic, the Mahabharata, which, like the Ramayana, is part heroic tale, part religious lesson. The Mahabharata tells the story of a bloody war fought for a kingdom—and the tale is probably a semihistorical account of an internecine struggle that took place north of Delhi at the dawn of the First Millennium B. C.
As the Mahabharata has it, the throne of the Kuru tribe had fallen to a blind prince, who because of his affliction was barred by law from ruling. He therefore ceded the throne to his younger brother Pandu. The trouble begins when their sons reach maturity. By law the crown should next devolve to Yudhisthira, the eldest son of Pandu; but the blind man's sons understandably want for
A MANY-ARMED GOD OF FURY stabs an enemy demon in this detail from a Hindu temple sculpture in southern India. Hindu sculptors considered a deity's arms to be extensions of his inner energy and the objects in his hands to be symbolic of his various cosmic powers.
Themselves the kingdom that they might have had but for their father's blindness. The eldest of them challenges Yudhisthira to a game of dice; he cheats and wins the kingdom for himself, but, subsequently persuaded to compromise, he agrees to return the throne to Yudhisthira after a period of 13 years.
The 13 years pass and Yudhisthira reclaims the throne, but his cousin has learned to like the taste of power and goes back on his promise. So Yudhisthira and his brothers go to war—reluctantly, because they are peace-loving men and their cousins have been their lifelong friends—and in a bloody struggle that lasts for 18 days, all their cousins are killed. Yudhisthira and his brothers win the war and the kingdom, and Yudhisthira rules wisely into his old age.
This grim tale of war is the vehicle for expounding on all manner of Indian ideas: on Krishna as an incarnation of the god Vishnu; on dharma, particularly as it applies to royalty; on love and grief and caste. In the middle of the account of the battle, the Mahabharata has a separate segment of some 700 couplets that stands alone as an independent religious treatise and work of art. This is the Bhagavad Gita, or "Lord's Song"; and so sacred is it to Hindus that it corresponds to the New Testament in the Christian world. The Bhagavad Gita is a sermon given by the god Krishna to Arjuna, a younger brother of Yudhisthira. The prince, who quails at killing his relatives, cries out to the god, who has joined the war and is serving as Arjuna's charioteer:
Krishna! As I behold, come here to shed Their common blood, you concourse of our kin. My members fail, my tongue dries in my mouth. It is not good, O [Krishna]! Naught of good Can spring from mutual slaughter! to, I hate Triumph and domination, wealth and ease
Thus sadly won! Alas, what victory Can bring delight [O Krishna], what rich spoils Could profit, what rule recompense, what span Of life itself seem sweet, bought with such blood?
But Krishna has not joined the battle for nothing. "Let them perish. Prince, and fight!" he exclaims. This cold-blooded counsel the god justifies on three counts. First, the soul cannot be slain because it is eternal; only the body dies. Thus Arjuna cannot really kill his cousins, and besides, he will do them a favor, for in dying they will move out of this life and on to the next. Second, his dharma, or duty as a prince, and therefore a member of the warrior class, is to fight. Third, if he fails, to do so, his enemies will accuse him of cowardice. Arjuna is not convinced, so Krishna tells him he cannot win salvation unless he does his duty—that is, unless he fights; and if he does so by detaching his "self" from the act he is committing, he will be like the ascetic for whom "supreme bliss draws nigh."
Perhaps Krishna protests too much. If the poem patently sanctifies dharma as expounded by the brahmans, it just as surely lays bare the failings of the existing order. Yudhisthira, whose kingdom is at stake, is no less unhappy over the war and its inevitable disaster than is his younger brother. "There is nothing more evil than a kshatriya's [warrior's] dharma," he says to Krishna. "Stop this cruel carnage!" he begs. He even goes so far as to curse the concept of dharma.
But more than exposing iniquities peculiar to Hindu society, the Mahabharata speaks to the universal human condition; and in this it rises to the level of art. Yudhisthira voices the eternal struggle of individual conscience against society as it is ordered, and he shares the universal plight of man powerless against forces he did not create—forces he may decry but has to reckon with. Like the hero of a Greek tragedy, Yudhisthira is a noble figure
DISTINCTIVE HEAD MARKINGS identify the followers of the two largest sects of Hinduism. Shaivites, who worship the god Shiva, paint bands across their foreheads (far left). Vaishnavites, adherents of Vishnu, wear three vertical lines (left).
Who is punished in the end for one failing. On reaching the city of the gods after his death, he finds his vain and pompous cousin, whose greed had brought on the war, feasting happily among the gods. Then, like Dante, he is escorted on a tour of hell, where he endures the sight of his brothers and his wife burning in a pit. He cries out in anguish, only to hear from the gods that his cousin had earned his reward by fulfilling his dharma in going to war without quailing. Yudhisthira himself, for cursing the gods and questioning dharma, is condemned to a stint in hell and further rebirth, in order that he may work out his dharma better.
In other passages the Bhagavad Gita reaffirms the Hindu desire for reconciliation of all things in one. At one point Krishna declares to Arjuna:
Gaze [upon me], I manifest for thee
Those hundred thousand thousand shapes that clothe my Mystery.
I show thee all my semblances, infinite, rich, divine.
My changeful hues, my countless forms. See! in this face of mine. . .
Wonders unnumbered, Indian Prince! . . .
Behold! This is the universe!
This is an extension of the thesis stated in the Upanishads that everything in the universe is one with everything else; that appearances ("those hundred thousand shapes") are illusion; they "clothe" the "mystery" of the one true Reality.
But even as he reaffirms the ancient concept of oneness, Krishna reveals a shift in the concept of god and of man's relation to him. God, or the prevailing spirit behind the universe, remains one with creation, but he is no longer impassive; he is a personal god who loves man, who desires love in return and—most significant—he is a god who will assist man in his course through life. Not only is this implicit in the appearance of the god Krishna at Arjuna's side in battle; lest the point be missed, the god tells Arjuna in no uncertain terms at the close of his exhortation:
Take my last word, my utmost meaning have! Precious thou art to me; right well-beloved!
Listen! 1 tell thee for thy comfort this.
Give me thy heart! adore me! serve me! cling In faith and love and reverence to me!
So shah thou come to me! I promise true,
For thou art sweet to me! . . . Fly to me alone! Make me thy single refuge! I will free Thy soul from all its sins!
Such a god as Krishna is a far remove from Brahman, the impersonal world spirit put forth in the Upanishads. Krishna's words indicate how the concept of the deity had evolved. By the Fourth Century A. D. the loving kind of deity of which he spoke had grasped the hearts of the people—and as it took hold there arose a new form of worship appropriate to such a god. The worship was bhakti— from the Sanskrit word bhaj, the original meaning of which was "to share or participate in"; bhakti is a form of intense personal devotion. Practically any or all of India's manifold deities may be the object of bhakti; but in practice the gods Vishnu, Shiva and Shiva's wife in several guises get the lion's share of it.
But even as popular devotion to a personal deity grew, philosophic speculation never ceased. Far from ignoring or condemning devotion to the gods, the brahmans not only sanctioned it but participated in it as well. They still treasured the Upanishads as sacred scripture, but they sought to absorb the new deities into an ever-expanding philosophical scheme. Continuing the tradition begun in the Vedic age, philosophers all over India went on debating the secrets of the universe, seeking always to find unity in the multiplicity of the world around them.
Of all the philosophers that India has produced, one who graced the Ninth Century A. D. ranks among the great minds in all history. That was Shankara, a brahman born in Kerala, in southern
India. In a brief life of 32 years he did for Hinduism what the 13th Century Thomas Aquinas did for Christianity: he took his religion apart and examined it in minute detail, then drew the pieces together again in one cohesive whole. He wrote the most famous of all the commentaries on the Upanishads and established himself as chief exponent of the system of philosophy most esteemed by Hindu intellectuals.
Like many philosophers and all great men, Shankara was a host of human contradictions. He discarded the concept of a warm and loving deity in favor of the ancient impersonal Brahman of the Upanishads, but he persisted in writing eloquent hymns in praise of Shiva. He had no use for the Buddhists, but he employed missionary techniques similar to theirs. He dismissed reason as inferior to intuition, yet his achievement rests essentially upon his brilliance in dialectics.
Like Thomas Aquinas, Shankara accepted without question the scriptures of his religion as divine revelation, then dared to set about verifying them through the use of reason. Having done that much, he parts company with his Christian counterpart, for Aquinas, although he left much that was unexplainable to be accepted on faith, never doubted the power of reason. Shankara, on the contrary, professed to abandon reason in the end, declaring that intuition—the ability to seize on truth without recourse to reason—is more to be prized than reason itself. All knowledge, he said, is warped and inconclusive, for the senses impair man's grasp of reality. Hampered by illusion and ignorance, man sees many forms where there is in truth only one reality—Brahman: a reality that is changeless, timeless and unified in all things. Only through the practice of asceticism, and through the ascetic control of the senses, can man attain salvation; and in Shankara's philosophy salvation does not mean "union" of the soul with Brahman, but rather absorption in it through the intuitive grasp of the truth that the soul and Brahman are one. When man achieves that insight he will be able to quit the cycle of rebirths forever.
Shankara's statements about the soul and Brahman were not new; they merely reaffirmed the concepts set forth in the Upanishads more than a thousand years before his time. Neither was his advocacy of asceticism original; insofar as it meant a life of austerity, a giving up of worldly goods and pleasures, asceticism was a time-honored tradition in India. What was new was his systematic arrangement of the diffuse concepts of the Upanishads. What modern philosophers are able to discern in the obscurities and self-contradictions of the ancient scriptures, they see largely through Shankara's elucidation of them.
Not everyone, of course, is suitably equipped for the practice of asceticism, nor endowed with insight; and Shankara conceded that for lesser mortals salvation may come through worship of Shiva, Vishnu or any other god of the pantheon one chooses. But those gods, like the illusions of self, are in the last analysis merely half-way manifestations of the ultimate spirit. Brahman; they are necessary only so long as man is hampered by illusion and ignorance. The highest salvation is reserved for those who take the arduous path of asceticism; only in that way can they master their senses and then pierce through illusion to reach the goal of insight.
Shankara's philosophy, like that of the Upanishads on which he based it, was fine for those with the intellectual mettle to grasp it and live by it. But the average Indian could no more reach Shankara's heights than he could plumb the secrets of the Vedas. Bhakti prevailed over ascetic meditation—and not among the peasants alone, but in all strata of society throughout India. It remained for another philosopher in the 11th Century—Ramanuja, also a southern brahman—to give to the practice of bhakti the blessing of philosophical formulation.
Like every Hindu philosopher who had preceded him, Ramanuja retained the concepts of dharma, karma and reincarnation—virtually the only ideas of Hinduism never to have been abandoned—but unlike most of his predecessors, he rated ascetic meditation second to devotional worship, and argued the merits of a truly personal deity over the impassive Brahman. Shankara had allowed devotion to a personal god as the means to an end; Ramanuja extolled it as an end in itself. Shankara saw the soul as identical with Brahman and the goal of life as absorption of the one in the other; Ramanuja saw the soul and god as separate entities, and the goal of life as communion of the two. Shankara put the burden of salvation on man himself; Ramanuja gave the deity a role in the process. In words that could have come from the Psalms of David or a Christian litany, he described his god— Vishnu—as an "ocean of tenderness," a sublimely merciful spirit who "takes away [man's] sorrows." The idea of such a bountiful supreme spirit had lain for centuries in Krishna's discourse to Arjuna, but Ramanuja was the first to articulate it as formal philosophy.
The musings of a philosopher such as Shankara or Ramanuja may be little known to the peasant who worships at a shrine; they may indeed be beyond his reach. But civilization flowers when the intellectual flights of the one correspond to the unarticulated feelings that beat in the breast of the other. In their ceaseless questing after unity in multiplicity, Indian philosophers from the Vedic Age onward forged for themselves and their people such a reconciliation in Hinduism. It is no coincidence that the centuries in which the Hindu religion was developing in complexity were also the centuries of India's greatest development in culture —in the arts, in economics, in statecraft.
KNEELING HUMBLY, the four-headed god Brahma salutes Krishna in a pasture where Krishna and his companions have been grazing their herd of cattle.
World History
