The Heart of Hinduism

Having early cast off the Midwest Protestantism in which I was baptized and confirmed, I, like others of my generation, I found much to admire and accept in philosophical Daoism and Ch’an Buddhism. I marveled at the marvelous symbolic webs of Hindu mythology but could, at the time, accept them no more than the metaphoric figures of the ancient Greeks or the Bible. Through neo-Vedanta, Isherwood and Huxley, then Watts and Ginsberg, but even more through reading the Upanishads, I believe I have glimpsed some significant peaks of Hindu thought. I am aware of the criticism by some of the tradition descending from Ramakrishna as Westernized. Perhaps it is, and perhaps that need not be a criticism.

I quote from Robert Ernest Hume’s The Thirteen Principal Upanishads (Oxford: Oxford Press, 1921).



     For me the heart of Hinduism is expressed in the Upanishads. I recognize that very likely most Indians would prefer the passionate devotion, magnificent poetry, and ethical authority of the Bhagavad Gita, but for those seeking philosophy the Upanishads must be preeminent. I am innocent of Sanskrit and no expert on even European philosophy, but to me the essential insights of the forest sages are sublime.
     The definition of Hinduism can be elusive. Its own self-images tend to suggest a very accommodating tent. Buddha is commonly considered an incarnation of Vishnu . Much to their chagrin, Sikhs are treated as a subgroup of Hindus by the Indian constitution. Even tribal groups whose traditions have nothing in common with Hinduism are labeled “scheduled castes” and enrolled in the Hindu world order, albeit at the very bottom.
     Hinduism’s extraordinary breadth of inclusiveness is suggested by a survey of its accepted theological schools. Among the six orthodox traditions that generally accept the authority of the Vedas are reckoned [1] the Mimāṃsās who continue to focus on the ancient Vedic rituals dedicated to a range of deities and the generally monist Vedantists. There are also the dualist Samkhyas with little interest in gods, and the Nyayas whose central focus was the refinement of logic and who were originally atheist, though some of their later authors were theists. The Vaiśeṣikas engaged in atomist and scientific speculation with little reference to the supernatural. Finally, there are practitioners of the various forms of yoga. Thus among these lineages alone only the first could be considered really fundamentalist. Some may use religious rhetoric because that vocabulary was the only one available for intellectual speculation. One may be a Hindu while believing in no god, one god, many gods, or some more nuanced formulation between these options; one may accept or reject the divine revelation and hence the infallibility of certain ancient texts. One may practice puja daily in any of a bewildering variety of forms or use none at all.
     Hinduism, however, is willing to go further yet and to embrace even those who reject the ancient scriptures: the essentially godless Buddhists and Jains as well as the uncompromisingly atheist and materialist Cārvākas, the deterministic atheists associated with the Ājīvika school, and the utterly skeptical and hence agnostic Ajñana philosophers.
     The observer may also sort the countless “denominations” of Hinduism according the favored deity: most commonly Vishnu or Shiva, while the Bhakti practitioners generally honor some form of the goddess Devi such as Kali or Durga. Smartas avoid the choice by declaring that all the deities are in the end alike. Add to these factors the immense land area and varied historical experiences of different parts of India, and it will be no surprise that Hinduism is so resistant to definition.
     Surely one reason for the elasticity of the term Hindu is that the word was originally not an ideological but a geographical or ethnic term, indicating the people of the Indus area. Though it is possible for foreigners to convert to Hinduism, in the eyes of many Indians, a true Hindu must be an Indian. [2] Those from other countries are necessarily outcaste.
     It is no surprise that the Upanishads which provide the philosophic theory to accompany the ritual practice laid out in the earlier Vedas are the portion more accessible to Western readers. Though Indian philosophy is capable of exceeding subtlety and Sanskrit has an immense and erudite tradition of scholarship and hermeneutics, for me the heart of Hinduism is adequately suggested by what are perhaps the best known phrases from these two and a half millennia old texts.
     The author of the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad allows himself a lyric flight before declaring his apophatic intuition of the divine Brahma. “The form of this Person is like a saffron-colored robe, like white wool, like the [red] Indrapropa beetle, like a flame of fire, like the [white] lotus-flower, like a sudden flash of lightning . . . Hence, now, there is the teaching ‘Not thus! Not so!’ (neti, neti), for there is nothing higher than this, that he is thus.” [3] This is a cautionary corrective, warning against idolatrous error, reminding the listener in the oral tradition or the reader of the written word that perhaps the most adequate definition if deity is “that which one does not know.” The same insight is recorded in traditions around the world and through the centuries, particularly by mystical poets, but it is dramatic here paired as it is in Hindu tradition with the Vedic texts with their plethora of supernatural beings, their advocacy of the psychedelic soma, and their obsession with ritual. [4]
     Simply reading, or even being convinced by the principle of neti, neti is insufficient. For liberation the truth of the formula must be experienced. The system of guru/disciple relationships serves this necessarily experiential enlightenment. The use of entheogens, practice of sacrifice, and visualizations of a world of symbolic deities may, however, be considered as aids to the critical alteration of consciousness that alone can free the individual from suffering.
     There is a dialectic counterpart to this via negativa, though it, too, may be elusive, though omnipresent. Most people seek Ultimate Reality in cultivating a relationship with specific deities, but in the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad when questioned about the number of the gods, Yajnavalkya provides first a scriptural response “As many as are mentioned in the Nivid of the Hymn to All the Gods, namely, three hundred and three, and three thousand and three.” Upon repeated questioning, he eventually declares there to be a single god, Brahma. [5]
     The monad, variably named Atman, Brahma, or Ishvara, may be too immense to wrap the mind around. Beginning, as Descartes did (following Aristotle and others) with the self-evident certainty of their own consciousnesses, the ancient forest sages made the bold leap from subjectivity to a plenum. [6] To them one’s own perceived reality, partial and even distorted as it might be, is identified with Reality in the formula “tat tvam asi” (often translated “that art thou”). Recognized as one of the Mahavakyas or great sayings of the Upanishad in the Advaita tradition [7], this simple intuitive assertion, rests on neither ratiocination nor revelation. Further, the experience of the whole is identified with pleasure. [8] These claims arise not from authority but through experience, the practice, already ancient, of meditation and ascetic practices that produced a myriad ecstatic philosophers.
     In the Katha Upanishad which specifically addresses mortality in Naciketas’ questioning of Yama “tat tvam asi” occurs thirteen times, each a hammer blow to ignorance and fear. [9] When the ego dissolves, where is unease to be found?
     These visionary insights are repeated in many different ways in the Upanishads and are then affirmed by later authors -- Adi Shankara, Dattatreya, and others. For the apprentice sannyasi it may have been at the thousandth iteration that the realization arrived.
     Hinduism will remain multifarious with as many faces as a Khajuraho temple. One can only wish the best to people placing hibiscus petals before Kali or Mallomars for Ganesh. Those performing works of dana (caritas) are surely meritworthy as well. All humanity can sympathize with those who swoon with devotional love (bhakti). For those of an intellectual or mystical sensibility, though, the paradoxical insights of the Upanishads can provide a route to liberation from suffering and a whiff of the exhilaration of the sublime. Realizing in one’s back-brain that the divine cannot be described and yet that it is everything allows the very certainty of one’s own existence that might inspire anxiety or despair to be transformed into a consciousness of the holy.
     These concepts are simple and clear, yet it remains true that the path to their full realization is “a sharpened edge of a razor, hard to traverse,/ A difficult path is this – poets declare!”



1. These are called astika (“there is,” “there exists”) in distinction to the five nastika (“there is not”) schools.

2. I am reminded of how well-meaning people have long insisted “Judaism is a religion, not a race” yet many atheists identify themselves as Jews, and, of course, to the orthodox, the child of a Jewish mother is Jewish willy-nilly.

3. See Brihad-Arayaka Upanishad 2.3.6. The phrase is repeated at 3.9.26, 4.2.2, and 4.5.15.

4. In the Kena Upanishad even the great Vedic gods such as Agni, Vayu, and Indra are said to be ignorant of Brahma (14 ff.).

5. 3.9.1-3.9.9.

6. After his convincing demonstration of skepticism, Descartes made a far feebler attempt to rebuild the intellectual universe familiar to him including Catholic orthodoxy, though he was insufficiently orthodox still for the Roman Church which banned his books in 1663.

7. The other three Mahavakyas are similar in meaning. They are prajñānam brahma ("Prajñāna is Brahman" from the Aitareya Upanishad 3.3, ayam ātmā brahma ("This Self is Brahman" from the Mandukya Upanishad 1.2, and aham brahmāsmi ("I am Brahman", Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10.

8. Chandogya Upanishad 7.23-4.

9. From 4.3 through 5.8. The author is not averse to figurative half-truths as well, though, describing the soul as a chariot with the intellect as driver (3.3 ff.) and the executive in the mind as a homunculus “the measure of a thumb” (4.13).

10. Katha Upanishad, 3.14.

Walking the Via Negativa

     The believer in nothing may find that nothing can be as substantial a deity as old Jehovah or bright Apollo. Though many sensibilities seek the warm (but sometimes frightening) anthropomorphic god provided by myth, others, miraculously, perhaps, find a secure foundation in a lack.
     For the spiritually inclined unbeliever to whom the deity of childhood is inconceivable and indeed who cannot even understand how any contemporary educated person can continue loyal to institutional religion, the data reporting mystical experience retain a different sort of truth value. There can be no denying experiences of unity with the divine throughout history and around the world. Apart from the mystics, some theologians have laid out a theoretical basis for a faithless faith. The skeptic will take particular interest in the apophatic tradition, the via negativa, which eschews positive assertions about god, describing the divine in terms of what the godhead is not and basing an authentic spirituality in what we do not know.
     Hinduism and Buddhism have been more hospitable to apophatic theology than Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. In Asia the phrase “neti, neti” (“not this or that”) is the definition of Brahman in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad and the Avadhuta Gita. [1] For the eighth century philosopher Adi Shankara the highest concept of the divine was Nirguna Brahma, a Brahma without qualities. In general Advaita (non-dualistic) schools of Vedanta and Jnana Yoga employ such language. Jainism, Buddhism, and Daoism, have in fact no god, though devotees have not been slow to invent quasi-divine figures such as the Jain Tirthankaras and the many godlings of popular Buddhism and Daoism. Though the Abrahamic religions are by comparison resistant to a truly agnostic theology, their more philosophic and mystical practitioners have regularly condemned anthropomorphism.
     Buddhism is notoriously receptive to agnostic or atheist ideas. When the Buddha was asked about the nature of the divine and the afterlife, he responded that one should attend no more to such matters than a man injured by a poisoned arrow need learn all the details about his attacker before tending to his wound.


And why are they undeclared by me? Because they are not connected with the goal, are not fundamental to the holy life. They do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, self-awakening, Unbinding. That's why they are undeclared by me. [2]


     Likewise in the works of Nagarjuna, founder of the Madhyamika school of Buddhism, all phenomena, including acts of cognition, are empty. Even the deity is a sort of Kantian noumenon inaccessible to the human mind. The Aïguttara Nikàya and the Jataka stories both deny a personal all-powerful god. [3]
     Buddhism regularly teaches, in contrast to the notion of a savior, that one must not look for aid from some supernatural being. In the pursuit of Ultimate Reality one can depend only on individual effort.


By ourselves is evil done,
By ourselves we pain endure,
By ourselves we cease from wrong,
By ourselves become we pure.
No one saves us but ourselves.
No one can and no one may.
We ourselves must walk the path:
Buddhas only show the way. [4]


For Buddhism what is significant is ridding oneself (and for Mahayanists other sentient beings as well) of suffering. Inquiries about the afterlife, the eternity and infinity of the creation and other issues are dismissed as “the fourteen unanswerable questions” (though the numbers differs in different texts) which are fruitless to pursue. [5]
     The most significant source of apophatic theology in Christianity is pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in particular his Divine Names and Mystical Theology. Dionysius built on his Platonic and neo-Platonic predecessors [6] when he concluded that the description of Ultimate Reality is impossible. For Dionysius the contemplation of God leads to “a divine silence, darkness, and unknowing.” The truths about God are "unspeakable and unknowable,” they surpass "our logical and intellective power and activity" Thus one may not predicate anything whatever of the deity without falling into error. Dionysius did make allowances for some scripturally based epithets and nodded to tradition, saying "we must praise the providence of divine dominion, the source of goods, [in terms taken] from all the things that are caused.” According to Dionysius human reasoning which takes place in time cannot access the divine, while what he called our “intellective” faculty can grasp truth in an instant. This sort of knowledge, similar to what Augustine called illumination and Boethius “intelligence” is capable of a vision of God.
     The notion that God may be apprehended in a transformative realization leads naturally to an openness to the experiential data of mystics: those who enter into union with it [God], "according to the ceasing of all intellectual activity, . . . praise it best of all by denying all beings of it.” [7]
     For Gregory of Nyssa, the fourth century bishop, a necessary consequence of the infinity of God is his belief that God, as limitless, is essentially incomprehensible to the limited minds of created beings. To him “every concept that comes from some comprehensible image, by an approximate understanding and by guessing at the Divine nature, constitutes a idol of God and does not proclaim God."
     This concept of the divine, with its close links to Plato and Proclus, was brought forward in a tradition including Maximus the Confessor and Johannes Scotus Eriugena to the high Middle Ages when it proved fundamental to the mystics of the fourteenth century such as Richard Rolle and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Later Meister Eckhart declared, citing Dionysius, “God is naught. Meaning that God is as incomprehensible as naught.” For him “the height of gnosis is to know in agnosia.” [9]
     Likewise, while popular Judaism can be thoroughly anthropomorphic, more sophisticated thinkers have outlined an apophatic deity as well. To Philo Judaeus the anthropomorphism of a literal reading of the Bible was impious as well as mistaken. He considered it manifestly absurd to ascribe to God purely human attributes. [10] His most distinguished successor was Maimonides who in his Guide for the Perplexed insists that “the negative attributes of God are the true attributes.” [11]
     This smattering of theologians of widely varying views is hardly meant to indicate that I accept the view of godhead proposed by any one of them or even that I fully understand their positions. Rather it is excellent evidence that I and perhaps you are not wholly idiosyncratic in the attempt to save spirituality from the supernatural. The experience of people as far back as records exist has included experiences of what Romain Rolland in a 1927 letter to Freud, called "oceanic feeling." [12] Whatever one may make of it, the records of such sensation s are clear and consistent throughout human culture. There can be no doubt that people, often using one of a variety of mind-altering techniques such as fasting and meditation, have through the cultivation of cosmos-connected consciousness, achieved an enviable level of serenity and satisfaction. These empirical data carry far more weight than the theories of thinkers seeking to justify such spiritual endeavors, yet they imply the need for each individual to pursue enlightenment anew. The words, even of Gautama Buddha, are, "like a man pointing a finger at the moon to show it to others who should follow the direction of the finger to look at the moon. If they look at the finger and mistake it for the moon, they lose sight of both the moon and the finger." [13] And this orientation to the lunar sphere, which is to say to the sublime, persists in spite of the fact that the liberated mind perceives the hollowness of all phenomena, “all construings, all excogitations, all I-making & mine-making & obsessions with conceit.” [14]



1. See the Avadhuta Gita 1.25 and the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.3.6.

2. Majjhima Nikaya 63 MN 63, called the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta.

3. Aïguttara Nikàya A.I.174, Jataka VI,208.

4. Dhammapada 165, here in Paul Carus’ translation.

5. Of course, many Buddhists reverted to the Hindu belief in reincarnation as well as to the apotheosis of Buddha and other figures.

6. See Timaeus 28c.

7. All references to pseudo-Dionysius may be found in Mystical Theology I, 1-3 and Divine Names cols. 585-588, and 593 and in Harrington and Corrigan’s article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

8. The Life of Moses; translation, intro. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson ; pref. by John Meyendorff , p. 81.

9. The Divine Being, Sermon XV.

10. De Confusione Linguarum, 27 [i. 425].

11. In Chapter 58.

12. Discussed by Freud in Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929).

13. Surangama Sutra trans. by Charles Luk.

14. Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta: To Vacchagotta on Fire, translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.