Whatever takes form is false.
Only the formless endures.
When
you understand
The
truth of this teaching,
You
will not be born again.
—Ashtavakra
Gita 1:18
According to Juan
Mascaró, Hindu religion bespeaks of an acceptance of all religions in the sense
that the central theme focuses, not on the doctrines of the various religions,
but on the spirit behind all religions.[1]
It claims that no single religion is better than any other and that all people
are on the pathway to God at varying levels, living their current life and the
next in reincarnated form until they have lived sufficiently well to become
yoked to the Supreme Cosmic Spirit, Brahman. Although reincarnation offers many
chances of reaching perfection life after transmigrated life, it also means
failure in the previous life. The Hindu scholars suggest that reincarnation is
not a desirable path.[2] In
essence, reincarnation signifies procrastination from the union with Brahman by
living multiple lives in apathy and laziness like a perpetual and vertical
slinky.
The bottom line
for the Hindus is that Happiness requires work. As all are flawed in one way or
another, misery naturally abounds. Without the hard work to build character and
conform to truth, all must continue to transmigrate into a lower form until
they resist the false and conform their lives to truth, which will ultimately
lead to the coveted universal life as Brahman.
The Hindus claim
that all must have the highest faith to become Brahman. They believe that
everyone conforms to one of the three gunas of faith: sattva, rajas or tamas.[3]
Sattva signifies the faith of someone without blame—spotless. His fruit is joy
and knowledge and he is ascending upward in his faith. The faith of rajas is
characteristic in someone ruled by passion, craving, activity and greed. He
loves his possessions and is attached to activity; his fruit is unhappiness and
he goes nowhere. Finally, tamas describes the faith of one who is absentminded,
slothful and tends to sleep excessively. His fruit is ignorance. He becomes
negligent by obfuscating knowledge and directs himself perpetually downward.
The object of the Hindu is to suppress the lower two forms of faith and until
that happens he finds no joy in life. From the faith of sattva, comes
happiness, but misery is born of the lower two faiths.
Gaining
the faith of sattva prepare the Hindu for yoga, the root of which means “to
yoke,” and literally signifies yoking oneself to commitment. The ultimate aim
of yoga is a spiritual purification[4]
and self-understanding leading to union with Brahman. Krsna, in the
Bhagavadgita introduces Arjuna to a yoga of knowledge and a yoga of action. The
yoga of action is to devote oneself to his own task, that which God has given
him—in Western terms, we might call it personal mission. The key is not to seek
the recognition or glory for performing the action. Says Krsna of the yoga of
action, “…pursue the daily tasks disinterestedly, for, while performing his
acts without self-interest, a person obtains the highest good.”[5]
Then Krsna explains that the yoga of knowledge is true knowledge that helps
individuals learn how to control the mind and senses in order to become free
from the bondage of ignorance and passion, “For there is no means of
purification the like of knowledge; and in time one will find that knowledge
within oneself, when one is…perfected by yoga.”[6]
The yogi engages in the yoga of action and knowledge by restraining the mind
and the senses. He therefore yokes himself to the commitment of tasks and
knowledge that purify and cleanse his Atman. Again, observance or
non-observance to yoga accounts for happiness or misery.
From the
Upanishads, including the Bhagavadgita, it is apparent that the Hindus believe
in a sort of salvation from sin and death. According to the Taittiriya
Upanishad, the seven needful things to wash sins away are righteousness, truth,
meditation, self-control, peace, ritual, and humanity.[7]
This means that only through individual actions are we cleansed from sin. The
power of death comes to every mortal body, but to save it from this, the Hindus
believe that the spirit, or Atman, which never dies, must rule the body. The Chandogya
Upanishad says, “…If a man is ruled by his body then this man can never be
free. But when a man is in the joy of the Spirit, in the Spirit which is ever
free, then this man is free from all bondage, the bondage of pleasure and
pain.”[8] Hinduistic
salvation then lies both with correct choice and allowing Atman, our true self,
to lead us from bodily pleasure and pain.
To
summarize, the Hindu religion is the process of baby steps of progression or
digression with the just reward of joy and happiness or misery and suffering,
respectively. Each successive life depends upon the individual choices made in
the previous life and is manifested by entering a new higher or lower body. Whether
the Hindu scholars feel that reincarnation ought to be avoided or not, I do not
see a reason for any individual to reduce the amount of lives lived, for there
is not any greater reward given to the one who reaches Brahman sooner than he
who slowly prods along in life after successive life. The only difference is
that the former finds happiness sooner and the latter delays it to remain
miserable in his seemingly endless suffering. For the Hindus, each individual
is his own personal Savior and Exaltation to Brahman falls exclusively to the effort
of the individual himself. Perhaps
Shakespeare prescribed Hindu happiness best when he wrote, “To thine own self
be true.”[9]
[1] Juan Mascaró, The
Upanishads, (London: Penguin Books 1965), Introduction, 11-12
[2] Gary B. Swanson, Who
is You?, http://www.perspectivedigest.org/article/42/archives/16-3/who-is-you, Perspective Digest: A Publication of the Adventist Theological Society, 2011
[3] J. A. B. van Buitenen, The Bhagavadgita in the
Mahabharata: A Bilingual Edition, (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1981), 127, 135
[4] “As he sits on
his seat, let him pinpoint his mind, so that the workings of mind and senses
are under control, and yoke himself to yoga for the cleansing of his self.”
—Ibid., 95: 2nd paragraph.
[5] Ibid., 83
[6] Ibid., 89
[7] Juan Mascaró, The
Upanishads, (London: Penguin Books 1965), 109
[8] Ibid., 125
[9] Shakespeare, Hamlet,
Act 1: Scene 3, 78
