Brief history of Hinduism

The Hindu pantheon is as impermanent as it is rich. From time to time, from place to place and even from person to person, the importance and meaning of themes, stories and divinities shift. In the course of history new gods arise, whose positions are justified by newly composed stories, devised to establish a lineage with the old gods. A brief history therefore can only offer a very crude outline of what is an ancient, immensely intricate and essentially ungraspable complex of religious systems.

     The vedic gods (1500 BC)

The Rig Veda is a collection of some thousand hymns, composed in ancient Sanskrit in North-West India by the invading Indo-European troops that pushed aside the existing Indus-culture. A few centuries later, the commentaries of the so-called Brahmanas were added, that contained many myths on which the later Hindu-literature would be based to determine the features of their gods.

A fair deal of the Rig Veda consists of various creation myths: some centered around Vishnu, others around Brahma (then still called Prajapati), in which heaven and earth are created, the beings, the natural cycles, the division of good and evil and the social caste-system introduced by the Indo-Europeans.

Another theme in the vedic texts is the perennial battle between the gods and the demons. In one of the most famous of these myths, the demonic serpent Vritra coils around the Himalayas to stop the waters from flowing to the valleys. The thunder god Indra pierces Vritras body with his thunderbolts, thus forming the great Indian rivers that created Indias wealth.

As famous is the myth of the churning of the ocean when the naga (water serpent) Shesha is used by gods and demons to churn the elixir Soma to secure their lifespan.

     The power of ritual

The vedic gods owe their power to rituals in which fire and language are central. The vedic priests, the brahmans, were therefore very scrupulous about the conservation of the rituals in their minor details, as they envisaged it pivotal to the conservation of the whole world - and their own power.

This immobility led to a form of religious sclerosis, so that by the beginning of the sixth century BC protest movements arose, and the devoted seekers of religious enlightenment rather felt the need for interior investigation, away from society and away from the established rituals.

The mystical writings of the Upanishads express a part of this search. Two of the most successful outcomes of the Indian protest against the brahmanic immobility are Buddhism and Jainism. In a renewed interest in its own yogic tradition, the brahmans tried to fight off the considerable influence of these heretics and later mythology would purify them away completely.

     The epic poems and the Purunas (500 AD)

In the later period the old gods are reduced to metaforic and even ridiculous characters. The kings would continue to observe the vedic rituals scrupulously, but on the whole a more theistic form of Hinduism was spreading in the India of the Gupta-period (300 - 600).

The two main sources of the new mythology are the epic poems Mahabharata and Ramayana, that later on were joined by the 18 Great Purunas and countless smaller and local Purunas that often go back to ancient and even foreign myths.

The new systematisation of religious life and the practice of bhakti - personal devotion for a god of ones own choice - created new subdivisions. Vishnu and the newcomer Shiva became the main foci of mythology and devotion. A very particular position is taken in by a third pivotal figure: the Goddess, who appears in all kinds of forms and who was possibly imported from Nepal.

The myths of these gods are told in Sanskrit texts that date from about 500 AD until deep into the middle ages and that up until today are being told in various forms, and have remained very popular, even in soap series and cartoons.

     Vishnus avatars

During the Indian Gupta-period the cult of Vishnu was the most popular with kings. The majestic status of this divinity on whom the whole of creation supports until the end of the universe, obviously must have appealed to the rulers. Also the stories of Vishnus avatars - embodiments in which Vishnu time and again saves the planet from the demons - enabled the ruler to identify with this god, and immediately point out his enemies as demons. In fact it is not even impossible that some of the avatar myths were composed explicitly to serve royal prestige.

Vishnu saves the world as a fish, a lion, a boar, as Rama (in the Ramayana) and so on. One of the most popular avatars is Krishna, whose feats (fighting demons) and amorous playfulness (involving the gorgeous sheep-herding gopis) were grateful themes for artistic expression.

One of the most religious-political avatars is the Buddha-avatar, by which the Hindu-priests tried to undo the dammage that the Buddhist school did to their prestige by asserting that the Buddha was in fact Vishnu, preaching a false doctrine to confuse the demons.

     Shiva

Whereas the alvars (Vishnu-adepts) were in full swing at the royal courts, the nayamnars preached the myths of the other great god: Shiva. He is a god of the ascetics, but also of fertility and at the same time of cosmic destruction. But he is also very simply a lover of music and dance. This god, whose body is smeared with the ashes of corpses, has his light and utterly dark sides.

The most popular form of Shiva by far is the lingam of phallus, that shows him as the creating god, the god of fertility. According to myth, on the night of creation the two gods Vihsnu and Brahma saw a pillar rising out of the primal ocean. They tried to find the bottom and top of the pillar, and when they finally gave up, Shiva revealed himself and declared the pillar to be his lingam.
In this period another portret of Shiva became popular as well: Shiva as a family man. Even though he is a yogi and spends most of his time in trance in the Himalayas, he is shown in a rare moment of tenderness with his gorgeous wife Parvati and their children Ganesha and Skandha.

A third popular depiction of Shiva is as a dancer: sometimes innocently enjoying the music, but at other times extatically causing the end of the universe in a frenzied dance.

     The Goddess

A remarkable apparition in the Indian Gupta-period is the assimilation of the cult of the Goddess in Hinduism. Sakta, the Goddess, is the symbol of the cosmic energy (sakti), the ultimate reality, and also a mother goddess with child. In her ultimate form she unites many goddesses, among which Durga, the demon-slayer and, Kali, the black goddess. In this dark and ambiguous form she is associated with the just as ambiguous Shiva.

In its esoteric tantric form the Sakta-cult influenced Jainism and Vajrayana Buddhism, where extatic Buddhas are shown in unity with their consorts, a form that found its way to Tibet, China and Japan.

     The syncretic forms

Apart from the groups of adepts that composed their own Purunas around their supreme god, others were trying to unite the different systems.

Hari-Hara, a strange apparition whose right side shows Vishnu and whose left side Shiva, is a typical and fairly succesful example of these attempts.

The divine couples like Shiva and Parvati or Vishnu and Lakshmi are another example. At times they were even represented as one hermaphroditic being. Vishnu is also often named the eternal abode of Lakshmi, who is then depicted as the srivat-symbol on his chest.

     The export of Hinduism

The advent of Hinduism in Southeast-Asia was the result of the labour of Indian brahmans, who - less restricted by a rigid caste-system when abroad - married into local royal families. Long years of trade contacts had preceeded them and the Southeast-Asian people had come to regard the culture of India as superior by far. The local rulers too felt attracted by the Indian notion of the god-king (devaraja), and a brahman at their court only helped to assume that position themselves

In this way Southeast Asia was not conquerred by a wave of monolithic Hinduism, but rather by a plethora of influences and forms, out of which the local people distilled their own syntheses and added their own accents. Artistically too, these people owed a great deal to India, but they grew into developing their own genius.

Not surprisingly Vishnu was adopted as the favourite of kings, but Krishna and Skandha (the warrior god) could count on some devotion in Cambodia as well. And also Shiva lingams very often formed the centre of Cambodian and Thai temples.

Remarkably the Sakta-cult did not gain a foothold in Indochina. Certainly not in her form as mother-with-child, but also hardly as cosmic energy. The rather priestly goddesses (Uma) show little inclination to perform either role. It was not until the ninth century that the Khmer sculptres would add true femininity to the female shapes. By then they had moved away considerably from the orthodox Indian religion.

Bibliography
Pratapaditya Pal: The Ideal Image, The Gupta Sculptural Tradition and Its Influence, The Asia Society, 1978, pp .24-35.
Wendy OFlaherty: Hindoeïsme. In: Richard Cavendish (red;): Atlas van de Mythologie, Spectrum, Amsterdam 1982, pp.14-33.