Standing before the great ocean of Hinduism and looking for a direction to sail in marking my appreciation is like claiming to be able to measure the Ratnakara (the Sanskrit name for the Indian Ocean): I’m sure someone can do it effectively, but it’s probably not me. What I am really proposing to do is to talk about how the history of Hindu civilization, from the Harappans of the Indus Valley to the Vedic society of the Gangetic plain to the forest ascetics and critical philosophers that wrote the Upanishads and founded movements like Early Buddhism and Jainism to the poets that wrote the Mahabharata and the Ramayana to the bhaktic communities that formed around deities like Vishnu, Shiva, and Shakti to the dialectical skepticism of Nyaya and the moderate hedonism of the Kamasaśtra to the yogic discipline of Patañjali to the philosophies of Adi Shankara and Abhinavagupta to the medieval and modern saints—and that’s just the “canonical” stuff—has affected me. Beyond them there are the more subtle geniuses of Hindu thought, literature, and life: the delineation of life into Purusharthas, by which people are able to have a holistic experience of being human, cultivating the good life in artha, kama, and dharma before renouncing the world in pursuit of mokśa; the celebration of the natural as sacred manifestation of the Deity, a point of appreciation I also registered for Zoroastrianism, close cousin to all the dharmic faiths; the erotic spirituality and spiritualized eroticism of so many forms of Hindu religiosity (even though sexual taboos are still alive and well in many Hindu social settings); the open acceptance of a vibrant pluralism, however modern some aspects of that synthesis are (and not all of them are); the warm embrace in most Hindu settings of the sciences, including the social sciences, as authentic disciplines compatible with matters of faith and philosophy.
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