This is a great piece on
Hinduism. As a person who has spent most of his life studying the essence of
religions, I have found humility is the bedrock of all religions, and arrogance
is the root cause of all problems in the world. Every religion without fail
prescribes prayers as its anti-dote to arrogance, and to bring everyone on par
with the other - we bow, we kneel and we prostrate as a symbol of acknowledging
a greater power.
The sentences, concepts and the
words in the following article have been a part of my understanding and my
writings over the years. Indeed, it is Bhagvad Gita that inspired me to find
the truth on my own, and eventually took me to study Quran and find resonance
with it. Indeed, Islam is square on it, you are individually responsible for
your karma and you alone are accountable for your thoughts, talks and acts.
Both books (and all the religious books) are about creating a cohesive society where all humanity can co-exist with least conflict by accepting the otherness of other and learning to value the uniqueness of each one. Poet Sahir Ludhanavi wrote this beautiful couplet in Urdu/Hindi language;
Qur’aan no ho jis may o dharam tera nahin hai
Geeta no ho jis may o haram tera nahin hai
Both books (and all the religious books) are about creating a cohesive society where all humanity can co-exist with least conflict by accepting the otherness of other and learning to value the uniqueness of each one. Poet Sahir Ludhanavi wrote this beautiful couplet in Urdu/Hindi language;
Qur’aan no ho jis may o dharam tera nahin hai
Geeta no ho jis may o haram tera nahin hai
Your religion is incomplete
without Qur’aan in it
and your worship is incomplete without Gita in it.
and your worship is incomplete without Gita in it.
Meaning the essence of Goodness
is embedded in every religion. What you hear about others is not true, much of
it is built on arrogance that mine is better, mine is superior, and even mine
is humbler... non sense it is, all religions are beautiful. If it is not, then
we have not taken the time to learn the truth but went by what suits our ego -
that others are inferior. That is not Hinduism, not Islam, not Christianity and
not any religion.
Indeed, humility is the hallmark
of every religion.
You might want to experiment
this, as I have in the past – replace the words like Bhagvad Gita with Qur’aan
or Bible, dharma with righteousness, Deen or right path and few more like that…
The Muslim, Christian or other will feel it is about his religion. That is the power
of goodness, it permeates in every religion.
Mike Ghouse writes weekly
articles on Pluralism at Dallas Morning News and in his daily blog at www.Theghousediary.com
Now enjoy reading this piece with full humility.
HUMILITY IN HINDUISM
Posted: 03/24/2012 9:42 pm
By
contributing writer Gautama Mehta, originally published at KidSpirit Online
Growing up in a Hindu family in
New York, I've always been taught that I should try my best, but understand
that after I've done what I personally can, I should leave the rest to God.
Well, not specifically God, but
whatever factors there are beyond my control. There is, in my religion, the
concept of dharma, or duty: each person has his or her own righteous path to
follow, and at different times in your life, your dharma could be being a good
student, or parent, or hard worker, and so on.
Hindus are taught to have
humility. Ancient Hindu artists were never supposed to sign their names on
their work, and temple artists, when creating statues of gods, are always
supposed to leave a deliberate imperfection to show that they cannot really
represent God.
It's a religion that decries
affectation. It doesn't presume to be the one and only "true" faith:
there is no conversion ceremony. All the Hinduism I have grown up with, has
taught me to be free of misconceptions about my personal importance, my own status
when viewed against all the other billions in the world. I don't know how
"Hindu" this is, but my mother has always told me that the religion
teaches only to do one's best, and not worry about the outcome. I don't know
what it means for an idea like this to be "Hindu," as opposed to just
a cultural notion that, in my limited experience, follows the faith wherever it
goes. Hinduism is like that: Gandhi's ideals are considered just as Hindu as
age-old scriptural doctrines.
In my family (and many others)
when a baby turns one, we shave off its hair as a sacrifice to God for the
beautiful baby, and also to protect against vanity or conceit. That's the
beauty of traditions like these: we can interpret and re-interpret, internalize
and re-internalize, to fit with our culture and ethics. The root, of course, is
Hinduism, but Hinduism is evolving, is changing. It's an intensely personal
religion. There is no Hindu Church or centralized authority. Hinduism can mean
incredibly right-wing fundamentalists who use it as an excuse for violence, or
it can mean my mother, a self-proclaimed atheist who is one of the most devout
Hindus I know.
But there's a contradiction.
Culturally, Hindus (or Indians in general) have a lot of pressure to do well,
to succeed. Especially immigrant families like mine here in America, which are
the ones I know best. In general, immigrant cultures tend to value achievement,
because of how hard it is for them to make it in a foreign country where they
are poor and discriminated against. Indians in America have done well, though.
I see us in Ivy League schools and computer software, in spelling bees and
politics. And we're still stereotyped as the culture that pressures its
children into doing better than all the American kids, coaching the kids after
school in trigonometry and computer science, and if a kid isn't valedictorian
in every subject then he's beaten.
Obviously, this is an exaggeration, but the philosophy is still there -- the intense competition, the praise given for having one's name everywhere. In India, kids have an incredibly strict education system, learning everything at a much more advanced rate than I am here in New York, and students are strictly ranked in every aspect. There's a rigorous Hindu caste system only now falling apart, and still very much present in India's villages. My mother, a Brahmin (on the top of the ladder) talks about how growing up in India, she was told that she was superior to everyone else, and though she hates it, she still feels that inside her today. Harsh competition is encouraged from an early age in most Indians. So why the discrepancy between the religion and the culture?
Obviously, this is an exaggeration, but the philosophy is still there -- the intense competition, the praise given for having one's name everywhere. In India, kids have an incredibly strict education system, learning everything at a much more advanced rate than I am here in New York, and students are strictly ranked in every aspect. There's a rigorous Hindu caste system only now falling apart, and still very much present in India's villages. My mother, a Brahmin (on the top of the ladder) talks about how growing up in India, she was told that she was superior to everyone else, and though she hates it, she still feels that inside her today. Harsh competition is encouraged from an early age in most Indians. So why the discrepancy between the religion and the culture?
Perhaps the discrimination
Indians felt everywhere they went instilled in them the sense of having to be
the best, and nurtured in them the insecurity that causes the egotism that is
so warned against by Hinduism. My father's family, for example, has spent the
last four generations moving across the globe in search of business, everywhere
from a rural village in India to Kenya to Calcutta. When my dad was 14, he
moved from Bombay to Queens, N.Y., and he describes the move as one of the most
influential moments in his life. When he got here, he experienced flagrant
racism at his local Catholic high school, in which he was the only minority
student, and this has shaped the way he thinks and acts today. But in spite of
all the hardships they've faced Indian immigrants like my father have kept
religion with them, trusting it to guide them, preserving its traditions as
best they can. For him, the Bhagavad Gita, probably the religion's most
important text, is the one book he would want on a desert island. But he didn't
discover it through his parents. He found it in an undergraduate course on
Hinduism at NYU.
In this way, his Hinduism is like
mine: Growing up, he knew the Hinduism that his grandparents told stories
about, the Hinduism of gods and demons and many-headed animals. But the other
side of Hinduism, its philosophy, is something too personal to tell kids on
your lap stories about. I know Hindu mythology partly from my Ammamma (mother's
mother) telling me stories as a kid, and partly from Amar Chitra Katha, a
popular Indian comic book series illustrating myths and scripture. But to try
and understand the reasons for the inconsistencies I've seen in my community, I
decided I actually had to read the stuff.
I read through the Bhagavad Gita,
expecting to find an archaic, illegible piece of scripture that would make no
sense to me. But instead I found lines that illustrated perfectly ideals that
still make perfect sense, many centuries later.
Let me give a bit of background
on the Gita, as the book is commonly known. It's a chapter in the epic poem
Mahabharata, which is about an ancient war between two sets of brothers. The
Gita, Wikipedia tells me, was written between the 5th and 2nd centuries B.C.
It's 700 verses long.
The story of the Gita is a
conversation between Arjuna, a good-guy on one side of the war riding a chariot
into battle, and Krishna, his charioteer who's also a god. Arjuna feels guilty
about having to kill his cousins who are fighting on the other side, and he
expresses these doubts to Krishna, sitting down in the chariot, letting his bow
and arrow slip out of his hand. The result is an intense, beautiful dialogue about
life, death and reincarnation. But the part that interested me most was when
Krishna talked about ego, and "selfless service."
His initial answer to Arjuna's
questions is that it is his dharma to kill his cousins. It wouldn't be immoral
to kill them, because it is a part of the cycle of life and death that exists
for everyone. "For a warrior, nothing is higher than a war against
evil," Krishna counsels. And anyway, even when a body dies, he says, its
soul, or Self, lives on, living forever in future and past, in an eternal cycle
of karma and reincarnation until it is finally released from karma by defeating
ego and materialism and sin. "You were never born; you will never
die," he explains.
The ultimate object of this cycle
is to become immortal and "be united with the Lord." The way to do
this is to "renounce all selfish desires and break away from the ego-cage
of 'I,' 'me,' and 'mine.'" In another place, he says, "Deluded by
identification with the ego, a person thinks, 'I am the doer.'"
Another theme Krishna stresses is
work. "You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work... The
ignorant work for their own profit, Arjuna; the wise work for the world."
This, more than anything else, clashes for me with the stress my culture places
on rewards and achievement.
When I read all this, I was
fascinated by it. It resonated so truly with all the lessons I had been taught
were Hinduism. All the principles I was taught came right out of its
philosophy. The humility asked for by Krishna is simultaneously present and
absent in his followers.
I don't think that the sense of
pride only comes from immigrant cultures like mine. I think it's present in
India too. There is constant religious violence between Hindus and Muslims,
another example of the frenzied, insecure need to uphold whatever you have.
India, as many Indians will readily brag, was once a huge world power, one of
the most advanced cultures on the planet, the discoverer of zero, the creator
of our numeral system, the inventor of chess. I have heard these facts so many
times I know them and a million others by heart, all talking about "how __
India is," how India is "the most __ nation in the world."
But India was colonized by the
British, and wherever its people went, they were put down. They were weaker,
poorer and darker than everyone else, and that had to leave a mark on them. I
don't know if I'm enough of a historian to attribute it to whatever they must
have faced, but it's easy to imagine how all those factors could contribute to
a collective need for self-esteem, that could have resulted in what I
experience today.
When he
wrote this, Gautama Mehta was 15 years old and on the KidSpirit Editorial
Board. His article is reprinted with the permission of KidSpirit
Magazine and can be found here. Gautama Mehta lives in Brooklyn, NY,
and is into writing, music, art, math and social justice.
Follow
KidSpirit on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kidspiritonline
# # #
MikeGhouse
is committed to building a Cohesive America and offers pluralistic
solutions on issues of the day. He is a professional
speaker, thinker and a writer on pluralism,
politics, civic affairs, Islam,
India,
Israel, peace and justice. Mike is a
frequent guest on Sean Hannity show on Fox TV, and a
commentator on national radio networks, he writes weekly at Dallas Morning News and regularly at Huffington
post, The Smirking Chimp and several other
periodicals. His daily blog is www.TheGhousediary.com
