The Strongest Case for Hinduism

Many Hindus call their tradition Sanatana Dharma, the eternal dharma, and "Hinduism" is an umbrella term for many related traditions of South Asia.¹² Dancing with Siva, a catechism that teaches a monistic form of Shaiva Siddhanta,³ names four main denominations: Shaiva, Shakta, Vaishnava, and Smarta.⁴⁵⁶ Hindu thinkers make their case in more than one way. Classical schools argue formally about how anything can be known,⁷ while devotional and modern teachers give reasons for trust and practice, as items 4 and 5 show.

Items 1 and 3 draw mainly on Advaita Vedanta, the nondualist school of Shankara, with the Mimamsa and Nyaya schools in item 1, and the Sringeri monastery and a Shaiva voice in item 3. Item 2 comes from the Nyaya school of logic. Item 4 gathers Vaishnava, Shaiva, and Shakta voices, and item 5 draws on Swami Vivekananda, a modern teacher rooted in Advaita, beside Smarta and Shaiva sources.⁸ Each item names the schools it speaks for. For how the traditions differ, see the Branches page.

Five reasons Hindu thinkers give

1. The Veda is revealed knowledge

The Mimamsa, Nyaya, and Vedanta schools accept the Veda as a valid source of knowledge.⁷ Shankara, whom the philosopher Neil Dalal calls the preeminent Advaita Vedantin (eighth century CE, by the dating Dalal reports),⁹ holds that it is the way to know what the senses cannot reach. Brahman, ultimate reality, is not an object of the senses, he argues, so perception cannot show whether the world comes from Brahman.¹⁰ In one reading of the Brahma Sutra he offers, Brahman is known as the cause of the world through scripture alone.¹¹

The schools differ on where the Veda comes from. The philosophers Stephen Phillips and Anand Vaidya report that for Mimamsa, the school of Vedic interpretation, the Veda's words were never first spoken by anyone, so they carry none of a speaker's errors. Almost all Nyaya thinkers, they report, hold instead that every sentence has a speaker, and that the Lord (Ishvara) is the Veda's author.⁷

Vedanta teachers give their own account. Ramanuja holds that the Veda is eternal. He describes how, as a great dissolution of the world ends, the supreme Person brings forth the world again and, Having thereupon manifested the Vedas in exactly the same order and arrangement they had had before¹², teaches them to the creator god Hiranyagarbha.¹² Shankara cites an Upanishad's image of the Rig Veda and the other Vedas as breathed forth from the great Being.¹¹

Vivekananda gave a modern form of the argument at the Parliament of Religions in 1893. The Vedas, he said, are spiritual laws, like the law of gravitation, which existed before anyone discovered them. Those who discovered them are called rishis, and Hindus honor them as perfected beings.¹³ Not every Hindu tradition takes this road: the scholar Michael Witzel notes that Virashaivism and many Tantric groups reject the Veda's authority.²

Historians' views: see the Sacred Texts page.

2. Reason infers a maker of the world

The Nyaya school argues that the world points to an intelligent maker. The philosopher Matthew Dasti writes that, from fairly early in its history, Nyaya took it upon itself to defend the existence of God, mainly through arguments from design. The logician Udayana (about 975 CE, in Dasti's dating) put one argument this way: Things like the earth have a maker as their cause, because they are products¹⁴.¹⁴

An earlier Nyaya thinker, Uddyotakara, argued from tools. An axe has no mind, so it cuts only when someone wields it. Matter, atoms, and even karma also lack minds, so they too must be guided by an intelligent cause.¹⁴ Buddhist and Mimamsa philosophers replied that this stretches inference too far, from ordinary products and their makers to a single maker of the world. Nyaya thinkers answered that even everyday reasoning relies in part on inference to the best explanation.¹⁴

Not every theistic teacher accepts this approach. Ramanuja (1017 to 1137 by traditional accounts; 1077 to 1157 in recent scholarship), the leading teacher of the Sri Vaishnava tradition, criticized proofs of God from reason. For him, the philosopher Shyam Ranganathan explains, scripture must be taken on faith before one sets out on the path it describes; proof comes later, as the follower comes to perceive what it teaches.¹⁵

3. The sages knew for themselves

Advaita teachers hold that the deepest truths are meant to be known directly, not only believed. For Shankara, scripture reveals Brahman, but the inquiry does not end with scripture alone. Scripture and intuition both have their place, because intuition is the final result of the enquiry into Brahman¹⁰.¹⁰ The scholar Sangeetha Menon notes that Advaita adds reason and personal experience to scripture to make knowledge of Brahman real.⁸

The Katha Upanishad calls the seeker to this work: Arise! Awake! Having reached the Great Ones (illumined Teachers), gain understanding. The path is as sharp as a razor, impassable and difficult to travel, so the wise declare. (Katha Upanishad 1.3.14)¹⁶

The monastery at Sringeri, one of those that trace their founding to Shankara, describes the goal in the same terms: Liberation (Moksha) is the direct recognition of this eternal oneness¹⁷.¹⁷ Vivekananda told the 1893 Parliament that the best proof a Hindu sage gives about the soul and God is this: I have seen the soul; I have seen God.¹³ The Hindu religion, he said, lies in realizing truth and becoming it, not in struggling to believe a doctrine.¹³ Dancing with Siva, a catechism of one monistic Shaiva school, speaks in the same way, calling Shiva a sacred mystery that can be known in direct communion¹⁸.¹⁸

4. Loving devotion to God

Devotional traditions teach that God receives anyone who comes to him with love. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says: Whoever with devotion offers me leaf, flower, fruit, water, that, presented with devotion, I accept from him whose self is pure. (Bhagavad Gita 9.26)¹⁹ A few verses later, the Gita says that even those it calls of sinful birth, along with women, Vaishyas, and Shudras (the third and fourth of the four classes), reach the supreme goal by resorting to Krishna.¹⁹² Near its end, Krishna promises: Forsaking all duties, come to me as (your) sole refuge. I will release you from all sins. Be not grieved. (Bhagavad Gita 18.66)¹⁹

Ramanuja taught bhakti, loving devotion, as the way to liberation. Ranganathan, summarizing the scholar Robert Lester, reports that Ramanuja's main works stress bhakti as both the beginning and the end of liberation. His followers later debated how far the soul's surrender (prapatti) and God's grace each bring it about.¹⁵

Classical Shaiva poets in Tamil say the same of Shiva. The scholar Mariasusai Dhavamony, describing the poet Appar, writes that without love for Shiva, knowledge of scripture, outward ritual, and asceticism are of no avail for salvation. Among those he quotes is Tirumular, for whom love of God cannot be had without love for all humankind.²⁰

Shakta devotion turns to the Goddess as protector and mother. The Devi Mahatmya, a section of the Markandeya Purana recited at the autumn festival of Durga Puja, tells how the gods, oppressed by the buffalo demon Mahishasura, appeal for help. Their combined anger becomes a mass of light that takes the form of the Goddess, who destroys the demon's armies.²¹ For her devotees, the scholar Rachel Fell McDermott writes, Durga offers worldly enjoyment or liberation, and Kali rescues those who call on her from distress.²²

Historians' views: see the Sacred Texts page.

5. One truth, many paths

Some Hindu teachers argue that the same truth takes different forms for people of different natures. A hymn of the Rig Veda says of the gods' many names: To what is One, sages give many a title (Rig Veda 1.164.46)²³. In the Gita, Krishna says: I serve men in the way in which they approach me. (Bhagavad Gita 4.11)¹⁹

Vivekananda made this the closing argument of his 1893 address. Differences between religions, he said, come from the same truth adapting to different natures: It is the same light coming through glasses of different colours.¹³ On this view, a person is not travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth¹³. He cited a saying he attributed to Krishna, that the Lord is in every religion like the thread through a string of pearls.¹³

Voices from other schools make a similar point. The Sringeri monastery teaches Many forms, one Bhagavan¹⁷: all divine forms show the same Supreme.¹⁷ Smartas, Dancing with Siva reports, choose a preferred deity, each a reflection of the one Brahman.²⁴¹⁷ The Tirumantiram, in a verse Dancing with Siva quotes, says that six faiths all seek the feet of the one God.²⁵

Hindus do not all draw the same conclusion. Dancing with Siva, while stressing a shared heritage, holds that the four denominations differ so much that each is a complete and independent religion⁴. Madhva's Dvaita school holds that God, souls, and matter are forever different, and that souls differ from one another in their inborn natures.²⁶

How other faiths see their own paths: see the guides to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and the Latter-day Saint faith.

The hardest objection: why is one Lord's world so unequal?

If one Lord creates the world, why are its beings so unequal? Shankara states the objection in full. Some beings, such as the gods, the Lord makes highly happy; others, such as animals, highly unhappy; humans sit between. A Lord who made such a world would seem to act from passion and malice, and the pain and death of all creatures would make him cruel.²⁷ Vivekananda put it in modern words in 1893: why does a just and merciful God create one happy and another unhappy, why is He so partial?¹³¹³

This page takes it as the hardest objection because Vedanta poses it to itself. The Brahma Sutra raises it (2.1.34), and Ranganathan notes that every version of Vedanta seeks to interpret that text consistently.¹⁵ Shankara and Ramanuja both set the objection out in full before answering it.²⁷²⁸

Both answer that the inequality comes from beings' own past deeds (karma), not from the Lord. Shankara writes that the circumstance of the creation being unequal is due to the merit and demerit of the living creatures created, and is not a fault for which the Lord is to blame.²⁷ He compares the Lord to rain, which falls alike on rice and barley while each seed grows by its own hidden potential.²⁷

Ramanuja cites the Upanishad's teaching that good works make a person good and bad works make a person bad.²⁸ The Gita has Krishna say: I am alike to all beings; to me none is hateful, none dear. (Bhagavad Gita 9.29)¹⁹

But what of the first creation, before any deeds? Shankara answers that the transmigratory world is without beginning²⁹, so deeds and inequality cause each other like seed and sprout.²⁹ Vivekananda gave the same answer: there must have been causes before birth.¹³ Shankara adds that creation is mere play to the Lord, whose power is unlimited³⁰, and that it belongs to the world of appearance, not the highest reality.³⁰ Ramanuja rejects that last step, defending the reality of individual persons.¹⁵ Madhva traces differences further back, to each soul's inborn nature, with karma as the means that carries it to its end.²⁶

Dancing with Siva, a Shaiva Siddhanta catechism, reports two answers within that school. Pluralist teachers hold that anava (the soul's inborn limitation), karma, and maya, the material of the world, have always existed, so a perfect God did not create the world's flaws. Monistic teachers hold that, seen from higher consciousness, there is no intrinsic evil, and that opposites are the means by which souls mature.³¹ In a verse the catechism quotes, the Tirumantiram calls all of nature, darkness and light alike, the Lord's grace.³¹

Where to go next

The comparison page sets this case beside Christianity's own account: Christianity vs Hinduism. The Strongest Case book series sets each faith's strongest ground beside its hardest objection.