Sanatana

It is Sanatana that emerged as the first religion on the earth; it is a set of divine law, or rather the eternal law. The first civilization that emerged on the earth was through the people of Caucasian race that lived in the Central Asian Steppes called Airyan Vaeja, the ancient homeland of the Airya who were the Indo-European-speaking people. Vedic texts are the oldest surviving evidence of Proto-Indo-European culture that originated all, Indo-Iranian, Celtic, Norse, Greek, Germanic and Roman cultures. Indo-Iranians and Indo-Aryans share the same ancestors and belong to the Indo-European family of nations and lived as pastoralists on the Southern Russian steppes, to the east of Volga. Their society was divided into three main groups: priests, warriors and herdsman. From the fourth to the third millennium BC the Proto-Indo-Iranians forged a significant religious tradition that has influenced their descendants, the Brahmans of India and the Zoroastrians of Iran. The two groups were very likely separated around the third millennium BC and linguistically became two distinct groups, the Indians and Iranians.

It is Aryans who developed Sanatana or the Vedic religion. Later about 6000 thousand years back, they migrated into Indian subcontinent with the new civilization called Sindhu Valley Civilization (circa 2700 to 1750 BCE) that provides convincing evidences of the starting points of Hinduism as the statues of God Shiva, Shakti and a priest have been found in the cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. This religion was further developed when the Aryans finally settled as farmers on the Ganges Plain after c. 1100 BCE. Hinduism is the fusion of various Indian cultures and traditions like the Indo-Aryan and Harappan cultures and civilization, Sramana and Dravidian traditions and tribal religions of neolithic times. Thus we may call Hinduism/ Sanatana the first religion of the world.

All religions sank into the sky of time, yielding to a newly formed faith and culture, but Sanatana is still shining like the North Star because like education it is the basis of democratic society. Sanatana is the collection of many sacred texts of laws discovered and modified by generations of maharishies and thinkers. In fact, it is more of a traditional way of life, having always existed, than a religion; or if you call it a religion, it is the basis of a democratic society. It is thus the creation of a complex tradition that includes numerous interrelated religious doctrines and practices with some common characteristics but without any unified system of beliefs and practices. It also encompasses a number of major and sub-sects with regional variations, which, though seem to have distinct religious traditions with specific theologies and ritual traditions, reach a common end. The Hindu worldview is based on the doctrines of samsara (the cycle of rebirth) and karma, that is, one's actions and thoughts directly determine one's current life and future lives. Some of us hold that the cosmos is populated by numerous gods and goddesses who actively influence the world and also interact with humans. The tradition is typically divided into four major sects: Shaiva (devotees of the god Shiva), Vaishnava (devotees of the god Vishnu), Shakta (devotees of the goddess), and Smarta (those who believe in the essential oneness of panchtatva or Shanmata, five or six deities as personifications of the Supreme). Sanatana teaches eternal duties, such as honesty, non-violence, purity, goodwill, mercy, patience, forbearance, self-restraint, generosity, and asceticism, that the followers of any class, caste or sect have to follow. It is because of this, Sanatan is non-sectarian. It is like Ganga that cleans every dirt; it like chandan that soothes every stress. Nomadic rivers, to flow to the eternity, ultimately find home in it.

All living things are flexible whether it is a plant, a man or an animal. Dead is dry and not able to be bent whether it is a dry twig, a corpse or a river. Sanatana is a living religion like a stem on which the flowers of a happy and optimistic life and leaves of all-round development grow. Politics with all its reptilian venom often tries to infect it but it always remains cool and fresh like the sandalwood. It is the day and not the night; it is love and not hatred; it is divine and not earthly; it is pure and not contaminated.  

The holy books of Sanatana are not the collections of superstitious stories about God and moral scruples as they often consider them to be. They are the history books consisting of life and work of great persons, or rather of the incarnations of God. They teach us high levels of politics, humanities, social science, physics, maths, astronomy, chemistry, philosophy, ethics, philology, medical science etc, shed light on almost all aspects of life on the earth and speak of the immutable mystery of the universe and also of the mysticism of human nature. Now that they are the accumulations of experience and knowledge acquired over a long period of time and across a broad range of learning, they attract the attention of the elite rather than of the common people. 

The Sanskrit term Sindhu, the name of the river Sindhu, is the origin of the word Hindu. Once, Parsa (now a province of Iran known as Pars) was the kingdom of all the Iranian and Aryan kingdoms, which came to be known as Persian Empire, the largest of that time. This empire was on the other side of the river Sindhu. Persians began to call this river Indus instead of Sindhu. They then named the people living on this side of the river as Hindus. Slowly this Persian word Hindu migrated to Arabic and became the part of it in a slightly changed form as al-Hind; then from Arabic this word travelled to the European languages with the same meaning. By the 13^th century, Hindustan, the land of Hindus, emerged as the alternative name of India and towards the end of 18^th century European merchants began to use Hindu to refer to the followers of Indian Religions. Thus Hindu, Hindustan and Hinduism became the popular word across the world.  Hinduism comes from the tribal religions of Mesolithic and Neolithic times and travelling through all the ages of the development of civilizations, it has arrived to the present day with about one billion followers as the third largest religion after Christianity and Islam.

Just as you understand an idea or a thought by reading a sentence made up of letters that has a symbolic shape, so you understand of Shiv and other gods by looking at their sculptures. They work like letters and give abstract thought about God. Now it is for you how you take them. The sculpture of Shiv represents the universe as the shape of the universe and Shiv sculpture are alike. The stone sculptures in a temple help us understand God. A teacher teaches his young students with the help of a picture book but an advanced learner understands without its help, simply because the images of things to be learnt are already present in his mind. However, none can learn anything without having a real or imaginary image formed in the mind. Since most people don’t understand the laws of nature, our ancient thinkers adopted symbols as an easy way for them to be au fait with those laws. They also linked different things to religious beliefs in order to persuade people to follow rules established by them. For example, the water of Ganga is good for health so they called its water nectar and related this river to the divinity and thus succeeded in compelling them to make use of it.”

The Creation is based on three eternal processes: the birth, the survival and the end. Now that the working agent for the processes is energy which is also considered to have female characteristics, our ancient thinkers modelled the icons of three Mahadevies to represent it in its three different roles. But when they thought that the everlasting and senseless parts of the energy engaged in the three different jobs could do nothing unless they were operated by something that knew what to do and not to do and found them violating no law, though they had been able to, they continued the search and found a great mind controlling and running them. They then contrived the idols of two Mahadevas to symbolize that great mind. The first of the Mahadevas is called Sadashiv, the husband of the two similar Mahadevies called Maa Durga, who was witnessed by the thinkers as a big blast, creating universes, and Mahakali as a black thing in the centre of universes, devouring everything which was needful. Now the things that a universe is made of are interdependent and therefore useful; and all that is useful has value. Then everything that is valuable is wealth and wealth is called Mahalaxami, the third of the Mahadevies and the consort of Narain, the second of the Mahadevas, who like a king rules the universes and enforces unalterable laws favourable to the entities in terms of their survival and lust for life. Thus the idols of gods and goddesses are personified as natural and paranormal phenomena.

The entities that make a universe take shape and grow and in doing so they need something to live on. This need is the mother of business which is symbolized as Bhagwan Ganesh. Now then, you might think different things have different requirements, but a set of entities in which members have similar characteristics may share the same thing. Moreover, there are numerous groups of related species, each with a large number of members, in the universe. Such members often try to achieve the same sorts of things the same time, and as a result make competitors or rivals. Now where there are rivals, there is clash and war. Mahaprabhu Hanuman Ji is the god of war. Business and war are the functional outcomes of the universe, so Hanumanji Maharaj and Bhagwan Ganesh are considered as the sons of Mahadevas and Mahadevies. Since they bring forth change and this function involves both power and wisdom, they are not only prominent gods but also considered as the most powerful and intelligent of all gods. Those who love them and yield to them absolutely enjoy prosperity and success.

There are two schools of the Vedanta: Dvait and Advat. The Dvait sect of philosophers believes in the existence of things as we see or feel them and maintain that the Supreme Being with human attributes is responsible for everything that happens in the universe. They therefore worship idols. The Advait School of Meditation believes that there is nothing other than Brahma and what we see or experience through our senses is all false information and it is through Nirvikalp Samadhi, a sense of oneness with the universe, that we can know the ultimate reality. Since the non-dualistic philosophers of Vedant dismiss the perception formed by the mind that relates one thing with the other to know about the universe, they teach the way to enter the superconscoius state where one can see nothing but Brahma, the indistinguishable whole. They, however, consider Brahma to be conscious. The supreme consciousness of His is called Srashvati who is generally assumed as the wife of Brahma. Now you must have known why our temples don’t have idols of Brahma and Srashvati.

Gududev Shankara was born about 788 C.E. and at rest at the young age of 32. In this short life span, what he did is impossible for the people of many generations. He travelled the whole country to revive Sanatana, establishing four Peethas on the four edges of it: Sringeri in the South, Jagannath in the East, Dwarika in the West and Badrikashram in the north. He believed in Vedant philosophy and Strict Monism was his doctrine as he argued that it is true we, through our senses, experience the continuous process of Brahma’s creation of phenomenal universes with worlds and planets in which both sentient and insentient originate, grow and end up, but this form of Brahman is illusory. Brahman, the impersonal God or the universal soul is without attributes, characteristics or shape and form. There is nothing that is not identical to something else. In fact, our minds are customised to a particular setting which enables us to see indistinguishable Brahman having different things and by separating us from the rest causes us to live in fear and confusion. He showed that we can recognize monism by meditation and finally obtain salvation, a life without human worries. The quintessence of his philosophy is 'Brahma Satyam Jagan Mithya Jivo Brahmaiva Na Aparah ' Brahman is absolute and therefore real; the world as we find in our everyday life is unreal; and there is no difference between an individual soul and Brahman.

The identity of things is possible only when each one of them is placed by the side of something different or opposite to it. This is why all human individuals are unique. The universe would not go if all the things were the same. The day alone could do no better than it does with the night. If everything tasted just the same, we could not enjoy our meal so well. In the same way, if all the religions had the same characteristics, there would be no conflict and less activity on the earth. Conflict is the mother of activity which helps the world change. While developing humanity on the earth, Providence thought that a passive religion cannot accelerate human mind and this is why He inspired the humanity to form a few more religions with aggressive nature. 

Indo-Aryans were pastoralists who formed semi-migratory groups herding their cattle, sheep and goats on limited areas on foot with help from dogs. Their society was divided into three main groups: priests, warriors and herdsman. Since each group was dependent on the other, there was a perfect harmony between them. Slowly their civilizations developed and there arose one more branch of work, following which, about three thousand years back, the caste system came into being. There was still no concept of any caste being low or high, nor were the classes based on family origin. The classical Hinduism started from 200 BCE and lasted for 1300 years afterwards, but India did not witness any sort of bitterness between the four main divisions of Hindu society.

Islam came to Indian subcontinent in the early 7^th century with the advent of Arab traders but no sectarian strife resulted until 1100 CE. The British invaded India by a divide-and-conquer strategy. They promoted religious, ethnic and cultural divisions among Indians. Slowly their policies entered into the intellectual realm and Hindus came to believe these divisive ideas. Thus the society of India underwent the divide between high and low castes and between different religious and cultural groups for a long period of 900 years.

India came to democratic rule in 1947 after a series of governments of foreign rulers. Unfortunately, the new democratic structure continued the same policy of divide and rule. Moreover, it is not only India that has been prey to sectarian politics, but the violence across the world is the result of international politics. It is not the various religions that have the narrow and intolerant fundamentalist view rather it is the politics that makes their followers so. We see different religious show off every year – just think who is behind them. If it is not the political parties, who else then? 

 - Ramesh Tiwari