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The Hindus
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The Hindus (edit title/settings)

An Alternative History

by Wendy Doniger (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

From one of the world’s foremost scholars on Hinduism, a vivid reinterpretation of its history An engrossing and definitive narrative account of history and myth that offers a new way of understanding one of the world’s oldest major religions, The Hindus elucidates the relationship... read more

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  • “One medieval Hindu philosophical text defined a great teacher as someone with the ability to grasp both sides of an argument (11).”
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  • The first three classes (Brahmin, Kshatriya, and Vaishya) became more sharply delineated not only from the Shudras (the fourth class, below them) but, now, from a fifth category, Pariahs.
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  • Within Hinduism, the transition was from meditating on the Vedic sacrifice while doing it (in the Brahmanas and early Upanishads) to meditating upon the sacrifice instead of doing it (from the time of the Renunciation Upanishads), a move implicit in the renunciation of the householder life.
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  • Between about 2000 and 1500 BCE, one culture in Northwest India was dying and another was beginning to preserve its poetry. Fade out: Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). Fade in: the Vedas.
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  • The polytheism of Vedic religion is actually a kind of serial monotheism that Müller named henotheism or kathenotheism, the worship of a number of gods, one at a time, regarding each as the supreme, or even the only, god while you are talking to him.
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  • All in all, when we refer to all the disenfranchised castes below the three upper classes known as twice born, it is convenient to designate them by the catchall term of Pariahs (a Tamil word—for the caste that beat leather-topped drums—that finds its way into English) up until the twentieth century and then to call them Dalits.
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  • Where the Rig Veda expressed uncertainty and begged the gods for help, the Brahmanas (mythological, philosophical, and ritual glosses on the Vedas) express confidence that their infallible Vedic verses (mantras) can deal with all dangers.
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  • The development of the idea of merit or karma as something “to be earned, accumulated, occasionally transferred and eventually realized”3 owes much to the post-Vedic moneyed economy.
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  • Three animals—horses, dogs, and cows—are particularly charismatic players in the drama of Hinduism. The mythological texts use them to symbolize power, pollution, and purity, respectively, and link them to three classes of classical Hindu society: Kshatriyas or rulers, particularly foreign rulers (horses), the lower classes (dogs), and Brahmins (cows).
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  • both Vardhamana Mahavira (also called the Jina), the founder of Jainism, and Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, were born into distinguished clans in one of these alternative, nonmonarchical state systems. Such systems fostered greater personal freedom and mobility, nurturing individuals as well as social groups—the trader, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the government official.
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  • Sanskrit texts usually regard women and hunted animals as primary objects of addiction, and the senses that cause addiction are likened to horses; animals often represent both women and the lower classes; the tension between sexuality and renunciation results in an ambivalence toward women as mothers and seductresses; and violence is first addressed largely in the form of violence against animals.
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First Sentence edit see section history

The image of hte man in the mooon whi is also a rabbit in the moon, or the duck who is also a rabbit, will serve as a metaphor for the double vission of the Hindus that this book will strive to present.

Glossary edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Wendy Doniger (Author)

Awards edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • Hindu Myths
  • The Rig Veda
  • Kama Sutra
  • The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was: Myths of Self-Imitation
  • Siva: The Erotic Ascetic (Galaxy Books)
  • The Implied Spider
  • Other Peoples' Myths
  • The Bedtrick

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