Thick and Clear Religions

A redated post.

From C. S. Lewis's essay "Christian Apologetics, " found in God in the Dock.

“I have sometimes told my audience that the only two things really worth considering are Christianity and Hinduism. (Islam is only the greatest of the Christian heresies, Buddhism only the greatest of the Hindu heresies. Real Paganism is dead. All that was best in Judaism and Platonism survives in Christianity.) There isn’t really, for an adult mind, this infinite variety of religions to consider. We may [reverently] divide religions, as we do soups, into ‘thick’ and ‘clear’. By Thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of Thick religions. By Clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are Clear religions. Now if there is a true religion it must be both Thick and Clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly. And the only two religions that fulfil this condition are Hinduism and Christianity. But Hinduism fulfils it imperfectly. The Clear religion of the Brahmin hermit in the jungle and the Thick religion of the neighbouring temple go on side by side. The Brahmin hermit doesn’t bother about the temple prostitution nor the worshipper in the temple about the hermit’s metaphysics. But Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. The savage convert has to be Clear: I have to be Thick. That is how one knows one has come to the real religion.”

And you thought Christianity was sexist?

From the Hindu Padmapurana:

There is no other god on earth for a woman than her husband. The most excellent of all the good works that she can do is to seek to please him by manifesting perfect obedience to him . Be her husband offensive in manners debauched, immoral, a drunkard, a gambler live in open sin with another woman a wife should always look upon his as her god . She must on the death of her husband , allow herself to be burnt alive on the same funeral pyre then everyone will praise her virtue . In his presence, she ought always to be cheerful and never show signs of sadness or discontent.

Yet, India has had a female prime minister (as has Islamic Pakistan). America has never had a female President.

Some dialogue on Eastern religions at Richard Dawkins' site

Are religions like Buddhism and Hinduism unacceptable to someone who believes as Dawkins does? Atheists debate that issue here.

Different Hindu conceptions of Moksha or release

Six paths to Moksha

According to Hinduism.

Hinduism and Reality

Is the world of ordinary experience, of living from one moment to the next, going up and going down, illusory? If we saw things the way they really were, would we say that the world of our experience is the real world, or is some other reality real.

One school of Hinduism, Advaita Vedanta, says the is one reality, and it is the spritual reality of Brahman. It is one. The idea that I am a distinct person from you is an illusion. If I go to prison tomorrow, it's not real. If I win the lottery tomorrow, it's not real. Brahman, the true God whom we cannot even define with our words, that's what's real.

A question from a student

According to perhaps the most popular philosophical tradition in Hinduism, Advaita Vedanta, all things are one and distinction between one thing and another, or between God and the world, are not real. Yet through much of Hindu history, one of the defining elements of Hinduism is the caste system, which makes a good deal about the distinctions between persons. If, as Advaita Vendanta teaches, all things are one and all things are God, doesn't it follow that all castes are one and distinctions between them are not real?

The Four Acceptable Goals

The Four Acceptable Goals

I. Although for Hinduism Moksha, release from the cycle of birth and rebirth, is the ultimate goal. However there are four acceptable goals, Kama or pleasure, Artha or power and wealth, dharma or duty, and Moksha or release. Many people are uninterested in “religion” and have other fish to fry. Hindus don’t find this objectionable.
A. Kama or pleasure
1. Consider the response of the typical Christian to the life of a pleasure-seeker. For many Christians, someone who lives this way is living in sin, pursuing the wrong goal for one’s life. Such a life is in need of correction in order to avoid eternal punishment. Even in more secular circles, a life primarily devoted to pleasure-seeking is considered shallow.
2. However, in Hinduism the pursuit of pleasure is not regarded as necessarily a bad thing. Eventually a person will tire of worldly pleasure, to be sure. Enjoyment is, however a permissible goal, and pleasure-seekers need not go without guidance. Everyone’s favorite Hindu sacred book, the Kama Sutra, provides instruction on how to pursue pleasure. Someone who seeks pleasure is not criticized so long has he stays within moral rules. However, in this or some future existence he will come to realize that pleasure is not enough and that he needs something more deeply satisfying.
B. Artha, or power or substance—material possessions and social standing.
1. This is considered a legitimate aspiration and requires toughness and ruthlessness. Once again there is literature to guide people in their pursuit of this goal, the Arthasatras. But once again this is not supposed to be ultimately satisfying.
C. Dharma or duty-Being faithful in doing that duty required of a person based on that persons’s caste, sex, and stage of life. These are spelled out in the Code of Manu.
D. Moksha or release/ Negatively, this goal is release from the cycle of rebirth and redeath, positively it is pure freedom, liberation from both existence of existence and nonexistence. It is sometimes called Nirvana in Hindu literature; for the Buddhist tradition that is what it is always called.

Some more notes on Hinduism

Although Hinduism is referred to as a religion, it is often difficult to figure out just what is or is not Hindu. There is no gate-keeping institution that determines what is or is not a form of Hinduism. The religious perspectives of the Buddha, for example, seem clearly to stem from the Indian religious tradition, but are thought to be a distinct religion. Yet Hinduism seems not to define itself doctrinally. Hinduism seem to be defined as the religion that emerges from the subcontinent of India, and is formed around the Indian social system. (Buddhism’s deviation seems not to have been doctrinal, but rather has to do with the Buddhist rejection of the caste system).

However, there seems to be a certain flavor of character to Hindu religion, having to do with the doctrine of reincarnation. Old joke:

Christian: I’ve been born again.
Hindu: That’s nothing. I’ve been born again, and again, and again, and again, and again!

Exactly why Hinduism acquired the characteristics that it did is mysterious to me. What we know is that there was an indigenous culture in the Indus river valley, and that the Aryans invaded and became dominant. The features of the religion of the Vedas seem to be an unremarkable form of polytheistic religion, not much different from the Greek mythology. Vedic ritual included:

1) Sacrifices to nature gods
2) A hereditary priesthood
3) Outdoor fire altars
4) Memorized Vedic chants
5) Offering of food, drink, and animals to the gods

Yet, there seems to be a strand of critical reflection on this religious heritage even in the original religious writings of the Hindus, the Vedas. Rather than a confident statement about how the world was created, such as the biblical “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”, we instead get a passage about how the universe was formed from the God Purusha. But it is then stated that no one knows how this happed except Purusha, or perhaps, he doesn’t know either!”

The Axis was around 500 B. C. E. This was the time of the Buddha, Confucius, the Hebrew prophets, and the earliest Greek philosophers. In any event, a polytheistic world-view was beginning to be questioned. There were questions about the value of the Vedic sacrifices, and even the belief in many gods. Instead they sought a single divine reality that might be the source of everything. They spent a lot of time alone in the forest contemplating.
Also, these Hindus develops methods of altering consciousness (sitting for long periods of meditation, breathing deeply, fasting, avoiding sexual activity, practicing long periods of silence, going without sleep, using psychedelic plants, and living in dark caves).

The Upanishads were written at this time. The word means “sittings near a teacher” and were filled with teacher-student dialogues.

Six Concepts from the Upanishads

My History of World Religion classes are covering Hinduism, and these central concepts from the Upanishads are central to the Hindu tradition;

Six Concepts from the Upanishads

Brahman-The divine reality underlying all things. It is reality itself, pure consciousness, and bliss. It is the way thing are in the final analysis, when we see reality without illusion (maya). Unlike the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, The Hindu Brahman is not a transcendent creator and sustainer of the world but is the universe itself. It is beyond time and space, hence in the Hindu tradition space and time themselves are only the world as it appears to us, not the world as it is in itself.

Hence for the mainstream philosophical tradition of Hinduism, everything is one and everything is God. If I were to convene class and said “I am God” you would all think I was nuts, because our concept of God is a transcendent creator. In Hinduism no one would raise an eyebrow.

Atman: Called the self or soul, but really the deepest self. It is what is fundamental to me as an individual. However, in the last analysis, the Hindus teach that the deepest self really is God. One can achieve moksha, in some tradition, by realizing that atman is Brahman.

Maya is illusion, the root word is the same as the English root word for magic. The world, for the Hindu, is real but not what it appears to be. (I’m really God, but I appear to need glasses in order to see). It appears to be temporal, but it isn’t. It appears to be material, but it really is spiritual, it appears to be unconscious, but it is conscious. I appear not to have lived before, but I have.

Karma: The moral law of cause and effect. It is in accordance with the law of Karma that my past and future incarnations are determined. A bad life may result in my being reincarnated as a poor person or an animal.

Samsara is the cycle of birth and rebirth. Continuously being reincarnated again and again is considered to be a bad thing. As our reincarnations continue, we long to put a stop to the whole thing, to no longer be reincarnated.

Moksha is liberation from the cycle of birth and rebirth. According to the Upanishads this is the ultimate human goal. (It is not, as we shall see, the only goal worth pursuing.) It involves getting beyond one’s own ego and the limits of being an individual. Imagine what your day is like. You wake up, you want to get to work on time, you hope your boss is happy with your work and that you are successful, you come home and hope your relationships with your family go well, If you are dating, you hope that those relationships work out and you don’t have to break up, etc. But if you reach moksha you get beyond such concerns. Detaching yourself from pleasure and pain also helps lead to freedom.