SmartSurat  #  Hinduism

Monotheistic trends

The later hymns of the Rug Veda suggest that the search for the source behind the gods themselves was gaining ground and the seeds of a more speculative kind of religious thought had begun to develop. There was always a tendency in the Vedas to blur the distinctive roles of the deities, and there were times when one deity was given the identity of another; Rudra, for example, was the more terrible forms of Agni. But some of the later hymns refer to an indescribable Source such as Tat Ekam, ' That One ', or simply ' That '.  One late Rug Vedic hymn, epitomizes this speculative and metaphysical search for this Source. Basham described it as `one of the oldest surviving records of philosophical doubt in the history of the world, and his translation of the hymn is worth citing in full for its sensitive translation and because the hymn is a superb example of the heights of Vedic thought:      Then even nothingness was not, nor existence. There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it. What covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping? Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomed?      Then there were neither death nor immortality, nor was there then the torch of night and day. The One breathed windlessly and self sustaining. There was that One then, and there was no other.      At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness. All this was only unillumined water. That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing, arose at last, born of the power of heat. In the beginning desire descended on it that was the primal seed, born of the mind. The sages who have searched their hearts with wisdom know that which is is kin to that which is not. And they have stretched their cord across the void, and know what was above, and what below. Seminal powers made fertile mighty forces. Below was strength, and over it was impulse.       But, after all, who knows, and who can say whence it all came, and how creation happened?  The gods themselves are later than creation, so who knows truly whence it has arisen? Whence all creation had its origin, he , whether he fashioned it or whether he did not, he, who surveys it all from highest heaven, he knows - or maybe even he does not know. Wendy O' Flaherty satisfiably says of this hymn:      in many ways, it is meant to puzzle and challenge, to raise unanswerable questions, to pile up paradoxes and this in fact was what the Vedantic period, the end of the Veda, did so well. Vedic deities gradually came to be recognized as different dimensions of One underlying reality - the ground of all being - and this realization led the Vedic poets to come to accept the fusion of all the deities into one (Visvedevah) and to look beyond them to the source of all existence in a very monotheistic way:      Kindled in many a spot, still One is Agni ; Surya is One though high o'er all he shines. Illuminating this. All, still One is Usas. That which is One has into All developed. It would need only the identification of each human being with this ultimate One to become a monistic belief system - something which reaches its peak in Vedantic thought and the last line of this hymn in some ways suggests this identification. Certainly at the end of the Vedas polytheism gave way to monotheism with the gods and goddesses being conceived of as manifestations of one ultimate Absolute. This is well expressed in the following Rug Vedic hymn which states of the One:      They call him Indra, Mitra, Vatuna, Agni and he is heavenly noble-winged Garutmat. To what is One, sages give many a title: they call it Agni, Yama, Matatisvan? The move to see all things emanating from one source - Time, Heat, Water or Desire for example - certainly lays the seeds for the move to monism in Vedantic philosophical thought and while the Absolute as Brahman does not emerge in the Vedas the trend towards its conception is clear. Alongside the Indus valley culture the Aryan religion supplied the other major foundation for later Hinduism. While the complex ritualism of Vedism no longer obtains aspects of it were important enough to have survived to the present day and can be found in the ceremonies of life-cycle rites and many aspects of temple worship. Hindus regard Vedism as the authentic roots of their religion which still contain the eternal wisdom of existence, the timeless truths of the universe. Over the centuries the Aryan religion spread throughout India to Sri Lanka in the far south. The different shades of Hinduism evolved from the interchange of beliefs and practices between the indigenous population and the Aryan people, and with Hinduism's remarkable ability to accommodate different ideas alongside each other rather than assimilate and syncretize them, the many forms of Hinduism evolved.