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| SmartSurat # Hinduism | |
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| SmartSurat # Hinduism | |
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The Move Towards Theism |
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Whilst Vedantic thought gave to subsequent Hinduism the substratum of most of its philosophical thought as well as many basic beliefs, the level of its metaphysics must have barely touched the ordinary village people for whom a totally transcendent Absolute such as Brahman must have seemed far less appropriate than the important village deities. We have little evidence to suggest continuity of tradition in village life, simply because it was the official Aryan ideas and rituals which were eventually committed to written form. And while it is almost certain that indigenous religious beliefs and practices must have been accommodated by the
Aryans themselves, the evidence for exactly which aspects is uncertain. But it is likely that such aspects as worship of divinity in female form continued at the village level and that the more theistic beliefs in personal deities obtained widely in village life. The evidence from the Svetasvatara, Katha and Isa Upanisads suggests that theism, albeit of a different kind to that which obtained in the earlier Vedic period, began to emphasize the saguna aspects of Brahman; the manifest aspects of deity. It is this manifest dimension to divinity which flowered into the whole expression of devotional Hinduism and a theism which allowed for an intensely personal! relationship between the individual and the divine. The trend towards monism which was witnessed in the Upanisadic scriptures of the Vedanta gave way to an overt dualism between God and humankind, and it was this dualism which allowed for expressions of theism ranging from simple anthropomorphism to highly transcendent perspectives of the divine. No longer was the Absolute indescribable. In its manifest form there was no end to attributes it Could be given and no end to the number of divine manifestations which emanated from it. It is devotional Hinduism, therefore, which is characterized by the multiplicity of deities which we associate with Hinduism today. |
