Call to Gather: There is an immense number of gods and goddesses in the Hindu pantheon--330 million by one estimate. Commenting on this, the historian of religion Huston Smith said, "All these faces of God are necessary to flesh out the human soul."[1]

Reading: Responsive Reading #611 from Singing the Living Tradition--"Brahman" from the Bhagavad-Gita

Maybe a people's world-view always flows to a great extent from the place and the cultural tradition in which the people live. You can see, for instance, the awesome beauty and wonder of the unspoiled, pre-Christopher Columbus North American environment breathing through Native American world-views. Ask a Lakota Indian about her spirituality, and you can feel the terrain of the Dakota hills and plains coursing through the words she speaks.

The same is true of early Christianity. Read the New Testament, and you can feel the dust and hot summers and the oppressive, sometimes hopeless political context of tyrannical Roman occupation. You can see the crosses dotting the countryside and feel the quiet desperation of the poor people who lived and toiled in the shadow of the crucifixes. That time and that place breath through the early Christian world-view.

And the same can be said of 1950s main-stream, Protestant religion in the United States. You can see the neat and ordered and homogenous and conventional streets, houses and lives depicted with such stunning force in the movie "Pleasantville" echoed in the neat and ordered theology of the 1950s Main Line church. The world-view was dualistic and black and white: what fit into the neat ordered city and home and church was good; what didn't fit--what stuck out and clashed and was untidy--was bad. Meatloaf: good; originality and creativity: bad. Dad at work and Mom at home: good; Mom working outside the home: bad. Just as with the Lakota Indian or the early Christian, the culture and the landscape of Pleasantville breathes through the religion of Pleasantville.

Well, the same thing is surely true in India. I talked last week about the incredible diversity of topography, climate, history, culture, ethnicity and religion that lies at the heart of India. Another way to say it is that India is a land of paradoxes. India is home to the highest mountains in the world and vast, sea-level plains. India is home to glaciers and deserts and tropical rain forests. India is home to the most polytheistic of the world's religions, yet there are more than a hundred million Indians who are adherents of Islam, the world's most radically monotheistic religion. India is home to indigenous peoples who have been there for 200,000 to 400,000 years[2] and settlers of European descent who conquered the area 3000 or 3500 years ago. India is the home of Mahatma Gandhi, arguably the greatest advocate of non-violence the world has ever known, and the most terrifying nuclear arms race in the world today--a mere fifty years after Gandhi's death.

As much as Pleasantville was black and white, India is ambiguous and paradoxical and gray. But not a dull gray. It is the most colorful gray imaginable--with bright reds and blues and greens and oranges that only as a totality make an ambiguous yet stunningly bright shade of gray. India in its paradoxes and diversities is not a dull gray melting pot; it is, as one Fellowship member suggested in the congregational response last week, a thali--the favorite Indian meal served on a round, metal tray with each succulent, distinctly spiced and colorful gastronomic creation in a separate, little metal bowl. Each dish has its own character and boundary and charm, but together the whole thali is far more than the sum of each individual dish. India is, in the words of Shashi Tharoor, "a singular land of the plural" and a "land of maddening paradoxes."[3] At the heart of India is the central paradox of unity in diversity, the paradox beautifully illustrated by the thali meal.

And not surprisingly, at the heart of India's Hindu theology is the paradox of unity and diversity. Hinduism has an impossibly huge number of individual divinities--330 million by one estimate. Each of these individual gods and goddesses has a distinct story or mythology. Each has a distinct set of rituals and a particular following of people devoted to it and particular holidays that retell its mythology. Each is embodied in one or two or a hundred or a million stones and sculptures and paintings and even in animal and human forms. Some are masculine, some are female, some are androgynous. Some are humanoid, some are animal, some are ethereal. Some are trees and some are stones. The individual gods and goddesses are each so distinctive and unique, it's almost as if there is a distinct, unique religion centered on each one of the 330 million gods. And then, as if that's not enough illustration of manyness and diversity, many of the individual deities themselves express multiplicity. Many are depicted, for example, with multiple heads, eyes and arms. Manyness is a relentless theme in Hinduism.

I've heard that Unitarian Universalism is the Shaeffer Beer of religions: the religion to have when you're having more than one. Well, that label is even more apt for Hinduism. Reflecting the diversity of India's landscape and people and climates, Hinduism's multitude of divinities takes polytheism to the extreme. What a stark contrast with the Western world, where wisdom tends to be found in oneness and unity. In India, wisdom tends to be found in manyness. The scholar Diana Eck notes that the sacred geography of India reflects this opposite viewpoint from the West: Mt. Mehru, the most sacred mountain in Indian mythology--India's equivalent of Mount Sinai or Mount Olympus--is wider at the top than at the bottom. The mountain top is not a point of singularity and uniqueness but is the widest and most diverse place in the cosmos.[4] In Indian mythology, that's where heaven is!

Yet the multiplicity of diverse deities is not the whole story in Hinduism, just as difference and diversity are not the whole story in India. As with India herself, there is in Hinduism recognition of a paradoxical unity underlying the almost infinite diversity. Underlying everything and everyone that exists is the eternal, unchanging, spiritual essence that is called Brahman. Brahman is ultimate reality. Brahman is one. All is unified in Brahman. So ultimately, in this extraordinarily polytheistic religion, God is one. Just as beneath the incredible variety of human beings, humanity is ultimately one. God is many and God is one. There are 330 million gods; there is one God. All of these statements are true in this land of paradox and ambiguity. This isn't some new fad in India: three thousand years ago, this wisdom was articulated in the Rig Veda: "Truth is one; the wise call it by many names."[5]

According to Diana Eck, this paradoxical way of seeing the world is very representative of the Indian perspective: everything that is important is thought of as both a singularity and in the plural.[6] So there are maybe 330 million ways--give or take a few--to view the reality of Oneness, or Brahman. All angles on Brahman are important and ultimately not contradictory. The abundance of gods and goddesses embodies the abundance of ways to see and understand Brahman. Even eternal truth itself comes in many names and variations and forms. This may be the central truth about India E.M. Forster captures in the pivotal scene of his novel A Passage to India: the scene in which something dreadful happens to the English traveler Adela in one of the sacred Malabar caves. What happens to Adela in that cave? Is she, as she alleges afterward, sexually assaulted by the Indian physician Dr. Aziz? Is she overcome by claustrophobia and the haunting echo of the cave? Or did something supernatural happen in that cave? Forster, taking a cue from the manyness of perspective in India, doesn't definitively answer the question. Indeed, he always insisted that he himself didn't really know the answer.[7] India is not the black and white world of Pleasantville. Even Truth itself is considerably more ambiguous and complex.

Hindu polytheism ultimately is about the multiplicity of perspectives, not the number of gods and goddesses. Polytheism enables the Hindu to honor the multitude of angles on the vast Oneness that underlies and unifies everything. Hindu polytheism is about the language we humans use to name divinity and the images we use to picture divinity. Hindu polytheism also points to the truth that we are forever bound by the human limitations of understanding and imagination in how we name the divinity or oneness that underlies everything. All of our words and labels for the divine and all of our ways of picturing the divine are inadequate. This is why we need 330 million ways of picturing divinity. Only that great of a number begins to get at all of the complexity of divinity. Idolatry in Hinduism is not seeing God in an object, as it is in the West; it's treating a particular image or symbol or understanding as if it alone captures all of God. Idolatry is thinking that our small, shallow language and understanding could ever really capture God.

The divine is so complex and so vast and so pervasive in every part of the cosmos that we humans cannot ever truly comprehend it. One common Hindu way of contemplating the reality of divinity permeating everything is seeing the whole world as contained within the body of the great God Vishnu. There is a story about a sage named Markandeya who wanders the world in Vishnu's body until one day he falls out of the mouth of the sleeping Vishnu. Now he can see the whole of Vishnu from the outside, but it is far too vast and complex for him to comprehend. Mercifully, Vishnu swallows the overwhelmed Markandeya. Now back in the smaller world of 330 million deities, Markandeya gratefully can again see only little pieces of the great Oneness. That smaller world is all he can handle![8]

The paradox of manyness and oneness is not the only paradox central to the Hindu world-view. Here's another paradox: Hinduism is a thoroughly this-worldly religion, and it is thoroughly other-worldly. Hinduism has the reputation at least in the West of being very other-worldly. We picture in our minds, for example, an aged, world-renouncing yogi, dressed in few, tattered clothes, half-starved, hair matted, talking only about release from the endless cycle of birth and death and birth. This image is not inaccurate: it is a part of Hinduism, as is the other-worldly, ethereal sense of the eternal Brahman that underlies everything. Yet Hinduism also is relentlessly this-worldly in so many fundamental ways. Where's the nearest path to the other-worldly eternity of Brahman? In one of the very billions of concrete images representing the 330 million gods and goddesses. The path to Brahman is in the sacred cow chewing its cud and in the stone that embodies a god or the tree that houses a goddess. That's where eternity is. In Hinduism, you can see the other-worldly face to face, up close and personal in the very concrete. Some gods have both the this-worldly and the other-worldly all wrapped up in them. Diana Eck writes that Krishna, for example, is "both ultimate and personal, both universal and particular." Devotees of Krishna worship him as a beautiful baby and a fun-loving, somewhat spoiled impulsive child. They worship him as a friend of village cowherds, and the sensuous lover of young milk-maids. They worship him as lord and king. And they worship him as completely transcendent, the embodiment of the unity of Brahman.[9]

A final paradox I want to share is the recognition in Hinduism that life is full of joy and love and goodness, and life is full of death and hatred and suffering and destruction. Both statements are true at the same time. The great god Shiva embodies this paradox. Shiva and the great Mother Goddess were worshiped as fertility deities 6000 years ago in India.[10] Myths and rituals today continue to celebrate their passionate, erotic, generative love. The cosmos itself springs from their erotic love. They are the Creators. Shiva is also worshipped as the great sustainer of the cosmos, pictured many times in myth and art lovingly holding the small cosmos in his giant hands. And Shiva is worshiped as the great Destroyer of the world, inflicting death on the cosmos and its inhabitants. Shiva is all three--Creator, Sustainer, Destroyer--all at the same time.

As I contemplate the paradoxes of India and Hinduism, a favorite image lingers. It is the oft-reproduced image of Shiva doing a joyous, wild, passionate, celebrative, life-giving dance--kind of a Snoopy dance with eroticism. The place of the dance presents the paradox: Shiva is dancing in a burial ground. The image itself is a paradox in so many levels: not only the paradox of dancing in the place of death, but also that this great god is hanging out in the most polluted of all places, a place higher caste Hindus avoid unless they have to go to witness the cremation of a loved one. They would certainly never go to the burial grounds because it's a cool place to dance. Joy and love and passion and creation and death and suffering and destruction are all bound up in the incredible mystery we call life: that's what this image reveals. Here is a profound truth about life in this beautiful, imperfect universe.

Copyright 2000 by Roger B. Bertschausen. All rights reserved.

[1]From the Bill Moyers video "The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith: Hinduism and Buddhism" (Newbridge Communications, 1996).
[2]Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 5.
[3]Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millennium (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1997), pp. 321, 350.
[4]Diana L. Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), p. 59.
[5]Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Other People's Myths (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1988), p. 54.
[6]Eck, p. 60.
[7]O'Flaherty, p. 64.
[8]Eck, p. 78.
[9]Eck, pp. 46, 98-99.
[10]Wolpert, pp. 7-8.