Every religion involves some underlying conflict between the demands of meditation on the one hand and ritual on the other. While both may be shaped around a similar religious motif, they involve different aspects of religious performance. Ritual is public and communal, while meditation is personal and private on its deepest level. The nature of the required ritual and the manner of the necessary meditation will differ from one religious belief to another, but both serve similar ends in bringing the individual on the one hand closer to the community of believers and on the other closer to God, the central deity, or the central tenet of the religion.
Hinduism is one of the oldest religions in the world and ranks as the third largest today, with 650 million Hindus worldwide, the majority in India where the religion was born. Hinduism was not founded by any one individual but is rather the result of the coming together of many religious beliefs and philosophical schools. Hinduism was regarded as the religion of all non-Muslims. Early Hinduism combined the religions of the Indus Valley in northwestern India with that of Aryan invaders from Persia. Hinduism later developed a more solid foundation through the writing and interpretation of the great Hindu scriptures (Wangu 6-8).
The doctrines of Hinduism are found in the four primary vedas in the vedic literature. The oldest are the Yajur-veda, Rig-veda, Sama-veda, and the Atharva-veda. There then follow the Brahmanas and the Aranyakas. Finally, there are the Upanishads, Vedanta-sutra, the Bhagavad-gita and Mahabharata, the Puranas, and the Ramayana (Nanda-nandana 23). The Upanishads, presented for the continued spiritual progress of the individual, are a collection of 108 philosophical dissertations, though there are over 100 other compilations that have been made of other so-called Upanishads which are not actually part of the primary group. The following eleven are con...