Major Religions of India

This research examines the major religions of India, notably Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Zoroastrianism. The research will discuss major features of the religions, including historical background, key concepts, rituals, and relevance to social organization in India, as well as the distribution of population and elements of religious diversity in countries where Indian religions are found.

Religion, with the Hindu religion predominant, emerges as the decisive element in all areas of Indian history and contemporary society. To see why Hindu culture predominates in India, claiming some 700 million adherents and accounting for 80% of Indians' religion ("Hinduism"), it is important to know that its history goes back to about 1500 BCE. It was in that period that the highly developed agricultural civilization in the Indus River Valley of northern India became dominated by nomadic peoples known as Aryans. Evidence exists of Indus worship of a mother goddess, as well as "phallic gods, sacred bulls, and in one case a deity in perhaps a yogic meditation posture" (Ellwood 61). The Aryan peoples possessed the Vedas, or basic scriptures of Hinduism, plus a strong priestly class, led by the Brahmins, and strict rituals, designed to hold together the order of the cosmos (Ellwood 61, 65-6). The Hindu pantheon seems to have incorporated various deities of the Indus and Aryan peoples, with the god Brahman, "the One beyond and in all these forms and changes" (Ellwood 69), expressing the unc

g a higher spiritual consciousness. The first stage of life is student, or brahmacharya (Kinsley 94), during which one learns the social order. The second ashrama is householder, or grihastha, which implies marriage, family, and good citizenship (Kinsley 94, 160). The third stage, called forest dweller or vanaprastha, refers to "spiritual retreat" to yoga and meditation. The fourth stage of Hindu life--reached by few--is sannyasi, identified with the wandering mendicant ascetic, typically of the highest Brahmin caste, who has no material or family attachments and is therefore considered free of preoccupation with material life (Kinsley 189). Ellwood cites two lines of Hindu observance--the renunciant, which "interiorizes" spiritual experience, and the devotionalist, or bhakta, which engages in elaborate temple ritual and piety toward such gods as Krishna, Shiva, Shakti, and Kali (87-8). Hindu spiritual teaching was traditionally conducted not by the text, for India was largely illiterate, but by itinerant priests. In the sixth century BCE, two such priests developed new religions in response to Hinduism. One was the Buddha, although Buddhism by 500 CE had largely migrated out of India into the rest of Asia. The other was Mahavira

Category: Philosophy - M