World Traditions · India · Hinduism · Vedas · Dharma · Moksha

Hinduism — The Eternal Religion

The world's oldest living religion — the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, and the many paths to liberation

Hinduism is not a single religion but a family of traditions — the world's oldest living religious complex, with roots reaching back at least 5,000 years to the Indus Valley civilisation and the Vedic culture that followed it. It encompasses extreme asceticism and passionate devotion, rigorous non-dualist philosophy and exuberant polytheism, temple ritual and forest meditation. What holds it together is less a shared creed than a shared library (the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, epics) and a shared sense of dharma — right living in alignment with cosmic order.

The Four Paths

Ways to Liberation

Hindu philosophy recognises four primary paths to moksha (liberation): Jnana yoga — the path of knowledge, discriminating the real from the unreal until only pure awareness remains; Bhakti yoga — the path of devotion, dissolving the ego in love of the divine; Karma yoga — the path of selfless action, doing without attachment to results; and Raja yoga — the royal path of meditation and inner discipline. Most practitioners combine elements of all four.

The Vedas

The four Vedas — Rigveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda, Atharvaveda — are the oldest scriptures of Hinduism, composed between 1500 and 500 BCE. They consist of hymns, ritual formulas, and philosophical speculation. The Upanishads, the Vedas' philosophical culmination, contain the non-dual teachings that became Advaita Vedanta.

The Bhagavad Gita

The most widely read of all Hindu scriptures — a dialogue between the warrior Arjuna and his charioteer Krishna (revealed as the supreme divine) on the eve of battle. Its teachings on dharma, karma yoga, and the nature of the self synthesise Hindu philosophy into 700 verses of extraordinary compression and power.

The Three Gunas

Hindu cosmology describes all of manifest reality as composed of three qualities (gunas): tamas (inertia, darkness), rajas (activity, passion), and sattva (clarity, harmony). Understanding one's predominant guna and working toward sattva is a core diagnostic tool of Hindu psychology and medicine (Ayurveda).

Atman and Brahman

The central insight of Advaita Vedanta: the individual self (atman) is ultimately identical with the universal ground of being (Brahman). "Tat tvam asi" — That thou art. The experience of separation is maya (illusion); liberation is the recognition of one's already-existing identity with the whole.