Right from the beginning, Hindu texts and practices tell of the simultaneous existence of polytheism and a broader belief in the ultimate oneness of the divine—not exactly monotheism, but a unitary substratum supporting a vigorous polytheism. And yet there has been from time to time an angry debate, in which some Hindus find it insulting to be called polytheists. The answer to this paradox lies in the history of Hinduism.
To the question, ‘Is Hinduism monotheistic or polytheistic?’ the best answer is, ‘Yes’ (which is actually the answer to most either/or questions about Hinduism). Not only have elements of both theologies been woven through Hindu texts for thousands of years, but different factions have argued passionately for one view and against the other during this entire period, and the issue still raises Hindu hackles today. The force of the passion comes from the political issues that have often driven this question, particularly since the time of the British Raj and now again in the Age of the Internet.
KATHENOTHEISM IN THE RIG VEDA
Hindu texts began with the Rig Veda (‘Knowledge of Verses’), composed in northwest India around 1500 BCE; the first of the three Vedas, it is the earliest extant text composed in Sanskrit, the language of ancient India. At first glance, it would seem to be unequivocally polytheistic: there are certainly many gods. Indra is the king of the gods and the god of rain (much like his Greek and Roman cousins Zeus and Jupiter); Varuna the god of the heavenly vault and moral law (related to the Greek Ouranos); Agni the god of fire (cf. the Latin ignis, and the English ‘ignite’); and so forth. Vividly anthropomorphized, these gods are like us, in fact, more so, and understand our appetites and desires since they want what we do—things like physical love, wealth, fame and praise. Each individual worshipper would know, and might use, several different poems to different gods. Always, there was an awareness of the multiplicity of the gods. At time of war or drought, for instance, one prayed to Indra; and in a sacrifice, one invoked Agni (the sacrificial fire). We can detect in the Veda both what might be called internal polytheism (one person worshipping several gods) and communal polytheism (several people worshipping several gods and respecting, or at the very least acknowledging the existence of, one another’s gods).
But the polytheism of Vedic religion sometimes functioned as a kind of serial monotheism that the Vedic scholar Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900) named ‘henotheism’ or ‘kathenotheism’, the worship of a number of gods, one at a time, regarding each as the supreme, or even the only, god while one is talking to him. Thus, one Rig Vedic poem will praise a god and chalk up to his account the credit for separating heaven and earth, propping them apart with a pillar, but another Vedic poem will use the same words to praise another god:
To the unknown creator: ‘He by whom the awesome sky and the earth were made firm, by whom the dome of the sky was propped up …’ [10.121.5]
To Soma: ‘He who is the pillar of the sky …’ [9.74.2]
To Tvastri: ‘He measured apart the two realms of space … and fixed them in place with undecaying pillars.’ [1.160.4]
To Varuna: ‘He stretched out the middle realm of space … placed the sun in the sky.’ [5.85.2]
To Vishnu: ‘Vishnu, who has measured apart the realms of the earth, who propped up the upper dwell-place.’ [1.154.1]
In addition, each god would have characteristics and deeds that were his alone: no one but Indra kills the demonic serpent of drought (Vritra), for instance.
Bearing in mind the way in which the metaphor of adultery has traditionally been used by monotheistic religions to stigmatize polytheism (‘whoring after other gods’), and used by later Hinduism to characterize the love of god (as in the Bengali tradition of Krishna and Radha), we might regard this attitude as a kind of theological parallel to serial monogamy, or, if you prefer, open hierogamos: ‘You, Indra, are the only god I’ve ever worshipped; you are the only one.’ ‘You, Varuna, are the only god I’ve ever worshipped; you are the only one.’ ‘You, Draupadi, are the only woman I’ve ever loved; you are the only one.’ ‘You, Subhadra [or Chitrangada, or Ulupi], are the only woman I’ve ever loved; you are the only one.’ This made possible a kind of non-hierarchical pantheon; the attitude to each god was hierarchical (‘You are the best’), but the various competing claims of supremacy cancelled one another out, so that the total picture was one of equality: each of several was the best.
The idea of ‘the [only] one’ as applied to several different members of a polytheistic pantheon also appears in some of the later verses of the Rig Veda: ‘They call it Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni, and it is the heavenly bird that flies. The wise speak of what is One in many ways; they call it Agni, Yama, Matarishvan.’ [1.164.46] And ‘The One’ is neuter, not male nor female: ekam sad vipra bahu vadanti. Neuter, like brahman (the impersonal Absolute). Not masculine, like Vishnu.
VEDANTIC MONISM
The Atharva Veda too, a fourth Veda composed around 900 BCE, asked how many gods there might be: ‘Who and how many were those gods who fastened together the chest and neck of the Primeval Male? How many fixed his breasts? Who formed his elbows? How many joined together his ribs and shoulders?’ [10.2.4]
To this polytheism question (‘How many?’) of the Atharva Veda, the Upanishads, philosophical texts composed from around the fifth century BCE, suggested a different answer. The gods were often called ‘The Thirty-Three’. But one of the earliest Upanishads mocked this number with a dialogue in which, in response to the pupil’s repeated question, ‘But how many gods are there, really?’ the increasingly impatient teacher replies, first, ‘Three hundred and three, and three thousand and three,’ then, ‘Thirty-three,’ then, ‘Six,’ then, ‘Three,’ then, ‘Two,’ then, ‘One and a half,’ and finally, ‘One.’ This ‘One’ is the emblem not of monotheism but of Upanishadic monism, which assumes that all living things are elements of a single, universal being (often called brahman), reached by individual meditation, a philosophy often contrasted with the polytheistic world of group sacrifice to multiple gods. An image often used to characterize the relationship between the individual soul and brahman is that of salt dissolved in water. ‘Thou art that [tat tvam asi]’, the Upanishads insist.
The doctrine of the Upanishads is also sometimes characterized as pantheism (in which God is everything and everything is God) or, at times, panentheism (in which God encompasses and interpenetrates the universe but at the same time is greater than and independent of it). And as the Upanishads are ‘the end of the Vedas’ (Vedanta), Upanishadic philosophy is also called Vedanta. These Vedantic doctrines view the very substance of the universe as divine, and view that substance and that divinity as unitary.
The vague monism of the Vedas was, thus, sharpened by the more systematized Vedantic monism of the Upanishads. The term ‘Vedanta’ later came to be applied to the philosophy of Non-Dualism (that is, the doctrine that there is no distinction between the soul and brahman), particularly with respect to the Shaiva philosopher Shankara (788-820 CE), whose teachings may have been buoyed by a need to respond to the monotheist philosophies of the great proselytizing religion, Islam, which arrived in India around the middle of the seventh century CE. (Shankara’s competitors argued that he championed monism because he was so stupid that he could only count to one.)
Vedantic monism stands in contrast both with Vedic polytheism and with the sort of monotheism that posits a single deity with consciousness and/or a physical form, like some of the deities of the medieval bhakti (devotional) movement. That sort of monotheism, unlike most other forms of Hinduism, did (and does) actively proselytize, and could be doctrinaire, even violently persuasive, at times. The South Indian bhakti authors even mocked their own proselytizing:
A Shaiva saint was a great proselytizer. He converted those of this world by any means whatever—love, money, brute force. One day Shiva came down in disguise to test him, but the devotee did not recognize Shiva and proceeded to convert him, forcing holy ash on the reluctant-seeming god. When his zeal became too oppressive, Shiva tried to tell him who he was, but the baptism of ash was still forced on him. Even Shiva had to become a Shaiva.
~~ On Hinduism -by- Wendy Doniger
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