Another name for Hinduism is Sanatan Sanskriti or Sanatan Dharma. The meaning of Sanatan is that one who always stands the test of time, which never gets old, in which the untruth that came in the flow of time gets bleached and reaches the sediment and the truth flows continuously. Then when, how and why did this misconception arise? What were the reasons for those misconceptions? To know this we have to look into the past. Hindu society has been battling with foreign- heretic invaders for more than 1000 years. But it was propagated that we were slaves continuously and the truth is that we were fighting.
Sometimes we lose, sometimes we win, but we have never surrendered, we are not bowed down, broken and lost. And whenever we got the opportunity, we left no stone unturned in uprooting these foreign-religious forces with their roots and core. There is no such part of the country, no such province, where these invaders have not faced resistance and defiance. This was the reason that in front of the storm of Islam, only we Hindus were able to protect our identity, our culture, our values of life. Fight and fight a lot!
We Hindus laid down our lives to protect our religion and culture. This ideological struggle of civilization for the welfare of the world continues even today. Yes, in independent India it is a bit weak. Because after independence, the hands in which the power of the country and the dynasty in whose hands came later, they were western coloured.
There was a sense of Eclectism in them. They considered themselves to be Hindus by accident. They did not understand and recognize the original nature and self of India. And the work of itching in leprosy was done by leftists and pseudo secularists. They detached the young generation from the ritual roots of the country with great planning and crookedly in honey-coated ways. Not only did they allow to develop the understanding of enemy and friend, the understanding of right-balanced history but also conspiratorially adapted them to think in a certain direction. They started looking at the Indian knowledge-tradition i.e.
Hindu knowledge-tradition with suspicion or inferiority. It was explained to them that whatever is the superiority, the prestige, everything is given by the West. We are a backward and retrograde society that harps in front of snakes, dances around trees, worships stones-mountains-rivers. The scientific-practical side behind all this was deliberately hidden from them. The root cause of the misconception is this alien-reliant-paradoxical, self-respect-less vision of the post-independence era, which unfortunately is being nurtured even today. If this ignorance is dispelled and the realization of self, self and eternal truth is made, then all kinds of misconceptions will automatically go away. Ignorance is the cause of confusion and knowledge is the only remedy.
The question arises, then what is Hindutva? Hindutva is a way of life, more than that, the life-view of seeing the same truth, one ultimate principle, the conscious being in the entire creation. Hinduism has contemplated man and the entire universe in totality. He did not consider man limited only by body, mind, intellect, but he discovered his spiritual being beyond that. The expansion of that spiritual being from individual to population is the ultimate goal of us Hindus. According to Hindu thought, every person – family, clan-lineage-community (fraternity), society, nation, world, is connected with the universe in a sense of attachment. It is interconnected with each other. The research of that interrelationship and the subsequent self-realization is the salvation or the ultimate truth in our view. We want to achieve and assimilate that oneness that pervades the entire past. Hindu philosophy holds that the soul and the Supreme Soul are one. Due to ignorance and ego, there appear to be two beings of both, which we have called Maya. While contemplating the
Atma-Parmatma, our sages and saints explained – “Atma is the form of Satchidananda, it is formless, indifferent, egotism, eternal and God is also the form of Satchidananda, formless, indifferent, egotism, infinite. “Since two cannot be infinite, both are one. According to the mathematical formula, adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing infinity with infinity gives the result infinity. That is, we considered the soul as a part of the Supreme Soul. And we did not halt here, but we saw the same truth, the same energy, the same God in all matter-conscious. Conceptualized for both to become tad-like. ‘Sarvam Khalvidam Brahm’, ‘Yatra Pinde, Tat Brahmande’, ‘Atmavat Sarvabhuteshu’ were our great words and life-mantras. We set the goal of Purushartha-Chaturtya of Dharma-Artha-Kama-Moksha. We considered Dharma as the foundation but did not neglect arth and kama. Rather, a Hindu becomes worthy of salvation only after passing through them. At the same time, the Bible considered Man to be a ‘product of sin’. The Old Testament describes “Man is born out of sin.” We do not consider man to be a child of sin. Those who teach us the lesson of science, why don’t you ever take a peep into your pocket! We have a belief- ‘Vayam Amritsya Putraah’. We are the nectar-sons i.e. children of God, part of him, pure-buddha-conscious being.
Expansionist-supremacist Islam only imagines happiness after man’s death. For him, this earth is not heaven. Rather, he spends his worldly life irritatingly for some other life with the concept and dream of an aerial-imaginary paradise in his mind. The ‘God’ of Christianity or ‘Allah’ of Islam resides in the seventh heaven, he never descends to earth. His form is different from our ‘God’. If anyone there declares himself to be a part of God or puts Nar and Narayan on the same plane, he will be punished with blasphemy. His punishment is the death penalty. That’s where we made a public declaration of ‘Aham Brahmasmi’ or ‘Tattvamasi’. We begin the journey of life to reach the height from Nar to Narayan. In our thinking-tradition, God also incarnates in human form and considers him as his good fortune. It is said in Vishnu Purana-
“Gayanti Deva: Kill Geetkani Dhanyastu te Bharat Bhumi Bhage,
Swargapavargaspad hetubhute bhavanti bhuyah purushah surattvat.” Our deities also sing this song, “Blessed are those who were born on the land of Bharat. This land is more than heaven, there one can do the sadhana of salvation by leaving heaven.
Our concept of religion is also not limited to any particular worship or system of worship. Rather, the worship or devotion method is a means for us to keep our mind or soul calm-pure-concentrated. It is one of the many ways to realize that consciousness. For us, religion is the foundation, providing constant realization of causation-non-action, duty-non-duty. We have considered Dharma to be the word of duty, that which is worth holding is dharma- ‘Dharayati iti dharmaah’. Here the dharma of the king, the dharma of the subjects, the dharma of the father, the dharma of the son, the dharma of the husband, the dharma of the wife, etc., are used in the sense of duty. Rather Dharma in this sense is only Hindu or Sanatan. The rest are sects, religions, doctrines, beliefs or theology. Religion-Majhaba does not accept any authority other than a creed, a scripture, a symbol, a prophet. Christianity has made some changes in its thinking with time, but in Islam even today all the thinking, all knowledge has remained confined to a particular era. They have the freedom to think only to the extent that they can justify what is written in a book. You imagine that even in today’s liberal and advanced times, his clerics are found publicly declaring that the earth is flat, it is stationary, the sun revolves around it. And to his great surprise that his followers listen and obey him. On the other hand, Hindutva does not bind to anyone scripture or sect. He does not stick to the dead body of the customs prevalent in a particular period. It keeps on tightening the truth on the test of the age. It also unhesitatingly analyzes the decisions of his beloved incarnations and the developments of life. His God is omnipresent. He is one but manifests in many forms. The hymns of Hindu rituals are – “Victory to Dharma, destruction of unrighteousness, harmony among living beings, the welfare of the world!” Hindu philosophy is a universal philosophy. That is human dharma. His exhortation of “Ekam sat viprah bahudha vadanti” is a boon to the world suffering from violence, discord and terror and a trava of freedom from troubles.
René Decartes, Marx, Freud, Darwin, Newton’s theory of science and thought gave a fragmented thought of man. All of them did not consider man as a part of nature and considered him as the master. And the Bible also said that this whole earth is for your consumption, Islam has given an exaggerated-aggressive-dominant notion and thinking of dividing the ‘male-ganimat’ among themselves, overall they argue instead of expanding man confined within the narrow circle of religion. Whereas Hindutva did not consider man as the owner of this world-universe as a component. He did not accept any other independent existence from him outside the cosmic universe. Instead of binding man to the limited circle of religion or sect, he found ways of his salvation. Suggest ways for its expansion. Marx says ‘The one who earns will eat, whereas Hindutva says that one who is born will eat, whoever earns will feed. God has given life, so he will also give food. Our common man also says – ‘Sabai Bhumi Gopal Ki.’ It is natural to earn and eat yourself. Taking away the food of others is a perversion and this is the culture to earn oneself and to distribute it to everyone by keeping the least for oneself.” That is why in our Upanishads, considering the whole universe as the property of God, giving the lesson of its sacrificed consumption, it is said – “Ishavasyamidam sarvam Yetkinch jagatyaam jagat. Ten tyakten bhunjitha ma gridhah kasyasviddhanam”. They could not reach the power of the soul. According to Marx, at the root of all the actions of man is earning money, if there is concern about bread, then is the concern of bread at the root of the inspiration of the works of great men like Maharishi Dayanand, Swami Vivekananda, Sardar Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. Was there a sense of earning? How unfair would it be to even think so?
In conclusion, we can say that “struggle for existence”, “survival of the fittest”, “exploitation of nature” and “individual rights” are paramount at the core of the western world and post-Hindu philosophy and thought. Whereas according to Hindu philosophy, existence requires more cooperation and coordination than struggle. The Sanatan culture of India has seen cooperation and harmony everywhere. In the atom-molecule of the universe, only one Supreme Brahma has been seeing the Supreme Soul or consciousness. They believe that the conflict and tumult that is seen in the whole world is the result of human intelligence. According to him the Hindu outlook of life sees the welfare of life and the world not only in protecting the existence of the powerful but in protecting the existence of all. That is why in the contemplation here, first of all, concern has been given to the child-old-handicapped, handicapped and weak, and not the powerful. Here nature is not considered to be a slave or an enjoyer, but a life-giving force or the mother of nurturing. The consequences of considering nature as a bhogya or a slave are in front of us today. Various types of infectious epidemics and destructive pollution are ready to swallow the whole world today. And before individual rights, there has been a tradition of performing duties in India. We believed that in the performance of one’s duty, the rights of the other are protected. The individual performs his duties towards the family, in return, the family protects his rights. The family performs its duties towards the society, in return the society protects its rights. The society performs its duties towards the nation, in return the nation protects its rights and the nation performs its duties towards the world, in return the world protects its rights. In this way, the entire human society from the individual to the collective and from the collective to the Parameshti is interdependent and connected in an integral sense. No one is separate from anyone, no one is absolute, self-appointed or separate from anyone. Hindutva or Sanatan philosophy of life is another name for the vision of attaining and seeing that one truth or ultimate principle pervading the whole world. Therefore it is not only beneficial for the Hindus but the whole world society. If we know this truth of Hindutva deeply, then all the confusion, all the doubts will go away on their own.
Author : Pranay Kumar