Hinduism: A Triumph of Collective Human Knowledge

During a journey of about two hundred kilometres, I saw flags, posters, idols, and vehicles decorated with images of Rama. The enthusiasm surrounding the Ram Mandir inauguration continued on my phone when I reached home.

I felt the familiar temptation to participate because everyone else was participating. Then another question appeared: what was I participating in? What did I understand of the tradition beneath the image?

The celebration brought me back to an inquiry that had changed my relationship with Hinduism.

Returning to something I thought I knew

A decade earlier, I would have described myself as an atheist. My education in mathematics and physics made me attentive to explanation and evidence. Rituals seemed to ask for a kind of acceptance I was reluctant to offer.

Later, difficult experiences led me towards philosophy. I read across traditions, looking for ways to understand love, suffering, identity, and the life I was living.

The smaller questions did not stay small. Understanding a relationship brought me to the question of the self. Understanding a reaction brought me to awareness. I wanted to know how these questions connected.

That search led me towards Advaita Vedanta and the Upanishads. Material I had previously associated with inherited religion became something I could interrogate seriously.

I had been familiar with the names. I had not understood the depth of the inquiry.

What I found valuable

The Upanishads drew my attention towards the person seeking the answer. What does it mean to say “I”? How do we distinguish what changes in experience from what knows the change? What do we take to be real, and why?

I found this approach especially powerful because it did not leave me as a spectator of an explanation. It asked me to examine the movements through which I interpreted my own life.

My admiration is personal and philosophical. I do not need to rank every intellectual tradition beneath it, or claim that a scientific theory has verified its conclusions, to describe how deeply it affected me.

What I call a triumph of collective knowledge is the richness of a continuing conversation: texts, interpretations, debates, practices, and teachers engaging with questions larger than any one author.

Hinduism contains substantial disagreement as well as shared themes. Advaita is one important tradition within it, not a substitute for all the others.

Philosophy inside a story

Watching The Sandman, I was fascinated by the way abstract dimensions of life become characters. A conversation can carry questions about desire, death, or despair without reading like a list of definitions.

That experience helped me appreciate philosophical storytelling in a different way. A story can make a conflict inhabitable. We recognise the question through what someone must decide.

The Bhagavad Gita offers a striking setting for this: Arjuna faces a crisis, and a dialogue with Krishna unfolds within it. Duty, action, knowledge, devotion, and liberation are explored through that encounter.

In my own nondual reading, I sometimes see the dialogue as illuminating the relationship between the troubled mind and a deeper clarity. That is an interpretive lens. It does not erase the text's battlefield, theology, or the different ways other schools understand Krishna and the individual self.

The story is valuable partly because it can sustain careful reading from more than one position.

Reverence and comprehension

Calling a text sacred can deepen attention. It can also become a reason not to ask questions.

I want to distinguish reverence from the assumption that familiarity is understanding. Repeating a passage may be meaningful, but do I know what it asks of me? Celebrating a figure may express belonging, but have I considered the qualities I claim to admire?

The same question applies to my enthusiasm for philosophy. I can collect profound explanations and remain defensive in the next ordinary conversation. Knowing the vocabulary does not complete the inquiry.

If a teaching concerns attention, love, or disciplined action, its meaning should become visible somewhere in how I attend, care, and act.

Paths that illuminate each other

The relationship between inquiry, devotion, action, and meditation interests me more than selecting one as the only legitimate path.

A question can interrupt an unexamined belief. Devotion can loosen the demand to remain at the centre. Responsible action tests what we have understood. Attention reveals where we are still reacting automatically.

These relationships are present in accounts of the four yogas within Vedanta. Their value for me lies in keeping understanding connected to a whole life.

They do not require appropriating other religions as unconscious versions of Hinduism. A resemblance can invite dialogue while leaving another tradition's own account intact.

An inheritance worth examining

My return to Hindu philosophy was not simply a return to childhood belief. It was an encounter with questions I had not realised were waiting within a familiar inheritance.

That is why I want celebration to include curiosity. The point is not to spoil the joy of a festival with an examination. It is to give our participation more substance than the satisfaction of joining a crowd.

What have I understood? What remains difficult? How does this reading change the next decision I make?

For me, the greatness of an inheritance lies partly in its capacity to remain alive under those questions. I want to receive it through attention, rather than assume it has become mine merely because I was born near it.