Nicholas F. Gier, Professor Emeritus
Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho

    Let me begin with some observations that should give any reasonable person pause. In 1998 Hindu fundamentalists proposed that a new Goddess temple be built at Pokharan, 50 km from the site of the atomic bomb tests that were conducted in April of that year. According to their program this would be the latest of 53 examples of Shaktipeeths (places of Goddess power) of Hindu world preeminence. (Another power center is the new temple to Rama in Ayodhya, being built on the site of the Babri mosque, destroyed by a Hindu mob in December 1992.) Some suggested that radioactive sand from the test site should be distributed as prasad, the Hindu sacrament, but cooler heads vetoed that idea. Some Hindu fundamentalists also believe that ancient Indians actually possessed atomic weapons, which they call "Om-made" bombs.

    The Indian military helped to fuel this religious enthusiasm by naming its long range missile after the Vedic god of fire Agni. The followers of Shiv Shena, a fundamentalist organization in Mumbai, proudly proclaim that, after the bomb tests, Hindus were no longer eunuchs and now could stand up to the world as real men. At the 1999 Durga festival in Calcutta celebrants found new figures in the traditional tableau of the Goddess Durga and her attendants. They saw life size figures of brave Indian soldiers who won a victory in the mountains of Kashmir because of Durga’s divine grace. Hundreds of years ago Hindu kings went into battle only after receiving Durga’s blessing by sacrificing dozens of water buffalo to her.

    Another chilling experience is to read about plans to recover the original Hindu Empire, extending West into Afghanistan and Central Asia encompassing all Buddhist sites; extending North to recover Tibet, the original land of the Aryans according to Dayananda Saraswati, extending Northwest to Cambodia to recover the Hindu Khmer kingdoms of Angkor Wat and North Vietnam, where Shiva lingas have been found; and extending Southeast to Java, where a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom once flourished, and Bali where three million Hinuds still live. This reminds me of Zionist maps of Greater Israel, or plans by some Calvinists for a new Confederate States of America where God-fearing Anglo-Celtic top males will rule their households and their nation of fifteen states.

    My proposed book The Origins of Religious Violence consists of three parts: (1) a historical analysis of violence that can be traced to religious motivation; (2) a theoretical investigation of what might be the reasons for this religious violence; (3) and a Gandhian proposal to teach nonviolence as a civic virtue as well as personal virtue. I anticipate that the historical analysis will show that the Abrahamic religions (defined as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) have generated more religiously motivated violence than the Asian religions. In Part Two I will test the following hypotheses about why that might be the case:

After a thorough analysis and debate, I may find some of these hypotheses better supported than others, but I am confident that some of these differences do indeed correlate with less religiously motivated violence in Asia.

    Some crime statistics from 19th Century India are particularly illuminating with regard to our thesis. In 1881 the frequency of crime by religion was as follows: one of 274 Christian Europeans committed a crime; one of 799 Christian Indians did so; one of 1,361 Hindus; and one of 3,787 Buddhists. If the Jains had been included in this count, one would have expected an even higher ratio for them. With regard to the native Christian count, an English official made the following observation: "It appears from these figures that while we effect a very marked moral deterioration in the natives by converting them to our creed, their natural standard of morality is so high that, however much we Christianize them, we cannot succeed in making them altogether as bad as ourselves." An 1899 statistical dictionary reported that for every 100,000 people in Western Europe there were from 100-230 prisoners; 190 for England; and 38 for India.

THE DIFFERENCES: ASIAN AND ABRAHAMIC RELIGIONS

    If we look at the conceptual foundations of the Abrahamic and Asian religions, we find a significant philosophical difference. The former make God the "axiological" ultimate, i.e., the highest good. The latter--especially Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism--make God (or sometimes simply a divine One) the "metaphysical" ultimate, i.e., the highest being or reality. Abrahamic prophets exhort us to worship the holy "ought," while Asian yogis and sages invite us to meditate on the holy "is." It is oddly ironic that people who worshiped the highest good would tend to commit more violence and be more intolerant than those who do not have such a moral focus.

    Mohammed called the Abrahamic faiths "Religions of the Book," and it is here that we can find a clue for our inquiry. Jews, Christians, and Moslems all claim to have received a linguistic revelation, i.e., direct words of God. Moses claimed to have talked to God "as a friend," and the angel Gabriel's first command to Mohammed was "Read!" In contrast are the Hindu Vedas, literally divine sounds, but they are used more for meditation and spiritual discipline than moral and political action. Indeed, the typical Indian worshipper does not understand the Sanskrit their priests recite. In the Asian religions there has been very little debate about what God said for us to do. Hindu and Buddhist dharma is rarely ever connected to divine will and command.

    Religions of the Book also have been more concerned with maintaining the purity of divine revelation. Even though the revelational integrity of each has been compromised by religious syncretism, most of their followers find it very difficult to believe that their faiths have been adulterated in such a manner. In Asia religious syncretism has not only been accepted, but in some cases celebrated. (For example, the Rev. Sunyung Moon claims to be a good Buddhist, Confucian, a Korean shaman as well as a good Presbyterian.) Here there has been no fetish about revelational purity. This may be a key to widespread religious tolerance in Asia as opposed to the Middle East and Europe.

    The difference might also be due to the way in which religions view the origins of evil. A recent examination of the worldview of Muslim terrorists found that they divided the world into the forces of light and the forces of darkness and evil. This way of looking at the origin of evil is called Manicheanism, named after a Persian prophet by the name of Mani. Mani saw the universe as a cosmic dualism between good and evil, with evil being found primarily in bodies (specifically in their sexual function) and all matter in general. Short of this radical dualism the Abrahamic religions have seen the origin of evil in human agents with deficient moral wills. The Chinese, on the other hand, view evil as a matter of imbalance. Yin is dark, female, and negative and Yang is light, male, and positive, but rarely ever is Yin called evil or the origin thereof. The good in Chinese cosmology and Chinese medicine is balance and harmony between Yin and Yang; evil is not located in a will or a thing. An imbalanced person will do evil, but it is primarily because of the lack of harmony in that person’s soul. (The irony is that of all the Asian religions, Jainism, the originator of the ethics of nonviolence, Jainism tends to be most Manichean.) Furthermore, the pre-Socratic Greeks actually assumed the Chinese view, but this culture did not produce any noticeable philosophies of peace or politics of peace.

    "I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth." The initial words of the Apostles' Creed testify to the prominence of divine power in Christian theology. Placing omnipotence first, even before divine goodness and wisdom, is the preference not only of Christianity but also Judaism and Islam. Anna Case -Winters observes that in Judaism "power becomes a paraphrase of the divine names, a kind of euphemism for God." In these Abrahamic religions, more so than in the Asian, divine power has been conceived in terms of political power. In Islam, Judaism, and Christianity God is seen as a cosmic king, exerting absolute and uncontested rule over the universe and everything in it. Political terms such as pantokrator ("all -ruling"), sovereignty, and kingship dominate Abrahamic descriptions of God. In his book The Kingship of God Martin Buber argues that Yahweh is different from the other middle eastern gods in that he demanded control in all areas of human life, not just the religious.

    In the Abrahamic religions God’s power is externally applied, but in Asia power is expressed more in terms of one's inner spiritual power--a power that is rarely ever used coercively. Furthermore, if people are is taught to view God as a distant "other," they might learn perceive other people as "other" as well. Indeed, this socio-psychological dynamic is taken by some scholars to be at the root of modern racism as well as general cultural intolerance. As Christopher Chapple observes: "When the other stands opposed to self, violence can proceed. When other is seen as self, nonviolence can prevail." But one does not have to go all the way to absolute monism to get the same results. Indeed, the social-relational self of Buddhism and Confucianism offers a middle way between social atomism and the complete loss of self in absolute monism. Even though Gandhi associates himself with the monistic Vedantist tradition, he is more in line with the neo-Vedantists, who affirm both the reality of the world and the individual. The thesis of my book The Virtue of Non-Violence is that Gandhi’s ethics of nonviolence is best interpreted in Buddhist terms, a position completely in line with his great admiration for the Buddha and his commitment to a real but changing self that must move from attachment and egoism to compassion and nonviolence.

    The origins of Hindu religious nationalism are quite recent considering the long history of advanced cultures in the Indian Sub-Continent. V. D. Savakar’s Hindutva (literally "Hinduness") was published in 1923, but the ideas of this book go back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The supreme irony about Hindu fundamentalism is that its first writers were profoundly influenced by European Orientalism and its archeological and linguistic discoveries. The same Orientalism that gave Europeans the excuse to view Asians as effeminate and impotent, thereby lacking the capacities for self rule, was used by Indian writers to create a view of India as a unified nation that gave birth to not only to the European languages but also to its first civilized peoples and the world’s greatest religion. The idea of India as the cradle of civilization and spirituality is, amazingly enough, found in Voltaire, Herder, Kant, Schegel, Shelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. Some scholars argue that the Indian philosophy that we now know as neo-Vedanta found in Aurobindo, Vivekananda, and Gandhi, is just as much German idealism and Indian philosophy.

    Hindu fundamentalists were flattered by Aldous Huxley’s idea of the Perennial Philosophy and its mystic monism, originally found in the Upanishads and only later, according to their views, spread to other cultures. Thesophists such as Annie Besant turned Orientalism on its European creators, claiming that what they perceived as weaknesses-- namely, nondualism, nonviolence, renunciation, meditation, and tolerance–were precisely what was needed for the salvation of Western societies. As Achin Vanaik states: "Indian intellectuals made worthy the characteristics that Orientalist empiricists made unworthy." In the 1870s there was a concerted effort on the part of English theosophists to merge with the Indian Arya Samaj (Society of Aryans) as part of Annie Besant’s vision of a World Federation of Aryans. Ironically, in another move of reverse Orientalism, members of Arya Samaj vetoed this idea because they insisted that Indians were the only true Aryans! Interestingly enough, both Indians and Europeans agreed on at least one proposition: Hindu civilization was indeed corrupt and suffering a long decline, but Hindu fundamentalists believed that the solution to that problem was not Christian capitalism; rather, it was the recovery of a glorious Hindu past that Europeans had conveniently rediscovered for them.

    Even before Arya Samaj there was the Brahmo Samaj (Society of Brahma, the Hindu Creator God) founded in Calcutta in 1828 by Rammohan Roy, who, although still preserving the idea of Vedic authority, developed a fully modernist, that is rationalist and humanist, approach to Indian identity and nationhood. Debendranath Tagore, father of the more famous Rabindranath Tagore, broke with Roy over the issue of Vedic authority, and another nationalist Keshab Chandra Sen proposed that Hinduism ought to be Christianized. The result of these developments within the Bengal Renaissance was a growing view of Hindu supremacy and exclusivity. One of the most dramatic examples of these views came from Bajnarain Basu, who waxed eloquent as follows:

The noble and puissant Hindu nation rousing herself after sleep, and rushing headlong towards progress with divine prowess. I see this rejuvenated nation again illuminating the world by her knowledge, spirituality and culture, and the glory of the Hindu nation agin spreading over the whole world.

Rajnarain was insistent that the Hindu Motherland could have no place for Muslims because their religion was alien to India. India’s religion should be a cultural Hinduism based on the Upanishads but allowing for the mediation of the one true God by means of the traditional idols. The Brahmo Samaj proposed gradual but sure reform on the elements that had tarnished the image of Hinduism word wide: caste problems, widow remarriage, untouchability, and child marriage.

    Arya Samaj was founded by Dayananda Saraswati in 1875 in Bombay, now renamed Mumbai because of Hindutva. (Some Hindu nationalists also want to change all English street names to Hindi and no longer want their children to attend English medium schools.) Dayananda’s philosophy is sometimes called neo-Hinduism or Semitized Hinduism, what I would call an Abrahamic Hinduism. Dayananda claimed that the Aryans originated in Tibet, an hypothesis that the Nazis tested by sending Ernst Schaefer and Bruno Beger on two expeditions there in the 1930s. (The Nazis were also captivated by an alternative bizarre idea that the Arctic was the home of Aryans, an idea promoted by Hindu nationalist B. G. Tilak.) While in Tibet the Aryans, according to Dayananda, purged themselves of inferior people (identified as the dasyus in the Rigveda) and then spread to the rest of the world. In India they established the Hindu Golden Age described in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. This great age came to an end with the Bharata War, the beginning of which is dramatically described in the Bhagavad-gita and the result, according to the text, was over a million deaths. Hindu civilization then descended into a long decline that was exacerbated by the pacificism and nihilism of Buddhism and Jainism, which were seen as failed off shoots of Hinduism and not separate religions from Hinduism. During the Second Millennium CE a weakened Hindusim was easy prey for first the Mughal invaders and second British imperialism.

    Dayananda saw the Aryans as paragons of virtue and the world’s first monotheists. Even though he uses the Hindu epics as proof of the Golden Age, he argued that only the Vedas and the Upanishads have religious authority. (Oddly enough, the members of the Ayra Samaj retained the Vedic fire ritual for their services.) He rejected the authority of the priests to interpret scripture and set himself up, in a way very similar to some preachers in the Abrahamic religion, as the only one that could interpret the Vedas correctly. He saw the Vedas and Upanishads as the literal Word of God and as the infallible text of the one true Hindu church, a concept alien to the Indian religious tradition, but one again very similar to the Abrahmanic religions. Setting the stage for twentieth Century Hindutva, Dayananda lauched systematic attacks on traditional Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Christians, and Buddhists.

    On the plus side Dayananda believed that the subjugation of women came with the decline of Hinduism and declared that this was a social ill that needed corrected. He also spoke out against the thousand plus subcastes (jati) that divide Indians according to specific vocations and prevent lateral movement in Indian society. With regard to the four main castes Dayananda thought that it was a mistake to think of them as hereditary, a position that was an advance over Gandhi, who, while rejecting the oppression of the Dalits, still maintained the hereditary nature of the four main castes.

    After Dayananda’s death there was a campaign to reconvert Dalits whose families had gone over to Christianity and syncretistic Muslims who, because they so fully participated in Hindu celebrations, ought, according to Arya Samaj, to return to the fold of the true faith. This campaign of reconversion is still at the forefront of Hindu fundamentalist efforts today, especially among the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

    A key figure in the transition from the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj is Chandranath Basu who is the author that coined the term Hindutva (Hinduness) and he turned Hindu nationalism in a decidedly conservative and reactionary direction. In 1892 he published Hindutva–An Authentic History of the Hindus in which he defended traditional views Hindu ritual, caste, restriction of women’s education and civil rights, and the maintenance of male authority. Chandranath was firmly committed to demonstrating the superiority of Hinduism over Christianity, especially after the wide spread concern that conversions to Christianity were increasing in the latter half of the century.

    In the novels and commentaries of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya we see again the profound influence that European philosophy had on the rise of Indian nationalism. Particularly important was the work of Immanuel Kant, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and Auguste Comte. Interestingly enough, Bankim early support for women’s equality, presumably under Mill’s influence, disappeared in his later works, which also contain stronger claims to Hindu supremacy and more stringent anti-Muslim comments. He criticized Mill and Comte for their atheism and substituted Krishna’s religion of love as the key to human spiritual cultivation and progress. Nineteenth Century Indian nationalists were fully caught up in the idea of evolution and Bankim proposed that Hinduism was the perfect candidate for Comte’s idea of "positive religion," the final stage of human perfection. Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy finds a new Indo-European home, but it has a new humanistic twist. Bankim rejects both the abstract monotheism he finds in Abrahamic religions and the impersonal monism of his own Brahmo Samaj in favor of the divine incarnation of Krishna as a human being.

    At the turn of the century one of the most important Indian nationalist figure is B. G. Tilak, whose importance and standing in the Congress Party was second only to Gandhi. For purposes of our study of Hindu fundamentalism, Tilak was instrumental in inventing a powerful new form of devotionalism centered on the elephant god Ganesha. Tilak’s strategy was calculated and very effective: the new Ganesha festival (first celebrated in 1893) would compete with the Muslim festival of Muharram, which Hindus had always attended. Hindu nationalists in the state of Maharastra were successful in creating a new division between Muslims and Hindus that would intensify decade by decade into the new century. The Ganesha festival in Bombay is now so huge that it is common to see pictures and stories of it in the international press.

    Tilak also resurrected King Shivaji, who, by the grace of his patron goddess Bhawani, was by far the most successful Hindu warrior king against the Mughal Empire during the seventeenth Century. Hindu fundamentalists admire Shivaji’s courage and excuse his ruthlessness against the Muslims he defeated. Tilak also instigated celebrations honoring Shivaji but many of them in the 1890s turned violent, the beginnings of the communal conflict that was to increase in the next century but was an uncommon occurrence in earlier times. Tilak used the Bhagavad-gita to justify Shivaji’s campaigns against the Mughals but also the violence that may be necessary to keep the Muslims of his day in line. Shivaji has become a hero and a model for a militant leader who will bring back the glory of all things Hindu. It is significant, however, in terms of the historical Shivaji that while Muslims repeatedly declared jihad against him, Shivaji principal motivations were Maratha nationalism rather than a broader Hindu nationalism based on the concept of the Indian Sub-Continent as one nation and the idea of Hinduism as a universal religion. Tilak also ignored the fact that Shivaji not only had Muslim allies but employed Muslims in his army and administration, demonstrating that his concept of a Martha nation included non-Hindus as well. Nonetheless, the revival and revision of Shivaji’s reign resulted in a number of Shivaji societies that believed that violence against British rule was a religious duty.

    Tilak was also involved in researching and writing about the origins of Hinduism and the Hindu nation. I have already mentioned his wacky thesis, defended in a book entitled The Arctic Home of the Vedas, that Aryan culture actually goes all the way back to the last Ice Age. Drawing on astronomical allusions in the Vedas, Tilak takes Vedic history back 8,000 years and argues that the Vedic gods were polar deities worshiped by arctic Aryans. From all of his research he drew the same conclusion that many other 19^th Century Indian nationalists did, and I will conclude with this illustrative but problematic passage:

During Vedic times, India was a self-contained country. It was united as great nation. That unity has disappeared bringing great degradation and it becomes the duty of the leaders to revive that union. A Hindu of this place [Varanasi] is as much a Hindu as one from Madras or Bombay. The study of the Gita, Ramayana, and Mahabharata produce the same ideas throughout the country. Are not these. . . our common heritage? If we lay stress on forgetting all the minor differences that exist between the different sects, then by the grace of Providence we shall ere long be able to consolidate all the different sects into a mighty Hindu nation. This ought to be the ambition of every Hindu.

The sects of which Tilak speaks the Sikhs, the Jains, and the Buddhists. Not at all included, unless they pledge allegiance to Hindutva (conversion itself is not mandatory), are India’s 40 million Christians and 120 million Muslims.

Note: Most of the information about 19th Century Hindu fundamentalism came from Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalis: Origins, Ideologies, and Modern Myths (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 1-36.