India was and continues to be a plural society in which people of different ethnic groups and creeds coexist. Geographically very varied, it is an extensive region dotted with large river valleys and multiple tributary rivers that feed a very fertile land full of riches, especially in the fertile plain created by the combined basins of the Ganges and the Indus. On the other hand, there are also inhospitable jungles, barren mountains and practically inaccessible deserts, but almost all these corners are inhabited by different ethnic and cultural groups.
His position as crossroad between the different cultural spheres that surround the subcontinent has caused multitudes of peoples and influences to enter it throughout its history, violently or peacefully, which characterizes many of its aspects. This diversity is notable if we observe, for example, its linguistic variety: there are nearly 2,000 languages and dialect forms in the whole of this territory, of which about twenty make up the main languages with a certain state official status. In this wealth you can see how India really is a conglomeration of a myriad of cultural traditions. The constant influences, both foreign and local, have produced a vast universe of beliefs and ideas where different creeds have been mixing.
Religion is central to understanding India and its past, structuring the very foundations of their society, although it is a field that is difficult to understand for other conceptual horizons, such as ours. There are those who would consider that irrational aspects of an exotic culture are being touched upon, stating that India is excessively decentralized from the religious and doctrinal point of view when compared to religions such as the Christian or the Muslim. For this reason, we must not forget the high spirituality of these traditions and their intimate relationship with philosophy, with which there is almost no difference whatsoever. There is also no unity that brings together the different faiths of this territory, which partly explains the tensions and the constant conflict, but if there is any link between them, it is geographical coexistence throughout Indian history.
Nineteenth-century Europeans, faced with the vastness of the Indian religious world, erroneously included this complex reality within the same term, Hinduism, although the traditions that accept the dharmathe order assumed by certain traditional universal laws, and the primacy of the Closed, the main sacred texts of India, of which they do not. These currents are qualified from Vedic Hinduism or astika as non-orthodox or nastika, which could include, among others, the Buddhists, the Jains and the Sikhs, who follow some of the Vedic doctrines but do not accept the authority of these books and their main interpreters, the Brahmins. Along with these two large and heterogeneous groups, which would well deserve numerous volumes for an in-depth analysis, appear the exogenous religions that have been introduced with greater or lesser luck in the subcontinent. The most notable is undoubtedly Islam, the second religion in the region, followed by a much smaller presence of Parsees Zoroastrians or Christianity.
Antiquity in India: the Indus Valley and the Vedas
The religious development of India dates back to prehistoric times, so its origins are confused, practically unknown. Its main roots are in two elements, the Dravidian traditions and the Closed. The first of them is related to indus valley culture, the first great civilization of India and prior to the arrival of the Aryan peoples of Indo-European origin. Known mainly for the great cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, by the second millennium B.C. C., these peoples developed a considerably urbanized society in the Indo-Gangetic valleys. Although the iconography of this people was very rich and characteristic, their texts with their own writing are still undeciphered and there is no certainty about their origin, while most interpretations remain theories. This culture has been considered as the nucleus of the current Dravidian peoples (today they mostly inhabit the south of the subcontinent), a native tradition of India that prevailed for several centuries before being swept away by the Indo-Aryan migration and that will be of great importance for the future configuration of the country.
The second relates to the arrival of the aryan peoples, from the year 1500 a. C., in a process that lasted several centuries. They brought profound changes to the local society, especially in the religious and cultural aspect, still emerging in an embryonic stage what would be the future Vedic religion. Hinduism and Buddhism have their roots in this transformation, and even today the language used by them, Sanskrit, is used as a liturgical language among the Brahmins, who recite poems and hymns of great antiquity dating back to the Indo-Aryans. The main foundation of this religion were and are the Closed, the oldest texts of India, which collect ancient oral traditions in Sanskrit to form a canonical base of four collections of verses that deal with different issues such as ritual norms for celebrations and sacrifices, facts of Hindu mythology and philosophical and moral debates. The analogy that can be observed with the Christian gospels is curious. To facilitate its reading, the different Brahmins wrote a series of comments or brahmanawith clarifications in prose to better understand the doctrine that the Closed they want to convey. This priestly class reserved the transmission of divine knowledge, reserved for their families, who inherited the privileged right to interpret and recite them before the rest of the community generation after generation.
The most important consequence of this irruption was the transformation into a society structured by religion in castes or varna. For the first time, these texts defined the varna arya or main castes, composed of the priests or brahmanathe warriors or kshatriya and the producers or vaishyato which are added the servers or sudra, all with a mythical origin in different parts of the body of Brahman, the creator of the universe. Apart are the outcast or outcast/dalits, who are not considered part of the system or children of Brahman. The first two classes made up the social elite, interacting with each other and sharing those responsible, for which they direct both spiritual and secular power, although through their complicated rites and the obtaining of tributes, the priests obtained pre-eminence over the warrior kings. .
The ritual It was the basis of the Vedic religion, since it allowed controlling and manipulating the forces of the cosmos, preventing undesirable events and favoring community interests. Great specialization was required, so not just anyone could carry them out, favoring an internal hierarchy of the priestly class, according to the functions of each ritual specialist. The basis of their economic power was that to carry out these tasks, the applicant had to pay each priest participating in the ritual, so the tributes were a source of considerable wealth.
The most characteristic feature of this religion was its complicated polytheism. Specific aspects of the rituals and gods related to nature were deified, although there was a tendency to focus on a specific god, Agni, representation of fire, since this is the key point of the various brahmanical rituals. As in other religions of the Indo-European tradition, there is a divine trifunctionality called trimurty, which will inherit later Hinduism, and a struggle between ancient gods of obscure origin with new gods destined to replace them, the Asura and the Deva, similar to Greek mythology (Titans and Olympians), Celtic (Formorians and Tuatha) or Germanic ( vanes and aces). Possibly, this fight is a metaphor for the arrival of the Aryans to the Indian subcontinent and the imposition of their gods on that of the peoples before them. Gradually, noticeable changes occur in the Vedic religion, with the importation of existing female divinities among the previous Dravidian cults, and a greater preaching of individual spirituality and meditation.
The excessive ritualization and moral domination of society by corrupt and declining Brahmins have been interpreted as the origin of the emergence of new religions such as Buddhism and Jainism from the 5th century BC. C. The impact of the influences coming from the contemporary worlds of Persians and Hellenics was considerable, and the consolidation of a tolerant state and patron of Buddhism such as the Ashoka’s Mauryan Empiregave way to a religious revolution, from a conception family and communityto a more conception universalist while radically individual, definitely surpassing the Vedic framework. The religious conglomerate expanded throughout the territory, emerging dozens of schools and doctrines of all kinds. Centuries later, with the subsequent arrival of Islam from the West, the Middle Ages began in India.
A response to injustice and suffering: Buddhism and Jainism
buddhism It is a purely European concept, coined at the beginning of contact with the Asian sphere. Westerners saw a major connecting link in the figure of Siddharta Gautama, better known by his post-enlightenment name, the Buddha. His message and preaching were common elements for a series of diverse cults existing throughout the Asian continent, from Central Asia to Japan, but most of them lacked a unitary structure. The doctrinal diversity in Buddhism is quite wide: from schools that bet on the human nature of the Buddha and the denial of the gods, to those that deify the figure of the founder and observe a spiritual universe full of divine entities and forces, differences that could speak to us of a series of “Buddhist religions” rather than a single religion.
Its origin dates back to the 6th century BC. C. in the north of India and had a development very similar to that of Christianity, another missionary and expansive religion with multiple internal differences in its doctrine. Gautama, originally a member of the warrior caste born in a Nepalese kingdom, is accepted as the main historical figure, who seeking moral wisdom and the end of suffering through internal balance he ended up reaching enlightenment or nirvana, for which he received the epithet of the “Awakened One”, Buddha. He preached this path until he formed the nuclear monastic community of Buddhism, from which generations of missionaries would emerge who would spread these teachings to different corners of the world. A movement…