The legacy of Indian culture and heritage is so great that it inspires us to consider everything in nature as holy and powerful. Man is at nature’s mercy, if he goes against its will, the cruel punishment he receivers might range from depriving him of his legitimate livelihood to death! Hindus believe that, the entire creation, including the life of the humans is made up of five elements; (1)‘Prithvi’ (the earth ),’Aapaha’(water),’Tejaha’(Fire or effulgence),and ‘Vaayahu’(air),’Aakaasha’(the aetherial sky, the infinite space above).After death, the human body dissolves into these five elements of nature and thereby balances the nature’s cycle of ‘Srishti’ (creation) followed by ‘pralayam’ (extinction or annihilation).
(2)In Hinduism, a very prominent belief is that, water cleanses all the ailments of human body and it is the symbol of fertility without which human existence becomes impossible. Most of the holy places are located on the banks of the rivers, sea shores and mountain ranges. They have special significance and they are considered sacred. It is the goal of the Hindus to bathe in the waters once in their life time, to be cleansed of their wrong doings .(3)The Hindus have a close and sentimental pious attachment to all the rivers in India. The Narmada is one of the most sacred rivers of the seven holy rivers, originates from the Maikali ranges at Amarkantak in MP and flows between the mountain ranges of Vindhya and Sathpura. Gita Mehta, a post colonial writer, meticulously weaves the stories and connects the lives of the characters to the holy river the Narmada in her book, ’A River Sutra’.’Sutra’ means thread that connects, ’River Sutra’ means river that connects. Throughout the book, one cou...
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...e could understand, digest and try to showcase the Indian culture and heritage is quite inspiring.
Works Cited
1.The Five Elements - Jiva Ayurveda
http://www.jiva.com/ayurveda/about-ayurveda/31.html
2.All You Need to Know About Hinduism: Water and Hinduism
http://history-of-hinduism.blogspot.com/2010/06/water-and-hinduism.htm
3.The 7 Most Sacred Rivers of India - WalkThroughIndia
http://www.walkthroughindia.com/attraction/the-7-most-sacred-rivers-of-india
4.Gita Mehta Essay - Mehta, Gita - eNotes.com
http://www.enotes.com/topics/gita-mehta/critical-essays
5.Eternal Ganesha: Gita Mehta: Amazon.com: Books
http://www.amazon.com/Eternal-Ganesha-Gita-Mehta/dp/B00AZ8TAPS
6.A River Sutra by Gita Mehta, VIKING-Penguin India
7.Hamlet by Shakespeare
8.Gita Mehta: Making India Accessible - May 1997
http://people.virginia.edu/~pm9k/59/tales/gitapub.html
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Birth, Death, and Rebirth: Sky Burial and the Cyclical Cosmos of Tibetan Buddhism. n.d. University of Missouri. Web. 2014 February 2014.
Hindus believe that when a soul expires, it acquires rebirth in a new body. This cycle is called samsara. To be set free from the endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth one must discover their true nature in order to be with the Brahman in Nirvana. In figure G a picture of a Cambodian statue of the A.D. 900 of Brahma meditating is presented. Nirvana is a state where pain, worry and the outer world do not exist. When a person in Hindu religion has bad Karma, they must take rebirth multiple times. The sacred source of all existence is divided among three gods. Brahma is the creator, Vishnu is the preserver, and Shiva is the destroyer. All three contribute to a person’s life and death and afterlife. In figure H a picture of a Vishnu sculpture is shown, and in figure I a picture of a sculpture of Shiva is
Hinduism is one of the world’s major religions that evolved from the Vedic religion of ancient India. Hinduism has branches that contain several sects. The major branches are Vaishnavism and Shaivism. These sects rely on their own set of scriptures but their focal point is the ancient Vedas. The philosophical Vedic texts, from the Aryans, involved the Upanishads in searching for knowledge on how the human beings would escape reincarnation. Hinduism has a cosmic principle Brahman, whereby they believe in rebirth after death. Hinduism emerged around the beginning of Common Era then coexisted within Buddhism for several centuries (Clearly, 2013). It spread to Southern India and parts of Southeast Asia from the Northern India. The basic teaching of Vedanta is the belief that the human being is neither confined in the body nor mind but the spark of God within the soul. Most Hindu’s practice bhakti as a way to worship and follow their deity. Rather than live of fear of their deity, bhakti focuses on being connected with the...
Although Daoism and Hinduism are two completely separate religions with the former indigenous to China and the latter to India, both of them encompass striking similarities that undeniably make it seem that one influenced the other. However, no known relations between the two religions exist. Comparing the small, but contextually vital part of the Hindu epic Mahabharata known as Bhagavad Gita with the central text to Daoism, Tao Te Ching offers an unparalleled journey of knowledge and understanding. Tao Te Ching emphasizes the crucial concept of Dao, which is translated as the “Way” while Bhagavad Gita stresses the all-encompassing Brahman. Since no sufficient language can express the full meaning of Dao, the most suitable example that shows its operations is the movement of water (TTC 8). Water simply flows with unity with nature – it can transform itself into whatever form is needed to flow. Dao is essentially an indescribable eternal energy and origin of the entire universe. Fully arriving at the Dao is the main goal of Daoism. Similarly, Brahman is the ultimate end to everything in the universe. In the Bhagavad Gita, Brahman is described as the source from which all beings originate from and eventually return. The fundamental principle of both concepts is, therefore, one and the same. I will specifically focus on vital parts of the two concepts in order to illustrate the parallelism of the eventual goal of the Dao and the Brahman. The emphasis on action with no desire for the “fruit” of the action, Dao and Brahman’s inexpressible essence, and following one’s own duty in order to complement the movement of the universe. These concepts illustrate the similarity between Dao and Brahman and ultimately demonstrate that they are ide...
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Many foreigners cannot know what makes Hinduism so strange. Hinduism lacks an uniting belief system and many people do not know faithfully what makes up the Hindu religious belief. After one goes in-depth concerning Hinduism, one must be familiar with the fundamental details about this difficult religion. Do you realize that almost 80 percent of the India people find themselves being Hindus? Hinduism is in addition known as the Sanatana-Dharma, which means everlasting religion. Hinduism is the third leading religion following Christianity and Islam and has no one initiator, teacher, or spiritualist and it is not an unconvinced religion. All through this article, I will look further in-depth on what makes up the Hindu religion what the traditional and group influences that have prepared Hinduism fundamental to Hinduism, and I will provide details the yearning for freedom from early existence.
Death is natural. It affects everyone and everything that is living. It is something that every person comes to understand as being a part of life, yet people are so often afraid of it. Death reminds people of all the negative things that are a part of life, such as pain and sorrow. If an alternative to death comes around, or something makes death easier, people want to take a part of that. Many people jump to religious ideologies not always because they truly believe in them or want to follow them, but because they want to escape death. Yet in many eastern religions, death is unavoidable and cyclical. There is new life after death, but that life leads death again, and the cycle seemingly continues forever. This cycle of rebirth is often called reincarnation in western culture. It is one of the core beliefs in many eastern religions. Hinduism is one of those religions; in fact, it is likely the first religion to adopt this train of thought, as Hopfe and Woodward (2014) claim it is perhaps “the oldest and most complex of all religions in the world” (p. 78). Before one fully understands Hinduism, they must recognize the relation reincarnation has to it. Reincarnation is a foundational belief in Hinduism, and it
Humanity is a part of nature (not apart from it) and everything returns to the earth in the end. In what is my favorite sequence of the film, Baraka takes us to the Ganges River in India. We see the masses gathered at the river bank engaged in various rituals; some bathe, others worship. The Ganges is sacred in Hinduism, a religion centered on the idea of birth and rebirth. A bath in the river is spiritually cleansing, and can even help you escape the endless cycle of birth and rebirth. It is here, in the Ganges, that the story comes full circle. There is life in the river (bathers, worshippers), and there is death (cremations, funeral rituals). Tellingly, Baraka revisits the scenes of religion from the beginning of the film at this point. We see scenes of followers of Abrahamic religions gathered in worship, followed by images of empty temples and mausoleums, and concluded with an image of a single floating candle on the Ganges (a funeral ritual). Religion is not exempt from the cycle of life and death. Of course, death is not the end. There is always rebirth, and the film ends with time-lapsed shots of structures and landscapes imbued with a sense of awe, concluding with an image of the starry night
Hinduism has been a religion for a long time, the Buddha was a Hindu before seeing how terrible the world was, he then found the religion Buddhism. Since the creator of Buddhism was Hinduism as a child, it is only expected for the two religions to be similar. While the two religions are similar they are also quite different as seen by their creation stories. The creation stories are these religions way of explaining how the world started. With most religions the creation story gives the most basic beliefs of the religion as this is where their religion supposedly starts its life. The two stories this paper focuses on is no different, and since they technically have the same origin, it can be obvious as to how they would be similar. However, in the case of the idea of social order and moral decline, they can be different too.
Nesbitt, E. (2002). The body in Sikh religion. In S. Coakley (Eds.), Religion and the Body (pp. 289-305). UK: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.