General Introduction to major religious traditions in India

Introduction to major religious traditions in India

1. Introduction

The term “religion“originated from the Latin noun “religio”, that was nominalized from one of three verbs: “relegere” (to turn to constantly/observe conscientiously); “religare” (to bind oneself [back]); and “reeligere” (to choose again). Because of these three different meanin

gs, an etymological analysis alone does not resolve the ambiguity of defining religion, since each verb points to a different understanding of what religion is. During the Medieval Period, the term “religious” was used as a noun to describe someone who had joined a monastic order (a “religious”). Despite this change in meaning, it is important to note the term “religion” is primarily a Christian term. Judaism and Hinduism, for example, do not include this term in their vocabulary.

Ninian Smart defines religion as, “Religion is the way humans experience and relate to some sacred focus (or foci). It is an experience transmitted as a community tradition with sacred symbols, places, times, people and (sometimes) scriptures; it is expressed in rituals, myths, doctrines, and ethical-cultural values. By participating in this constantly adapting tradition, perceived human limitations and threats to existence are experienced as overcome or transcended.” (A hrilfiena sei deu zieksa thei)

Religious studies is the academic field of multi-disciplinary, secular study of religious beliefs, behaviors, and institutions. It describes, compares, interprets, and explains religion, emphasizing systematic, historically based, and cross-cultural perspectives.

While theology attempts to understand the nature of transcendent or supernatural forces (such as deities), religious studies tries to study religious behavior and belief from outside any particular religious viewpoint. Religious studies draws upon multiple disciplines and their methodologies including anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and history of religion.

Religious studies originated in the nineteenth century, when scholarly and historical analysis of the Bible had flourished, and Hindu and Buddhist texts were first being translated into European languages. Early influential scholars included Friedrich Max Müller, in England, and Cornelius P. Tiele, in the Netherlands. Today religious studies is practiced by scholars worldwide. In its early years, it was known as Comparative Religion or the Science of Religion and, in the USA, there are those who today also know the field as the History of religion (associated with methodological traditions traced to the University of Chicago in general, and in particular Mircea Eliade, from the late 1950s through to the late 1980s). The field is known as Religionswissenschaft in Germany and Sciences des religions in the French-speaking world.

Various dimensions of religious traditions:

1. Ritual dimension: - Each religion has ritual forms or patterns of sacred action. Ritual means one or more ceremonial act which is often repeated in the name form. They are customary act to religious persons. Ringing of bell in Christianity, sacrament performs the role of ritualism. In Hinduism the ‘Samskara’ performs the role of ritualism.

2. Mythical dimension: - Myths are sacred stories about religious heroes, gods, demons and cultic figures for example, Ramayana and Maha Bharatha. Myths has a moral dimension, therefore they are recited during the sacred ritual.

3. Doctrinal dimension: - doctrines express conceptually the meaning of rituals and myths of religious traditions. The affirmation of key doctrines is very important in our attempt to understand and interpret the meaning of any religions. Christianity the Trinity concept, Hinduism the six schools of philosophy.

4. Social dimension: - Glimpses of community life is visible in the religion tradition. Other is a strong sense of people bound together by a religions loyalties and lives together in the society. Therefore religion and society are inseparable.

5. Ethical dimension: - Most religions have ethical rules and codes developed for maintaining and regulating the life together in a religious community. The relationship of community members and their dealings with one another are related by the ethical norms.

6. Experiential dimension:- It is the core vision that integrates complex religious rituals, symbols etc. there are two aspects of experiential dimension namely:-

a) Transcendental

b) Participatory

a). Transcendental: Transcendental aspect is about something beyond the human perception, but yet to be believed and accepted. For Example, Holy, Shakti, Nirvana, Consciousness etc.

b). Participatory: Participatory experience is about the understanding the meaning of existence or the experience to be shared in by others which created a community and tradition.

2. Methodology

The most important methodological approaches to the study of religion are:

1. Archaeological and Linguistic Method

The great archaeological discoveries greatly enlightened modern knowledge of the Greco-Roman and ancient Middle Eastern worlds. Biblical archaeology, culminating perhaps in the discovery of Masada, the Judaean hill fortress where the Jews made their last stand against the Romans in the revolt of ad 66–73 and that was mainly excavated in 1963, has given a new perspective to Old Testament, intertestamental, and later studies of ancient Judaism. The spectacular discovery by the English archaeologist John Marshall and others of the Indus Valley civilization pushed back knowledge of Indian prehistory to about 3500 bc and called into question the earlier theory of the primacy of Vedic culture in the formation of the Indian tradition, many features of which appear to have their first manifestation in the Indus Valley cities.

Archaeology made another profound impact on the study of religion when in 1841 the discovery of prehistoric human artifacts and later finds gave clues to early man’s magico-religious beliefs and practices..

The work of the archaeologists has not merely stimulated new thinking about the early stages of religious history but it has also been a factor in drawing attention to the roles of buildings and art objects in religion

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2. Historical Method

Religion is historically conditioned in its social forms, styles, theological patterns and ethical norms. Just as historians try to discern a chain of cause and effect relationships in the general world events, so religious histories often reveal similarly rational patterns in the process of their development. It is the historian’s discipline that has been largely responsible for the development of critical norms by which literary and other written sources can be reliably investigated.

The historical approach applies historical methodologies to the study of issues. The objective historian seeks to accumulate all the evidence and data he or she can to discover as close as possible to what really happened in past events. Historians, however, in the study of religion, often come to it with presupposed philosophical ideas about what could or could not have happened. For instance, many Bible historians presuppose that any miraculous or supernatural occurrences recorded in Scripture cannot possibly have happened in real history. Thus, they say, those events must be based on legends and myths or were embellished by the biblical authors. In some cases they may speculate about what happened by offering naturalistic alternatives.

3. Comparative Method

Comparative religion is the branch of the study of religions concerned with the systematic comparison of the doctrines and practices of the world’s religions. In general the comparative study of religion yields a deeper understanding of the fundamental philosophical concerns of religion such as ethics, metaphysics and the nature and form of salvation. Studying such material is meant to give one a richer and more sophisticated understanding of human beliefs and practices regarding the sacred, numinous, spiritual and divine.

4. Phenomenological Method

Phenomenology is a philosophical doctrine proposed by Edmund Husserl based on the study of human experience in which considerations of objective reality are not taken into account.

It is a systematic study and comparative classification of religious phenomena. Phenomenological Approach attempts to understand the practices of the religious tradition and the belief of the believer. Two distinctive principles related with this approach are:

1. Epoche: Is an objective study by bracketing or suspending the judgment from the part of the investigator.

2. Eidetic vision: It is subjective study to grasp the essence of phenomena by means of intuition and empathy.

Some of the scholars related with this approach are:

a) R. Otto: For him the essence of all religious is the sense of numerous. It is a Latin word which explains the non-national movement of wonder and fascination. Numen is a divine spirit or a localized power through the ancient Roman perceived the nature. Therefore, numinous is a feeling that one is a creature in the presence of a superior power (creature feeling).

b) N. Soderbolm: For him the idea of holiness is the center of religion.

c) Vanderleew: For him the essence of religion is “wholly the other power”.

5. Anthropological Method

As the term implies, anthropology is the study of man, or the study of culture as a human phenomenon, religion being an integral part of culture. There is a sense in which all religious activity is human culture, for everything that is said and done in religion is said or done by human beings. EB Tylor is regarded as the founder of the anthropological approach of religion. He saw the earliest animistic experience as the irreducible and original source of later religious life.

E.B. Tylor expounded, in his book Primitive Culture, the thesis that animism is the earliest and most basic religious form. Out of this evolves fetishism, belief in demons, polytheism, and, finally, monotheism, which derives from the exaltation of a great god, such as the sky god, in a polytheistic context.

As anthropologists became more concerned with functional and structural accounts of religion in society and relinquished the apparently futile search for origins. Various forms of functionalism in anthropology—which understood social patterns and institutions in terms of their function in the larger cultural context—proved illuminating for religion, such as in the stimulus to discover interrelations between differing aspects of religion.

6. Sociological Method

Religion is also in many respects a socially conditioned phenomenon. Without diminishing the creative role of individual leaders in each tradition (founders, heroes prophets, charismatics, mystics etc.), we can go one step further with sociological accounts and accept that each world view which develops within a religious tradition is to a large extent is a creation of the community concerned.

The sociology of religion concerns the dialectical relationship between religion and society; the practices, historical backgrounds, developments, universal themes and roles of religion in society. There is particular emphasis on the recurring role of religion in all societies and throughout recorded history. The sociology of religion is distinguished from the philosophy of religion in that it does not set out to assess the validity of religious beliefs, though the process of comparing multiple conflicting dogmas may require what Peter L. Berger has described as inherent “methodological atheism”. Whereas the sociology of religion broadly differs from theology in assuming the invalidity of the supernatural, theorists tend to acknowledge socio-cultural reification of religious practise.

It may be said that the modern formal discipline of sociology began with the analysis of religion in Durkheim’s 1897 study of suicide rates amongst Catholic and Protestant populations. The works of Max Weber emphasised the relationship between religious belief and the economic foundations of society. Contemporary debates have centred on issues such as secularization, civil religion, and the cohesiveness of religion in the context of globalization and multiculturalism.

The sociology of religion also deals with how religion impacts society regarding the positive and negatives of what happens when religion is mixed with society. Theorist such as Marx states that “religion is the opium of the people” - the idea that religion has become a way for people to deal with their problems.

7. Psychological Method

The psychology of religion is concerned with what psychological principles are operative in religious communities and practitioners. William James was one of the first academics to bridge the gap between the emerging science of psychology and the study of religion. A few issues of concern to the psychologist of religions are the psychological nature of religious conversion, the making of religious decisions, religion and happiness, and the psychological factors in evaluating religious claims.

Sigmund Freud was another influential figure in the field of psychology and religion. He used his psychoanalytic theory to explain religious beliefs, practices, and rituals in order to justify the role of religion in the development of human culture.

8. Philosophical Method

The scope of the philosophy of religion has changed somewhat in the last century and a half—that is, in the time since it came to be recognized as a separate branch of philosophy. Its nature is, as is typically the case in philosophy, open to debate. Three main trends, however, can be noted: (1) the attempt to analyze and describe the nature of religion in the framework of a general view of the world; (2) the effort to defend or attack various religious positions in terms of philosophy; and (3) the attempt to analyze religious language. Philosophical materials are also often incorporated into theologies—a modern example being the use of Existentialism in the theology of Rudolf Bultmann, the German New Testament scholar, and others; an older example is the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas’ use of Aristotle and of his (Aquinas’ own) insights in the service of a systematic Christian theology. Thus, much of philosophy of religion is concerned with questions not so much of the description of religion (historically and otherwise) as with the truth of religious claims. For this reason philosophy can easily become an adjunct of theology or of antireligious positions. To this extent, philosophy lies outside the main disciplines concerned with the descriptive study of religion; thus, it is often difficult to disentangle descriptive problems from those bearing on the truth of the content of what is being described. Feuerbach’s “projection” theory of religion, for example, possessed a metaphysical framework, but it also included empirical claims about the nature of religion.

9. Theological Method

The theological approach to the study of religion is also sometimes called a “theology of religion”, where one would look at particularly how a “religion” defines itself. Any authentic interpretation of a religious tradition must at least include that tradition’s theology. In this sense, the word theology covers all doctrinal systematizing that emerges within the whole range of religious traditions. Western philosophy of religion, as the basic ancestor of modern religious studies, is differentiated from theology and the many Eastern philosophical traditions by generally being written from a third party perspective. The scholar need not be a believer. Theology stands in contrast to the philosophy of religion and religious studies in that, generally, the scholar is first and foremost a believer employing both logic and scripture as evidence. Theology according to this understanding fits with the definition which Anselm of Canterbury gave to it in the 11th century, credo ut intelligam, or faith seeking understanding (literally, “I believe so that I may understand”). The theologian then has the task of making intelligible, or clarifying, the religious commitments to which he or she subscribes. The scholar of religious studies has no such allegiances.