An Introduction to Hinduism

"I completely agree. The term that they look at is shraddha, which is devotion. Is it the same “faith” as understood in the Abrahamic religion? No, because in Hindu tradition, ritual is very closely integrated with devotion. Devotion is very closely integrated with the way we access or think about other worlds in which the divine world is one. What Gavin Flood does really well is he lays out this landscape in the least biased way. I don’t think anyone is a hundred percent unbiased, but Gavin Flood’s book does a really good job of laying out this complex history, the interconnectedness with different periods, different empires, and different needs of the society. And it gives us the storyline where we can very clearly see what’s also going on in the society at that time, and how the religion was responding to what was happening in the society. I use the phrase “socio-cultural-DNA.” One of the things in the socio-cultural-DNA of a Hindu is that of being very comfortable with fuzzy boundaries, being very comfortable with not having an answer, to thrive in the chaos, to be okay with asking, do we have thirty thousand deities, or do we have one? Do we believe in reincarnation, or do we not? Our DNA, in many ways, is constructed to live with that ambiguity, in not having an answer. So, absolutely, I agree with Flood. It is not a category."