I was in a campus dining hall yesterday. A member of the staff had briefly left her post, leaving behind a small, compact book, lying open to a page which was filled with dense, carefully laid out text. I liked the book’s brown cover and its thin pages — I think that it was a Bible. I’m not sure because prudence prevented me from taking a closer look, but regardless of what text it actually was, it made me think about the Bible.
The Bible is canon in Christianity, that is, authoritative religious literature, with a sense of completeness and perfection. Moreover, the Bible is the sole literary fount of the tradition — from this comes the common expression of a book being the “bible” of its field. Many minds have been spent on the Bible, producing a rich theological tradition.
Hinduism, for its part, has its own canon. But in seeing the leafy volume in the dining hall, I had a more visceral desire for a personable, canonical text. We have our Vedas, our Mahabharata with its Gita, our Ramayana and Manu-smriti — but these all come to us regurgitated, digested by scholars and priests and other keepers of our religious tradition. And we have our oral and cultural traditions — by their transient nature, nowhere culled into a canon.
When asked for a Bible of Hinduism, most people who call themselves Hindu would point the curious to the Gita, and indeed, the Gita has the features I find attractive when it is bound as a book. But I do not find the Gita to be unique. It is canonical, it is attractively bound and worthy of a pocket in a spiritual pair of pants, but it is not the sole fount of our tradition. Our Hindu tradition is rich, vast, and expansive, and that is, in my opinion, both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
So we do, in a sense, have our own Bible — the Gita — but it is not the sole fount of our tradition.
At that moment of seeing that book lying open in the dining hall, with its thin pages, I wished for such a sole fount, a personable pocket-worthy, comprehensive tome, a little piece of canon from which everything else can be derived. I wonder if that same aesthetic desire was the impetus that drove so many minds to write these canonical texts, and to carve and partake of them thereafter.
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One Comment
I have faced the same confusion many times when people ask for the “Bible” of Hinduism. And like you, I normally point to the Gita.
Thinking about it again, however, I realize that the Vedas are the most important texts in Hinduism – they were recited by Bhrahman himself, so it seems as if they should be the “Bible” of Hinduism, as the Bible was spoken by God also. At the same time, the Gita and Ramayan are so much more widely read and known than the Vedas, most probably because they are easier to understand.
Though it becomes confusing, I actually find it appealing that Hinduism does not prescribe to a single text. It allows people to find what most relates to them and what best fits their level of understanding and interest. Perhaps everyone Hindu needs to choose his or own personal Hindu “Bible.”
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