In The Hindu View of Life, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Hindu philosopher and former President of India, proposes a relevant history of South Asian Hinduism where neighboring faiths were systematically accepted, absorbed, and slowly whittled into the core religion.
Historicity aside, the point is insightful, and provides an interpretation of some mythological stories. For example, he says that the story of Kaliya, where Krishna defeats and dances upon a troublesome snake, was meant to subtly discourage snake-worship, and that the demise of Daksha, a sacrificer of both animals and humans, represents the fading of live sacrifice. He calls this the absorption of various creeds, specifically the reconciliation of Vedic and non-Vedic beliefs. Radhakrishnan tells a story of the advancing front of Vedic thought — in his own words:
“The Hindu took up the gods of even the savage and uncivilized and set them on equal thrones to his own” (p.32, Unwin Paperback edition).
He provides the example of Kali to support this point, citing Kali’s initial status as the object of demonic sacrifice, and her evolution into a divinity on par, in the Hindu pantheon, with any of the other gods. (For a more eloquent description of Kali as a divine goddess, see this well-written post on The Hunt for Paradise.)
Though Radhakrishnan does not explicitly use him as an example, Gautama Buddha is an interesting instance of absorbing another creed. By including the Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu, Hinduism was acknowledging his divinity and the worthiness of his beliefs.
The objection here is that absorbing all neighboring faiths would result in a mass of deities, with no uniting force. That is, simply collecting objects of faith in one place does not unite the faithful. To address this objection, Radhakrishnan defines a goal of Hinduism with careful eloquence –
“[Hinduism] seeks the unity of religion not in a common creed but in a common quest” (42).
The reason this point is salient is that this common quest — the quest for truth, the good life — is what unites all Hindus, even today. We are as varied in our beliefs as we are in the languages we speak, the clothes we wear, but we are united by our common quest. Realizing this, early Hindu theologians undertook the absorption of nearby faiths, uniting the disparate beliefs of the South Asian subcontinent into one pantheon of Hinduism, and merging them over millennia into a consistent body of thought.
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