In a post Saketh wrote a while ago, he asked us all what one of our objects of devotion was; he divided objects of devotion into 3 categories:
1. A deity
2. A person
3. A goal or inanimate object
Today, I want to bring up a similar question:
Hinduism is a religion with many different viewpoints — and consequently, many divisions and categories. In my experience, the division between dvaita (dualism, or the worship of a personal God that is separate from us) and advaita (non-dualism, or the worship of an impersonal God that is all-pervading, and part of us as well as everything around us) is a major one. I realize that one discussion may not suffice, but it is an important point to bring up:
How do you choose to think of God? Are dualism and non-dualism irreconcilable? And if so, does Hinduism, as a unified religion, actually even exist?
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It may be more instructive to think of Dvaita and Advaita as representing two poles of Vedāntic conceptions of God / Universe, for there are (and have been) a number of philosophies that fall somewhere between the two.
The Bhedābheda school (of Vallabha, Nimbarka, and of the intellectual ancestors of ISKCON) held that there was both a difference and an absence of difference between the individual soul (jīvātman) and the Supreme soul (paramātman); how that was precisely formulated varied from school to school.
Rāmānuja’s Viśiṣṭādvaita differs sharply from Śaṅkara in that it denies māyā; for Viśiṣṭādvaitins, the world is real. Rāmānuja argues against both Dvaita and Bhedābheda on the grounds that the former opposes certain Upaniṣadic teachings (so that, for instance, ahaṃ brahmāsmi cannot be true) and the latter is logically incoherent.
Now it is certainly legitimate to ask: who cares? What we’ve been raised with is probably good enough, right? Fair enough, if you stick to these particular theological questions, but these schools are more than just simple statements about God. They are entire worldviews, which can hold consequences for the way we think about things.
Advaita, for instance, denies that the world really exists, and thus it becomes questionable whether dharma really truly essentially matters. Viśiṣṭādvaita insists that the world does exist and that dharma truly must be followed. But both agree that a deep, calm, intellectual comprehension of the doctrines of Vedānta suffices for salvation. Some of the more devotion-minded Bhedābheda schools held, instead, that ecstatic devotion to your personal form of the Divine (often Kṛṣṇa in these cases) was more important than everything else in the universe.
So to answer your second question, it can certainly be argued that Hinduism does not exist as a single religion—but it certainly does exist as a dense web of closely related streams, which, if you wish, can then be given a collective name.
As the Ganga and the Brahmaputra, approaching the Bay of Bengal, give rise to an enormously complicated, almost fractal, ever-changing network of streams, constantly criss-crossing and merging and splitting, all of which are drawn inexorably by the force of gravity towards the great ocean, so too do the various branches of Hinduism interact with one another while ultimately leading to the greater ocean.
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