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spread to the south and east, eventually extending their rule over most of India. Over time, the gods and culture of the Aryans gradually combined with those of the existing local cultures, and what Westerners later called “Hinduism” evolved from this ancient marriage. Although the Aryans never developed a great and voracious imperial government intent upon world conquest—just as no dominant state emerged in ancient Greece—their myths eventually knit together the people of this vast and diverse “subcontinent” as no single state or government bureaucracy ever could. Their beliefs and sacred rituals, the Sanskrit language, the holy temples to the cosmos of gods and goddesses—and the unshatterable “caste” system their beliefs cemented rigidly in place—formed the soul of Indian culture.

Yet to talk about “Hinduism” as a monolithic religion is a mistake. It has no pope or hierarchy. No founder or central prophet. No uniting creed. No Vatican or Mecca or Jerusalem. As it exists today, Hinduism—along with its two most significant offshoots, Buddhism and Jainism—is a complex collection of beliefs with a vast pantheon of gods and differing schools of thought. Its dizzying diversity has led writers such as historian Ninian Smart to comment, “Even to talk of a single something called Hinduism can be misleading because of the great variety of customs, forms of worship, gods, myths, philosophies, types of ritual, movements and styles of art and music contained loosely within the bounds of the religion…It is as if many Hinduisms had merged into one. It is now more like the trunk of a single ordinary tree; but its past is a tangle of most divergent roots.”

From those ancient roots—the stories, legends, and ancient myths—comes a vibrant, pulsing religion with a collective consciousness that has few parallels in other cultures or belief systems, either East or West.

MYTHIC VOICES

Scholars of India are puzzled by why their culture, so ancient, so rich in sculpture and architecture, in works of mythical and romantic literature, should have been so lacking in critical historical writings. Some suggest that the ancient Indian works of history written in Sanskrit may, for still unexplained reasons, have suffered wholesale destruction. A more plausible explanation is that they never existed…. The main interest of Hindu Indians in their past was not in the rise and fall of historical empires, but in the rulers of mythical golden age…. The lack of a historical record reveals not merely the Hindu preoccupation with the transcendent and the eternal, but also the widespread sense that social life was changeless and repetitive…. In a society that did not know change, what was there for historians to write about? When real events were recorded, they were usually transmuted into myth to give them a universal and enduring significance.

—DANIEL BOORSTIN, The Discoverers

If the slayer thinks he slays,

If the slain thinks he is slain,

Both these do not understand;

He slays not, is not slain.

—Katha Upanishad

How do we know what the ancient Indians believed?

The Egyptians left us their Book of the Dead, the Mesopotamians their Gilgamesh. The Greeks gave us Homer and Hesiod. The Celts left stories that were later preserved by monks. But when it comes to the myths of ancient India, we have a vast collection of mythic and religious writing that dwarfs all others. If anybody deserves the sobriquet “people of the book,” it may well be the compilers of India’s vast libraries.

When the Aryans arrived in the Indus Valley sometime between 1700 and 1500 BCE, they brought along Sanskrit, the oldest known written language of India. Although Sanskrit died out as a “living language” by about 100 BCE, it was used—like the Latin of medieval Europe—as the “learned language” of poetry, science, philosophy, and religion. Forming the core of Hinduism’s beliefs and practices, the collections of Sanskrit hymns, poetry, philosophical dialogues, and legends all exist in an imposing set of texts that include, most significantly, the Vedas and