Respectfully Engaging Hinduism

Darrell Bock: Okay. And a graduate of the seminary here?

And then we’ve got Conrad Bowman. Now, he is coming with us by Skype. And normally we would have a face and a name. But in this particular case, because of sensitivities – and we’ll talk about that in just a second – we’ve decided to do this audio-only with Conrad. And you are a missionary for Crossworld; is that right?

Darrell Bock: Go ahead.

And, Conrad, I’m going to assume you might know this. And that is Hinduism was largely confined to the Indian region of the Southeast Asian region for a long time. But because of the diaspora that you’ve already mentioned, Hinduism and Hindus are now spread all around the world. Do you have any idea as to the numbers that we’re talking about when we talk about this?

Well, let’s turn to something that I’ve alluded to a couple of times. I’m not necessarily intending to ease people about this. But when we speak of Hinduism, we have to think completely differently than Western religion. And also we have to think completely differently about thinking about there is one thing called Hinduism.

Conrad, I’ll start with you. I imagine when you went to India and began to minister to people, that it sort of took awhile for you to get your head around that. And we’re really dealing with a conglomeration of various religions tied to India, which some people say has been labeled Hinduism unfairly while other people defend the term. Since you’ve lived in India – and I’ll ask Subash about this as a native Indian in a minute – did you come across this when you were in India as you thought about interacting with people?

And so my family and I, we have come to a point where we understand Hinduism to be a civilization. So in the same way that you say someone from China is Chinese and they are a part of the Chinese civilization, we have learned to say that Hinduism is a civilization of people. And under the umbrella of this civilization, you can literally have thousands of varieties of various religions. You could be atheist, agnostic, pantheistic, you could be whatever you can think of, it exists within the Hindu umbrella. And so basically the short answer to your question, Hinduism is a civilization. And if you understand that, then every state you go to, every village, there’s going to be some different kind of religion. But Hinduism as a civilization is a great way to organize those thoughts.

Okay, Subash, so hoe did Conrad do in describing Hinduism and thinking through, you know, that we’re not just thinking about religion in the classical sense with a doctrine and that kind of thing?

So for example, you come to India, Hinduism is different from the Hinduism that is practiced in Central America or Singapore and Malaysia. And in those days Hindus scattered to other places, like Sri Lanka, Mauritius, South Africa, through the British colonizers, and Central America. And those people who moved out of India, they still keep to their 200 years back religion. But you come to India, they have adapted so much. And the Hinduism between India and Malaysia probably are different.

So with all these racial differences and language differences and world view difference, there is something that unites Hindus, which I see is people not having a single claim; this is the way we need to live. It’s a democracy of religions. And there may be three people in a home – you, me, and our mother – all three of us can have three different gods, three different world views, but we are Hindus. And that keeps kind of the country together, the people together. Although we hear some of the unrest on the basis of religion in some places, particularly North India. But on the whole, the society is intact.

But what Subash is saying is really crucial to understand. Because caste plays such a huge role in India. And for those who are not familiar with India, you have to understand that historically when you were born, your caste determines a number of things immediately before you life a week of life. It will determine who you can marry. It will determine in some cases what kind of job you’ll have or what kind of life you’ll have or who you can interact with or who you can’t interact with. And even when I lived in Benares or in Aussie for a little bit, even when they would burn the bodies on the Gandak river, even the low caste people, different levels of the ghats or the stairs leading down the rivers, they’ll burn the high-caste people higher, and it just decreases from there. And so in life and in death there is this discrimination based on the name that you were given by this system. And even if you go out to the India matrimonial websites, like Shaadi.com, one of the things you have to fill out is caste. And a lot of times parents in India when they have arranged marriages, parents won’t even consider marrying off their son or their daughter to someone who is not from the same caste. And so it’s a limiting factor in terms of love and families. And so it’s very well intricate. And in order to understand India, you have to understand the caste system.

Let’s talk a little bit, before we transition into Hinduism, real briefly on the impact of Christianity on India. Because this is an important part of the story. One of the things that is a feature of Hinduism is it’s primarily an oral set of beliefs as opposed to being based in written texts and that kind of thing. And so it produced a culture that was very oral. That kind of thing. And you were sharing in the break how Christianity has had a real impact on India because of the influence of what came with Christianity. Talk a little bit about that.

And the revolution began with the arrival of William Carey from England in 1792. When he came after a lot of struggle, he introduced newspapers in which he actually surfaced social issues like burning of widows, and women education, educating the Dalits and the underprivileged people. And eventually they started schools for women and underprivileged people. That began the education movement in 1800s and 1900s. And you go to any city, any religions; good schools were started by Christian missionaries. And all this computer revolution, medical revolution, all of them were the seeds of missionary work.

There is an undergraduate college in New Delhi called St. Stephens. That has produced all the major leaders in the Civil government. Lawyers and journalists and the people who are sitting in the cabinet. They are all – most of them come from that school.

But the philosophical religion which is practiced probably by ten percent of the people, they don’t have many gods. And they have scripture. And Indian philosophy has six schools of philosophy. They call it the six world views. And along with that, three other are there. The first six are based on scripture, called Veda. And the other three are not based on any scripture.

So let me just quickly tell you what they are. Nyaya, Vaisheshika, yoga, Samkhya, Pūrva-Mīmāṃsā, and Uttara-Mīmāṃsā. These are based on Vedas. And the other three are materialism – they call it Cārvāka philosophy – Buddhism, and Jainism. So we have nine schools through which you can look at the world.

Then about 200 years before Christ, a philosopher by name – I forgot his name. He introduced something called ashtanga yoga. Eight steps through which you are able to separate your soul from your body. And a little bit later instead of looking outside for god, they came inside to god. And that is where you have these five principles, all the philosophers and all those people know about it. One is called karma, samsara. Karma is whatever you do, you do it today, but it has effect tomorrow. And samsara is cycle of birth and rebirth. Then next one is Māyā. Māyā is vanity. Everything that you look in this world is vanity. Even the table that we look, it is vanity. Because we are in something called Māyā, or ignorance. Then achaman. Achaman, you know, analogously you can say it is the should. Then brahman. And brahman is the ultimate reality. This brahman is not he or she, but it is it.

So through this five principle, philosophical Hindus define the world. And any guru movement except iskcon, all of them are followers of openishic religion.

And most guru movements that you see in the west –

And so my wife and I have learned to integrate talking about spiritual things in almost every area or every aspect of life. And especially money. Like Hindus love when we talk about money and Jesus’ teachings about money, because Hindus love money. But yeah, don’t be overwhelmed with all these big terms or these big, hard-to-pronounce ideas. The main thing is you go straight to the source. You have to go straight to the man, to the woman, to the child and ask them specifically, hey, what’s your understanding of the universe, what’s your understanding of why we’re here? What keeps you up at night? What are you afraid of? And once you begin to learn to ask questions that really peel away the outside and getting to the core, into the heart of who someone is, you can then begin understanding who this person is, why they do the things they do, why they think the way they think. And so that’s the only thing I can really add in terms of some of these ideas.

And so the demonic ideology that really kind of comes forward is basically a system in which questions are not encouraged. And in fact, you get bad karma for asking questions. So there’s a lot of fear in a lot of this stuff. And that’s really important to know going into this.

We’ve chatted a little bit – and I’m transitioning now. I just put that in there so that people are aware of it. But the Gita is a major piece of kind of background story, isn’t it, Subash?

So, Conrad, tell us what that looks like as you approach someone and you’re interacting. You’ve already said to interact personally with them, just talk about spiritual things. But that seems like it’s a bridge that’s a challenge to cross in some ways.

So for your listeners, if God is putting on your heart to engage Hindu people, no matter what our background, no matter what your ethnic background is, this is a situation that requires all hands on deck. And so the idea that you’ve got to be confident in the power of God to be with you and to strengthen you and to encourage you because Hindu ministry is very, very difficult. It’s not easy. And you’ll have more bad days than good days. But basically just realizing that as you begin to think about God loves these people so much that he died for them. And he doesn’t desire any should perish, but all have eternal life with Him in heaven.

And so that’s my biggest encouragement and challenge; that the main thing is that you do something and that you love people, you learn how to communicate in a way that they understand and that you really put it all on the line because so much is at stake. And the reality is God accomplishes everything He wants to accomplish, there’s no doubt about that. But it’s so crucial to understand that this is a spiritual battle and it’s going to hit pretty hard once you start doing it.

What this suggests to me is that we’ve done an introduction to Hinduism. There is a lot more that could be said. And I’m sure we’ll be coming back to you guys for more discussion of this and to get into a little more detail. We’ve served to try and introduce the conglomeration that is Hinduism and the variety of things that one deals with when one walks into a world that is impacted by Hinduism. And I really do thank you both for taking the time to be with us and help us get a little bit oriented.