tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561829398685858313.post6162831064196337725..comments2023-05-08T04:06:30.276-07:00Comments on Notes of an Itinerant Mendicant: Faith, Hindus, Christians and Cynics: A Letter to SudinJason Keith Fernandeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13747657801280747019noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561829398685858313.post-89745300647455814752010-01-27T04:10:33.155-08:002010-01-27T04:10:33.155-08:00In all fairness, Jason, the idea that Hinduism lac...In all fairness, Jason, the idea that Hinduism lacks faith isn't purely a Western construct. There have been schools of Hinduism which've said as much, most notably Purva Mimamsa. I can dig out and translate a two paragraph summary of purvamimamsa by the Sage of Kanchi, if you like. <br /><br />These schools never had much of a hold in the far south, where the bhakti tradition seems to have always held sway, but they *were* Hindu orthodoxy in the North for a long while, and they've left definite imprints on contemporary North Indian Hinduism. An orthodox Hindu from the South would never have made the statement you attribute to Sudin, but it's not unthinkable for a North Indian. I suppose Sudin is at best guilty of refusing to recognise the diversity of Hinduism if he claimed that faith was alien to Hinduism, but if all he was saying was that faith is not necessary to be a Hindu, he was simply expressing an idea that has a long, orthodox pedigree.<br /><br />As an aside, from what I can see the main impact of 'modernity' on Hinduism (in the 19th century, anyway) was to *deprecate* faith in favour of a more intellectual approach to religion. One of the forms this took was emphasising ritual and sacrifice as noble, symbolic acts (drawing here on Marcus Aurelius, Julian the apostate, and that branch of late classical paganism), which were far preferable to blind faith and superstition. To these guys, faith wasn't the gift of modernity, the ability to free religion from superstitious faith was. This, obviously, has fairly interesting implications for the two incidents you describe in your blog post.oskeladdenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05011896108932029303noreply@blogger.com