A family of paths sharing dharma, karma, and liberation — not a single creed.
Less a single religion than a family of traditions rooted in the Indian subcontinent — bound not by a founder or creed but by shared orbits: dharma, karma, rebirth, and liberation. It contains monists, dualists, devotional theists and household ritualists, often in the same family.
DeitiesAsk a Hindu who God is and the honest answer is: which Hindu. The Advaitin says there is one reality without a second and your own self is it. The Vaishnava says Vishnu is God and you are eternally his and eternally not him. The Shakta says the Goddess is the power without which the gods are corpses. The Smarta worships five and treats them as faces of one. What is actually prayed to on an ordinary Tuesday evening is narrower than any of that — the family deity, the goddess at the edge of the village, the god of the street corner, and the dead of one's own line. The figure of 33 or 330 million gods is not a census. It is a way of saying the list does not close.
EmergedIndian subcontinent
AfterlifeRebirth (samsara), until liberation (moksha)
TextsVedas · Upaniṣads · Bhagavad Gītā
The map
Hinduism’s corner of it — solid lines are descent; dotted lines are resemblance only, ideas held in common across unrelated faiths. Click a node to recenter; ✕ returns here. All 171 faiths →
c. 1500 BCE Vedic Religion 800 CE Smartism 800 CE Advaita Vedānta 1250 CE Dvaita Vedānta 1955 CE Ananda Marga 1958 CE Transcendental Meditation
Hinduism is a name that came from outside.
No founder, no creed, no council, no single book. The word comes from the Persian for the people living beyond the Sindhu river, and the -ism was added by British administrators who needed a column to count subjects in; what the traditions inside it call themselves is sanatana dharma, vaidika dharma, or simply the name of their own sampradaya.
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Dharma sustains the cosmos; to live rightly is to live in accord with it.
Order is not imposed on the world — it is the world; conduct, ritual, and law participate in it.
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The Vedas were not composed by anyone.
Apaurusheya — not of human authorship, and without beginning: heard rather than written, and preserved by sound long before sense. Accepting their authority is the classical test of orthodoxy, which is why almost every Hindu affirms it and almost none has read them.
held by most
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Action bears fruit: karma binds consequence to deed across lifetimes.
No judge required — cause and effect run through moral life as surely as through nature.
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The world is an appearance you have mistaken for a fact.
Maya, in Shankara's Advaita: Brahman alone is real, the world is neither exactly real nor exactly unreal, and ignorance is the only thing that ever needed removing. Ramanuja and Madhva both rejected it outright — for them the world is God's and therefore real.
⚖ contested within
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The self is reborn until liberation.
Samsara is the default condition; moksha — release — is the shared goal the schools define differently.
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Six ways of arguing, and all six are orthodox.
Nyaya took logic, Vaisheshika atoms, Samkhya the inventory of what exists, Yoga the discipline, Mimamsa ritual and language, Vedanta the Upanishads. They contradict each other on nearly everything and were taught side by side, and a student was expected to state his opponent's case better than the opponent before refuting it.
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God is one, you are not God, and the difference is permanent.
Madhva's Dvaita holds five eternal distinctions — God from soul, God from matter, soul from soul, soul from matter, matter from matter — and goes further than anyone else in Vedanta by teaching that souls differ in kind, and that not all of them are going anywhere.
⚖ contested within
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Atman and Brahman are one — the self is the absolute.
Advaita affirms this; Dvaita holds the opposite — that self and God are eternally distinct. Both are Hinduism, and their argument is eight centuries old and still running.
⚖ contested within
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The world and every soul are God's body.
Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita: one reality, but a qualified one — Vishnu as the self, souls and matter as the body he animates and rules. It keeps the unity the Upanishads insist on and the relationship devotion requires, which is why it became the theology of the largest devotional network in the south.
⚖ contested within
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Many paths, one goal: knowledge, devotion, action, discipline.
Jnana, bhakti, karma, raja — the yogas are parallel routes, chosen by temperament.
held by most
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The supreme has a name, a face, and a preferred flower.
For most Hindus God is not an abstraction but a person — Vishnu, Shiva, or the Goddess — and each stream holds that its own is supreme and the others are lesser or dependent forms. The philosophical claim that they are all one is sincerely held and is not what is said inside the temple.
held by most
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When dharma decays, the divine descends.
The avatara doctrine: Vishnu enters the world age after age — fish, boar, dwarf, prince — whenever the order of things tilts too far. God is not aloof from history; history is where God intervenes.
held by most
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Time is a wheel, and this is the worst quarter of it.
Four yugas turn from a golden age down to this one, Kali Yuga, which by the standard reckoning began in 3102 BCE and has some 426,000 years still to run. The cosmos is not going anywhere in particular: it dissolves and is remade, and a single day of Brahma runs 4.32 billion years.
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Heaven runs out. Liberation does not.
Svarga is a reward with an expiry date — good karma spends down and the soul comes back. Moksha is the only exit, and every school in the tradition, however violently it disagrees about what moksha is, agrees that it is the point.
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Sound is not a description of the thing. It is the thing.
A mantra is held to work by what it is rather than by what it means, which is why the Veda was transmitted with pitch and meter intact for three thousand years by people who guarded pronunciation far more carefully than interpretation. Om is the syllable the universe is said to be made of.
held by most
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Grace does the work; your effort is mostly getting out of the way.
Prapatti — surrender — split the Srivaishnava community into two schools that have never reunited. The Tenkalai say the kitten hangs limp and the mother carries it. The Vadakalai say the baby monkey has to hold on. The argument is six hundred years old and still decides which temple you attend.
⚖ contested within
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Birth does not decide worth — and the tradition has argued about that for three thousand years.
The Gita says the four varnas were made by quality and action; the dharmashastras say they are made by birth, and set the penalties accordingly. Every reformer from the Buddha to Basava to Ambedkar has hit this seam, and the ones who stayed inside argued from the tradition's own scriptures.
⚖ contested within
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The god is in the image, once invited.
Prana-pratishtha installs the deity in stone or bronze, and from that moment the murti is bathed, dressed, fed, woken, garlanded and put to bed. The Arya Samaj and the Lingayats reject the entire apparatus, and both are counted Hindu.
held by most
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What the ascetic renounces, the tantric uses.
Tantra takes the body, the senses and desire as the material of practice rather than the obstacle to it — mantra, yantra, mudra, and an energy woken at the base of the spine. Most Hindus absorb its methods through ordinary temple ritual without ever using the word, and the transgressive left-hand rites are practised by very few and disowned by nearly everyone.
⚖ contested within
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B
Brahman.
The absolute — not a god among gods but the ground of everything, of which every deity is a face, a name, a door.
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V
Vishnu — the preserver.
Sustainer of the cosmic order, who descends as avatar when the world tilts: Rama, Krishna, and more. The heart of the Vaishnava stream.
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T
The ten descents.
Fish to turtle to boar to lion-man to dwarf to man — a sequence nineteenth-century Hindus noticed reads like evolution, and have been pointing out ever since. Including the Buddha was a way of absorbing a rival rather than fighting one, and Buddhists have never been pleased about it.
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S
Shiva — destroyer and regenerator.
Ascetic on the mountain, dancer whose steps end and renew the universe, the yogi's god — center of the Shaiva stream.
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Sandhyavandana — the joints of the day.
Water sipped, the breath held, the Gayatri counted on the finger-joints, the sun addressed at the moments when day and night hand over. It is the oldest daily rite in the tradition and the one most quietly abandoned.
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Puja — the daily offering.
Flame, flowers, food before the deity's image — hospitality to the divine as household routine.
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Darshan — going to be seen.
You do not attend a service. You queue, look at the deity through a doorway for a few seconds, and are looked at back. Tirupati moves sixty to eighty thousand people through that doorway on an ordinary day.
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Japa — the name, repeated.
A mala of 108 beads worked with the thumb, one name per bead. Initiated Hare Krishnas count sixteen rounds a day, which is 1,728 repetitions, and keep a book.
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Where next
the museum exit — every door leads deeper inSources
34 cited texts
- Rig Veda 10.129, the Nasadiya Sukta (rendered) where it is cited →
- Bhagavad Gita 3:35 where it is cited →
- Rig Veda 1.164.46 (rendered) where it is cited →
- Bhagavad Gita 2:47 where it is cited →
- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.3.28 (rendered) where it is cited →
- Bhagavad Gita 2:22 where it is cited →
- Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7 where it is cited →
- Bhagavad Gita 4:11 where it is cited →
- Rig Veda 1.164.46 where it is cited →
- Bhagavad Gita 4.7–8 where it is cited →
- Bhagavad Gita 18.66 (rendered) where it is cited →
- Bhagavad Gita 4.13 (rendered) where it is cited →
- Katha Upanishad 1.3.14, in Vivekananda's rendering where it is cited →
- Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7 (rendered) where it is cited →
- Puranic accounts of the churning (rendered) where it is cited →
- Bhishma, Mahabharata, Sabha Parva (rendered) where it is cited →
- Bhagavad Gita 2.47 where it is cited →
- Bhagavad Gita 3.35 where it is cited →
- Mahabharata (Anushasana Parva, rendered) where it is cited →
- Taittiriya Upanishad 1.11 where it is cited →
- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.3.28 where it is cited →
- Devi Mahatmya 5 (rendered) where it is cited →
- Patanjali, Yoga Sutra 1.2 (rendered) where it is cited →
- Tirumular, Tirumantiram (rendered) where it is cited →
- Andal, Tiruppavai 1 (rendered) where it is cited →
- Manusmriti 9.3 (rendered) where it is cited →
- Taittiriya Upanishad 3.1 where it is cited →
- Bhagavad Gita 4:7–8 where it is cited →
- Devi Mahatmya 1.75 where it is cited →
- Bhagavad Gita 9.32 (rendered) where it is cited →
- Basavanna, vachana (rendered) where it is cited →
- Bhagavad Gita 18.66 where it is cited →
- Bhagavad Gita 9.26 where it is cited →
- Ramayana (Ayodhya Kanda, rendered) where it is cited →
These citations identify texts used in the linked passages. Follow each passage to read its quotation and context. A tradition’s own texts explain its teachings; historical claims may also require independent scholarship. Translations marked (rendered) are our own plain-English wording, not a standard edition; where a passage matters, read it in a full translation.