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.
This is the first thing to get right, because everything else on the page depends on it. There is no Hindu equivalent of a creed, a council, a canon-closing, or an office that can rule on membership — and the traditions gathered under the word include strict monotheists, uncompromising monists, ritualists who barely mention God, atheistic Samkhya philosophers, and villagers whose entire religion is a goddess with no Sanskrit name. The umbrella is real all the same: dharma, karma, rebirth and liberation orbit all of it, and practitioners recognise each other across enormous differences. Colonial censuses from 1871 onward hardened the category by making people pick a box, and twentieth-century Hindu nationalism hardened it further by defining a Hindu politically, as someone whose holy land is India. Indian courts have repeatedly had to supply working definitions because no religious body could. Treat any sentence that begins "Hindus believe" with suspicion, including the ones on this page — which is what the scope band under each claim is for.
Who really knows, and who can say where this creation came from, or how? The gods came after it. So who knows where it arose? Perhaps it made itself, or perhaps it did not. The one who watches from the highest heaven knows — or perhaps he does not know.
Rig Veda 10.129, the Nasadiya Sukta (rendered)The oldest layer of the tradition ends its creation hymn with a shrug, and the tradition kept it at the front.
The same ground, other faiths
claims that share this one's ideasSign in to open the first thread. Everything here is attributed.