Hinduism must be defended because it is the only civilization of consequence that never bolted the door.
Its oldest hymn doubts God.
The Nasadiya Sukta of the Rig Veda asks who could possibly know how creation began. It answers that perhaps the one who oversees it from the highest heaven knows. Then it turns, and in the last breath of the hymn it says: or perhaps he does not know.
Read that again and understand what has happened. The priest is standing at the origin of a civilization, at the head of its most sacred text, in the act of composing scripture, and he has just conceded that God himself may not know. Not that God is silent. Not that God is inscrutable. That God may not have the answer.
Genesis opens by announcing. The Gospels open by announcing. The Quran opens by announcing. This one opens by asking, and then confesses that the asking may have no terminus at all. Doubt was not smuggled into Hinduism later, by a modern, in defiance of the tradition. Doubt was there in the first light, spoken by the priest, inside the scripture, before there was anything to defy.
Everything worth defending descends from that line.
—
Because the hymn doubts, the man may doubt.
A Hindu may believe or disbelieve. He may accept the gods or reject the gods. He may accept the Vedas or reject the Vedas. He may reject the whole apparatus of metaphysics, root and branch, declare it a fiction and go about his life, and no one may pronounce him dead.
This is not a modern tolerance grafted on by reformers. It is old. The Carvaka denied the soul. He denied the afterlife. He denied karma, denied liberation, denied the authority of scripture, and said that the priests were men making a living. He was recorded. His arguments were preserved by the men who opposed them, stated in their own texts, in his own words, so that they might be answered. He was not burned. He was cited.
The greatest minds India ever produced in the Buddhist schools were born Brahmin. Nagarjuna was Brahmin. Dharmakirti was Brahmin. They left. They walked out of the house of their fathers, built a rival system, and dismantled the metaphysics they had been born into. Nobody hunted them. Nobody declared their blood lawful. They are honored to this day by the very tradition they abandoned, and their books are studied by the descendants of the men they refuted.
Now perform the same experiment inside the Abrahamic house.
The Jew who leaves is mourned as dead. The family sits shiva for a living man. The Christian who leaves is damned, and the damnation is eternal, and it is not metaphorical. The Muslim who leaves is killed. This is not the excess of a mob. It is the settled finding of every classical school of law that has ever existed in Islam, Hanafi and Maliki and Shafi’i and Hanbali and Ja’fari alike, in agreement on almost nothing else and in agreement on this.
Three faiths. One architecture. The exit is bolted, and behind the bolt stands excommunication, damnation, or the sword.
That is the difference. It is not a difference of temperament. It is not a difference of doctrine. It is a difference of construction. One house has a door.
—
What sits at the center of the Hindu house is not God. It is Dharma.
This must be understood exactly, because the whole argument turns on it. Every sect of Hinduism has quarreled over metaphysics. The Nyaya fought the Mimamsa. The Advaitin fought the dualist. The Samkhya counted twenty-five categories and the Vaisheshika counted six and each thought the other confused. They fought for two thousand years and they fought in public and they fought in writing, and not one of them questioned Dharma.
Dharma is cosmic justice. It is moral obligation, binding upon all humanity, owed by every man to every other man and to the living world and to the creatures in it. It does not require belief. It requires conduct. It does not care in the smallest degree what you think about the gods.
There is no such thing anywhere in the Abrahamic faiths. There is law given by a lawgiver. There is obedience owed to a person. There is salvation dispensed by a warrant, and revoked by the same warrant, and there is no appeal from the revocation. Remove the lawgiver and the entire edifice falls into rubble, because the edifice was never resting on anything but him.
Remove every Hindu god tomorrow. Burn the temples, break the idols, silence the priests. Dharma stands exactly where it stood. A man still owes his neighbor. He still owes the river. He still owes the child not yet born. Nothing has been subtracted from his obligation, because his obligation never rested on a person in the sky.
Which is why, by their own definitions, Hinduism is not a religion at all.
It has no founder. No single book. No creed. No confession of faith that must be recited. No church. No priesthood with the power to expel. No final authority from which there is no appeal. It possesses not one of the features by which they recognize a religion, and it possesses the one feature they cannot recognize at all: a civilization organized around freedom of conscience.
They have no word for such a thing. So they call it heathenism, and they go looking for the idol, because the idol is the only thing in the room they know how to name.
—
Now the enemy.
India has been at war since the year 712, when Muhammad bin Qasim entered Sindh. That war has never closed. Battles were won. Kingdoms rose and struck back and held ground for centuries. The war was not won. It has never been concluded, never been settled, never been signed. It is being fought this afternoon under the name of Pakistan, by an army, with nuclear weapons, and it will be fought tomorrow.
In thirteen centuries, not one sage, not one Guru, not one Swami, not one Mahatma, not one Sant has understood the nature of the thing he was facing.
They mistook it for a religious disagreement.
A religious disagreement is Nyaya against Mimamsa. It is two schools contending over the means of valid knowledge, each granting the other the right to exist, the right to be heard, and the right to be wrong. Each publishes. Each answers. Each concedes a point when the point is well made. That is a conversation. It has rules, and it has an umpire, and the umpire is argument.
Islam does not grant Hinduism the right to exist.
This is not a matter of the temperament of Muslims. It is a matter of theology. The removal of idol worship from the face of the earth is a sacred obligation, laid on the believer, by the text, without expiry. The Hindu is the idol worshipper. He is not an opponent whose conduct offends. He is not a rival whose doctrine must be corrected. His existence is the offense. Not what he does. That he is.
Christianity delivers the identical verdict in a gentler voice, and the gentleness has deceived the Hindu for three hundred years. If salvation comes through one man and through no other, then a billion Hindus are not the adherents of another path. They are not wrong about a detail. They are souls in error, in danger, awaiting correction, and the correction is called love, and it arrives carrying a school, a hospital, an orphanage, and a purse.
This is not a religious conflict. It is a civilizational conflict. One side has been prosecuting it for thirteen centuries, without pause, without doubt, and without any need to apologize for it. The other side has been holding an interfaith dialogue and congratulating itself on the quality of its manners.
—
The Guru cannot save Hinduism. He never could.
Not because he is wicked. Most of them were not wicked. The charge is not malice, and malice would be the lighter charge.
The charge is that he did not know what the war was, and he did not know that a weapon existed.
He sat across the table from the missionary holding Shankara. He met the mullah holding Nagarjuna. Now understand what those men are. Shankara is the most formidable metaphysician the human species has produced. Nagarjuna dismantled the concept of inherent existence itself, and the dismantling has not been repaired in eighteen hundred years. These are the finest instruments ever devised for the interior life. They are made for the man alone at midnight with his own death.
They are not weapons. They were never built to be weapons. Nothing in them was designed to be pointed at a stranger who has arrived to abolish you.
So the Guru brought consolation to a knife fight, and he was praised for his serenity, and the ground was taken from beneath him while he was being praised.
He fought theology with theology. He answered scripture with scripture. He said: our book also speaks of compassion. He said: we too have a great tradition. He entered a courtroom whose rules of evidence his opponent had written, accepted the jurisdiction of a judge appointed by the prosecution, and lost. And lost. And lost again, for thirteen centuries, and he called the losing tolerance, and his students applauded, and the temples came down.
—
The weapon exists.
It is Logical Empiricism, and it does not refute Abrahamic theology. It negates it. The distinction is the whole of the matter, and no Guru in thirteen hundred years has grasped it.
Refutation grants a claim the dignity of being false. To refute a thing is to concede first that it said something, that the something was capable of being true, and that upon inspection it turned out otherwise. Refutation is an honor. It is the honor a physicist pays a hypothesis when he takes the trouble to kill it.
Negation withholds even that.
A statement that forbids every possible test, that no observation could confirm and no observation could disturb, that would stand unshaken whatever the universe did, is not a false statement. It is not a statement. It has the grammar of a sentence and none of the content of one. It has a subject and a verb and it says nothing whatsoever. There is nothing there to argue with, because there is nothing there.
Revelation is such a noise. Final judgment is such a noise. The sealed book. The last prophet. The only son. The eternal fire prepared for the unbeliever. Arrange the words correctly and they resemble knowledge. They have the cadence of knowledge, the solemnity of it, the syntax. Then ask the one question that separates a claim from an incantation. Ask what would show it wrong.
Nothing is offered. Nothing has ever been offered, in twenty centuries, by anyone, because nothing was ever on offer.
The Hindu does not need to prove the prophet mistaken. He has been trying to do that since 712 and he has failed every time, and he will fail every time, because you cannot demonstrate the falsity of a sentence that has not said anything. He needs only to observe, in a level voice, that the prophet never said anything at all.
—
Now turn the weapon around and point it at the Vedas.
Do it. The criterion does not exempt the man who wields it. It has no loyalty to the hand.
Ask what observation would confirm rebirth. None is offered. Ask what would disturb liberation, or the cosmic order, or the hymns themselves. Nothing is offered, because nothing was ever on offer there either. The blade does not know whose house it is standing in and would not care if it knew.
Very well. Let it cut.
If Hinduism is disintegrated, if it is rotten, if it is corrupt, then let Hinduism die. But let it die on the operating table and not on the altar.
Let it die under examination, in the hands of Logical Empiricism, at the cost of a question honestly asked and honestly answered. Not in the hands of a warrant that forbids the question, and executes the questioner, and calls the forbidding salvation.
Those are not the same death, and no man should ever be permitted to confuse them.
One is an autopsy. The body is opened, the disease is named, and the method survives the corpse. Whoever comes after may use it, on Hinduism, on anything, on the method itself. The other is a sacrifice. Something is killed on a stone to satisfy a claim that cannot be checked, and afterward nobody may ask anything, ever again, about anything.
So let it be said plainly, because it is the center of this essay and everything else is preparation for it.
I am not defending Hinduism.
I am defending the condition under which a man may put his own gods on the table and open them. Everything under the sun is to be examined, including the sun. The Vedas are to be examined. Dharma is to be examined. This essay is to be examined. If Hinduism cannot survive that examination, then Hinduism has earned precisely what every unverifiable claim has earned, and it should receive it without complaint and without a hearing.
No Christian may write that sentence. No Muslim may write that sentence. No Jew may write that sentence. Not one of them, not once, in twenty centuries, on any continent, in any language. Not because they lacked courage. Because the warrant forbids the concession, and a man who makes it has left the faith by the act of making it.
That inability is the entire indictment. This paragraph is the entire defense. They are the same paragraph.
—
This is the tool. It was sharpened in Vienna, and the Hindu who refuses it on that ground must first surrender his telephone.
Electricity is not Hindu. The aeroplane is not Hindu. Penicillin is not Hindu. The train is not Hindu. The internet is not Hindu. The smartphone in his hand, in which he is composing a denunciation of Western thought, is not Hindu, and neither is the satellite carrying it, nor the mathematics of the encryption, nor the electricity in the battery, nor the medicine that kept him alive to write it.
He accepted every Western instrument that carried him. He refuses the single instrument that could defend him.
That is not a philosophical position. There is no philosophy in it anywhere. It is the reflex of a beaten man who will take gifts from the master and will not touch the weapons, because taking a gift is safe and taking a weapon is an act of war.
And it was never the master’s weapon.
Europe was the first victim of Abrahamic monotheism, not its author. Understand this, because the Hindu has been taught to see a single undifferentiated West and it has cost him everything. The gods of the Saxons were extinguished by the sword, and Charlemagne beheaded four thousand five hundred of them in a single day at Verden for refusing baptism. The gods of the Prussians and the Lithuanians were extinguished by a crusade. The gods of the Norse were extinguished. Athens was silenced. The Academy was closed by imperial decree after nine hundred years. The temples of Rome were pulled down by the sons of men who had worshipped in them.
Europe’s temples were smashed before Europe ever learned to smash anyone else’s. The continent was conquered first, converted at the point of a blade, and then handed the blade and pointed outward.
And Logical Empiricism was forged in that wreckage, in Vienna, by the descendants of the conquered, as the counter-weapon. It was not built by the victors to extend the conquest. It was built by the defeated, in the ruins, to make certain it could never happen again.
The Hindu is not importing the master’s tool. He is picking up a weapon left on the field by a fellow victim.
—
And it was ours before it was theirs.
The Buddha said: examine, and know for yourself. Do not accept a thing because it is tradition, or because it is scripture, or because it is widely reported, or because it follows from an inference, or because a teacher of great reputation and personal magnetism has said it. Test it. Then accept it, or do not.
The Carvaka said: what cannot be perceived is not admitted. He said it two thousand years before Vienna and he was not persecuted for saying it, and his enemies wrote his arguments down.
Dharmakirti built an entire epistemology that recognized perception and inference and nothing else whatever. Not testimony. Not scripture. Not revelation. Two sources of valid knowledge, and the door closed behind them.
We held the instrument in our hands. We put it down. We buried it under a mountain of commentary, and commentary upon the commentary, and we went looking for a Guru.
—
Nothing else will save the Hindu.
No Baba. No Swami. No Mahatma. No temple puja. No pilgrimage. No ritual whose meaning nobody has understood for a thousand years, whose syllables are recited by men who cannot construe them, and whose recitation is called learning.
Only reason, relentlessly applied, without exemption, without an inner sanctum where reason is asked to remove its shoes.
Only critical thought. Only empirical evidence. Only the scientific method, which is the sole procedure ever devised by which a man may discover he is wrong before reality discovers it for him.
Only a body that is fed and trained rather than starved and blessed. A Hindu should know STEM. He should know the philosophy of science. He should know his own health, his own blood, his own strength, and he should know these things better than he knows the syllables of a rite. The gymnasium before the temple. Not as blasphemy. As arithmetic. The temples have been full for three thousand years and the children are stunted.
And he should know one thing about the enemy above all others.
Abrahamic monotheism asks for equality when it is weak. It requests a seat at the table. It speaks the vocabulary of pluralism fluently and it is entirely sincere in the asking, and the sincerity is genuine, and the sincerity is worth nothing.
When it is strong, it does not ask. It legislates. It converts. It demolishes. It forgets the vocabulary altogether, and it forgets that it ever spoke the vocabulary, and it is astonished to be reminded.
Nothing has changed in the doctrine. Nothing has changed in the heart of the believer. Nothing has changed except arithmetic.
—
There is no live and let live in Abrahamic monotheism. There never was.
The phrase cannot be constructed inside it. It is not a sentiment they have failed to cultivate. It is a sentence their grammar will not form, because a warrant that is final cannot concede that another man may keep his own.
And the proof is not what it did to the Hindu. The proof of that would be dismissed as the grievance of the defeated. The proof is what it does to itself.
Catholic against Protestant, and the Thirty Years War took a third of the population of the German lands. Sunni against Shia, for thirteen centuries, and this morning. Trinitarian against Arian. Orthodox against Monophysite. The reformer against the schismatic against the heretic against the apostate who altered one syllable of a creed he otherwise shared entire.
These wars were fought between men who agreed on the prophet and disagreed only on the succession. Between men who agreed on the son and disagreed on the mechanism of his presence in a wafer. Cities were emptied over a single word inserted into a confession, and both parties could recite the whole confession and differed on the word.
A warrant that cannot grant coexistence to a brother who shares ninety-nine parts in a hundred was never going to grant it to the idol worshipper.
Intolerance of the stranger is not the disease. It is the symptom, and it is the late symptom, and it arrives last.
The disease is a claim that cannot admit the possibility of its own error. Such a claim will devour its own household first and the world afterward, in that order, always, everywhere, without a single exception in twenty centuries. The behavior toward the Hindu and the behavior toward the cousin are identical, because the architecture is identical, and the architecture does not know the difference between them.
—
If this world is destroyed, it will be destroyed by Jewish, Christian, or Muslim fundamentalists.
It will not be destroyed by Hindu fundamentalists. Or Buddhist. Or Confucian. Or Shinto. Or Taoist.
There is no Hindu end of days that any man is obliged to hasten. There is no Buddhist final judgment. There is no Confucian last morning on which the unbeliever is consumed and the cosmos completed and the account at last closed. No devout Hindu, however devout, is under any obligation whatsoever to accelerate the annihilation of anything.
Only three traditions on this earth contain a final day that is desired. A last war that is prophesied and awaited. A saved remnant. An unbeliever whose destruction is not an accident of history but is written into the architecture of time itself, as a necessary event, as the completion of the design.
And only those three now stand beside nuclear arsenals, in the hands of men who believe every word of it.
—
So the question is no longer a Hindu question, and it stopped being one some time ago.
A species that has manufactured the means of its own extinction has exactly one survival condition available to it, and the condition is pluralism.
Epistemic pluralism, which holds that no man and no book possesses a final and uncheckable truth, and that every claim, without exception, must present itself for inspection.
Religious pluralism, which holds that a neighbor’s metaphysics is not a wound requiring surgery.
Ethnic and racial pluralism, which holds that the stranger is not a defect in creation awaiting repair.
Embrace it, or perish. There is no third arrangement. There is no fourth. And there is no longer any time in which to go looking for one.
Abrahamic monotheism cannot supply the condition. Not because its adherents are cruel, and most of them are not. Because its warrant forbids the concession that pluralism requires, and the concession is the price of admission, and the price cannot be paid. It has never supplied the condition anywhere, in twenty centuries, on any continent, to anyone, including its own children, including its own cousins, including itself.
One civilization of consequence was built upon that condition from its first hymn. Built on it and on nothing else. It has never in its history required a single man to believe a single thing in order to live.
It is being dismantled now, in the open, in daylight, by people who call the dismantling progress and by people who call it salvation, and between them there is no meaningful distinction.
Therefore, and let this be understood by men who have no interest in India and no affection for its gods:
Whoever defends liberty defends Hinduism, whether he has noticed it or not. Whoever defends freedom of conscience defends India.
Not out of sentiment. Not out of heritage. Not because the temples are old or the philosophy is subtle. Because the door that Hinduism left unlocked is the only door out of the room, and it is the only one that was ever built, and there is not another one anywhere on this earth.
—
So fight.
Alone if necessary. It will be necessary.
Fight as the honey badger fights, which is to say without first calculating whether the thing standing in front of you is larger than you are. The calculation counsels surrender. It has always counselled surrender. The badger has never once made it.
It is not large. It is not swift. It has no armor worth the name. It has one gift, which is refusal, and that refusal has made it feared by animals that could kill it in a moment and that decline, on inspection, to try.
You have one weapon. Reason. Empirical evidence. The relentless, undeviating, socially ruinous demand that a claim submit itself to a test before it is granted the name of truth. It will cost you dinners. It will cost you friends. It will cost you the good opinion of every serene man in the room.
Nothing else.
No one else.