¹ It is a revised version of a plenary address delivered at the East–West Philosophers' Conference (12–15 August 1994) at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand. My visit to New Zealand was sponsored in part by a grant from the British Council (New Zealand), for which I am grateful.

² The giant bird-mount of God Visnu.

³ It seems that some current anthropological discourse about Hindu phenomena is moving in this direction. See, e.g. McKim, Marriott's theoretical ‘Constructing an Indian Ethnosociology’, in Contributions to Indian Sociology, New Series, XXIII, 1 (1989), 1–39,Google Scholar Sage Publications, New Delhi & London, which has inspired some of the ethnographic studies published in the same issue. Thus the category of ‘mixing’ in Marriott's essentially triadic structuralist account, in which unfortunately ‘Indian’ seems to be assimilated to ‘Hindu’, ‘suggests the probability that any entity will be found nonself-sufficient, incompletely related to itself… being to a greater or lesser degree open and dependent for its qualities and processes upon exchanges with others’ (p. 19). What Marriott's analysis has in common with mine is its stress on fluidity and perspectivalism in Hindu categories. His cubic meta-model I find opaque.

⁴ It is well over 200 years old and has a canopy of about 4 acres.

⁵ Further support will be forthcoming from the integrity of the scholarship on ‘Hinduism’ from which I draw.

⁶ I contend in my recent book, Hindus: their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London: Routledge, 1994),Google Scholar ch. 1, that to be Hindu is not necessarily to be religious. Nevertheless, since historically Hindus have collectively regarded religious activity as a chief concern and factor in shaping their identity, it is religious Hinduism that I mainly address in this essay.

⁷ Macmillan, New York, 1962, and SPCK, London, 1978.

⁸ SPCK edn, p. 51. See especially chs. 2 and 3.

⁹ A Wittgensteinian notion.

¹⁰ The title of S. Radhakrishnan's well-known book, first published by George Allen & Unwin, London, 1927, and subsequently reissued (including Unwin Paperbacks, 1980).

¹¹ By W. C. Smith in the book mentioned. But see a rejoinder by Smart, N. in ‘Truth and Religions’, in Truth and Dialogue (ed. Hick, J.), (London: Sheldon Press, 1974).Google Scholar Similar problems would arise with the use of such terms as ‘Vaishnavism’, ‘Śaivism’ etc.

¹² It might be objected here that the world ‘Hindu’, from which ‘Hinduness’ is derived, is originally an outsider-term, imposed in various senses on indigenous inhabitants of India. As such, especially through such abstract constructs as ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Hinduness’, it gives the misleading impression that the religion, culture etc. of these people(s) is homogeneous. But it is disputable, to say the least, in what sense ‘Hindu’ is an outsider-designation, since it seems to have arisen from the Sanskrit word sindhu (‘river’, with special reference to the Indus) which, it may be argued, played a significant role in determining Hindu identity from the inside. Further, ‘Hindu’ has now been virtually universally appropriated by those we designate ‘Hindus’ as a self-description (with different meanings, of course). My purpose in this essay (see further) is not to invest ‘Hindu’ and its derivatives with tendentious meaning, but given the fact of their self-appropriated and common currency, to suggest how they might aptly be used, and more specifically, what a chief mark of ‘Hinduness’ might be, based on an analysis of mainstream Hindu Sanskritic sources.

¹³ For guidance here, see e.g. Sibajiban, Bhattacharyya'sGadādhara's Theory of Objectivity: Visayatāvāda, Part I (Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research in association with Motilal Banarsidass, 1990)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 3, and Matilal, B. K., Logic, Language and Reality: An Introduction to Indian Philosophical Studies (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1985),Google Scholar esp. ch. 2.

¹⁴ See the author's ‘On “Hindutva” and a “Hindu–Catholic”, with a Moral for our Times’, in Hindu–Christian Studies Bulletin (1992), 7.Google Scholar

¹⁵ For a current discussion of this appropriation see, e.g. Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: a Critique of the Hindu Right, by T. Basu, P. Datta, S. Sarkar, T. Sarkar & S. Sen (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1993).Google Scholar For a conceptual analysis of this ideology, see ‘Hindutva Ideology: Extracting the Fundamentals’, by Ram-Prasad, C., Contemporary South Asia, 11 (3) (1993), 285–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁶ The Face of Truth: a Study of Meaning and Metaphysics in the Vedantic Theology of Rāmānuja (London: Macmillan, & State University of New York Press, 1986).Google Scholar

¹⁷ This is infelicitously translated, as I have myself done on occasion, as ‘substantial/substantival’ cause. Upādāna does not necessarily connote a substance, the Sanskrit equivalent of which is, philosophically, dravya. Upādāna denotes appropriate or self-referencing being, the stuff or resource-material out of which changes take place (from ā-dā, to take to oneself, to appropriate, and the prefix upa). It is significant that in Buddhist thought, upādāna is generally denotative of attachment or change (see, e.g., Gethin, R., ‘The Five Khandhas: Their Treatment in the Nikayas and Early Abhidhamma’, in Journal of Indian Philosophy, XIV (1986), esp. pp. 37–9).Google Scholar

¹⁸ See ch. 5 of The Face of Truth.

¹⁹ Brahman is also epistemologically the world's support, as I go on to discuss in the book.

²⁰ Which is the general, traditional image of e.g. the Christian God. By contrast, in Hindu art Brahmā, a demiurgic figure representative of the world as produced, is depicted as emergent on a lotus whose stalk arises from the navel, i.e. nub, of Visnu, the supreme being. Such Hindu depictions suggest a far more intimate ontological nexus between originative cause and produced being than in corresponding Christian portrayals. On the classical understanding of the Christian God as substantivally monocentric, see e.g. the theology of Thomas Aquinas as presented in Ward's, K.Images of Eternity (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1993 edn).Google Scholar Ward starts off by noting that ‘the classical Christian idea of God…reached its paradigm formulation in the work of Thomas Aquinas’.

²¹ See The Face of Truth, p. 174, note 24.

²² See The Face of Truth, p. 174, note 31.

²³ That is, the ucchista or sacralized food, which is identified with prasāda in devotional worship.

²⁴ See, e.g., Fuller, C. J., The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India (Princeton University Press, 1992), ch. 3, esp. pp. 72f.Google Scholar

²⁵ ‘This work’, the Mahābhārata says of itself, ‘is on a par with the Vedas and is supremely purifying. This ancient lore, praised by the seers, is the best of tales worth listening to [because of its universal purifying power]’, 1.56.15.

²⁶ Mariasusai, Dhavamony, Love of God according to Śaiva Siddhānta (Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 4.Google Scholar

²⁷ For more examples, see Hindus, pp. 58–62.

²⁸ In the Poona critical edition of the epic, the dicing incident is located in Book 2, chs. 43–65.

²⁹ I have analysed the connotations of dharma in this context at length in my book, Hindus (ch. 8); here I can do no more than summarize.

³⁰ See further Hindus, ch. 8. Dharma's interpretive elusiveness is attested to repeatedly in the Sanskritic tradition. It is implied, for instance, in the highly influential Law Code of Manu which requires that a group of experts, including a logician (hetuka), a dialectician (tarkin) and a semanticist (nairukta), deliberate on what is dharma in certain cases (Manu 12.111; see also 12.105–15). See further, Matilal, B. K., ‘Dharma and Rationality’, in Biderman, S. & B.-A., Scharfstein (eds), Rationality in Question: On Eastern and Western Views of Rationality (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989).Google Scholar

³¹ Rather than, say, of the other ‘epic’, the Rāmāyana. As has been pointed out, the Rāmāyana seems to have been ‘composed in the manner of an epic’, presumably starting out as a literary oral composition in epic style before succumbing to ‘processes of textual inflation’ and Brahminic literary redaction. This is why there is a tendency in Hindu tradition to refer to it as kāvya or ‘poetry’. The Mahābhārata, however, which is ‘most commonly referred to as itihāsa [narrative]’ seems to be an epic proper, having evolved from the diffuse nucleus of an orally transmitted tradition. Quotations taken from Smith, John D., ‘The Two Sanskrit Epics’, in Hatto, A. T. (ed.), Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry, vol. 1 (London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1980)Google Scholar, to which attention is directed for further discussion on this distinction.

³² For an analysis of Radhakrishnan's religious philosophy, see the author's ‘Religion and Religions’ in Radhakrishnan. Centenary Volume, G. Parthasarathi & D. P. Chattopadhyaya (eds) (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

³³ London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

³⁴ A recent work providing particular ethnographic evidence of a polycentric approach to deity is Kathleen, Erndl'sVictory to the Mother: The Hindu Goddess of Northwest India in Myth, Ritual, and Symbol (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).Google Scholar But this is a characteristic approach, and in my view, reaches back to the origins of ‘Hinduism’. It may well have given rise to the somewhat puzzled description of Vedic religion as henotheistic, by the well-known orientialist F. Max Müller (1823–1900), according to which ‘the god invoked is seen to be supreme [for the occasion] and… there are no clear cut relationships of superiority and inferiority among the gods’; see Neufeldt, R., F. Max Muller and the Rg-Veda (Calcutta: Minerva Associates Publications, 1980), p. 31.Google Scholar For tendentious reasons, Muller seems to have described as ‘henotheistic/polytheistic’ what was and remains, in fact, polycentric.

³⁵ Princeton University Press, 1985.

³⁶ O'Flaherty, W. D., Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Śiva (Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 82.Google Scholar

³⁷ I do not claim, of course, that in daily life Hindus are necessarily doctrinally or behaviourally tolerant, or even more tolerant than people of other cultures or faiths. In fact, experience can indicate the contrary, but then this would seem to be at variance with some of the tradition's fundamental normative insights.

³⁸ See further, e.g., Mohanty, J. N., Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought: An Essay on the Nature of Indian Philosophical Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992),Google Scholar and the titles mentioned in note 13.

³⁹ I offer thoughts on the groundwork for this urgent task in ‘Seeking Others in their Otherness’, The Aquinas Lecture for 1993 at Blackfriars, Cambridge; New Blackfriars, 03 1993, pp. 152–65.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ South Asia, Journal of the South Asian Studies Association, New Series, XII (1) (June 1989), 85–102.

⁴¹ I am not speaking of grand dialectical movements across historical spectra of a particular culture or civilization.