The experience of the late Dr. John Henry Barrows, President of the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893, may be quoted in confirmation of the absence of a Hindu creed. After he had won the confidence of India's representatives as their host at Chicago, and had secured for them a unique audience there, being himself desirous to write on Hinduism, he wrote to over a hundred prominent Hindus requesting each to indicate what in his view were some of the leading tenets of Hinduism. He received only one reply.
[Sidenote: Pantheism, Maya, and Transmigration may be called Hindu doctrines.]
No one doctrine is distinctive of Hinduism. It is an extreme misleading statement, nevertheless, to say as some Western writers have done, and at least one Hindu writer,[63] that Hinduism is not a religion at all, but only a social system. There are several doctrines to which a great many Hindus would at once conventionally subscribe, and these I venture to call Hindu doctrines. In theological conversations with Hindus, three doctrines very frequently show themselves as a theological background. These are, first, Pantheism; secondly, Transmigration and Final Absorption into Deity; and, thirdly, Maya, i.e. Delusion, or the Unreality of the phenomena of Sense and Consciousness. I find a recent pro-Hindu writer making virtually the same selection. In the ninth century, she writes, Sankarachargya, the great upholder of Pantheism, "took up and defined the [now] current catch-words--maya, karma [the doctrine of works, or of re-birth according to desert], reincarnation, and left the terminology of Hinduism what it is to-day."... "But," she also adds, "they are nowhere and in no sense regarded as essential."[64] Naturally, then, the inquiry that we have set ourselves to will at the same time be an inquiry how far Christian thought has affected these three main Hindu doctrines of Pantheism, Transmigration, and Maya.
[Sidenote: Commingling of contradictory beliefs--]
Nor is it to be imagined that the Hindu polytheism, theism, and pantheism are distinguishable religious strata. "Uniformity and consistency of creeds are inventions of the European mind," says a cynical writer already quoted. "Hinduism bristles with contradictions, inconsistencies, and surprises," says Sir M. Monier Williams. The common people are indeed polytheists, at different seasons of the year and on different social occasions worshipping different deities, male or female, and setting out to this or that shrine, as the touts of the rival shrines have persuaded them. Nevertheless, an intelligent member of the humbler ranks is always ready to acknowledge that there is really only one God, of whom the so-called gods are only variations in name. Or his theory may be that there is one supreme God, under whom the popular deities are only departmental heads; for the presence of the great central British Government in India is a standing suggestion of monotheism. The officer who drew up the _Report of the Census of India_, 1901 (p. 363) gives an instance of this commingling of monotheism and polytheism. "An orderly," he writes, "into whose belief I was inquiring, described the relation between the supreme God and the Devata [minor Gods] as that between an official and his orderlies, and another popular simile often used is that of the Government and the district officer."[65] The polytheism of the masses may thus blend with the theism which is the ordinary intellectual standpoint of the educated classes.
