Tripti Lahiri
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| Courtesy India Heritage Research Foundation |
Hinduism is famous for being a religion full of concepts that are difficult to pin down, largely because the religion doesn’t have a single authoritative text but many different scriptures and streams of belief.
That may be why it took a collection of Hindu scholars and spiritual leaders a quarter-century to create a new illustrated encyclopedia of Hinduism. The encyclopedia was a project of the India Heritage Research Foundation, a nonprofit founded by an Indian spiritual leader who is based in the northern Indian town of Rishikesh.
The full U.S. edition, which was unveiled at the University of South Carolina last week, runs to 11 volumes and some 7,000 pages. The event was attended by an eclectic group of people that included Hindu holy men and women, anticorruption activist Anna Hazare and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who is of Indian origin.
While there have been other efforts to catalogue and define Hinduism, this project’s managing editor, Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswati, argues that their encyclopedia is one of the most comprehensive guides to a religion practiced by hundreds of millions of people.
“There’s not a paragraph that I can see us cutting and still being able to say it includes everything,” said Sadhvi Bhagawati, an American who visited India during her graduate studies in psychology and converted to Hinduism as a result, adopting a new name along the way.
The encyclopedia is massive because it attempts to categorize multiple aspects of Hindu civilization, including the spheres of art, culture, music, dance, philosophy and medicine, she said.
The Wall Street Journal spoke to Sadhvi Bhagawati, who lives in an ashram in Rishikesh, and who is a disciple of the guru who conceived of the encyclopedia project. The term “sadhvi” refers to a woman who has renounced marriage and committed to a life of prayer and service.
Edited excerpts.
The Wall Street Journal: Why have an encyclopedia of Hinduism?
Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswati: There was a lack of authentic sources for answers to the questions that so many of the Indian youth [growing up in America] had. Many Indians moved to the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly young qualified professionals. So their children were being raised in a system that encouraged questions.
They would go home and ask their parents the same kinds of questions they would ask at school and their parents didn’t have the answers.
But also India today — more so today but even at that time — has become part of the global scene and people are really interested in all of these sorts of things. People have been really, really fascinated by the land of India.
So this is not an encyclopedia by Hindus for Hindus. It is an encyclopedia of Hinduism for that audience, Hindu and non-Hindu, who have questions and inquiries about this tradition.
WSJ: Why did it take so long?
Sadhvi Bhagawati: The vast majority of articles were hand-written in the native tongue of the scholars, whether that was Hindi, Sanskrit, Bengali, Tamil. In the early 1990s, you couldn’t say to these various experts to type. They didn’t type. The definitions had to be translated, had to be typeset and then of course we entered rounds of in-depth substance editing.
By the early 2000s the work had come to a place where we had most of the articles back from the scholars and we were getting to a phase of editing and finalization.
The last 10 years of the project you can say were headquartered in India. [The original chief editor] had passed away many years ago. Kapil Kapoor had been appointed chief editor – he was rector of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. He appointed his own team of associate editors, bringing together scholars from across India and from across the world to review the articles. Every article has been edited eight or 10 times.
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| Courtesy India Heritage Research Foundation |
An illustration accompanying the entry under ‘Vallabha Sect.’ Vallabha is described in the encyclopedia as a celebrated saint who was born in the 15th century.
WSJ: What sources did you draw on? Were they written or oral?
Sadhvi Bhagawati: To us what was most important was that the authors be people not just who had got a master’s at this or that university but people who could give information from primary sources.
We weren’t looking for people who could pick up a whole bunch of secondary or tertiary sources and combine them. We were looking for articles from people who were themselves steeped in the wisdom of primary sources. These were people who were reading scripture, philosophy, treatises.
I would say the source matter is in almost every case things that have been written down. We are now at a period in history where the vast majority of that which had been oral has now been transcribed. Even though many of the scholars may have received knowledge orally, it had also been written down.
What was really important was that this be a project that has impeccable scholastic and academic integrity. There’s no article that’s going to say, ‘I know this because my grandfather passed it down.’ Every article has a bibliography.
We now really have a source that is authentic, that is comprehensive that is unbiased and that is agreed upon by more than 1,000 of the top scholars around the world.
WSJ: How did you reconcile different understandings of concepts in Hinduism?
Sadhvi Bhagawati: There was nothing where we had to concede and say, ‘Okay leave that as it is.’ We weren’t prepared to. If the scholars we’ve chosen are all experts there must somewhere be a meeting point.
You tend to have more competing views among followers [who are not familiar with primary sources]. Then you have religion and dogma being like a game of telephone and as it gets passed along, it changes.
That said, there are so many different ways of looking at things when you’re translating an original text. When you’re translating Sanskrit, which is such a rich, rich language, people will say ‘That could mean that, or it could mean this.’
And this particular transition isn’t necessarily in conflict with that translation. The original writer maybe actually meant all of these things. When you’re looking at aspects of philosophy particularly… that’s going to have a variety of different views.
A definition for something as short and fundamental as the Bhagavad Gita is going to be completely different from a saint who’s steeped in the Bhakti tradition versus steeped in the Vedanta tradition. We weren’t about choosing one over the other.
WSJ: Were you able to draw on sources of Hinduism from different countries?
Sadhvi Bhagawati: There are many, many articles on Hinduism in the diaspora as well as Hinduism in different countries and regions across the world. There are articles, for example, on Hinduism in the Caribbean compared to Indonesia compared to in the Philippines.
WSJ: Is there going to be an online version?
Sadhvi Bhagawati: Absolutely. There’s two different ways to go about the online version — we may actually end up doing both of them.
The first way is the easier — what you do is take that which has already been prepared and simply make it available online in a wiki type of system.
But then there’s another way of doing it in a much more interactive, multimedia way.
In the encyclopedia, in an article on the [the elephant-headed god] Ganesh, let’s say you’d have an article on Ganesh and you’d have an image or two images. But once you go online, with what multimedia can do these days, as you roll the mouse over different parts of Ganeshji, you’d have text pop up saying ‘Here’s what the broken tusk means, here’s what the belly symbolizes.’
WSJ: How do you see people accessing the encyclopedia?
Sadhvi Bhagawati: I see it getting disseminated in a couple of different ways. It should be in every library, in every institution. I also see it being something that every Hindu family or every family interested in Hinduism or multiculturalism would have.
Here are brief extracts from some of terms defined in the encyclopedia (in each of the following cases the explanations run to multiple pages). They have not been altered except to drop special characters that could not be reproduced.
Ahimsa
literally, non-violence or non-injury to living beings.
The first reference to ahimsa (non-violence) is found in Acarangasutra, a Jaina text, dating from the 4th century B.C.E. Buddhist texts from the 3rd century B.C.E. also explicate the principle of non-injury. Acarangasutra states that all beings desire to live, and outlines the practice of not harming any person, animal, plant, or the microscopic beings found in water, fire and air. To facilitate ahimsa, Jainas adopt the practices of sweeping the area where one sits, sleeps and walks to protect small life forms from potential harm, and wearing a face mask to prevent the inhalation of small creatures and to soften the force of air exhaled from the body.
The adherence to vows of Ahimsa affects every aspect of Jaina life. Jainas choose professions that minimize violence such as law, manufacturing, publishing and trading in goods, art and textiles (except silk). Until the last few decades, due to prohibitions against distant travel, all Jainas lived in India. However, tens of thousands of Jainas now live in North America and Europe, applying their philosophy of non-violence to modern lifestyle.
Aum
the sacred sound-symbol of Brahman, the Supreme Being.
This monosyllable is understood to be the source of all sound and speech. Aum permeates all words, like ribs permeate a leaf, according to Chandogya Upanisad (II.23.3). Since all objects are nameable, all objects are aum. Before reciting Vedas or names of gods and goddesses in worship, aum should be uttered. Taittiriya Upanisad describes aum as anumati (permission). Traditionally, aum and atha were uttered by Brahm, the Creator, and are considered to be the most auspicious. Apastamba wrote that the syllable aum is the gateway to paradise.
Moksa
liberation from the worldly bondage of birth and death.
Hindu sages have envisaged purusartha catustaya (four-fold goals of human life), which are dharma (duties for social sustenance and individual good), artha (means of maintenance and prosperity), kama (enjoyment within moral premises), and moksa (liberation from the transient and attainment of the eternal). Out of these, moksa, liberation from the pains and sufferings of life and also from the bondage of the vicious cycle of birth and death, has been evaluated as the supreme goal of every human being and the ultimate destiny of all living beings whatsoever.
Courtesy : The Wall Street Journal