BY DR. K. M. VENKAT NARAYAN*
What a tradition without a single founder or creed can teach us about uncertainty, pluralism, and the search for truth
Some years ago, someone asked me a deceptively simple question: Why is Hinduism so complex, and how does it differ from the Abrahamic faiths? I responded with a list. Hinduism has no single founder, no universally binding creed and no central religious authority. It accommodates a personal God and an impersonal absolute, devotion and scepticism, elaborate ritual and the rejection of ritual. Having grown up within a Hindu world and spent my professional life in science, I have long been drawn to traditions that leave room for conviction and doubt. The more I considered that list, the more I wondered whether complexity was itself a clue to understanding Hinduism.
Any comparison among religions requires humility. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are themselves diverse, with long histories of debate and interpretation. Hinduism, too, has histories of hierarchy, exclusion and struggles over authority. Still, a broad difference is worth examining. The Abrahamic traditions give particular importance to revelation and to a God who acts in history, expressed through differing understandings of covenant and prophecy. Hindu traditions also recognise revelation, but their shared identity grew through an accumulation of texts, practices, local deities and philosophical schools. Their unity often resembles a conversation conducted over centuries.
Questions at the Heart of the Tradition
One of the oldest and most striking expressions of this questioning spirit appears in the Nasadiya Sukta, the creation hymn of the Rig Veda (10.129). It imagines a beginning when there was neither non-existence nor existence, neither death nor immortality. It asks where creation came from, then leaves the question open: perhaps the overseer in the highest heaven knows, or perhaps even he does not. The hymn allows uncertainty about the origin of everything to remain within a sacred text.
It would be misleading to call Hinduism simply agnostic. Many Hindu traditions make confident claims about God and reality. Yet this ancient hymn gives uncertainty a legitimate place within religious thought. Doubt can be a form of reverence, an admission that reality may exceed our capacity to understand it.
The Upanishads turn this inquiry towards the self. Their teachers ask what survives death, what makes consciousness possible, and how atman, the deepest self, relates to brahman, ultimate reality. Their answers are not uniform. Later Vedanta philosophers disagreed profoundly: Shankara’s non-dualism, Ramanuja’s qualified non-dualism and Madhva’s dualism offered rival accounts of God, world and self. All three became enduring Hindu traditions. Disagreement belonged at the intellectual heart of Hinduism.
The One and the Many
To outsiders, Hinduism’s many gods can seem bewildering. Yet labels such as polytheism, monotheism and pantheism do not fully capture Hindu belief and practice. A worshipper may regard Vishnu, Shiva or Devi as supreme, honour another deity on a particular occasion, and also believe that the divine exceeds every name and form. A verse in the Rig Veda (1.164.46), commonly rendered as “Truth is one; sages call it by many names”, gives memorable expression to this possibility. It need not mean that every doctrine is identical, or equally accepted by every Hindu.
In the Upanishadic and Vedantic traditions, brahman is not simply another deity. It names ultimate reality, understood in some schools as beyond attributes and in others as possessing infinite auspicious qualities. Devotional traditions may understand that reality as a personal God. Images and stories make the divine familiar and approachable; philosophical reflection asks what lies beyond those forms. Different communities give these approaches different weight.
The scholar Julius Lipner describes Hinduism as “polycentric”, with multiple, overlapping centres rather than a single controlling one. This helps explain more than the number of gods. Religious authority is distributed among scriptures, teachers, temples, families, philosophical traditions and local customs. What is central to one community may be peripheral to another, while shared practices and ideas connect them.
Many Paths and Different Human Temperaments
Hindu traditions also recognise that people approach spiritual life in different ways. The Bhagavad Gita brings together disciplined action, knowledge and devotion. Karma yoga asks one to act without attachment to the fruits of action; jnana yoga seeks liberating insight; bhakti yoga emphasises loving devotion. Meditative disciplines, ritual, service, art and pilgrimage provide further approaches, though their place and importance vary across traditions.
This variety recognises a familiar human difference. Some people are drawn to love and devotion, others to inquiry, duty or contemplation. A tradition that accommodates these temperaments will offer several paths. They may compete, overlap or converge. Their coexistence produces complexity, but it also allows spiritual life to respond to different circumstances and dispositions.
The four purusharthas, or human aims, extend this breadth into ordinary life: dharma, ethical responsibility; artha, material well-being; kama, desire and pleasure; and moksha, liberation. Traditions debate how these aims should relate to one another, but their inclusion acknowledges more than a single model of the good life. Family, work, pleasure and public responsibility all have a place in moral reflection.
The Demands of Dharma
It is tempting to describe Hindu ethics as leaving each person to discover an individual dharma. There is some truth in this, but dharma is not unlimited personal preference. The word can refer to cosmic order, moral duty, law, virtue, religious practice and the responsibilities attached to relationships or stages of life. Its meaning depends on context, and context can bind as well as liberate.
The Mahabharata repeatedly reminds us that dharma is subtle. Its moral crises arise when duties collide: loyalty with justice, kinship with public responsibility, truthfulness with the prevention of harm. The Bhagavad Gita begins with Arjuna paralysed by competing obligations. Krishna’s response contains firm teachings, but their meaning unfolds through an extended dialogue about action, duty, knowledge, devotion and surrender.
Attention to context can deepen moral judgement by asking what responsibility requires in a particular situation. It can also reinforce injustice. Appeals to inherited duty have been used to justify caste hierarchy, gender inequality and exclusion. B. R. Ambedkar’s critique of caste remains indispensable because a tradition must be judged by the lives its social order permits, as well as by its philosophy. Complexity cannot excuse injustice. A living tradition must be able to question what history has made sacred.
Scripture and Dissent
Hinduism has no single scripture with the same role across all its communities. The Vedas carry a distinctive authority, but Hindu religious life has also been shaped by the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the Puranas, devotional poetry and vernacular retellings. Their authority and use vary. Orthodox Vedic traditions regard the Vedas as apaurusheya, not authored by a human being. Interpretation, however, has never ceased.
Indian intellectual culture also developed through dissent. Buddhists and Jains rejected Vedic authority; materialist traditions challenged karma, rebirth and an afterlife; rival Hindu schools debated valid knowledge and the necessity of a creator God. Traditions classified as nastika in this context reject Vedic authority, rather than necessarily belief in a deity. Buddhism and Jainism have independent identities and should not be treated as branches of Hinduism. Their arguments nevertheless helped shape the intellectual environment in which Hindu thought developed.
Even the modern category “Hinduism” has a history. Scholars have debated how much it was consolidated under colonial rule. Andrew Nicholson’s work shows that precolonial thinkers were already drawing connections among diverse philosophical schools and developing shared identities. Colonial classification and modern nationalism later sharpened boundaries and encouraged a more unified presentation of Hinduism as a world religion. Hinduism is an old, evolving family of traditions whose understanding of itself has also changed.
The Scale of Time
Many Puranic traditions describe immense cycles of creation, preservation and dissolution through yugas, kalpas and recurring worlds. These scales dwarf an ordinary human lifetime. They should not, however, be presented as anticipations of modern astrophysics. Mythic accounts and scientific measurements use different methods and serve different purposes.
Such vast cycles can place a human life in humbling perspective. Worlds arise and pass away; no generation occupies the whole stage. This view can encourage humility, but it can also invite resignation. As with karma, much depends on interpretation. A sense of cosmic scale need not diminish our responsibility for the lives around us.
The Gift and Burden of Complexity
Hinduism’s decentralisation has helped it absorb local practices, new teachers and changing circumstances. It has allowed people to express religious identity in markedly different ways. A Hindu may be deeply devotional, committed to ritual, philosophically inclined, reformist or mainly attached to inherited culture. Some Hindu philosophical traditions do not require a creator God. Ideas such as dharma, karma, rebirth and liberation provide a shared vocabulary, without being understood or accepted in the same way by everyone.
Pluralism, however, should not become a reason for self-congratulation. Hindu communities have drawn boundaries and competed for authority. Caste has inflicted lasting injustice, and women and subordinated groups have often had to struggle for a voice. In my view, efforts within contemporary Hindu nationalism to impose a more uniform religious and political identity risk narrowing this inheritance. Equally, celebrating complexity while avoiding questions of injustice weakens the case for pluralism.
What I value most is the space Hindu traditions have repeatedly made for questions. Is ultimate reality personal or beyond personality? What is the relationship between the divine, the world and the self? How should we act when duties to family, society and truth conflict? The answers differ, and the disagreements matter.
These questions have generated stories, rituals, philosophical arguments and movements for reform. Hinduism is complex because it holds the accumulated efforts of many communities to understand reality and live within it. Some of that complexity comes from historical layering and unresolved contradiction. Some comes from a willingness to let more than one answer remain in the conversation.
Perhaps the question “Why is Hinduism so complex?” invites another: Why should we expect reality, or the human search for meaning, to be simple?
The Nasadiya Sukta leaves us at the edge of what can be known. For me, its hesitation is a reminder that conviction and humility can coexist. A tradition may endure because it continues to ask questions.
Selected Sources
- The Rig Veda, especially 10.129 (the Nasadiya Sukta) and 1.164.46. Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India, Oxford University Press, 2014. The rendering of 1.164.46 in this essay is a common English formulation, not a quotation attributed to their translation.
- The principal Upanishads; the Bhagavad Gita, especially chapters 2–3, 6 and 12; and the Mahabharata.
- Julius Lipner, Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, second edition, Routledge, 2010.
- Andrew J. Nicholson, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History, Columbia University Press, 2010.
- B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, 1936.
*K.M. Venkat Narayan, MD, MSC, MBA, is Executive Director, Emory Global Diabetes Research Center. He is Ruth and O.C. Hubert Professor of Global Health and Epidemiology at Rollins School of Public Health and a professor of medicine and endocrinology at Emory University School of Medicine. A leading international diabetes expert, he is an elected member of the US National Academy of Medicine (NAM), a foreign fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), member, Association of American Physicians (AAP), and fellow, American Association of Advancement of Sciences (AAAS).
