'The Eternal Religion: Glimpses of Hinduism' book review: The Ancient Core

The foundations of Sanatana dharma are grounded in spiritual guidance, profound philosophy and continual scholarship. Our ageless religion has weathered the buffets of millennia, and yet may be comprehended in its pristine form, without accretions of history. Yet, its flexibility, its vastness and multiplicity may render it too difficult for laypersons to conceive. There is more misinformation and misapprehension about this ‘eternal religion’ than knowledge about what it truly is. One common lacuna is the obsession with its theology/mythology and rituals, while its spiritual core is ignored. What little information about the religion has been propagated recently is more basic and limited despite its immortal wisdom and spiritual guidance.

Against such a backdrop, The Eternal Religion: Glimpses of Hinduism by Karan Singh comes as a sorely needed resource book. Not only is it almost impossible to distil the essence of a religion this extensive, to do so within the limited word count of a book is an extraordinary task, and it takes a writer of great lived experience to attempt it. A unique feature of the book is that while it delineates what seems to be a collation of broad knowledge, there pops out a sentence that either poses a philosophical query or factoid quite stunning, unheard of.

The reader rediscovers the familiar and questions anew, just as the ancient texts meant to question each of us.

The book covers enormous ground through a simple though effective framework in four parts. The first segment concisely presents the bare basics of Sanatana dharma: origins, its holiest texts, many forms, deities, practices, thought leaders, foundational concepts, evolution through the centuries and Hinduism’s current form. Interspersed throughout are commentary from the author’s vast research. “Madhava also held a doctrine, not generally found in Hinduism, that souls who consistently indulge in evil can ultimately get so weighed down that they can be permanently expelled from the universe to a state of eternal damnation.” While all of us are familiar with this notion of purgatory from Christianity, it is new that Hinduism posits an alternative to the ‘bad karma leads to bad fate’ belief systems. While discussing the extensive pantheon, the text succinctly explains its significance. “This has led to the erroneous view, still extant in some quarters, that Hinduism is polytheistic. It certainly encourages the worship of many forms and symbols, but it must be understood that behind these myriad forms is the same all-pervasive divinity mirrored in a thousand different ways.”