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| The Hindu Phenomenon |
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A UNIQUE PHENOMENON |
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| Hinduism
provides for the ultimate Truth but not for a final and last
statement of that Truth. So, we cannot have either the son of God,
or the last messenger of God, or the final revelation. Indeed, in
our civilization, when we project a nayak, we also project a
priti-nayak, the nayak's opposite.
It is not an accident that Hindus do not bury their dead; they cremate them; they do so primarily because they do not believe in resurrection which, needless to add, is the source of the belief in the possibility of a religious-cultural revival. It is a popular saying among Hindus that the soul sheds the body just as a snake sheds its skin to take on a new one. Hinduism provides for self-renewal, even if Hindus as such have not been able to make effective use of the built-in mechanism for change of centuries. The concept of Kalabrahma or Kaladharma is central to the Hindu way of thinking. It accepts explicitly the inevitability of change with the passage of time. The past is not superseded but is modified according to the demands of the spirit of the times, determined, in the traditional Indian view, by the cosmic movement of planets. Thus the Vedas are followed by the Upanishads and these by the Epics and the Puranas; nothing is final.
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