What we can, however, do is emphasize again and again that Hinduism is not a religion. Rene Guenon, one of the best known European traditionalist authors on various civilizations, writes in his book Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines: "...the term religion is difficult to apply strictly outside the group formed by Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which goes to prove the specifically Jewish origin of the idea that the word now expresses." He adds: "In India we are in the presence of a tradition which is purely metaphysical in its essence ... A fact which stands out much more clearly here than in the Islamic tradition, chiefly owing to the absence of the religious Point of view, ...is the com- plete subordination of the various particular orders relatively to metaphysics, that is to say relatively to the realm of universal principles."
Hinduism has been called a confederation of religions by apologists as well as detractors. That definition can- not, and does not, do justice to the spirit of the Hindu people. For, religion as such is a Semitic enterprise. It must, by definition, draw a boundary between the believer and the unbeliever: the chosen and the rejected: the blessed and the damned; the truly faithful and the heretic. It must divide, It just cannot do otherwise unless it comes to be tempered by other influences, as Christianity has been tempered gradually by the upsurge of the Graeco-Roman civilization since the Renaissance in Europe in the fifteenth century. That was a sister civilization to ours. That is why its coming in via British rule could help stimulate and renew Hindu civili- zation despite its Christian undertones and attempts at proselytization by the missionaries.
Hindus accept no divisions between the believer and the unbeliever. Every path leads to Him (God or Reality): there can be as many paths to Him as the number of human, in fact, sentient, beings. For, every being is differ- ently constituted, with different capacities and needs, and can follow only a path appropriate to him or her. As such, Hindus can have no difficulty in accepting the legitimacy of Christianity and Islam for their adherents, though for themselves they cannot possibly accept either Christ as the only son of God, or Mohammed as the seal of prophecy and the Koran as the immutable word of God to be taken literally. Indeed, the prophetic tradition is alien to Hinduism. An avatar (incarnation of God) is not a Hindu variant of the prophet. His actions and sayings are not immune to interpretation and, in fact, to disre- gard and rejection.
Hinduism provides for the ultimate Truth but not for a either the son of God, or the last messenger of God, or the final and last statement of that Truth. So, we cannot have revelation. Indeed, in our civilization, when we project a nayak, we also project a prati-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 for 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.