From the Introduction

Max Müller, the pioneering Indologist of the nineteenth century, wrote, "We all come from the East and in going to the East everyone ought to feel that he is going to his 'old home' full of memories if only he could read them." Those words have a specially poignant meaning for me, since I was born in India of parents who themselves were born in India, spent the first nine years of my life there, and have returned as often as possible since, always to try and drink deeper from the still-living springs of its ancient passion and wisdom. The texts that I am offering in this anthology have been intimate companions for many years; India, in all its faces and powers, has been at the core of my life and search. India is, and always will be, the "old home" of my heart and of my soul.

One of the first things I learned as a child about "Hinduism" is that the word itself is inaccurate. An old Indian scholar friend of my parents explained to me patiently one morning that "Hindu" was originally a geographical rather than a religious term, used first in the Persian empire and then by the Greek soldiers and historians who followed Alexander as he swept across the world, for those who lived on the banks of the Indus River, in what is now the Punjab. "We Indians do not use this name," my friend said gently. "We call our religion the Sanatana Dharma—the 'Eternal Way.'" He spelled out the magical Sanskrit syllables slowly for me and then wrote them out in big letters in my red school notebook. Being an inquisitive seven year old, I asked, "Why do you call it the Eternal Way?" He looked a little startled and then almost whispered, "Because, my dear Andrew, it is eternal. The Sanatana Dharma, we believe, began when the universe was first unrolled out of the mind of God. It and creation began at exactly the same moment." Those words with their sense of a clear, majestic, changeless order thrilled me, and I repeated them to myself for years.

As a child, what I knew of this Sanatana Dharma was at once exotic and ordinary, homespun and picturesque. Hinduism for me was visits to temples where plump, smiling priests fed me sweets and introduced me to various gods swathed in brilliant yellow and purple silk; it was the garish shrines to Shiva and Vishnu by the side of the road, reeking of rancid butter, the festival of Holi with thousands of wild shriekers in the streets flinging fresh paint at each other, comic books with the stories of Krishna luridly fleshed out for children, the sound of temple bells echoing across moonlit fields, the tang of incense from our cook's tiny altar in the corner of his room. Once, as I was walking alone by the Jamuna River near our home, I saw an old holy man, a sadhu wrapped in a flame-orange robe, standing silently in prayer, his hands lifted in adoration to the rising sun; on his face I saw a look I had never seen in church, a look of still and incandescent devotion and tenderness; he seemed to be whispering to someone he knew very well and deeply. That afternoon I told my mother that I had seen a saint talking to God.

Later, when I came to discuss Hinduism with one of my colleagues at All Souls College, Oxford—Robin Zaehner, the brilliant and eccentric translator of the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita—I learned that in many ways "Hinduism" is nothing like what we normally think of as a religion. The Sanatana Dharma is a gallimaufry of the most extravagantly varied faiths, rituals, customs, and beliefs; Hinduism has no single dogmatic authority and, until very recently in its history, no "missionary zeal" to convert others, since it has never seen itself as the one true religion or the only hope of salvation. Zaehner was, when I knew him, a fervent Catholic convert, but he loved to exclaim, "If only the church had had the sense to allow so many different and seemingly contradictory approaches to God, how much saner its history would have been!"

It was this sublime ancient tolerance, Zaehner stressed often, that was the true proof of the wisdom and mature dignity of the Hindu tradition. "In the family of religions, Hinduism is the wise old all-knowing mother," he would say. "Its most sacred books, the Vedas, claim, 'Truth is one, but sages call it by different names.' If only Islam, and all the rest of the monotheistic 'book' religions, had learned that lesson, all the horror of history's religious wars could have been avoided. Which other religion has its God say, as Krishna does in the Bhagavad Gita, 'All paths lead to me'?" And here Zaehner would delight in repeating an anecdote he loved about a Protestant evangelical missionary trying to convert an old sage in Calcutta. "As you can imagine, the missionary pulled out all the stops. He wept and shuddered and shook and pleaded and implored and threatened hellfire and then evoked ecstatically all the joys of paradise. The old Indian sage listened quietly and, when he had finished, said, 'I accept wholeheartedly, dear honored sir, that Jesus Christ was a very great divine master whose life and teachings are of permanent sacred value to humanity. But the Buddha was also such a divine master, and so, I might add, was my dear Swami, Sri Ramakrishna. Why would God, after all, be so mean as to give humanity only one divine master and that one only for the white people?' At that, the missionary flung up his hands in horror and fled the room."

The sage in Zaehner's story was, it seems, a disciple of the great nineteenth-century Indian saint Ramakrishna and it was Zaehner, in fact, who first read to me the following passage from The Gospel of Ramakrishna that enshrines the Sanatana Dharma's "motherly" embrace of all ways to the Divine:

God has made different religions to suit different aspirations, times and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God himself. Indeed we can reach God if we follow any of the paths with whole-hearted devotion. One may eat a cake with icing either straight or sidewise. It will taste sweet either way.

As we can ascend to the top of a house by ladder or bamboo or a staircase or a rope, so diverse are the ways to approach God and every religion shows one of these ways.

People partition off their lands by means of boundaries, but no one can partition off the all-embracing sky overhead. The indivisible sky surrounds all and includes all. So people in ignorance say, "My religion is the only one, my religion is the best." But when the heart is illumined by true knowledge it knows that above all of these sects and sectarians presides the one indivisible eternal all-knowing bliss.

As a mother, in nursing her sick children, gives rice and curry to one, and sago and arrowroot to another, and bread and butter to a third, so the Lord has laid out different paths for different people.

For all its tolerance and variety of faiths and beliefs, however, there are certain essential beliefs and attitudes of spirit that bind together all those we call "Hindus." Nearly all religious Hindus share a profound faith in rebirth and karma, in the cyclical nature of time, in the transcendent and immanent Presence of the Divine, in the ultimately delusory and unsatisfactory nature of a life lived in ignorance of eternal truth, and in the supreme value of moksha, or liberation from all inner and outer limitations. Moreover, the different schools of Hinduism—while they may disagree even within themselves on such seemingly crucial issues as the nature of absolute reality, the status of the individual self, and the reality of the world—all derive their authority from the most ancient body of texts, the Vedas, which contain not only the great hymns of the Rig Veda (which begin my anthology) but also the Upanishads, the multifaceted core of Indian mysticism. While there is no one "exclusive" dogmatic Hindu tradition, then, there is, very definitely, a spirit of inquiry and of revelation that is so consistent that we find one of the greatest of modern Hindu mystics, Ramana Maharshi, speaking in ways and with images that echo exactly the terminology of the anonymous seers who wrote down the Upanishads more than two thousand years before him. It is this consistency that gives the Hindu mystical tradition its timeless purity, weight, and grandeur. It is as if one eternal voice is speaking in and through a myriad of different voices tirelessly exploring different registers of its own majestic range, as if all the tradition's poems and meditations and philosophical texts are, as Zaehner once said to me, "different-shaped peaks in one vast, grand, interconnected mountain chain, like the Himalayas."

What I have wanted to do in this anthology is to honor this consistency of vision and to present it in the way most relevant to all seekers on all paths today, and most pertinent to the dangers and challenges facing our world. I wanted to create an anthology that would—in the spirit of the Gita and Ramakrishna—inspire all readers, whatever their religious background or lack of it, to plunge into the uncovering of their eternal nature and then enact its sacred laws in loving action in the world. As it is written in the Svetashvatara Upanishad, "What use are the scriptures to anyone who knows not the source from which they come?" And as the Yoga Vasishtha warns us, "If you conceptualize these teachings for your intellectual entertainment and do not let them act in your life, you will stumble and fall like a blind person." For all its metaphysical loftiness and joy in speculation, the Hindu mystical tradition, like all true mystical traditions, is essentially practical, concerned with teaching, inspiring, and guiding authentic transformation. Whatever path you are on, then, use these texts not as intellectual puzzles but as signs of your essential splendor; pray, meditate, and serve others so that the wordless truth behind these truths can be revealed to you in your own life.

What, then, is the core truth of the Hindu tradition? It is the truth of the mystery of a Spirit that pervades, creates, and transcends all things and of each soul's conscious identity with it beyond space and time. In the Upanishads, this all-pervading, all-creating, all-transcending Spirit is named Brahman. In parts of the earlier Vedas, Brahman—from the Sanskrit br, to "become" or "breathe," and brih, "to be great"—means "that which is powerful and great" and most often refers to the force inherent in sacred hymns and sacrifices. In the Upanishads this concept widens, and Brahman becomes the Presence underlying, creating, and sustaining all of existence. For the Upanishads and all the later teachings rooted in them, every human being is naturally one with Brahman in his or her Atman, his or her "soul" or "indwelling core of divine consciousness." The aim of human life and the source of liberation from all the chains of life and death is to know, from inmost experience, the Atman's identity with Brahman and to live the calm, fearless, selflessly loving life that radiates from this knowledge.