Hinduism highlights

In the Indo river valley, in the north-west of India, an ancient Dravidian society flourishes probably in the fourth millennia BC. It was both agricultural and urban, with great cities as Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. It may have worshiped a mother-goddess. Its representations of God are a man with four arms, signifying symbolically that God was more powerful than the human being. God was sometimes called iruven, “the one who is” or “the one who exists”. God was also called “the one with goat horns” (symbol of strength) or “the one with fish eyes”, indicating his omniscience or knowledge of everything at all times (since fishes can never close their eyes). God is worshipped, feared and loved.

This Dravidian society suffers a crisis around 1700 BC. In the middle of the second millennium BC it receives an Aryan invasion. Aryans were of tribal tradition, pastoral and patriarchal, with Sanskrit as their language. They brought with them their gods (devas), predominantly male, the importance of each one varying in time: Dyaus (equivalent of Zeus and Jupiter), Varuna (god of the night firmament, creator of the Earth and the Sun and protector of the sacred royalty; it is a god remote to the world, containing the terrible creative strength, sometimes beneficial, sometimes destructive; it is the god with more moral characteristics, punishing sins and forgiving the repentant; equivalent to Jewish Yahweh and Greek Uranus), Mitra (the brilliant god of the day firmament, the sun god; always welcoming and good, of incorruptible justice, close to humans), Indra (god of war, storm and thunder), Agni (fire god, igneous in Latin, the intermediary of sacrifices and offerings consumed up to heaven), Soma (god of plants)...

They also brought with them their Sanskrit sacred texts, the Vedas (hymns for liturgical ritual sacrifices), which were later compiled by a wise man designed as Veda-Vyasa (the compiler of the Vedas). They gather in four groups: Rig Veda (Veda of the hymns), Sama Veda (Veda of the melodies), Yahur Veda (Veda of the formula for the sacrifice), and Atharva Veda (Veda of the Atharvan magicians, formulas and enchantments for everyday life).

Aryan society was divided in four groups (varna): brahmins (devoted to study and worship), kshatriyas (warriors), vaishyas (traders, artisans, bureaucrats, land owners) and sudras (peasants and servants). The Dravid population was included in this last group. A fifth group appeared, the dalit (devoted to despised tasks like garbage gathering or transportation of dead people), with those expelled from the other groups and those who were neither Aryans nor Dravids. Those groups are known as “casts”, and the dalit as “untouchables” or “pariah”.

In this context Brahmanism (a special aspect of the Vedic religion) consolidates in India, in coexistence with the popular ancient religious traditions, more local in nature. Brahmanism, traditionally linked to the warrior sectors, is later weakened with the raising importance of traders, as well as by the emergence of Buddhism and Jainism (both questioning the traditional Brahmanist sacrifices). But Brahmanism manages to maintain its influence as a transmitter of culture and education in Sanskrit. Buddhism and Jainism appear in the sixth century BC in confrontation with Brahmanism and they follow their own way.

Jainism underlines that the whole of the Universe is full of individual souls that do not only live in humans but in all living creatures (animals, plants). Those souls try to liberate themselves from the body where they are locked, and Jainism teaches the way to proceed for this liberation to take place. Central to it is the notion of ahimsa (“not to wound”, to avoid violence towards any living being), which implies opposition to the animal sacrifices typical of the Vedic tradition. Violence loads the soul with karma, which has to be dissolved through ascetics, meditation and good behavior. This leads to strict vegetarianism, since eating plants instead of animals reduces the degree of possibility of damaging activities. It also led to avoid the practice of agriculture, to avoid damaging the little animals living in the ground; which made the Jains to be mainly traders and, later on, industry promoters. They practice austerity in a higher degree than Buddhism: fast, bodily mortifications (nudism, exposure to cold and heath). Its monks and nuns have to observe five rules: not to kill, not to lie, not to steal, practice chastity and renounce to the pleasures coming from external things. Their main referent is Vardhamana Jnatiputra (549-477 BC), often designed as Mahavira (“great man” or “great hero”) or Jina (“victorious”). Tradition presents him as someone that, after the death of his parents, left his wife and children to become an ambulant ascetic during thirteen years; then he abandoned his clothes and submitted to twelve more years of severe penitence, until he reached the knowledge of the essence of existence. His disciples gathered in two kinds: the svetambaras (“dressed in white”) and the digambaras (“dressed in air”, naked).

The seventh and sixth centuries BC the Vedas are complemented by the Upanishads (Katha, Mundaka, Taittiriyaka, Brihadaranyaka, Svetasvara, Prasna). Instead of emphasizing the cult, they focus on ideas and symbolic thought; they underline the importance of ascetics, which generate "spiritual warmth" (tapas); transmigration reappears. Upanishad means “to sit attentively at the feet of”, referring to a master (rishi); it has also been interpreted as "esoteric teaching", "secret instruction". The fifth century BC brings the famous Bhagavad Gita ("song of the blessed"), Chapter 23:40 of a huge literary epic poem, the Mahabharata, religious and literary landmark together with the Ramayana.

Popular traditions converged to a devotional approach (bhakti), validated by the Brahmins. Already at the time of Chandragupta (340-298 BC), founder of the Mauryan dynasty in the kingdom of Magadha, there are witnesses of the worship to the god Vasudeva (one of those witnesses was Megasthenes, Seleucid ambassador to the court of Pataliputra, the capital of the Magadha kingdom). During the Sungai dynasty (183 - 71 BC), another Greek ambassador, Heliodorus, also expresses his devotion to Vasudeva. The Brahmins seek to formalize and universalize these cults, joining Vasudeva and other gods to Vishnu (originally a secondary solar deity in the Rig-Veda), the cult to which grows in importance.

Towards the end of the pre-Christian era crystallizes a Brahmanism trinity (trimurti) of gods: Brahma, the creator of the world, the creative force; Vishnu, who preserves and protects; and Shiva, who destroys and renews. Brahma is represented with four faces because he sees in all directions. Vishnu is dark blue as night, as space extending towards everywhere; he is represented with four arms: one hand holds the lotus flower of purity, two hold his weapons and another one a sea horn to be played at the beginning and the end of battles. Shiva is often represented as a dancer with many arms and legs as the permanent movement of the dance of life; he is the god of love and grace, of fertility and procreation, the merciful god that takes care of all lives; he maintains the world in existence with his yogic meditation, but he has also a sinister side, as god of the storm and of destruction, having then as domains the battlefield and the cemetery. The three gods are represented by the letters A, U and M, thus forming the sacred sound “aum” (or “om”), symbolically considered as the initial sound of the Universe from which all was created.

Brahma

Vishnu

Shiva

Three mother-goddesses (shakti, primordial cosmic energy) are associated with these gods: Saravasti, goddess of learning, consort of Brahma; Lakshmi, consort of Vishnu, also called Shri, goddess of wealth, love, prosperity (both material and spiritual), happiness, health, fortune, and the incarnation of beauty, and Parvati, responsible of the creation and agent of all change, consort of Shiva (also called Durga, Kali and other denominations).

Soon associated with the worship of Vishnu is the worship of Krishna (“the one who attracts"), a demi-god, protector of cattle, of which there are already references when the Greeks invaded northern India in the fourth century BC (they compared Krishna with Hercules). Krishna happens to be regarded as an avatar, a human manifestation (avatara, literally "descent", “the one who comes down”) of Vishnu. Another relevant avatar is Rama. Maybe avataras have some relation, whether directly or through Buddhism, with the figure of the Zoroastrian savior (saoshyant), coming to defeat the forces of evil.

In the religious thought that was developing in India it was crucial to see the identity between what is behind the exterior world and what is behind the human being: Brahman (the supreme reality without form, the omnipresent absolute) is the same than Atman (the divine dimension within each person; breath, spirit, being). To perceive this identity one has to be prepared by a spiritual master or guru. To perceive this identity is a source of spiritual liberation (moksha: liberation of the chain of reincarnations, complete realization, emancipation, release, salvation), and breaks the transmigration chain. This identity is graphically expressed with the words “tat twam asi”: you (Atman) are also this (Brahman), words that appear in the Shandongya Upanishad at the end of a comparison of Brahman to salt dissolved in water (which cannot be seen but impregnates it and gives it taste), made by guru Aruni to his son.

“Everything is truly Brahman. He is mind and life, he is light and truth, he is the infinite space.

Greater than Earth, greater than the atmosphere, greater than the sky, greater than all the worlds, lives in my heart. It embraces all the universe and, silently, it is Love towards everything. It is my Atman, this one is Brahman”.

Shandongya Upanishad

An important role is played by the trilogy of inseparable essences inherent to the True Being: "Sat-cit-ananda" ("existence-conscience-joy"), in other words “interior experience of truth – awakening of the conscience - beatitude or supreme happiness”. Humanity, the universe and the divinity form a unit; a conscience of this unity can be reached, we can see and experience it; this conscience generates joy and liberty.

The access to this conscience, that we can call wisdom, can follow four compatible ways, through which the union with the divinity can be reached, thus overcoming the stadium of multiplicity (maya): 1) knowledge, made of reasoning and discernment; 2) love, devotion, feeling; 3) uninterested action; and 4) physic-mental experimentation. They are four yoga (“way of union”), different and complementary, four ways to try to overcome, to go beyond, what hides truth. So we will speak of the knowledge yoga (to use the mind to deepen in the search for understanding, leaving aside the ego-centered concerns, jnana yoga), the yoga of devotion (love and deliverance to truth and not to our interests, bhakti yoga), the yoga of action (to make things that bring wisdom and detach from one’s own interests, karma yoga), and the yoga of attention (concentration in breath and the body movements or postures, observation of life, raja yoga or ashtanga yoga).

1) The way of knowledge goes through a first stage of learning ideas and concepts, a second stage of prolonged and intense reflection so that these ideas and concepts can become alive, operational in oneself, and a third stage of distance from the thinking subject, of displacement of one’s identity towards its perdurable part, thinking of oneself in third person, as someone out of us.

The way of knowledge is the shorter one but also the tougher one...

2) The way of love tries to channel towards the divinity the love that is inside every human heart. While in the way of knowledge the divinity has a more impersonal or transpersonal character, an infinite with which we end up identifying or unifying ourselves, in the way of love the divinity has a more personal character, and is more differentiated from the human being looking for him: God is “other”, different. The aspiration is not to identify with him, but contemplate and venerate him. This bhakti approach is magnificently expressed in a significant classical Hinduism prayer:

“Can water drink itself?

Can trees taste the fruits they produce?

The one adoring God has to be other than Him,

since only in this way will he be able to know the joyful love to God;

because if he says tan God and him are one same person,

this joy, this love, will immediately vanish.

Do not pray anymore for the total unity with God;

Where would the beauty be if the gem and the crimping were one?

Warmth and shade are two,

If they were not, were would be the consolation of warmth?

Mother and son are two,

If they were not, where would love be?

When, after being separate, they get together,

What a joy mother and child feel!

Where would joy be if the two of them were one?

Accordingly, do not pray anymore for the total unity with God."

That this God be personalized (instead of being a pure and infinite being) becomes indispensable. And the goal is to love this God with devotion, really love him, as a living experience (not only as a mental idea), and reach the stage of loving him beyond anything else, and love him with no purpose, not as a means to obtain anything. To do this a great deal of symbols, images and rituals are used, that are not finalities in themselves but elements through which the mind can “undertake the flight”. It is significant this invocation used by priests when beginning the rituals:

“Oh God, forgive three sins born from my human limitations: you are everywhere, but I revere you here; you have no shape, buy I revere you in these shapes; you do not need praise, but I offer you these prayers and salutes. God, forgive three sins born from my human limitations.”

It has to be kept in mind that a symbol (like the divinities with multiple arms showing the versatility and potency of the divine power, frequent in India) can be more significant than a whole treaty of theology. And that a myth can point to depths that the intellect can hardly indicate. It is the symbols, myths and rituals that move the human heart, not the prescriptions nor the logical reasoning; it is them which have the capacity to take thought and emotion from superficiality to depth, from worldly distractions to divinity. As Huston Smith, to whom we follow in these considerations, says: “When singing praises to God, when praying to God with total devotion, when meditating on the majesty and the glory of God, when reading the scriptures about God, when considering the whole universe as a work of God, we move our affection towards God.” Each representation of the divinity points to something “beyond”, and none exhausts the real nature of God. From here comes the opportunity of having a great number of representations of the divinity. Anyway, although it is true that all representations point equally to the divinity, it seems appropriate that everyone chooses one of them as the one with which he identifies the most (the ixta of everyone, the form of the divinity we adopt as the main one).

The way of love is the most widespread and popular...

3) In the way of action, of work, of labor, the key is the attitude from which things are done: whether they are done for one’s own profit or not. In the first option, every action reinforces our ego and isolates ourselves from the divinity; in the second one, the ego is weakened and so are the barriers separating us from the divinity. The goal is to reach uninterested action, which has a sense by itself and not for its results; it will no longer be evaluated according to its success or failure, the gain or loss, the pleasure or the pain. When this disposition is reached, concentration and calm can be maintained in the midst of the greatest agitation. Action is taken, and taken diligently, fully, without laziness or reserves, bringing in all the effort, but without being emotionally submitted to the results of the task.

4) The way of physic-mental experimentation considers that there are physical exercises and mental exercises that can take us closer to the divinity. The West has often mistrusted the way of personal experience, considering that it cannot be a sufficient proof of truth, but India has a different point of view. It proceeds through voluntary introversion, trying to reach the deepest part of psychical energy. The Yoga-sutra of Patanjali (II century BC) present an integral vision of this yoga, labeled as raja yoga. It considers it as a development of the aptitude to direct the mind exclusively towards an object and maintain this direction with no distraction. To reach this aptitude one needs a "practice" (to have reached through the corresponding exercises the capacity to make the proper or precise effort to reach and sustain the state of yoga), as well as a "detachment" (absence of aspirations or purposes from the senses and the mind, a kind of relativizing distance allowing us to see everything out of serenity, including ourselves and our impulses). This process generates a deep understanding of the object to which we address ourselves, an understanding that generates joy.

This process of in depth understanding, of reach of mental clarity, can be disturbed by nine possible interruptions: illness, mental blocking, doubts, lack of prevision, tiredness, excess of complacence, illusions on one’s own mental state, lack of perseverance and regression. These interruptions are manifested through four symptoms: mental unrest, negative thought, incapacity to be comfortable in different body postures and difficulty to control one’s own breathing.

This yoga tries to reduce our physical and mental impurities so that we can reach clarity of perception. The notion of "purification" is important, and explains, for instance, why one has to eat correctly (eat the appropriate things) or stop smoking. In order to purify ourselves, yoga wants to be useful in overcoming five kinds of obstacles: the improper understandings, value confusions, excessive attachment – to that which we believe can bring us happiness -, irrational aversions - normally resulting from experienced pains – and the feeling of insecurity – the anxiety in front of the future.

We should distinguish in ourselves eight relevant components in the process of exploration and clarification, which are at the same time the eight steps of the process:

1) Yama: Our attitudes towards what surrounds us, which have to include: a) respect towards all living beings, and in particular towards the innocent, the ones having problems or that are in a worse situation than us; b) proper communication through language, writings, gestures and actions; c) the overcome of greediness, or capacity to resist the desire of what is not ours d) moderation in all our actions; e) abandonment of avarice or capacity to only accept which is appropriate.

In other words, abstention from injury, lies, theft, sensuality and greed.

2) Niyama: Our attitudes towards ourselves, which have to include: a) cleaning, in other words, to keep our body and our environment clean; b) content, or faculty of feeling well with what one has and has not; c) suppression of impurities in our physic and mental organism by practicing correct habitudes of sleeping, exercise, nutrition, work and relaxation; d) studying and evaluating our progress in this field; e) venerating a superior intelligence or acceptation of our limitations in front of God, the Omniscient.

In short, cleaning, complacence, self control, study and contemplation of the divinity.

3) Asana: Reaching that the body does not distract the mind in the process, placing oneself in an intermediate corporal stadium between lack of comfort, that irritates and disturbs, and the relaxation that makes sleepy; between standing, that makes tired, and lying, that makes asleep. This is done through the asana, precise positions of the body that bring balance and tranquility, like seating correctly.

In other words, the practice of physical exercises in which attention and relaxation, effort and comfort, have to be in a fair balance.

4) Pranayama: The practice of breathing exercises (pranayama), which try to reach the conscious and deliberate regulation of breathing, so that breathing does not distract the mind in the process.

5) Pratyahara: To move attention from the outside to the inside, closing the doors of perception, immerging in the inner contemplation, so that the person can be alone with its mind.

In other words, the control of the senses.

6) Dharana: To reach concentration: to quiet one’s own mind, which spontaneously does not tend neither to calm down nor to obey (a Hindu metaphor says that the mind is like a monkey that is crazy, drunk, with Huntington’s disease and stung by a bee...), until reaching a stage in which the mind can focus at length on an object to explore it in depth, without losing the awareness of itself.

In other words, the capacity to orientate the mind.

7) Dhyana: The capacity to establish interactions with what we try to understand, to the point of reaching the dissolution of duality: conscience identifies so much with the object of perception that it forgets about itself and about the differentiation between it and the object.

8) Samadhi: The complete integration with the object of our understanding when it is the divinity leads to reach the state of samadhi: absorption of the human mind in the divinity. The mind keeps thinking, but in nothing in particular (the differentiating shapes have vanished); the mind is not “in white”, it “sees the invisible”.

The four ways (knowledge, love, action and experimentation) take to a kind of knowledge that goes beyond the knowledge of the rational mind: it raises to the depths, simultaneously dark and enlightened, of what is usually called the mystic conscience, since the object of knowledge is the divinity, the ineffable, that of which it is not possible to speak, the one having no name, the one “in front of which all words go back” (Shankara). But at the same time the use of words and concepts cannot be avoided, sole tools at the reach of our mind, knowing that words and concepts do not take us to the end of the way, but they can point us towards the right direction, give us the correct orientation. This is what happens with the term brahman and its three main attributes, sat, cit and ananda. With them it is said that God is being, conscience and joy, but they are not literal descriptions of divinity, they are only terms that tell us in which direction we have to orientate our search: towards the plenitude of being, and not towards “nothing”; towards the plenitude of conscience, and not towards unanimated matter; towards the joyous ecstasies, and not towards anguish. Because although God cannot be identified even with the trilogy “being, conscience and joy”, humans need concrete and representative images in order to find significations with a certain consistence. It is difficult to conceive, and still more to feel motivated, by things very far away from direct experience. God has no attributes, but it is easier to think about it with attributes, in a personal conception (brahman Saguna) than without, in a transpersonal conception (brahman Nirguna). Shankara will represent this second option, Ramanuja the first one; and Ramakrishna will consider that both points of view are equally correct.

It is also significant of the tradition from India the consideration of the existence of the "subtle body”: there is a subtle energy parallel and in connection with the functioning of the physical body. This subtle energy or prana would circulate through subtle conducts or nadis. There are three main nadis, parallel to the vertebral column: ida, which follows the left side of the vertebral column, basically of a yin nature; pingala, following the right side, basically yang, and sushumna, which goes in between the other two.

Also following the vertebral column or backbone, in the subtle body there are seven relevant points, seven centers cumulating energy, which correspond with points of the physical body, and are associated with psychological traits, natural elements, numbers, etc. They are the well known chakras:

1) muladhara, at the base of the column, the basic centre, the root, represented by a square or a lotus with four petals. Its element is the earth.

2) svadhistana, related to the sexual organs and the instinctive impulses, represented by a lying growing moon – with the horns looking up - or a six petal lotus. Its element is water.

3) manipura, related to the belly and the nostril, with the physical life of eating and digestion, represented by an inverted triangle or a lotus of ten petals. Its element is fire.

4) anahata, related with the chest, the heart and the lungs, with feelings and emotions, represented by a six point star or a lotus of twelve petals. Its element is air.

5) vishuddha, related with the neck, the larynges, the pharynges and speech, with expression and communication, represented by a circle within an inverted triangle or a lotus of sixteen petals. Its element would be space.

6) ajna, related to the forehead, the mind and conscience, represented y a circle or a lotus of two petals. Its element would be mental energy.

7) sahasrara, related to the highest part of the head, with superior intuition, spiritual will and the transcendent world, represented by a triangle or a lotus of one thousand petals. Its element would be spiritual energy.

The systematized emergence of Hinduism does not seem to occur until the early Christian period, although it will not be fully formalized until the time of the Gupta dynasty (320-650 AD), the golden age of Hinduism (a term used by western people; Indians call it sanatana dharma, the eternal right way). It gathers new interpretations of the Veda but at the same time maintaining a strong link with them and their gods (something that Buddhism and Jainism did not do).

Indian religious thought is gathered in six orthodox schools (astika):

- Nyaya (with a scholastic belief in a personal god and an atomistic world)

- Vaisesika (also atomistic, concerned by the distinction between beings and individual objects)

- Sankhya (founded by Kapila around 600 b.C., based on a dualism between eternal spirits –purusha- and a primitive and active material substance -prakrini-; the human being is composed of a material part, prakrini, which forms a body capable of enclosing purusha or free soul, which can suffer the pains communicated to it by the material element; liberation consists in discovering that purusha is free and that the material existence is nothing but an apparent illusion, but the divine help is necessary to reach such liberation)

- Yoga (of which we have already talked at length)

- Mimamsa (“interior search” or exegesis, or old exegesis –Purvamimamsa-, of a polyteist ritualism and considering that Vedas exist since the eternity and that they identify with the Creating Word; it considers ethic actions as the force that determines the appearance of the world)

- Vedanta (or Uttara Mimamsa, “posterior or superior exegesis”, of a monist carácter, strongly linked to the Upanishad and spread by Sankara)


Worship focuses principally in Vishnu and Shiva. Also popular are Ganesh, son of Shiva and Parvati, represented with the head of an elephant, who helps humans to overcome obstacles, and Hanuman, assistant to Rama with the appearance of an ape.

In the medieval period (500-1500) Brahmins, often counselors of kings, coexist with popular devotion, which the Brahmins sought to incorporate into their schemes; popular devotion (bhakti) was less sensitive to cast division than the Brahmins. In South India, in the Tamil territory, there was in the seventh century a flowering of fervent popular devotion, somehow confronted with Buddhism. In this context appears the strong personality of philosopher Shankara (788-820), a Brahmin (Brahmana in Sanskrit) taking distances both in respect of Buddhism (although some aspects of his thought are considered the result of Buddhist influence, even if it is considered that Shankara’s thought favored the decline of Buddhism in India) and in respect of the devotional approach. He gave great importance to ascetics and the yogi development of the individual self as Brahman. Shankara considered that it is maya (the illusion that makes the one appear as a large number of separate and independent entities) which prevents humans from seeing that reality is one and indivisible, that everything is Brahman (the absolute impersonal); a position called advaita ("not two", a nuance of genius between "one" and "two") that will have a long projection in the philosophy of religion. Maya puts humans in search of pleasure, generating suffering and problems; ascetics and contemplation are the ways to go beyond maya and therefore are more important than devotion or rituals. Since reality is one and includes the truth that is inside humans, there is no place for love and devotion to God by the faithful, nor is justified the consciousness of separation between God and the human. Shankara promoted the monastic movement within Hinduism, which bloomed during this medieval period in India; Hindu monasteries, called mathas, also had social and educational activities. In parallel, temples (mandir) also took new importance; since the sixth century they are made of stone (formerly they were made of wood or clay, more degradable). As in Europe, in Medieval India a lot of temples were built, in the north resembling mountains, in the south as courts surrounded by a wall with sanctuaries spread around.

The reaction of the devotional sectors towards Shankara was personified by Ramanuja (born in the mid-eleventh century, died in 1137), who sought to reconcile the tradition of the Upanishads (equivalence between Atman and Brahman) with bhakti devotionalism, which considers that humans can get absolution or salvation (moksha) through the devotion to God and through his grace. Ramanuja wrote an extensive commentary to the Bhagavad Gita. The followers of Ramanuja split in two schools: vadagalai (humans should have the initiative in the process of salvation, opening themselves to the grace of God) and tengalai (it is God who initiates the process, enveloping the human being with his grace; humans should only show their disposition to let them be caught). Tengalai is a little more popular and peasant oriented, and incorporates tamil language to its activities, while vadagalai is more faithful to Sanskrit.

In the twelfth century the lingayata cult appears, centered on the worship of Shiva, a strict vegetarianism, abstinence from alcohol, a virtuous life of hard work and sobriety, humility and kindness, the protection of their gurus, the defense of faith and daily worship, and the disapproval of cast distinctions within the lingayata community. It is possible that this movement was a result of the impact of Islam in India.

At the end of this medieval period the shakta worship boosted in India, focused on the veneration of the female consort of Shiva, called, as mentioned, Parvati, Durga, Kali and other names. For this movement, this goddess personifies the power of nature, of which humans are considered to depend. She creates only to destroy, and only creates because she destroys. She is fierce, hungry and full of violence, and can only be appeased by the sacrifice of living beings, including humans.

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (in parallel with what happened in Europe) see the appearance of a wave of religious reform and revival in the context of Hinduism, which resulted in the construction and restoration of many temples and the set up of many groups, schools or cults that blended devotional fervor with social protest, one of which became Sikhism (sikh meaning “pupil”, “disciple”). Sikhism, one of the most attractive and dynamic fruits of Hinduism, would result from the confluence of three factors: this wave of religious reform and revival, the encounter between Hinduism and Islam taking place in the northern part of India, especially in the Punjab, and the personality of the poet, religious reformer and mystic Nanak (1469-1539). Guru Arjun (1563-1606) was also important in it: he gathered the hymns of his predecessors and his own hymns in the book Adi Granth and was a martyr by decision of the Mogul emperor, since he did not want to convert to Islam. Sikhism combines elements from both Hinduism and Islam, and it consolidated as a differentiated community, with its own holy book (the Guru Granth Sahib, which includes the Adi Granth), its own worship and its own succession of gurus, with ten main ones, the first one of which is Nanak and the last is Gobind Singh (1666-1708), whom around 1699 created the Khalsa or “community of the pure”. Accede to it those willing to fully commit to serving the others, studying the masters, daily meditation and a healthy diet with no meat and no drugs. They carry the five symbols of the “holy soldier”, just and compassionate: uncut hair (Kesh), a wood comb (Kangha), a steel bracelet (Kara), short trousers as underwear, for both men and women (Kachera) and a ritual daga (Kirpan). Among the Sikhs there is no cast distinction; they help each other and they help other people, disregarding their religion, race, political orientation, sex or cult; they do not cut their hair and they consider that to die fighting for the Sikh cause leads to paradise. Sikh temples are called gurdwara (“door of the guru”), where the Guru Granth Sahib is venerated and its hymns are sung; one of its spaces is the langar, where a meal is shared with all those wishing or needing it. The main denominations given to the divinity are Vahiguru (“great master”), Satguru (“true master”) and Akal Purakh (“the eternal one”).

In South India this time of rebirth occurs within the liberal and tolerant kingdom of Vijayanagar (1336-1565), a kingdom that coexisted with a Syrian Christian community linked to the preaching of the Apostle Thomas (and therefore very old), and a Muslim community in Malabar established since the early days of Islam. To the north, where there was the Muslim sultanate of Delhi, it seems that the intense encounter with Islam and especially with Sufism was a trigger for much spiritual energy. A unique and significant figure in this regard is the poet Kabir (1440-1518), born in Varanasi, weaver by trade and for whom it is difficult to say whether he was Muslim or Hindu: "Oh God, whether you are Allah or Rama, I live under your name...". He used the vernacular languages instead of Sanskrit, typical of Brahmanism orthodoxy.

The next major step in the history of India is the Mughal Empire (1526-1858), a Muslim empire founded by Babur (or Babar) and the most significant ruler of which was King Akbar (1556-1605). Pious Muslim, open-minded, valued by the Jesuits, discussed by Orthodox sectors for his religious innovations, he married a Hindu princess who remained Hindu, and sought to improve relations between Muslims, Hindus and Christians in India. In the sixteenth century Portuguese Catholic priests also arrived in India, and in the seventeenth century the Jesuit Roberto de Nobili moved to Madura, in southern India.

Soon, however, the European presence in Asia will be stepping up to the height that marked the nineteenth century European colonization. The major religious cultures of Asia (Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam) suffered from this impact. Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833), who lived during a harmonic pre-colonial time, prior to the uprising of 1857 against European colonialism, is a significant character: he tried to reconcile Hinduism and Western culture. He was a Bengali, had good knowledge of Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit, worked for the East India Company and, once retired, encouraged institutions providing access to English education for Bengali people. He advocated social reform and fought for the abolition of sati, the voluntary immolation of Hindu widows. He has been called the "Father of Modern India". In 1828 he founded the spiritual association "Brahmo Samaj", to which will belong Debendranath Tagore (1817-1905), father of Rabindranath Tagore and a defender of the preponderance of the Upanishads over the Vedas, and Keshab Chandra Sen (1838-1884), who advocated a greater rapprochement between Christianity and Hinduism until the influence of Ramakrishna led him away from Christianity. Dayananda Saraswati (1824-1883), from the area of Mumbai, advocated a renewed Hinduism but not through Western influence but through a return to the essence of the Vedic teaching; he started the "Arya Samaj" movement. This recovery of Hinduism and reaction against Occidentalism will be channeled in the second half of the nineteenth century by two great personalities, Ramakrishna (1834-1886), a Bengali Brahmin priest in the temple of Goddess Kali, devoted to asceticism and meditation, with a good knowledge of Christianity and Islam, and his disciple Vivekananda (1863-1902), who in 1893 had a major impact in the Parliament of World Religions held in Chicago.

The confrontation between Hinduism and the West, in this case also including the Islamic influence, will be accentuated by Tilak (1856-1920). Defender of a predominantly Hindu nation, he advocated a fight against external influences and generated tension with the Muslim community. In prison, he wrote a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. He grounded political action, even violent one, in religion. The tension between Hindus and Muslims eventually lead to the partition between India and Pakistan after independence in 1947, and these community tensions are still present in the political life of India.

Great figures of twentieth century Hinduism will be the thinker, poet (1913 Nobel Prize in Literature) and teacher Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), and the father of India's independence movement and the non-violence movement, Mohendas Gandhi (1869-1948), called Mahatma, “the one with a big soul”. Gandhi studied in London, worked in South Africa and returned to India in 1915, in a context marked by the radicalism of Tilak. Gandhi also studied the Bhagavad Gita, but from a perspective influenced by the New Testament, Tolstoy and Ruskin. Dressed as a farmer, he lived very frugally to indicate the need to overcome the corruption brought by Western materialism and return to the simplicity of life and spiritual values. He defended the cause of the untouchables and the prohibition of alcohol. He became the undisputed moral leader of Hindu India. Since advocating a policy of conciliation toward Muslims, he was killed by Hindu nationalist radicals on January 30, 1948.

Buddhism highlights

Siddhartha Gautama is presented to us as a son of Prince Shuddhodana, of the Gautama family and the Sakya clan, established in Kapilavastu, near Varanasi, in northeastern India, an area close to the Himalayas and the Ganges, where Magadhi was the language spoken. He was born around 560 BC. He was married to Yasodara and was the father of Rahula. He carried the name Siddhartha until the age of thirty, when he left his home to become a monk, and called himself Sakyamuni. He experienced the life of mendicant monks and ascetics, but saw that to stay locked in these states did not provide a path of hope to men; thus he continued his personal quest until he reached, ten years later, in Bodh Gaya, sitting under a tree, his own enlightenment, at which time he was called Buddha, "the awakened", “the clear seer”, “the lucid”, "the enlightened", "the wise”. He died in Kusinagara around 480 BC.

The Sangha, the community of monks and nuns (bhikkus and bhikkunis) gathered around the Buddha, governed by the Vinaya or discipline, transmitted the preaching of Buddha, which constitutes the Dharma (in Sanskrit; Dhamma in Pali). The Dharma is presented through sutra (in Sanskrit; sutta in Pali), dialogues between the Buddha and a disciple (the title of each sutra is the subject of the debate or the name of the disciple). Later, already at the time of emperor Ashoka, the fundamental doctrine of the sutra was synthesized in the Abhidharma, a set of books that contain the essence of the teaching of Buddha. So that it was considered that the classical texts of Buddhism, written in Pali, gathered in three baskets (pitaka): the one of the sutra, the one of the Vinaya and the Abhidharma, forming the three baskets (tripitaka). The symbol of Dharma is a wheel with eight rays, since it is considered that the day the Buddha exposed for the first time his doctrine to his five companions and first disciples, “the wheel of Dharma started to turn”.

The core of the Buddhist Dharma can be found in the “Middle Way”, the way that has to permit people to free themselves from suffering. The Middle Way, the way of harmony, of not exceeding oneself in neither extreme, of “not too much of anything” – the guitar strings should not be neither too tense nor too lax, they have to have the right tension in order to give the right note - is centered in the "four noble truths":

a) First, that life is suffering (dukkha): "To be born is suffering, old age is suffering, illness and death are suffering, to unite with something not desired is suffering and to separate from something desired is suffering and not obtaining what is desired is suffering; i. e., that the quintuple attachment to senses is suffering." The five components of life (skandas: the body, sensations, thoughts, feelings and consciousness) are sources of suffering. This suffering derives from a separation between life and reality.

b) Second, that the origin of suffering is to believe that we are an "I" isolated from the rest: "It is the will of life which takes from birth to birth, together with luxury and desire, which find their gratification here and there; the thirst of pleasures, the thirst of being, the thirst of power." The cause of dislocation between life and reality is tanha, usually translated by “desire”, but it refers specifically to the desire of intimate satisfaction, of satisfaction of the “I”. Tanha breaks our capacity to behave generously, which is the source of freedom; it is egoism, the desire for oneself to the expense of the other forms of life. It is because of the “I” that we suffer.

c) Third, that the extinction of suffering passes by the suppression of this "I": "The extinction of this thirst through the complete annihilation of desire, letting it go, expelling it, separating from it, not giving it shelter." To overcome tanha, to leave desire behind.

d) Fourth, that there is a way to reach this extinction of suffering, a way specified by the “noble eightfold way”:

           i.  Correct belief: the proper or fair vision, a good understanding of what we are and what we are not.

         ii.  Correct aspirations: proper or fair intention, not the one coming from the interests of the small "I", but from totality.

        iii.  Correct language: proper or fair words, expressing reality and not false or fictitious worlds. To avoid false testimony, useless small talk, gossip, calumny and injury; subtle despise, “accidental” lack of tact, the mordacious saying.

        iv. Correct behavior: proper or fair actions, not damaging anyone. Five basic precepts: 1) not to hurt any living being, no killing; 2) not taking anything that has not been offered to you, no stealing; 3) not abusing of sensual pleasures, not being sexually pervert; 4) no lying; 5) abstaining from all stimulating or mind confusing or intoxicating substance or drink; no drugs.

        v.  Correct way of life: proper or fair occupations, excluding for example money trade, weapon manufacturing and trade, living beings trade (slaves, prostitution) and the manufacturing and trade of alcoholic drinks (we would now probably say drugs). In the spirit that to work is a mean to survive, not the purpose of life.

        vi. Correct effort: the proper and fair effort, the one that does not create tension, the balance between doing nothing and burn or exhaust oneself. A low level of will, a simple wish unaccompanied by effort and action to obtain it, is not enough.

      vii. Correct attention: proper mentality, correct or fair thought, the one taking us away from ignorance and from illusions and false worlds. “All what we are is the result of what we have thought.” (Dhammapada, 1). To be attentive of what goes on in consciousness.

      viii.  Correct ecstasies: proper or fair concentration, allowing us to focus on what is worth, leaving aside futilities.

Following these paths Nirvana (in Sanskrit; Nibbana in Pali) can be reached.

The pillars of early Buddhism are meditation and the Dharma-Vinaya, systematized shortly after the Buddha's death by a council of 500 monks in Rajgir (or Rajagraha), chaired by Mahakassapa. One hundred years later, a second council was held in Vaisali, summoned by the old monk Yasa and attended by 700 monks. Some tension appeared between a more Orthodox monastic Buddhism (sthaviras, the ancient ones, which tended to a literal and dogmatic approach to texts; their model of life was the arhat, the "worthy", the one who fully adhered to the law taking it literally) and a more flexible and secular Buddhism, the Mahasanghika (which emphasizes the notion of bodhisattva, the one owned by the light, which differs its entrance to nirvana in order to help others).

Buddhism developed in parallel to Judaism, being its first five centuries the period for its basic crystallization. Around 300 BC there was a division, giving birth to the Pudgala-vadin school. This school claims the existence of the person as a real entity, reflecting the weight of the Hindu tradition of transmigration and karma, which allows to preserve justice (if the person does not survive, ¿how can it be rewarded or punished in a future reincarnation for what it has done, thus imparting a justice that if not could not be exerted? Then there would be no reason to act honestly, and chaos would be generated). Many monks, however, opposed this view, maintaining the doctrine of anatta (there is no "I", the "I" is an illusion).

A major milestone is the reign of Emperor Ashoka Maurya in Magadha (269 BC - 232 BC). He was the grand-son of Chandragupta, who had defeated the troops of Alexander the Great. Ashoka became a Buddhist eight years after reaching the throne, and respected and supported also the other religions of his domains. Buddhism became more widely spread following the expansion of the empire of Magadha to the eastern part of the valley of the Ganges, and beyond, thanks to the delegations sent by the emperor to distant lands like Sri Lanka (where Buddhism expanded quickly), the Himalayas, western India, southern India and Southeast Asia. Also Buddhism reached Kashmir and Gandhara, the latter having a Greek government. Through Gandhara Buddhism could have had an influence in the Mediterranean area (King Milinda or Menander, a Greek from Alexandria who ruled in Gandhara, was very interested in Buddhism).

During the reign of Ashoka the third Buddhist council was held in its capital, Pataliputra, chaired by monk Moggalipputa Tissa, who refuted the doctrines of the sarvastivadins or panrealists, which were confronted with the sautrantikas. For the latter, disciples of Kumaralata, when present becomes past it ceases to be real, it disappears (anicca: everything is instantaneous, transient). Nothing comes out of the past; the instantaneous, deciduous, being constitutes the nature of reality (although every moment comes out of a previous moment, so there is moral continuity: we are determined by our antecedent). They gave priority to the sutras over the Abhidhamma (and that is why they were called sautrantikas: those for whom the sutra are the anta, the final word). The sarvastivadins, to the contrary, believed that when present became past it did not became unreal, but still had a real existence and produced real effects. Similarly, the future was also real (hence the name "panrealists"). They gave precedence to the Abhidhamma over the sutra. They went to the west, becoming strong in Kashmir and Gandhara.

In connection with the tension already expressed in the second council in Vaisali, and favored by the expansion of the Sangha, which implied the addition of more people of brahmanic origin, takes place the emergence, towards the first century AD, of Mahayana Buddhism (Great Vehicle, because their positions could be accepted by more people, since they gave less importance to discipline and monastic life, although they practiced it also). It scattered mainly in southern India (where it received the influence of the cults to the mother-goddesses) and northwestern India (where it received the influence of Persia and Greece). It replaced the traditional Pali by Sanskrit. The Mahayana puts emphasis on the "great compassion" (mahakaruna) towards all living beings.

Mahayana Buddhism is confronted with Hinayana (Small Vehicle, because the way to reach enlightenment is in it narrower, more demanding). Since this term could seem a little derogatory, its followers preferred the term Theravada (the doctrine of the Thera, the “ancient ones”; “the way towards the ancient ones”), considering it the initial form to interpret the message of Buddha, the closest to original Buddhism, gathered in the initial texts, the Pali Canon. It will be the form of Buddhism that will spread to Sri Lanka and part of South-east Asia.

Some confrontations can help to better define the distinction between these two major branches of Buddhism: 1) For Theravada, spiritual advancement depends on the individual, on his understanding and his will, humans liberating themselves through their own effort, without supernatural help, humanity being alone in the universe (there is no god to help it overcome difficulties, it can only rely on itself); for Mahayana, individual destiny is linked to the one of life in general, it is not divisible, and can count on assistance by divine powers and on the grace they grant; there is an unlimited power driving everything. 2) For Theravada, the main attribute is wisdom, the deep perception of the nature of reality; for Mahayana, the main attribute is compassion; meditation can confer a personal power of destructive nature if it has not been deliberately preceded by the development of compassionate concern for the others. 3) For Theravada, Sangha is central, monasteries and convents are important, and monks and nuns are much respected; for Mahayana, “lay” people are more important. 4) For Theravada, the ideal of human aspiration is the arhat, the perfect disciple that goes alone searching nirvana; for Mahayana, the ideal of human aspiration is the bodhisattva, the person that, having arrived next to nirvana, goes back and makes efforts so that everybody can reach enlightenment, leaving in a second level its own personal realization. 5) For Theravada, the Buddha was a saint, a supreme wise man that, through his efforts, reached truth and became an incomparable master, but his personal and direct influence ended with his death; for Mahayana, he was a savior that continues to attire towards him all creatures in order to liberate them. 6) Theravada gives little importance to theoretical speculation and to rituals, the contrary of Mahayana. 7) Theravada focuses on meditation, while Mahayana includes demand prayers and the invocation of Buddha’s name. 8) Theravada is more conservative and disciplinary, and has a political dimension, proposing a certain vision of society; Mahayana is more liberal and flexible, and leaves more aside the proposal of a specific model of society.

Within the Mahayana, in the second century AD a South Indian Brahmin that had converted to Buddhism, Nagarjuna, founded the Madhyamika school, which explores the relationship between Samsara (the empirical world of the senses) and Nirvana (transcendental reality): he considers Nirvana is present in Samsara but humans cannot recognize it and penetrate it because of the false constructions they erect over the world; the aim of religion is the suppression of these constructions (the Dhammapada will say: “I have gone round in vain the cycles of many lives ever striving to find the builder of the house of life and death. How great is the sorrow of life that must die! But now I have seen thee, housebuilder: never more shalt thou built this house. The rafters of sins are broken, the ridge-pole of ignorance is destroyed. The fever of craving is past: for my mortal mind is gone to the joy of the immortal Nirvana (153, 154)”. The other major school of Mahayana is the Yogakara ("yoga practitioner"), school founded in the third century AD by Maitreyanatha and deployed by his disciple Asanga in the fourth century AD. For them, only consciousness is real, and external objects are only real in the consciousness of the subject.

Also in the second century AD begins the expansion of Buddhism in China through trade routes, taking advantage of the vacuum left by the decline of the Han Dynasty and despite the reluctance of Confucian scholars. Chinese people appreciated Buddhism for its religiosity, its consistency and its moral stature. The Chinese monk Hui-Yüan (334-416) initiates the devotion to Buddha Amitabha (in Japanese, Amida); its devoted followers hope to be reborn in the “Pure Land”, an interior state of lucidity and full realization. Amitabha’s intermediary is bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (“the one who hears the claims of the world”), represented with many arms to signify his great helping capacity.

In the fourth century Buddhism was already strongly rooted in China. At the beginning of the fifth century, Kumarajiva translated into Chinese a hundred Buddhist works. In 520, Bodhidharma went to China, where he founded the Ch'an school (Zen in Japanese; ch’an derives from dyana, the Sanskrit word for “meditation”), which will become one of the major schools of Chinese Buddhism. In this school an important role is played by Huineng (638-717), who begins to emphasize awareness (wu, satori in Japanese: "to understand", that will be used as the equivalent of “enlightenment”). Chang Po (720-814) introduces koans and considers compatible to be a monk and work. With the T'ang dynasty (618-907), the situation of Buddhism in China goes through ups and downs, with a strong chase in 845 at the time of Emperor Wu Tsung (841-847) (who had persecuted Manichaeism in 843, whereas other T'ang emperors had welcomed Christian Nestorianism). Buddhism was protected by the Sung dynasty (960-1280), during which Ch'an Buddhism consolidates.

Around 550 Buddhism was introduced in Japan. Prince Shotoku, who governed Japan from 593 to 623, gave it a strong boost and proclaimed it as state religion. It lived in harmony with local traditions, which constitute the Shinto. In the Heian period (794-1185) the Buddhist Tendai School bloomed in Japan, driven by the monks Saicho and Kukai and characterized by universalism (all conscious beings can attain salvation) and good rapport with Shinto.

In parallel, Buddhism went into recession in its native India. Around the eighth century the Tantra stream bloomed (after an earlier rather discreet development), combining Buddhism with more or less magic traditional practices of the peasantry of India and yoga techniques. Tantra means “net”, in reference to the interconnection existing between all forms of energy, so that it is possible to exert an influence on this net and orient it towards the well-being of all creatures. This stream was also named Vajrayana Buddhism (Diamond Vehicle, brilliant as a diamond).

In the seventh century Vajrayana Buddhism was able to penetrate into Tibet, through the preaching of Padma-Shamba; later, it weakened significantly, until in the eleventh century a new preaching by the Bengali monk Atisha (980-1053) turned it into the dominant religion in Tibet, replacing the bon religion. The personality of Milarepa (XI century) had a prominent role in it. In 1244 a Buddhist abbot became regent prince of Tibet under the protection of the Mongol Khan; he will be the first Dalai Lama, the first Buddhist lama to assume simultaneously a temporal and a religious power, a tradition that is practically maintained until 1959, when the fourteenth Dalai Lama was expelled from Tibet by China, finding refuge in Dharamsala, in India. The present Dalai Lama belongs to the Gelugpa School, initiated in the fifteenth century.

Regarding the spread of Buddhism to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, even if in 1200 Buddhism was no longer a major feature of the Indian scene, it kept growing in Tibet, Burma, Thailand and Cambodia, in these last ones thanks in part to the influence of Sri Lanka. In China, Buddhism will decay from the thirteenth century, in correspondence to the crisis in India, traditional inspirer of Chinese Buddhism. Long time after, there will be a small rebirth of Buddhism in China with Taixu (1890-1947), who in 1929 organized the "Chinese Buddhist Society," which in 1947 had 4.5 million members.

Eisai (1141-1215) introduced in 1191 Ch'an Buddhism in Japan; the Rinzai Zen he inspired will become a success among the military elite, the shogun. In 1228 something similar happened with Dogen (1200-1253), who also returned from China boosting the more popular Soto Zen. In the Kamakura period (1192–1333) Buddhism approached Shinto, giving birth to the Shinto Ryobu, which considered that Shinto deities (kami) were manifestations of Buddhist divinities; for centuries this will be the predominant religious approach in Japan. But in 1868, with the advent of the Meiji dynasty, Buddhism was attacked and separated from Shinto. Buddhism, however, survived this persecution, as well as a decade of opening of Japan to the world; when Japan reacted against Europeanization and Christianity, Buddhism got back its reputation as a philosophy compatible with modern philosophical thought and a major religious tradition of Japan.

In the twentieth century Buddhism had some rebirth in India, derived from three independent factors: first, the arrival of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhist monks driven out of Tibet by China, which were welcomed by India. Secondly, the conversion to Buddhism in 1956 of part of the “untouchable” community, following the example of their leader B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956); in ten years, there were already four million converts. Finally, the recognition of Indian intellectual classes towards Buddhism, reflected in the publication in 1956 of a volume to commemorate the 2500 anniversary of Buddhism, with foreword by the President of India.

Also in the twentieth century, Buddhism began a significant expansion in the Western world.

Judaism highlights

One of the oldest fragments of the Torah (Deuteronomy 26, 5-9), sums up how the Jewish people saw itself, and it is significant both for what it is said and what it is not said:

"My father was a wandering Aramean who went down to Egypt and lived there as an immigrant with few people that came. There he became a great nation, strong and numerous. The Egyptians mistreated us, oppressed us and imposed heavy work on us. Then we implored the help of the Lord God of our fathers, and he heard our cry and saw our misery, our pains and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a strong hand and powerful arm, amid breathtaking feats, with signs and wonders; let us in this place and gave us this country, a land flowing with milk and honey."

The Jewish people is considered descendant of the patriarch Abraham, which means from nomadic tribes that around 1900 BC moved westward from Ur, in Mesopotamia, in search of a place to settle. They settled in the land of Canaan, around the Jordan River. When he was already quite old, Abraham had a son, Isaac, by his wife Sarah, and his faith in God was so strong that he accepted to offer this only son as a sacrifice; God, however, seeing his faith, released the commandment.

Isaac had two sons, Jacob and Esau; Jacob was the youngest, but bought the birthright for a lentil dish one day that Esau was hungry (all these stories should be interpreted symbolically; in this case, it may indicate that whoever gives priority to materiality, food, loses the favor of the Lord). Jacob is also often called "Israel," and seems to be the initiator of the "real" history of the Jewish people; Abraham would be a sort of prologue included later to link Israel with Mesopotamian precedents. Likewise, Abraham is an "ideal" figure (obedient to God, devoutly faithful and morally complete), while Jacob is "real" (intriguing, clever, cunning...).

Jacob had twelve sons, who originated the twelve tribes of Israel (twelve is the last of the numbers with strong symbolic meaning, representing the whole, the totality, the harmonious and well structured. Thus the twelve months of the year, the zodiac signs, the tribes of Israel, the disciples of Jesus...). One of these twelve tribes was the powerful tribe of Judah; from this term derive “Judaism” and “Jew”.

One of the twelve sons of Jacob, Joseph, moved to Egypt around 1700 BC; since there was work there and there were droughts in Canaan, he called the Jewish people. But in later generations the Pharaohs began to oppress the Jewish people, which decided to fight for its freedom and return to the land of Canaan, the Promised Land, in 1270 BC. The leader of this struggle and consolidator of Jewish religious identity, Moses, was apparently raised by the Egyptians, but recovered and deepened the faith of his ancestors and led the Jews out of Egypt during the reign of pharaoh Ramses II. This entailed intense experiences as the passage of the Red Sea or the experience of revelation of Yahweh at Mount Sinai (although there is a hypothesis that this revelation comes from a group of tribes who had not been in Egypt and joined the ones that had done the exodus in order to conquer Canaan. These tribes had its own tradition of having had an experience of the divine in a sacred mountain, of which they derived the pact of alliance with God and the reception of the divine law. Then the two traditions would have merged in one, personalized by Moses, who must have been an exceptional person: tribal chief, military leader, priest, inspired seer, prophet and legislator).

Yahweh is not really the name of God. In Hebrew, God is Elohim; he is also called “the Lord”, Adonai. Yahweh is an indication of the fact that God has no name, is unnamable, ineffable. In Exodus 3, 14 Moses asks God about his name, and God says “I am who I am. You will say to the Israelites: I am sent by I am”. A brilliant way to represent this lack of name was to designate the divinity with four unpronounceable letters (iod, he, vav and another he, written from right to left), that seem to invocate an inspiration and an expiration with the two corresponding posterior pauses.

The Sinai revelation was summarized in the Tables of the Law, containing the Ten Commandments. They were placed in a wood box covered with gold, with two angels on it. This was the Ark of the Covenant. When the Jewish people camped, the Ark was placed under a large tent which was also a meeting place, the Tent of the Gathering. These are the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20, 1-17 and Deuteronomy 5, 6-21):

“God said to the people of Israel:

I am the Lord your God, the one who brought you out of Egypt where you were slaves.

1.- Do not worship any god except me. Do not make idols that look like anything in the sky or on earth or in the ocean under the earth. Don't bow down and worship idols. I am the Lord your God, and I demand all your love. If you reject me, I will punish your families for three or four generations. But if you love me and obey my laws, I will be kind to your families for thousands of generations.

2.- Do not misuse my name. I am the Lord your God, and I will punish anyone who misuses my name.

3.- Remember that the Sabbath Day belongs to me. You have six days when you can do your work, but the seventh day of each week belongs to me, your God. No one is to work on that day—not you, your children, your slaves, your animals, or the foreigners who live in your towns. In six days I made the sky, the earth, the oceans, and everything in them, but on the seventh day I rested. That's why I made the Sabbath a special day that belongs to me.

4.- Respect your father and your mother, and you will live a long time in the land I am giving you.

5.- Do not murder.

6.- Be faithful in marriage.

7.- Do not steal.

8.- Do not tell lies about others.

9.- Do not want anyone’s wife or husband.

10.- Do not want anything that belongs to someone else. Don't want anyone's house, field, slaves, oxen, donkeys or anything else.”

Moses is attributed the authorship of the five books of the Torah: Genesis, that Jews call Bereshit (which is the first word of the book: “in the beginning”), explaining the creation of the world and humanity, with Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise, the fight between their sons Cain and Abel, the Universal Flood and Noah's Ark, the Tower of Babel and the story of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph; Exodus, which describes the escape from Egypt and the Covenant with Yahweh; Leviticus, dedicated to the establishment of codes and rituals; Numbers, which reflects the experience of the way from Sinai to the plains of Moab, and Deuteronomy (Deborim in Hebrew), which includes Moses’ final speeches and his death. It is considered that the first eleven chapters of Genesis gather Mesopotamian and Egyptian mythologies, adapted by later Hebrew thought. The second part of the Jewish Holy Scriptures is called Nebim (“prophets”) and the third one Ketubim (“writings”). The initials of the three parts are TNK, pronounced TaNaK, embracing all of the Jewish scripture, which will be assumed and called “Old Testament” by the Christian tradition.

The first period after Moses death, described in books like Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel and Kings, includes the experience of the conquest of Canaan in battle with neighboring tribes, a time ruled by the so called “judges” (liberators, charismatic leaders, as was also Deborah; they are exalted by Yahweh and his spirit descends upon them). The main judges are Joshua (successor of Moses and conqueror of Canaan to the Amorites), Gideon, Samson, and Samuel (seer, priest and judge). It is a theocratic stage, the axes of which are worship, law and charisma. Politically, Israel is a kind of confederation of tribes. Agriculture gradually takes more weight in Jewish life and this is reflected in its religious evolution, in detriment of mosaic prophethood.

The following period sees the unification of the tribes and the controversial instauration of the monarchy (Gideon had refused to take this step, even though having been asked to do so), under pressure from the Philistine invasion (people displaced from their land by the Greek invasion of the Peloponnese). It will be the cycle that begins with Saul, a charismatic military leader who becomes an autocrat (but not yet assuming religious authority).

The second step of this monarchic cycle is King David (reign 1010-970 BC), a complex and contradictory personality mixing successes and virtues with big mistakes and regrets: military leader, he conquers Jerusalem to the Jebusites. Jerusalem was a Canaanite sanctuary where a god called El-Elyon, Sedek and Shalem was worshiped. David turned it into the capital of the kingdom and the center of the worship of Yahweh, moving there the Ark of the Covenant –he himself made a ritual dance in this procession- and beginning the construction of a new temple. He successfully faced the Philistines, and he was polygamous: Abigail, Aljinoam, Micol...

The third step is King Solomon (reign 970-931 BC). Also polygamous, he is famous for the wisdom attributed to him. He finishes the construction of the temple of Jerusalem and consolidates a centralized and autocratic monarchy in the Egyptian style, with a rich court sitting on oppressed people. He introduces in Jerusalem Egyptian, Moabite, Ammonite, Phoenician and Hittite worships, which join the Canaanite worships that had been maintained, while far from the court survived the traditional Yahwist worship. The tension between the prophetic Yahwism and the influence of Babylonian and Egyptian systems can be seen in the words of prophet Nathan to King David (1Cr 17, 4 -6): “Go and tell David my servant: the Lord says, “You shall not build me a house to dwell in; for I have not lived in a house since the day that I brought up Israel to this day, but have gone from tent to tent, and from one tent to another. In all places in which I have walked with all Israel, did I speak a word with any of the judges of Israel, whom I commanded to be shepherd of my people, saying, ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?”.

Prophets (“those who speak in the name of God”) are another major Jewish contribution to universal religiosity. Initially, it was apparently a group phenomenon (First Book of Samuel 1 to 10), with a more ecstatic than ethical character. Then came the individual prophets of oral tradition (Elijah, Elisha, Natan and Ajiyya), in which ecstasies and ethics mixed; their words were swift and powerful, and they received the visit of God when they were alone; they asked for justice in the name of God, and addressed themselves mainly to individual unfair behavior. The third group is that of the great prophets of written tradition (among which Amos, Hosea, Joel, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Malachi). They included in their claims those wrongs deriving from the social structure itself, from the corruption of the social order and from oppressing institutions. Prophets considered that social justice is a pre-requisite for political stability; that injustice cannot prevail, since God’s standards are high: he will not tolerate forever exploitation, corruption and mediocrity. Prophets were convinced that all human beings have rights that even kings must respect. They were a strange, explosive force, and have become a reference until our times.

On a historical level, it seems that Elijah and Elisha belong to the ninth century BC; Amos, Hosea and Jonah to the eighth century BC; Micah, Isaiah and Joel to the seventh century BC; and Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel to the sixth century BC, the time of the deportation to Babylon and the subsequent Iranian influence. Malachi lives after the return from Babylon, and he is the last of the great prophets of Israel. The prophets opposed the degradation of worship and morals, as well as corruption; advocated a return to the original roots of Judaism (the time of Moses) and defended a more just social order. This was done in tension with the despotic monarchy, which often had syncretism trends at the religious level and that, by fastening the peasantry through taxes, exacerbated the polarization between rich and poor, between the urban glitz and rural depression. The message of the prophets was boosted by the conquest of the northern part of Israel by the Assyrian Empire in 721 BC and the later conquest of the southern part by the Babylonian Empire, which implied the deportation of the Jews to Babylon in 587 BC. Prophets, and not only those of Israel, aim at their peers proclaiming, in a rather compulsive way, the notion of a powerful being superior to them, that impels them to share their vision with other humans even at times when the safest or easiest or most logical thing to do would be to remain silent.

The TaNaK combines the political history of Israel with its religious development, brilliantly captured in the book of Psalms, the Wisdom books (full of wisdom, including the book of Job, Proverbs, Cohelet or Ecclesiastes, Wisdom and Sirach or Ecclesiasticus) and the lyrical poems of the Song of Songs, attributed to Solomon.

From everywhere emerges its strict monotheism (if God is the one to whom life is delivered without reserves, to have more than one God would lead to divided loyalties...): “Listen, Israel, the Lord, our God, is only one” (Deuteronomy 6, 4), as well as the vision of this God as personal (meaning that, in the last resort, ultimate reality resembles more to a person than to a thing, resembles more to a mind than to a machine; he is an “Other”). The God of Israel is not prosaic (he is a Being of appalling majesty), is not chaotic (he melts in a divine unity), is not amoral or indifferent (he is a God of justice and love). The people of Israel have a great esteem for their notion of God, for “their” God.

For Jews, the fruit of this creator God, the world, is very good, has an unquestionable value, as the initial fragment of the Torah insistently proclaims, when describing the creation of the world (Genesis 1). This includes humans, which even in their fragility (“they are like grass”, Salm 90, 6; “they are mud”, Salm 103, 14; “they are as easy to destroy as a night butterfly”, Job 4, 19) and in their capacity to be evil (to be “sinners”, Salm 51, 5, which means capable of “not attaining the goal”), they are of an unnamable grandiosity (image of God), dotted with freedom and children of God. As Huston Smith says, with these traits the human condition is drawn to avoid several equivoques: romanticism (prevented by fragility), aspiration reductionism (prevented by grandiosity), sentimentalism (prevented by sin), irresponsibility (prevented by liberty) and a vision of life as something drifting in a cold and indifferent sea (prevented by divine paternity).

Another fundamental trait of Judaism is the value given to history: history is of primordial importance, and has a sense. This is the ground for some specific attitudes towards social order and collective life: it is worth to actively be concerned by social, political and cultural issues of life. We are not “beyond circumstances”, we are “within the circumstances”; the context in which life is experienced is relevant. And we must take interest and feel responsible for the problems concerning societies and cultures. We cannot be indifferent to the social domain. From which also the relevance of collective action, of taking cooperative initiatives in order to change things (to plan, to organize, to act together). The experience of the exodus from Egypt structures the Jewish mentality, which saw in that foundational liberating moment the manifestation of the power and the goodness of God and of his interest in history. It is important to be attentive in order to find the most favorable moments, the decisive opportunities. The world can be changed, and to do it the accent has to be put in what should be, instead of putting it in what it is. Progress is possible, living conditions can be improved.

After Salomon’s death, Israel was divided in two kingdoms. The northern one fell under the Assyrian domination in 721 BC and disappeared (“the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel”). The southern one, the kingdom of Judah, was conquered by the Babylonian empire of Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC, with the consequent destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem and the deportation of the Jews to Babylon. In the Babylon exile is where the Torah starts to be transferred from oral tradition to scripture, so that it would not be lost nor forgotten; these Scriptures became the most important shared reference of Judaism. In 539 BC, however, Persian king Cyrus defeats the Babylonians and allows the Jews to return to Jerusalem, where they rebuild the Temple. The Persian domination lasts until 333 BC, with the invasion by the Macedonian troops of Alexander the Great. In 63 BC the Romans of Pompeius become - partly at the request of the Sadducees themselves - the new dominators of the territory, which they will call Palestine. Judea becomes a Roman province, ruled by local kings appointed by Rome (as Herod the Great) and later by procurers.

It is during this long period of occupations that historical Judaism is structured (Scripture, Sabbath, Synagogue). Important Jewish communities were established outside of Israel, mainly in Babylon and Egypt. Priests took more significance, and along with the role of priests, in this period scholars are also important, producing the Jewish wisdom literature. Since the Persians treated the Jews better than the Babylonians, Persian thought exerted more influence in Judaism (resurrection of the body, the final judgment, final transformation of the earth, more relevance of dualism...). Even before the exile, Jews took into consideration a capital problem (also considered by the Persians, originally monotheistic): The universe can be conceived as the creation of a higher being, omnipotent, by whose empire it exists and that is continuously involved in the evolution of things. But if the notion of moral virtue is applied to this being, how can the apparent injustices of life, the pain mankind suffers, be explained? A significant response is that of the Book of Job ("it cannot be understood, but this does not suppress the existential experience of the sacred"). Another response is Persian dualism: evil cannot come from God but from another principle, a hostile spiritual power (the devil, Satan, Lucifer).

The opposition of the Jews to Hellenization is reflected by the Book of Daniel (II century BC). It received the support of the Pharisees (the "separated", a pious and progressive sect; they were patient and sincere, ascetic and interested in people’s lives) and was opposed by the Sadducees, conservative and closer to the more conventional Sirach. At this time the Hasmonean family (with Judah Maccabee in front, who died in 160 BC) led a revolt in the form of guerrilla warfare against the Seleucid Empire of Antiochus Epiphanes, in which converged both the pious and pro-independence sectors. Once the Greek persecution was finished, the Sadducees occupied the political power, to which they later also associated the Pharisees. Other sects appeared, as the Essenes (devout and nonconformist) and the Zealots (political activists in the tradition of the Maccabees). In the first century BC a significant role is given to the apocalyptic literature, of a rather dualistic, messianic and eschatological orientation (Persian influence).

The Romans will have to face the Jewish revolt of 66 AD, deriving from the attempt of procurer Gesius Florius to take a good part of the Temple’s treasure. Romans will have to leave Jerusalem, but three years later the troops of general Titus conquer the city again, which will lead to a new destruction of the Temple in 70 AD and to the tragic suppression of the last focus of resistance in the fortress of Massada in 74 AD. In 132 AD, the Jews rebelled again against Hadrian: in 135 AD, Hadrian's army defeated the Jewish armies and Jewish independence was lost. Jerusalem was turned into a pagan city called Aelia Capitolina and the Jews were forbidden to live there, and Hadrian changed the country's name from Judea to Syria Palaestina. This lead to exile thousands of Jewish families: to Egypt, North-Africa, the Iberian Peninsula (which they will call Sepharad, and from where they will be ousted in 1492), Europe (in 1290 they will be driven out from England), India, China... This was a high point in the process of the Diaspora ("dispersion"): although since centuries before the Jews were scattered across different territories, from 135 AD on they are essentially a dispersed people. The sacrifices in the Temple will cease to be the central reference, being replaced by the study of the Torah and the oral tradition in academies and synagogues. Priests have no longer a significant role, being replaced by rabbis (“teachers”), which devote all their lives to the study of the Torah and to keep Judaism alive. Mind acquires a leading role in religious life, and mental energies are oriented towards devotion. To study and interpret the scriptures becomes a way of worship. On these grounds, Judaism survived in history.

After the writing of the TaNaK, the meditation of so many rabbis on the Bible itself and on the experience of their people was gathered in the Mishnah, to which still many more comments were added, which lead to gather it all, around 500 AD, in the Talmud, a consultation work that was key in the maintenance of Jewish identity. How the Jewish people survived a thousand years of dispersion and reappeared with vigor in the Middle Ages is exceptional. Maimonides (1135-1204) is a figure of great intellectual stature, who attempts to reconcile the human rational and empirical knowledge with faith in the omnipotent deity; philosopher, mathematician and physicist, he thought a lot on how to adapt the old scriptures to new times. At the same time it seems that in Germany flourished more emotional currents of Judaism, focused on love and feelings (as simultaneously happened in Christianity with St. Francis of Assisi, in Italy, and later also in Germany with the "modern devotion").

In parallel we find the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah ("tradition"), which seems to come from Iraq, from where it would have spread to Italy in the ninth century and to Germany in the tenth century. From Iraq it would have also reached Provence in the twelfth century (where the Languedocian Isaac the Blind was active), scattering via Girona into Spain, where it was prominent in the fourteenth century (and where shines the Zohar, the “book of the splendor”, a mystical text of about 1300, the main author of which is Moses Shem Tov (1240-1305), who operated in León). Girona was the capital of Catalan Judaism, and there taught Rabbi Acher ben David, a disciple of Isaac the Blind. Rabbi Azriel seems to have first explicitly formulated there the fundamental principles of cabbalism, which includes the theory of numbers (sefirot, in singular sephira) as mediators between the ineffable Ein Sof and the cosmos, as well as the symbolic reading of biblical texts.

The aforementioned emotional currents were initiators or precedents of the great emergence of Hasidism (Hasid means “pious”), which took place in Poland in the eighteenth century following Israel ben Eliezer (1700-1760), the "master of the good name", also known as “Baal Shem Tov” and the "Besht". He and his followers promoted a movement with thousands of followers in Eastern Europe that for one hundred and fifty years impregnated Jewish communities with a very humble and friendly character, where compassion and brotherhood coexisted harmoniously with the joy of living and mystical experiences. Hasidism is one of the most attractive faces of Judaism, and its stories have universal value. In these, magical elements occur naturally, mixed with moral considerations and advice about everyday behavior. These charming tales easily suggest a link, because of their style and orientation, with the traditional stories about a peculiar popular character, sometimes naive, other times rogue and other times wise that appears in the tradition of the Middle East with the name Nasruddin, also traceable in areas of Islamic influence in China under the name Afanti.

An interesting religious byproduct of the French Revolution of 1789 was the recognition of equal rights for Jews in 1791 by the French National Assembly. In England this equality was not recognized until 1866. Moses Mendelssohn, with his translation of the Jewish Bible into German, prepared the process of approximation of the Jewish community to German culture and to contemporary scientific thought, which brought with it a profound renewal movement of Judaism. In England and the United States there were also reformist movements of Judaism, and, as usual, counter-movements claiming the purity of tradition also appeared, as well as other centrist movements who stayed halfway. This has led to four main currents within Judaism: the ultra-orthodox, maintaining the way of life of the eighteenth century Eastern Europe, the orthodox, trying to stay as close as possible to tradition; the conservatives, which accept gradual changes and the progressive, reformed or liberal current, favorable to renewal. This last group underlines the purpose behind the norms more than its literality; in their communities women can be rabbi and in their Synagogues men and women are not separated.

In fact, in the nineteenth and twentieth century we simultaneously see in Europe places where Jews can reach normal citizenship and places, such as Tsarist Russia, where they are severely repressed, causing on one hand a large Russian Jewish migration to the United States and on the other hand the appearance of the Zionist claim (Leon Pinsker, 1884). In 1896 Theodor Herzl publishes the book "The Jewish State". Zionism will culminate in 1948 with the proclamation of the state of Israel. In between, there is the terrible experience of the Shoah (literally "calamity", "destruction"), the "holocaust" (“sacrifice consumed by fire”) that led to the annihilation of six million European Jews by the Nazis. It started in 1933 and was accentuated during World War II, reaching its peak between 1942 and 1945 with the "Final Solution" (the extermination of Jews in concentration camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Majdanek, Mauthausen, Sobibor and Treblinka).