Now, I always thought that Hinduism was older than Buddhism, because the Upanishads and Puranas and Vedas predate the life of Gautama Siddartha (600 BC or so); but apparently I was wrong, those sacred texts aren’t exactly Hinduism, the way the Bible is Christianity or the Qu’ran is Islam. MacGregor introduces Buddhism first, and even mocks it gently for being a religion which is hard to represent; and he turns the next day to Hinduism, and presents it very much as a here-and-now religion, and who cares about whatever ancient sacred texts. Which seems to fit stereotypes I’ve always had of it.
He starts this podcast at a Hindu temple in London, where, at 4 pm every day, they wake up the resident gods by blowing on a horn. (I guess this is the sound of Hinduism, if silence is the sound of Buddhism.) The little statues you see all over every Hindu temple—and in many people’s homes, even cheap little Ganeshas like the one I had in college—are the actual god themselves, the way the host in Catholicism is magically the flesh and blood. The god comes down to inhabit your little local image. In many ways it’s the opposite of Buddhism—the domestication of the divine, gods who function much like household pets, where people feed them and dress them and put them to sleep and care for them lovingly all through their lives, instead of that Buddhist journey where, if you want to find god, you better strip away all that makes you animal and human, and you may be able to get part of the way yourself.
The Hindu object MacGregor is using here as a springboard to talk about the religion is a pair of gold coins, minted by King Kumaragupta—the Gupta dynasty, which dominated a big kingdom in India for a long time, was evidently a peer of the Roman and Byzantine Empires. This particular king took as his personal god his namesake Kumara, the god of War, a son of Shiva. On one of the coins you see him killing a horse. He did that, in real life as a ritual to cement his power; it was a much earlier, pre-Hindu ritual, where they’d let a beautiful stallion roam free and pure for a year (they’d somehow prevent it from mating), and then the king would sacrifice it publicly. Though a Hindu, Kumaragupta performed this ritual to get any residual people in his kingdom for whom that ritual held power to believe in him; and then, in the ultimate show of power, as with Alexander’s heirs, he minted coins. MacGregor tells this story of Kumaragupta’s quasi-Catholic acceptance of the beliefs of multiple faiths as the great strength of Hinduism, as it has been of so many imperial systems; and by implication criticizes forces currently at work, in the Hindu world, to limit the purview of the religion, to define Hinduism as “us and only us, the rest of you are heretics.” As was made clear when this series began, that kind of thinking is not what the world needs these days.
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