What 'Hinduism' actually names
The word Hindu is not what the tradition originally called itself. It comes from a Persian rendering of the river the Sanskrit-speakers called the Sindhu — what is now the Indus — and was a geographic label long before it became a religious one. The British colonial administration of the nineteenth century needed a single category for the bewildering plurality of practices it encountered, and Hinduism was the result. The internal name is Sanātana Dharma — the eternal way — and it covers a range of schools, lineages and devotional movements that, in any other context, would be considered separate religions.
The six classical schools
Indian philosophical tradition recognises six darśanas: Sānkhya, Yoga, Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta. Each is a complete system of metaphysics and method, with its own canonical texts and lineage of commentators. Each accepts the authority of the Vedas; each disagrees with the others, sometimes sharply, on the nature of reality, the path to liberation, and the relationship between knower and known. The two most relevant to this index are Yoga — the eight-limbed practice codified by Patañjali — and Vedānta, specifically the non-dual sub-school known as Advaita Vedānta.
Advaita Vedānta — the school that travelled
Codified in the eighth century by Adi Śaṅkarācārya as a systematic reading of the Upanishads, Advaita Vedānta holds that there is, ultimately, only Brahman — one undivided absolute — and that the apparent multiplicity of the world, including the felt separateness of the individual self, is māyā: a real appearance, not an illusion in the trivial sense, but not a separate reality either. This is the philosophical lineage that produced Ramana Maharshi and the modern exponents of non-duality, and that meets the Buddhist recognition of anattā and the Sufi recognition of fanāʾ as descriptions of one territory in three vocabularies.
Hinduism in the index
Sadhguru is the index's most-present Hindu voice, drawing on the Śaiva yogic tradition of southern India — see Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy, the Inner Engineering Online course, and short talks like Sadhguru on disability and spiritual practice and Sadhguru on unlocking the mind's full potential. For the kriya yoga current, Paramahansa Yogananda's *Autobiography of a Yogi* remains the classic Western entry.
For bhakti — the path of devotion, one of the four classical yogas — Ram Dass brought the teaching of his guru Neem Karoli Baba (Maharaji) into American spirituality; his Maharaji story about *only God* is the bhakti tradition rendered in an American voice. The jñāna current — non-dual enquiry — runs through Nisargadatta Maharaj's *I Am That* and onward into the modern teachers gathered under non-duality.
What it isn't
Hinduism is not polytheism in the Greek sense; the many deities are typically understood as faces of one absolute. It is not a single doctrine; the schools disagree. It is not the same as Indian nationalism, though contemporary politics has frequently conflated the two. And it is not closed: the tradition has absorbed and been absorbed by Buddhist, Jain, Sufi and Christian elements over its long life, and continues to.
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