In the middle of posting this, someone just told me that many previously colonized countries have to outport their goods at an uneven exchange, and India has their culture as a product. Is there a lot of white washing disrespectful appropriation? Are there lots of cults too?
Imo, it comes out of having to sell the partition of India and Pakistan as ‘natural religious divides’, and then selling hindivatu nationalism as the ‘deep spiritual ancestry’ of a country that was historically multiple petty kingdoms with a myriad of faith traditions, with one of the most historically overwhelming not being a unified Hinduism, with is a faith practice that attempts to amalgamate myriad traditions into a singular whole that reifies a singular ruling elite and was typically practiced by the upper caste, but Buddhism, which came as a response to Hindu elitism or local animistic/ancestral faith practices and of course areas of Islam sprinkled throughout.
That and it created an anti-colonial ‘spiritual alternative’ to baby boomers who understood that capitalism was eating their lives but still had communist brain-worms, or baby boomers who were extremely successful under capitalism but had rejected Abrahamic faiths as being too ‘impure’ (as they actually understood what was being talked about, nothing helps faith like not understanding what the fuck is actually happening). Basically, people who don’t actually understand what karma actually is.
Was Bhuddism was originally rejection of casts and to express equality of worth? One legend I heard about Bhudda was how he was displeased and unsatisfied with a sheltered royal life and a endless bounty of any material good he could ask his dad for. So he ran away, slept under trees, and starved because he rather be among those who were once his subjects than live a life with next to no human connection.
It was one of the most politically important Buddhist doctrines that anyone, regardless of caste, gender, age, etc. can reach enlightenment in this very life, where the Hindu dogma at the time is that such a thing is impossible for the lower castes.
The very abbreviated origin story is that Buddha was a great prince who had endless bounty as you say, but due to a revelation that came from a series of hardships that he witnessed, he came to understand that suffering is inherent to the nature of our world and could not be escaped even through his wealth, because he too would grow old and die (etc.) He then set about to discover a solution to this problem, which at one point involved studying with yogis who were extreme ascetics, which escalated to him starving himself nearly to death before being nursed back to health from a comatose state by being fed rice porridge. He concluded from this that neither extreme indulgence nor extreme asceticism could save someone, but that moderation was a necessary element of right living. Following this, he meditated under a tree for 49 days and reached enlightenment, at which point he began proselytizing about the Four Noble Truths that he discovered over the course of his life, and his solution, the Noble Eightfold Path.
This is an extremely pared-down telling, so I’d appreciate if other users not jump on me, but I would appreciate any necessary corrections or additions for bettering the explanation. Probably the biggest issue is that it doesn’t cover the issue of non-attachment adequately.
That is generally my understanding of it.
What is hindivatu?
Sorry, It is hindutva, and it is basically a Hindu supremacist movement. They’re the people that killed Gandhi.