Vedic religion, the six orthodox and heterodox philosophical schools, major sects, and syncretic religious movements
Vedic Religion
The Basics
The earliest Vedic Aryans lived around 1500 to 1000 BCE in the region of the Sapta Sindhu, the land of seven rivers formed by the Indus and its tributaries, covering parts of eastern Afghanistan, Punjab and the fringes of western Uttar Pradesh. Society was organised into tribes called janas, led by a chief called rajan, also known as Gopati or protector of cows, whose office was not yet hereditary. The Rig Veda names about thirty tribes, among them the Purus and the Bharatas, and it speaks of constant warfare, including the Bharata king Divodasa's victory over the Dasa ruler Shambara, and conflicts between the Aryans and groups called Dasyus and Panis, the latter accused of hiding Aryan cattle and provoking battles called Gavisthi or Gaveshana.
By around 600 BCE, the later Vedic world of the Panchalas and Videha, in the upper Gangetic region, was dominated by elaborate state sacrifices and powerful priests. But a reaction was building against this priestly domination and against ritual for its own sake. Thinkers began to ask what the sacrifice really meant, and whether there was something more lasting behind the visible world of gods, fire altars, and chants.
By the beginning of the Christian era, the philosophical ferment that had grown out of Upanishadic speculation had crystallised into organised schools of thought called darshanas, meaning a way of looking at things. Some of these schools accepted the authority of the Vedas and were called astika, while others, such as the Buddhist, Jaina and Charvaka or Lokayata schools, rejected Vedic authority and were called nastika. The astika schools eventually came to be grouped as the six classical systems of Hindu philosophy, though the idea of counting them as exactly six as three paired systems only became fixed much later, in the medieval period.
Samkhya is one of the oldest Indian philosophical systems. Its ideas go back to the age of the Upanishads. Its classic text, the Samkhya-karika, was composed by Ishvarakrishna around the 4th or 5th century CE. Tradition names Kapila as its legendary founder, said to have lived many centuries earlier.
Mimamsa means the art of reasoning and interpretation. It used reasoning not to question the Veda, but to justify Vedic ritual correctly. Its base text was Jaimini's Mimamsa Sutras, composed around the 3rd century BCE. Shabara developed it further, and in the 7th century so did Kumarila Bhatta and Prabhakara. Mimamsa held that the Vedas contain eternal truth. It taught that salvation comes from performing Vedic sacrifices exactly as prescribed. Ordinary people could not perform these correctly, so priests became essential. This legitimised the social distance between varnas and strengthened brahmana ritual authority.
By the time Vedanta and Mimamsa were debating ritual and reality within the Vedic fold, another current of thought had already been running for centuries that rejected the Vedas altogether. These are called the nastika, or heterodox, schools: Charvaka, Buddhism and Jainism. Unlike the six astika schools, they denied that the Vedas were a valid source of knowledge, and they questioned whether Brahmanical rituals achieved anything at all.
Siddhartha Gautama was born into the Shakya kshatriya clan. Tradition places his birth at Lumbini. His father Suddhodana ruled as raja of the Shakya gana-sangha. The exact century is debated, though tradition places his life around the sixth to fifth century BCE. He married Yashodhara and had a son, Rahula. He lived as a young aristocrat but grew troubled after encountering sickness, old age and death. At the age of twenty-nine he left home, riding out with his charioteer Channa. He then spent years as a wandering ascetic practising severe austerity. He eventually concluded that this was not the path to liberation.
By the sixth century BCE, Vedic ritualism and the varna order were being openly questioned in the Gangetic plains, and new teachers were offering paths to liberation through personal effort rather than sacrifice. Mahavira belonged to this same world as the Buddha, and Jaina doctrine itself is held to be older than Buddhism, though it is hard to date its origins precisely.
By around 200 BCE, Vedic sacrifice to nature gods and Upanishadic speculation on Brahman were no longer enough for most people. A new devotional religion grew up around images installed in temples, where a worshipper could offer puja directly to a personal, supreme god. This impulse drew on older, widespread cults of yakshas, yakshis and nagas, nature spirits connected with fertility and the wilderness, whose worship was gradually absorbed and subordinated by the bigger traditions. Texts such as the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Bhagavad Gita and the Puranas, along with coins, inscriptions and sculpture, record this shift from ritual to devotion (bhakti). Three major sects took shape around three deities: Vishnu, Shiva and the Goddess Shakti.
Between the 6th and 9th centuries, under the Pallava and Pandya kings, and later also the Cholas, two groups of Tamil poet-saints turned devotion into a popular movement. The Vaishnava Alvars (there were traditionally 12, including the woman saint Andal) sang of Vishnu and Krishna as lover, mother or master, and their hymns were compiled as the Nalayira Divya Prabandham. The Shaiva Nayanars (traditionally 63, including Appar, Sambandar and Sundarar, whose hymns form the Tevaram) called themselves atiyar or tontar, meaning servant or slave of Shiva. Both groups composed in Tamil, not Sanskrit, rejected the austerities of Buddhism and Jainism, and in theory admitted all castes, including saints such as the Shaiva Nandanar and the Vaishnava Tiruppan Alvar who were remembered as untouchables. This openness, combined with intense, almost erotic personal love for god, was a reaction against the ritual formality and social exclusiveness of Vedic Brahmanism.
Guru Nanak was born around 1469 in the village of Talwandi, now called Nankana, on the banks of the river Ravi. He belonged to a Khatri household. His father was an accountant and trained him in Persian, but Nanak was drawn to mysticism instead. He preached during the years the Lodi dynasty fell and Babur took over Hindustan in 1526, making him a contemporary of the end of the Delhi Sultanate and the start of Mughal rule.