Thursday, April 01, 2010

Million Gods

Hindus have one God. They also have 330 million Gods. Male Gods, Female Gods, Family Gods, Household Gods, Personal God, Village God, Fertility God, Forest God, Sun God, Moon God and what not. You name it, there is a God for it. For Hindus, everything is divine and there is nothing that can be ignored. There is freedom to choose any form that you can relate to as God and also to reject all the forms. As a hindu progresses spiritually, there is a gradual rejection of forms to realize the Divine without form that is within.



I thought I should share this interesting framework of hierarchy of Gods in Hindu mythology that I found in a book - Myth=Mithya: A Handbook of Hindu Mythology by Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik. The book is also very interesting and deals with apparent paradoxes and unravels an inherited truth about life and death, nature and culture, perfection and possibility from Hindu Mythological perspective. It also retells numerous stories and decodes Hindu symbols and rituals, using a unique style of commentary, illustrations and diagrams.