Hinduism for Dummies by a Dummy

Hinduism has over 3 million gods - a little someone for everyone. The religion is extremely complex to learn and keep track of for non-Indians. One of our guides expressed that many Indians live their constant worship of the gods without ever knowing fully the stories or aspects they are worshiping. Every shop, home, street corner, mountaintop, empty corner holds an active Hindu temple in the centre and north of India. There are stickers and/or statues of at least Ganesha or maybe Hanuman on every rickshaw and taxi. There are little Hanuman shrines everywhere displaying a monkey face covered in an orange colour I normally associate with old school Kraft Dinner.

Aside from the very popular Ganesha the elephant headed and Hanuman the monkey god, the big three who are the main focus are the Vedic gods Brahma, the four-faced creator, Vishnu, the operator with at least 10 incarnations (the most popular version), and Shiva the destroyer. Then you get into their consorts, their vehicles, their arm numbers and hand postures, their children and their companions. The cosmology is mind-boggling and requires some cultural decoding to even understand what you are seeing. See a carving of a god with a bull at his feet? That's Shiva and his ride, Nandi the bull. Is Nandi looking up at Shiva? Then the destroyer is in turmoil and considering flight. Is he with a woman with a contented looking lion at her feet? That's Parvati, his consort who is in the mood for love while he is preparing to flee.

Coming from secular Canada, it is incomprehensible how much religion here is entrenched in life. It's not something set aside as sacred and special. Children doodle the gods in their school books and their names and faces decorate tyre shop signs. You can buy them as toys and the stories of the gods are dramatized quite cheesily on tv every night. There's a shrine in every shop. People absolutely believe in their religions and worship devoutly. I have many enjoyable, relatable conversations with the people I meet here but they are operating in belief and cultural systems so alien from my own that, at a deeper level, it would be difficult for us to completely understand each other. The inherent value of females and the central role of the duty of marriage would be two examples where we would be unlikely to ever meet eye to eye.

Then there is reincarnation. If it takes 8.4 million animal incarnations to return as a human again and have the option of building good karma, wouldn't you think we'd spend less of our human incarnations being assholes?