Understand in about 5 minutes
Barnett traces how Indian religion grew from the nature spirits and ritual magic of the Vedic age, through the abstract Brahma of the Upanishads, to the saviour gods and epic heroes worshipped with love.
Mind Map
Core Message
Barnett treats Hindu deities not as fixed figures but as characters that changed across thirty centuries. Vishnu begins as a vague spirit of the sacrifice and ends as a god of grace incarnate in Krishna and Rama. To understand a god, you trace what successive ages made of him.
Already in the Vedic village there was a popular religion of charms, heroes, and helpful spirits, and a priestly religion of carefully chanted hymns and exact ritual. The later history of Indian faith is largely the meeting, mixing, and rivalry of these two streams.
The Brahmans built a colossal system of sacrifice that worked like machinery upon nature, with little need of a moral God. In reaction the Upanishads sought salvation in knowledge of Brahma, the one impersonal Reality with which the soul is secretly identical.
The Bhagavad-gita and the worship of Krishna and Rama offered a god of grace and three roads to him: knowledge, dutiful works, and loving devotion. By this teaching caste became an avenue to salvation rather than a barrier, and devotion (bhakti) reached every class.
Summary
Barnett opens in an Aryan village of the eastern Panjab some thirty centuries ago, and asks what its people believed. He finds two religions living together. The common folk care about charms and magic and revere certain old heroes as helpful spirits. The priests, the brahmans, chant elaborate hymns, the Rig-veda, to many nature gods such as the Sky-father, the Dawn, Agni the fire, and Soma. The priests already half-believe that the rite itself, performed with exactness, has a magic power over nature. Barnett asks the reader to mark this idea, because much will issue from it.
In the age of the Brahmanas the tribes have become kingdoms ruled by kings and, spiritually, by an established Brahman priesthood. That priesthood works the logic of ritual to its end and builds perhaps the most colossal sacrificial system the world has seen. The strange result is that the system grows practically godless: the universe is run by an impersonal cosmic principle and by the soulless force of the rite, and God is no longer the highest power. Barnett calls this, in a careful sense, the atheism of the Brahmans.
A reaction follows within the priesthood itself. The thinkers of the Upanishads decide that works matter only as a path to knowledge, and that once knowledge is gained, works fall away. The knowledge they seek is of Brahma, the single, infinite, impersonal Reality that is both Being and Thought. The supreme secret is to realise that one's own soul is identical with Brahma. Alongside this comes the doctrine of karma and samsara: each act earns its reward across an endless chain of rebirths, and only the saving knowledge of Brahma releases the soul from the wheel.
The third age is the age of the epics and the gods who rise to the front, Vishnu and Siva. In the Mahabharata, Vishnu, once a faint spirit of the sacrifice, becomes a gracious saviour who incarnates himself to restore righteousness, and is identified with the hero Krishna. The Bhagavad-gita, spoken by Krishna to Arjuna on the eve of battle, teaches that duty done without selfish motive, and devotion offered to the Lord, lead to salvation as surely as the old path of knowledge. Caste is kept, but caste-duty done in a spirit of sacrifice becomes a road to God open to all. The Ramayana tells the parallel story of Rama, a human hero of Ayodhya who is raised in the later books into an incarnation of Vishnu.
Barnett closes by asking whether any single principle runs through this bewildering variety. He answers that the history of a god is shaped by two forces: the deepening spiritual experience of a people, and the character of its religious teachers. India in particular tends to read the guru as a manifestation of the god, so each strong teacher stamps something of his own mind on the deity he preaches. Gods are thus recast again and again in the mould of human hopes and ideals, which is why, as an old priestly saying puts it, in the beginning the gods were mortal.
Key Concepts
From the Vedic age onward Barnett distinguishes a folk religion of charms, heroes, and felt devotion from a priestly religion of hymns and exact ritual. The two borrow from and pull against each other.
This pairing is the engine of the whole book. Most later developments, from the rise of bhakti to the absorption of local heroes into the great gods, come from the meeting of these two streams.
The Brahmans came to hold that the sacrifice, correctly performed, works upon the machinery of nature by its own potency, almost independently of the gods it honours.
Carried to its logical end this idea makes the gods subordinate to the rite, producing a practically godless system and provoking the inward turn of the Upanishads.
The Upanishads teach that one infinite impersonal Reality, Brahma, underlies all things and is identical with the self, while karma and samsara bind each soul to a long cycle of rebirths governed by its acts.
These ideas become the deep background of nearly all later Indian thought, setting the problem (release from the wheel) that the devotional religions then answer in their own way.
Mental Models
Barnett reads each deity as a figure with a developing life story, shaped by changing worshippers and teachers, rather than as a timeless essence.
It lets a reader make sense of seeming contradictions, such as Vishnu being at once a quiet ritual spirit and a dancing herd-boy, by placing each face in its period.
The Bhagavad-gita recognises knowledge, the unselfish performance of one's duties, and loving devotion as three ways to the same goal, with the latter two open to everyone.
It offers a simple frame for understanding how a single tradition could hold austere philosophy and warm popular devotion together without forcing a choice between them.
Because India often treats the teacher as a living manifestation of the deity, a strong teacher transfers something of his own character onto the god he preaches.
It explains why Indian gods keep changing: religious history is partly a record of individual teachers reshaping the divine in their own image.
Selected Quotes
The friend of Indra became the friend of mankind.
knowledge is power, the perfect Power is perfect Knowledge.
In the beginning the gods were mortal.
Source
Source text: Project Gutenberg edition of Hindu Gods and Heroes by Lionel D. Barnett.
HTML text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22885/pg22885.txt
Project Gutenberg states that this ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.
Issued in the Wisdom of the East series; the Project Gutenberg ebook was released in 2007 from this edition.