This article is part of an introductory series on Hinduism: 1. What it is · 2. The texts · 3. Key words · 4. The paths to liberation · 5. The deities.
Anyone approaching Hinduism for the first time usually looks for the same things they find in the religions most familiar in Europe: a founder, a sacred book, a creed to recite, an authority that says what is right to believe. They do not find them. And it is precisely this absence that makes the best starting point, because it says a great deal about what Hinduism really is.
A name that came from outside
The word hindu was not born in India. It is how the Persians pronounced Sindhu, the Sanskrit name of the river Indus: it simply referred to those who lived beyond that river. From the same root come the Greek Indós and our word “India”. For centuries “hindu” was a geographical and cultural label, not a religious one.
The term “Hinduism”, as the name of a religion, only spread in the nineteenth century, in British-ruled India, where the authorities needed to classify the population by religion. Many scholars point out that very different traditions were gathered under that name, traditions that until then had not thought of themselves as a single religion.
Sanātana dharma, the “eternal law”
Many believers prefer another name: sanātana dharma, which can be rendered as “eternal order” or “eternal law”. Dharma is a hard word to translate: it means at once the order of the cosmos, each person's duty and the right way to live. To say sanātana dharma is to think of one's religion not as something founded on a certain day by someone, but as a truth without beginning, which the sages recognised and handed down.
No founder, no single book, no pope
Hinduism has no historical founder, as the Buddha is for Buddhism or Muhammad for Islam. It has no single book: it has a vast library of texts, from the Vedas to the epic poems, which the different schools read and arrange in different ways (we discuss them in the next article). And it has no central authority: there are teachers, monasteries, temple priests and family traditions, but no one speaks on behalf of everyone.
This explains why two Hindus can hold very different practices and beliefs: one may worship Viṣṇu above all, another Śiva, a third the Goddess; one may seek liberation in meditation, another in devotion, yet another in carrying out their daily duty well. Often the emphasis falls less on what one believes than on what one does: rites, festivals, pilgrimages, rules of life.
The great currents
To find their bearings, scholars usually distinguish a few large families:
- Vaiṣṇava: those who worship Viṣṇu, often in his descents into the world as Rāma or Kṛṣṇa;
- Śaiva: those who worship Śiva, the god who destroys in order to renew, master of ascetics;
- Śākta: those who worship the Goddess (Devī, Śakti) in her many forms, from Durgā to Kālī;
- Smārta: those who follow the tradition that honours several deities together, regarded as faces of a single reality.
These families are not separate churches: the boundaries are porous, and the same person may visit different temples or pray to different deities at different times of life.
What holds the traditions together
If there is no founder and no creed, what makes such different traditions “Hindu”? Scholars point to a few common features, none of which applies to absolutely everyone:
- recognition, at least in principle, of the authority of the Vedas;
- the idea of dharma, an order that sustains the cosmos and each person's life;
- the idea of karma: every action bears its fruit;
- saṃsāra, the cycle of births and deaths, and mokṣa, liberation from that cycle;
- an enormous variety of domestic and public rites, festivals and sacred places.
We will come back to these words one by one in the third article of the series.
Hinduism today
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2020 there were about 1.2 billion Hindus: the world's third-largest religion after Christianity and Islam. They live mainly in India and Nepal, but there are important communities in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia (on Bali), Mauritius, the Caribbean, East Africa, Britain, the United States and in Italy too.
Compared with other traditions
Set beside the religions born in the Middle East, Hinduism shows an almost inverted structure. Christianity and Islam recognise themselves in a founder, in a specific revelation and, at least in part, in a common creed; Hinduism recognises itself in a very long and plural tradition. Judaism is closer to it than it may seem: there too, practice (the mitzvot, the commandments) and belonging to a people and a history count for much more than assent to formulas.
Buddhism arose in India from the same soil: it shares words such as karma, saṃsāra and dharma, but it has a founder and rejects the authority of the Vedas. The Yoruba religion of West Africa, which we will explore in other articles, resembles Hinduism in one respect: it has no single book and no central authority, but rather a body of local traditions, deities and knowledge passed down by word of mouth.
What can we take from this? Perhaps this: that a religion can hold many people together without demanding that they all believe the same thing. Hinduism leaves room for different paths and places the way of life, rather than definitions, at the centre. It is an idea that even those who come from more structured traditions may find precious.
In the next article: the texts of Hinduism, from the Vedas to the Bhagavad Gītā.
Further reading
- Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- Kim Knott, Hinduism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. 2016.
- Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History, Penguin, 2009.
- Stefano Piano, Sanātana dharma. Un incontro con l'induismo, San Paolo, 1996.
- Pew Research Center, How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020 (2025)