God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World by Stephen Prothero Page A

opportunity: this world is a vale of tears, and whatever happiness we might cobble together here is transitory and impermanent. Even heaven is subject to the flux and frustrations of the iron law of samsara. It, too, was created and will be destroyed, as will whatever gods reside there. The Hindu goal, therefore, is not to escape from this world to some heavenly paradise, but to escape from heaven and earth altogether.
    Hindus call this goal moksha , which literally means release and in this case refers to spiritual liberation—freeing the soul from bondage to samsara and its unsatisfactoriness. This is the closest Hinduism gets to the Christian notion of salvation. But to refer to moksha as salvation is incorrect, since the concept of salvation implies salvation from sin, and Hindus do not believe in sin and so harbor no desire to be saved from it. What needs escaping is not sin but samsara. And moksha, not salvation, is that escape. 6
    Hindus understand that not everyone will be able to attain this goal, or even to strive after it. So they recognize four different aims in life. The first three are: kama, or sensual pleasure (as in the ancient sex manual the Kama Sutra); artha, or wealth and power; and dharma, or duty. But the ultimate goal is moksha. Some conceive of moksha as a loving union of the individual soul with a personal god. Others see it as a more impersonal merging of what Emerson called the “Over-Soul” into the ineffable essence of impersonal divinity. Still others visualize moksha as a place. Instead of the Christian heaven and its streets paved with gold, they imagine a paradise either at Vishnu’s home in Vaikuntha or at Shiva’s home in Kailasa.
    One of the most fascinating conversations in the Hindu tradition concerns how to reach this religious goal. What are the techniques for moving from samsara to moksha? As they wrestled with this question, Hindus developed three very different yogas (literally “disciplines”). The first, developed by priests and described in the ritual scripture the Vedas, was karma yoga , or the discipline of action, which initially referred to ritual action and particularly to fire sacrifice. The second, developed by wandering sages and written down in the philosophical scripture the Upanishads, was jnana yoga , or the discipline of wisdom. The third, bhakti yoga , or the discipline of devotion, is now by far the most popular form of Hinduism. It affirms that neither priestly sacrifice nor philosophical knowledge is necessary for release from the bondage of samsara. All that is needed is love—heartfelt devotion to the god of your choosing.
    Today when Westerners think of Hinduism, many think of Apu, the Kwik-E-Mart proprietor on The Simpsons television show, a worshipper of Ganesha and Shiva, and arguably the Western world’s most celebrated Hindu. But the classic image is the Hindu holy man. In the nineteenth century, missionary reports, ship-captains’ travelogues, and Oriental tales seared into Western consciousness images of crazy ascetics walking barefoot on hot coals, contorting their emaciated bodies into impossible positions, and swinging from metal hooks dug into their backs. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, this “race of knaves,” as one French missionary called them, went from being reviled to being revered. 7 As the counterculture traded in the “materialistic West” for the “spiritual East,” Americans and Europeans fell in love with gurus such as the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of Transcendental Meditation (TM) fame, who seemed to many baby boomers (not least The Beatles) the perfect antidote to the drab life of the corporate man in the grey-flannel suit. Today one of the stock scenes in New Yorker cartoons depicts Western seekers meeting Hindu holy men. In one, an emaciated mountaintop guru answers his visitor’s question with a question: “If I knew the meaning of life, would I be sitting in a cave in my underpants?” 8
    This image of the Hindu