Thrasher

The Historical Depth of Hindu Cosmology:

A Historical Interpretation of Hindu Dharma

By: Andrew D. Thrasher1

Virginia Beach, VA 2015

1
Andrew D. Thrasher holds a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies from George Mason University and is
currently pursuing a Master’s of Divinity from Regent University. He is an Adjunct Instructor of Religion at
Tidewater Community college and is an inaugural Fellow with the C. S. Lewis Institute in Virginia Beach, VA.

1
 Thrasher

Abstract

In contemporary scholarship there is a dynamic understanding of the complexity of the

Hindu religion. Hinduism is a name for a diverse set of religious communities and beliefs that
hold a common standard for truth; the scriptural authority of the Vedas. The Vedas, and indeed
Hindu scripture as a whole, play a primary role in being able to understand the Hindu
understanding of salvation. In this essay, it is my goal to delve into deeper meanings of the three
Hindu paths to salvation in the complex religion we know as Hinduism by offering an historical
understanding of Hindu Dharma by analyzing it implications in a Hindu cosmology. This essay
delves into an interpretive understanding of the depth of the tri-Marga in Hinduism by offering
an interpretation of a Hindu cosmology defined by Dharmic significance as it is enpresented in
the continuous development of Hindu history. Thus my goal is to present a historical and
religious interpretation of the development of a Hindu cosmology by addressing the Hindu
historical enpresenting of dharmic truth and meaning through interpretive schemas of time,
practice, and experience.

Introduction

In Hinduism it would be correct to define three main paths to salvation through history

that have dominated Hindu belief, practice, and philosophy. Primarily my focus is to address

three paths of salvation spanning from Vedic Hinduism through Postclassical emphases on self-

realization and faith. What the brunt of the this paper addresses however is an interpretive

schema through which dharma has been cosmologically understood through the shifts in Hindu

history. This paper begins with the Vedic understanding of the path of Karma and its relationship

to a Hindu Cosmology of dharmic significance to show the depth of a Hindu worldview that

enpresents a Hindu understanding of cosmological-religious significance in ritual action.

In turn, through philosophically interpretive methods, I offer an historical transition into

the path of knowledge from Vedic Religion by turning to Upanisadic and post-classical Hindu

understandings of the metaphysics and ontology of dharmic meaning to open the Hindu

conception of cosmology to the dis-closedness of cosmic Reality in experiential self-realization.

The final transition into Bhakti-Marga, or the path of loving devotion, turns the jnana-Marga

conception of dharma from the inwardness of understanding unto the opening to the divine other

2
 Thrasher

to delve the importance of personal faith in understanding the dynamics of Hindu cosmology as a

personified dharma in the Gods themselves.

Essentially the approach of this essay is particularly interpretive, and offers a historical

hermeneutic of how Hindu cosmology evolved through time as first ritualistic, then inwardly

metaphysical, and finally personally religious. The interpretive schema I am working with draws

from Hindu understandings of Vedic cosmology, cosmological understandings of Hindu

philosophical schools, and interpretations of a cosmological symbol in the experience of a divine

other by opening Hinduism to a historical framework of understanding religious experience in

Hinduism through time. The narrative dimension of this paper articulates the continuous

historical development of Hindu conceptions of cosmology and religious belief through history

as a historical enpresenting of cosmological truth and experience characteristically embodied in

Vedic truth that has been diffused through history as a standard of truth for Hindu religious

communities.

Cosmology in Ritual-Action: Upholding Dharma in Vedic Religion

In any articulation of the word karma, there is a necessity of understanding the religious

and historical distinction of what I mean when I say Karma. What I am articulating as Karma in

this essay is not the popular western (and even eastern!) notion of karma. Through history,

embedded in the Axial Age where religion transformed and took on a moral character, karma

came to be related first to the impersonal law of cause and effect which was in this form

expressed by the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama and the early Buddhists, and through time and

diffusion, the original meaning of karma became lost into the common saying as ‘what goes

around comes around.’2

2
The significance of the Axial age, coined by Karl Jaspers, played a major role in the development of World
Religions by innovating the ritualistic and cosmological religions with moral and ethical meanings embedded within

3
 Thrasher

The meaning this essay articulates of the word Karma is not merely that of cause and

effect, and even less to ‘what goes around comes around.’ The popular understanding lacks the

full depth of even the epistemological and ontological implications on understanding the

governing nature of how we experience reality as a law of cause and effect developed by Hindu

and early Buddhist thinking.3 What is even deeper to the understanding of Karma, of which my

goal is to expose, is the historical and cosmological nature of Karma as ritual-action in Vedic

Hinduism.

Vedic Hinduism has its origins in the cultural and religious diffusion of the Aryan people

migrating into the South-Asian sub-continent through the passes of the Hindu-Kush and into the

plains of northern India. The archeological digs of the Harrappan civilization in Modern Pakistan

have uncovered a sophisticated culture of architectural planning, literacy, and religious statues.

Scholars on the debate over the Aryan invasion are leaning more towards an idea of an Aryan

migration caused by the desertification of the steppes of central Asia, and the Harrappan

civilization most likely was abandoned for the same reason and the gradual change in the course

of the Indus River away from the original Indus Basin.4 But lasting through this migration into

northern India, we have common elements of what we could call the Vedic Religion, which

functioned primarily on a social hierarchy governed by the performance of Vedic Rituals with a

cosmological significance.

The blend of Central Asian Aryans and the native peoples of Hinduism transformed the

religious understandings of ritual and cosmology into a dynamic and complex understanding of

the cosmological and ritualistic understandings of reality, the world, and the divine. C.f. Karen Armstrong, The
Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (New York: Alfred & Knopf, 2006).
3
C.f. Raimon Panikkar, Mysticism and Spirituality, vol. 1, 2 vols., Opera Omnia 1 (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2014),
56; and Raimon Panikkar, Myth, Faith, and Hermeneutics: Cross Cultural Studies (New York: Paulist Press, 1979),
275-276.
4
C.f. Klaus Klostermaier, A Survey of Hinduism, 3rd ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 21-27.

4
 Thrasher

the nature of reality and our place within it. The Hindu conceptions of the world took on a three

dimensional sphere of influence, of the Gods (devas) above, Humans on earth, and Demons

(asuras) below. But what is distinctive of this three-world worldview is that the gods and demons

are interactive in the world to maintain an order of cosmic balance and chaos (Dharma and

Adharma). What is significant is that the ritualistic lifestyle of the Vedic Hindus took on a

cosmological significance between not merely the battle between the gods and demons, but to a

cosmological understanding of the balance and harmony between Dharma and adharma.

The significance of these two issues is central to the Vedic cosmology because they offer

us the way in which the world was viewed; it offers us the horizon through which karmic action

can be identified. The meaning and significance of Karmic Rituals was given from the

worldview of the cosmic balance between Order and disorder. By seeing the world as a space in

which the order of the universe was to be maintained by ritual action given in Vedic

prescriptions by Brahmin priests indicates an understanding that the world was in a balance only

through which the God’s could maintain cosmic order through the ritualistic petitions of

mankind. In a sense the Vedic form of Karma was an appeal to the Gods to maintain the

structure and form of reality as an ordered, ethical, and social cosmology in which man

participates with and in reality as a player recognizing that the nature of Reality is grounded

upon the cosmological implications of Dharma as a balance through which social and ethical

Harmony is dependently supported by the ritualistic actions of Vedic priests.

The cosmological significance of Hindu dharma plays a major role in understanding

karmic rituals. The notion of dharma governs the entire Hindu tradition, its notions of truth,

practice, and philosophy, and serves as the cosmological basis through which the historical

enpresenting of a Hindu cosmology can be interpreted. The dharmic significance of cosmic ritual

5
 Thrasher

in the Vedic period implies the social and cosmological balance to the universe. In a sense the

nature of reality is governed by dharma, the religious and social duties that must be performed

according to Vedic truth and rituals. The meaning of the dharmic significance is one that

implicates a pre-axial cosmology through which the world was ordered and maintained by the

heard truths of Vedic Sruti. In the Vedic period, Hindu cosmology is enpresented first in the

dharmic significance of maintaining the cosmic and social order of reality which historically

transitions into the axial age wherein the cosmological significance of dharma is deepened with

ontological and metaphysical insights.

The dominance of the cosmological order derived from Vedic ritual supported the social

hierarchy developing in Vedic Hinduism between the Aryan peoples and the natives of south

India. That the social structure of Vedic society was ordered and reflected in Vedic Cosmology

and karmic Rituals implies the connection between the social order and the cosmos; that the

balance between people is verified by the cosmological balance of reality that Man participates

in by petitionary rituals. In a sense the cosmological structure of Vedic Hinduism helped to

define the social structure of the Caste System in early India. This social structure however, was

fluid up until the codification of the Laws of Manu, which limited caste mobility to the trades

and occupations of the fathers. The importance of this social balance attributes to the very

function of society as a society primarily focused on knowledge as the ultimate goal through

which salvation could be attained. This turn was a shift in Hindu Cosmology towards the inward

realization of Dharma through the metaphysical knowledge of ontological self-realization.

Knowledge of Self: Ontological Metaphysics in Cosmological Realization

What the turn in the historical development of the tri-Marga delved into during the axial

age was an understanding of not merely the cosmological structure of Vedic religion, but its

6
 Thrasher

onto-cosmological depth in the questioning and affirmation of the cosmological-ontological

question, ‘What is the Nature of reality and how am I in it?’5 In Hinduism the cosmological

worldview opened the space through which Dharma took on not merely the notion of cosmic-

religious order, but the metaphysical-ontological basis on which the cosmos itself originated

from. This search for the source of reality shifted the cosmological understanding from the given

basis of Logic in Nyaya philosophy and scriptural interpretation in Mimamsa to metaphysical

and interpretive understandings of the knowledge of Reality and the Self in Vaisasikta and

Vedantic Philosophy. This transition towards knowledge of reality, rather than the given sense of

cosmic and social order, articulated a shift in the Hindu worldview that emphasized the

idealization of knowledge and methods of knowing called the pramanas in understanding the

Hindu cosmology.6

What is distinctive of Hindu metaphysical understandings of reality and self is that it

transformed the cosmological-religious emphasis on ritual action into the inward self realization

of an ontological-metaphysical cosmic order within oneself. The nature of Dharma in self-

realization then became the focus through which the path of knowledge embarked to express the

inner reality of cosmic order within us, of the essence of dharma underlying the cosmological

nature of existence. Thus the cosmological emphasis is shifted from social and cosmic order, to

the ontological experience of dharma within the reality of the world itself. The nature of this

reality became the central focus of understanding the inwardness of cosmological truth by

experiencing the cosmic essence of dharma in an intimate participation with and in the

experience of reality itself.

5
C.f. Klostermaier, A Survey of Hinduism, 31.
6
For the Pramanas in the Vedantic tradition, see Bina Gupta, An Introduction to Indian Philosophy: Perspectives on
Reality, Knowledge, and Freedom (New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2012), 239-252.

7
 Thrasher

The shift to metaphysics in a cosmological understanding of Dharma is one that embarks

upon the interiorization of Vedic truth, rituals, and dharma with and in the very experience of

cosmic reality itself. Hence the shift of depth moves from the cosmological order to the

cosmological reality. Instead of understanding the order of Reality, the path of knowledge

emphasized understanding the nature of reality. And in these questions on the nature of reality

we can understand the metaphysical-ontological interpretation of dharma as the foundation of

reality itself. The Hindu notion of ontology is one intimately tied to metaphysics that in the

nature and reality of the cosmos there are levels of experiencing the Real in which we participate

with and in Reality. Fundamental to the notion of Reality in its truest and most metaphysical

sense is that it is to be experienced in, in a way that Reality can no longer be broken down; no

longer subrated in the words of Eliot Deutsch.7 To understand the cosmological interiorization of

Reality one must understand that it is an experience of Reality in such a way that one is totally

immersed into the experience of reality itself without distinction.8

This shift in the historical development of Hindu Cosmology transformed the idea of a

Hindu dharma into the understanding that the ontological experience of Reality itself without

distinction expresses the experience of dharmic significance internalized and opened unto

immersion with and in all of reality; to the extent that the dharmic meaning of Vedic rituals are

embodied in the very experience of reality itself. It is a turn from a ritualistically interpreted and

socially structured religious-cosmology grounded upon karmic action unto the metaphysical

affirmation of an existential immersion into reality as a cosmological experience of dharmic

7
Eliot Deutsch, Advaita Vedanta: A Philosophical Reconstruction (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1973),
15-26.
8
This ideal state of experience is known as Nirguna Brahman, and entails an understanding of the cosmological
immersion of oneself with and in dharma without distinction. This realization of the onto-cosmological nature of
dharma within the experience of nirguna Brahman implies the state of an experience of dharma in its fully realized
experiential sense of the cosmological-ontological essence of dharma within the experience of reality itself.

8
 Thrasher

significance and meaning. The shift in cosmology is from action unto knowledge and experience

and in the self-knowledge of oneself as experiencing the utmost realization of reality itself with

and in me, one returns to the originating source of all reality. The shift in cosmology is thus not

merely to maintain and uphold cosmological-religious structures and order to reality but to

experience the source and essence of reality within daily life as an immersion into the

ontological-cosmological meaning of dharmic experience with-in oneself. Thus the cosmological

turn is to understand the depth of the knowledge of dharma in pure experience, rather than the

cosmological significance of cosmic order via religious-ritualistic action.

And yet in this historical shift in Hindu cosmology and worldview, practitioners of the

path of knowledge do not negate the necessity and natural implications of cosmic-religous ritual;

in fact they explicate that reality is to be experienced in a participatory manner to the extent that

cosmic order was to be embodied in the self-realization of the pure experience of dharma itself.

So there is not only a shift in cosmological significance towards understanding the nature of

dharma but that this significance is to be experienced in the very experience of reality itself. In

postclassical Hinduism the nature of knowledge takes on not only cosmic significance but a

metaphysical experience of this significance in the ontological realization of one’s true self as

participating with and in Reality itself.

It implies a worldview in which the world is given to the utmost extent that the world

itself, not merely cosmological balances maintained by Vedic rituals and social hierarchies, is

experienced as sharing the essence of dharma underlying experience itself. To experience the

world, then, is to experience metaphysically the source of reality (Brahman); to experience the

source of reality, means then, to experience the nature of Reality within me (atman); to

experience reality within me, hence, means to experience the ontological participation of my self

9
 Thrasher

within the cosmological structure of Reality itself (dharma). Experience becomes pivotal in

understanding the depth of Hindu Cosmology as an internal experience of the essence of the

reality with and in me. The inwardness of self-understanding dharmic significance thus becomes

experienced as the foreground through which the cosmological question of what is the nature of

reality takes on the relational and personal dimension.

Cosmology of Symbology: Experiencing the Dharma in the Divine

What is distinctive of the second postclassical shift in Hindu history is the aspect that

cosmology takes on a personal character of faith in an deity to realize the depth of Hindu

cosmology. This shift to the personal is one that Hinduism took in the realization that the

internalization of cosmological significance in the self-realization of dharma has an outward

expression through which reality is shared and governed by relationships with an deity. This

dialogical emphasis is one characteristic of the religious faith in a chosen deity (Istadevata) in

Hindu experience. Rather than merely internalizing the pure experience of dharma, one takes a

dialogical, relational, and personal step of faith in the Hindu historical development of the

cosmological understanding of dharma.

But this step is not merely a personal relationship with other human beings; rather the

cosmological significance of this relationship is experienced in the expression of faith in a

chosen God that expresses this cosmological reality of dharma within the deity’s characteristics

as isvara (lord). Instead of Man expressing the impersonal reality in the experience of

cosmological immersion, the shift in a Hindu cosmology of dharma turned towards a relational

experience with a cosmological symbol that both manifests and presents dharma with and in

itself to the believer through the experience of Darsana.9 Thus dharma in the bhaktic sense takes

on a cosmological relationship with a presentation of cosmological dharma in the very

9
C.f. Diana Eck, Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

10
 Thrasher

experience of the divine.10 This relationship between the sacred with Man implies the relational

experience with a deity that embodies symbolically in its nature the personal-cosmological

dharmic significance that is intimately participatory through the act of seeing the divine Murti

(image) and being seen by the divine in acts of domestic worship (puja), temple worship of

sacred space, and through pilgrimages.11

The nature of this seeing is called Darsana and in the reciprocal seeing of the divine, the

cosmos is expressed to the believer in the experience of a divine other through which the

cosmological significance, meaning, and truth of dharma is known, experienced and understood

through the experience of the Murti through faith. Thus in the transition unto relational faith, the

dharmic cosmology of Hinduism transitioned from the mere knowledge of dharma to be

experienced within me as one with reality, to the cosmological knowledge of dharma to be

experienced in the very experience of a divine other with me, sharing with and in me the

experience of the dharma symbolically in cosmological knowledge through devotion and faith in

the symbolically embodied dharma in a divine cosmology.

The notion of an embodied divine cosmology is one most clearly seen in the Hindu

understanding of the Tri-Murti, the three major deities. However, what I am addressing here are

not the three major deities based on the amount of devotees. To understand the cosmological

symbology embodied in religious experience of a personal God one must understand the

cosmological themes embodied by the tri-Murti. What I am saying here is that it is Vishnu the

preserver, Shiva the destroyer, and Brahma the creator that represent a cosmological symbology

of dharmic meaning. Each deity represents a part of cosmic order that is symbolically

represented by their very functions in a Hindu cosmology.

10
Klostermaier, A Survey of Hinduism, 108.
11
Klostermaier, A Survey of Hinduism, 263-287.

11
 Thrasher

What the Tri-Murti does is offer a personally religious cosmology that represents the

maintenance of cosmic order. Each deity in the Tri-Murti represents a functional portion of

Hindu cosmology, in sustaining, upholding, and symbolically personifying the ontological-

cosmological realization of Dharma within their very nature; in each of them is dharmic

experience of the self-realization of Brahman symbolically embodied as a personal Isvara (Lord)

to which their devotees can know and experience dharma through their personal faith in the

symbolic representations of dharmic truth.

What the Tri-Murti represents is a Hindu cosmology symbolically presented in the very

functions of cyclical existence and the maintenance of cosmic order. Each tri-Murti symbolically

represents the reality of samsara as a unity in diversity; but deeper still each represents the reality

of a cosmic dharma in a diversity of functions as a unity of dharma represented in a cosmological

symbolism of faith through a Hindu devotee’s act of worship through seeing and realizing the

dharmic significance of cosmological truth in the symbolic representation of the tri-Murti.

The Historical Depth of Hindu Cosmology

Throughout this essay the central issue has been to understand the historical development

of the Hindu cosmological understanding of dharma as an enpresented reality in the Hindu

tradition through an interpretive analysis of the Tri-Marga. In the transitions between a cosmic

order represented by the social-religious ritualistic upholding of dharma unto the inward

realization of the ontological metaphysics of dharmic truth in the cosmological experience of the

true self with and in pure experience of Brahman, and finally to the personally relational

experience of the cosmological symbol of dharma in the tri-Murti, what I have tried to pull out is

the historical depth and enpresenting of a dharmic cosmology and meaning in an interpretive

analysis of the Hindu tri-Marga and its relationship with an understanding Hindu cosmology.

12
 Thrasher

Thus What I have hoped to provide is an interpretation of the historical development of

Hinduism as a tradition that enpresents a dharmic cosmology at its core. I have argued that

Hinduism offers a cosmology that encompasses an enpresenting of dharmic significance through

time via a transitional depth of meaning, truth, and experience of dharma that opens one to the

cosmological meaning and truth of Hinduism through an understanding of the historical

character of Hindu thought and religious experience through time. The continuous nature of this

enpresenting of cosmological truth indicates that the reality of Hindu experience is dynamically

complex; of which my interpretation is only a small portion of understanding the diversity of

Hindu belief and thought through time.

13
 Thrasher

Bibliography:

Armstrong, Karen. The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. New
York: Alfred & Knopf, 2006.

Deutsch, Eliot. Advaita Vedanta: A Philosophical Reconstruction. Honolulu: University of

Hawaii Press, 1973.

Eck, Diana. Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. 3rd ed. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1998.

Gupta, Bina. An Introduction to Indian Philosophy: Perspectives on Reality, Knowledge, and

Freedom. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2012.

Klostermaier, Klaus K. A Survey of Hinduism. 3rd ed. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2007.

Miller, Barbara Stoler, trans. The Bhagavad Gita: Krishna’s Council in Time of War. New York:
Bantam Classics, 2004.

Panikkar, Raimon. Mysticism and Spirituality. Vol. 1. 2 vols. Opera Omnia 1. Maryknoll: Orbis
Books, 2014.

———. Myth, Faith, and Hermeneutics: Cross Cultural Studies. New York: Paulist Press, 1979.

Prothero, Stephen. God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World. New York:
Harper Collins Publishers, 2010.

Rambachand, Anantanand. The Advaita Worldview: God, World, and Humanity. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2006.

Roebuck, Valerie, trans. The Upanishads. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.

Ro, Young-Chan. “Cosmogony, Cosmology and Kosmology: Yin-Yang and Taiji Symbolism.”
CIRPIT Review 4 (2013): 145–53.

Sankara. Self-Knowledge (Atmabodha). Translated by Swami Nikhilananda. New York:

Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1989.

———. The Crest Jewel of Discrimination (Viveka-Chudamani). Translated by John Richards.

The Freedom Religion Press, 2011.

Smith, Huston. The World’s Religions. 50th Anniversary Edition. New York: Harper Collins
Publishers, 1991.

Spencer, Sidney. Mysticism in World Religion. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963.

14
 Thrasher

Thrasher, Andrew. “The Enpresenting of Historical Meaning: An Intellectual Study of History,”

2014.
https://www.academia.edu/10284005/The_Enpresenting_of_Historical_Meaning_an_Inte
llectual_Study_of_History.

15