Positive contributions

Hinduism has several positive contributions at both individual and social levels :-

When Marx said that religion is “the sentiment of the heartless world and the soul of the soulless conditions” (Haralambos and Heald, 1990, 460) he made a very profound positive statement on religion. For most people, life is full of uncertainties, anxieties, meaninglessness of death and diseases, and various types of human and social problems. Those who are broadly classified as Hindu are passing through a period of transition and passing through a phase of uncertainties and anxieties. Hinduism, like any other religion, has a great healing power for them. It provides explanation of what cannot be explained in everyday life and it generates hope (in the hopeless world). By emphasizing the illusionary nature of this phenomenal world, Upanishadic Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism convey that to be happy is to know the ultimate truth and to attain liberation and transcendence. The twentieth verse of the sixth chapter of the Shwetaswaropanishad aptly says that as it is not possible for a man to wrap the sky like a piece of leather it is not possible to be happy without knowing Deva (i.e., God or Brahman). This approach says that even good deeds which can make one have pleasures of life are ultimately binding; they lead to fall into the cycle of life and death and thus cause great misery. In place of looking for pleasure or doing good deeds one should look for moksha – the realization of self.