Before You Visit a Hindu Temple - Radha Krishna

Part I

Difficulty in Comprehension

It was in the early 1950s, long before the advent of TV in India. I had heard the story of an Indian villager who came to a nearby small town. His ancestors had barely traveled outside his village for hundreds of years. He had little ability to read even his local language, but somehow managed to learn to recognize the English alphabets. His friend in the town pointed to a small church nearby and told him, ‘Go and see the temple in which the Christians worship.’ He went in and came out in forty seconds and said, ‘No, that is not a temple. I see no divine images, no flowers, no bells to ring, no light, nothing. I see a few rows of benches like in a school. That must be a classroom.’ His friend took him back to the church, walked over to the altar, pointed to the wooden cross and said, ‘There, that is the God’s image they worship. These are benches for the devotees to sit.’

The horrified villager exclaimed, ‘They worship wood? Why, it looks like the English letter "T"! Do they worship that—wooden letters?’

Some such reaction is to be expected from a Westerner who visits a Hindu temple in America for the first time! In addition, most of the temples built in the US have a large number of images on the altar to satisfy the needs of Hindus who migrate from different parts of India. Out of the 1.1 billion people in India, over 800 million are Hindus, and Hinduism is a fascinating, unorganized religion!

The early Westerners who came to India were traders and travelers. They were astonished to see the large number and types of temples. The multitude of images, the many shapes and sizes of gods and goddesses with many hands and expressions and with their own Mercedes and Cadillacs (read vehicles of transport), and some images even partly like animals—the Westerners were fascinated by all this. To some they were even repugnant! With the cultural arrogance of the times, they even dubbed the Hindus ‘idolators’, primitive worshippers of crude, unnatural objects’.

© "Prabuddha Bharata" (December 2004) published by Advaita Ashrama, Mayavati, Champawat, Himalayas from its Publication Department, 5 Dehi Entally Road, Kolkata 700 014. Website: www.advaitaonline.com. Reprinted with permission.

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