Complexity of Hinduism

Hinduism is one of the oldest religions of the World. It is said to have evolved in the banks of the river Indus, previously known as river Sindhu, about 10,000 years ago. Slowly, it spread and took different forms in the subcontinent. Among the various religions of the World, Hinduism is said to be the most complex. The reason to it is its age old customs, traditions and beliefs among the people. Most of the other religions have a single God to follow. In Hinduism, the number of Gods and Goddesses are about 33 crores. There is still debate on the topic of why so many Gods and Goddesses are there in the subcontinent. Not only the number is high, they have different followers with separate rules and rituals. As our country has such a huge population, so how much high the number may be, they are always followed by a decent number of people. The people of Maharashtra follow the God of wisdom, Lord Ganesh. On the other hand, the people of Bengal worship the Goddesses of power and victory, Goddess Durga. Similarly, the people of different states and their districts have diverse beliefs. But, my concern is not about the people of today who have different beliefs. My concern is about how so many Gods and Goddesses came into existence. If we think rationally, we can assume that the first few people on this holy land, who described the Almighty in different forms, might have made it by going through the different elements of nature. Starting from the Sun, the Moon, the Sky, etc. any element which we can perceive, is included in their book of Gods and Goddesses. It seems funny to us, but, at that time, all those elements were given the form of Gods and Goddesses. One more amazing fact about Them, are the Human forms we pray. From my very childhood, I have seen the festival of the advent of ‘Goddess Durga on Earth’ in Kolkata. There are ‘pandals’, where every year, we have different forms with different names of the Goddess. This very thing amazed me and my friends and we used to guess the names of the Goddess. It was fun then. But, now I do understand the fact that, as the time passed, people thought of various forms of the Goddess to eradicate the evils of the World. And so the forms evolved each year. Besides, the religion itself has evolved and gave birth to new religions down the ages. It is said that most of the religions, including Sikhism, Jainism, Christianity, Buddhism and many others have either evolved from it or learned from it. That is why it may be known as the ‘Mother of all religions’.