ABSTRACT

That Brahmanism, in the form of later Hinduism, rose victorious over its rivals is due to its self-adaptation to changing conditions. The four permissible goals are: Kama, Artha, Dharma, and Moksha. The essential vigor of the older faith was demonstrated further by the fact that the three ways of release or liberation recognized by orthodox Hinduism were clearly worked out and described: a Way of Works, a Way of Knowledge, and a Way of Devotion. In early Gupta times, they were saying that three great deities—Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva—have among them achieved a significant cosmic manifestation of Brahman-Atman; they perform between them the functions of creation, preservation, and destruction. Two senses of "secularism" need to be distinguished: soft secularism, or the acceptance of a common nonreligious basis for personal and social identity, and hard secularism, or the rejection of religion.