IN 1968 I returned from college in the United States to visit my family in Jamnagar, India. Some friends had arranged a big dinner in my honor, and my father’s guru, Swami Trivenipuri, was there. After dinner he was talking about the supreme god and his relationship to the Hindu triune god, Tri-Murti, and what the three faces of the trinity represent. So I asked him:

“Aren’t the statues that Hindus worship simply idols? Is it good or bad that these are worshiped?”

He answered: “This is very good, because they are stepping-stones to the supreme god.”

So I asked: “Aren’t the statues really a stumbling block to understanding the supreme god? Don’t most persons think that the idols themselves are gods?”

“It is just the common people that believe that,” he said. And he went on with his discussion. But that did not seem right to me. I knew that my mother was not uneducated. She had studied in college for a law degree. And yet when she would go to the temple, she would say that she was going to durshan god. That Gujarati word durshan means “to see.” That was her understanding of the matter; she was going to the temple to see god, because the stone or idol was there. I know that mother viewed the idol itself as sacred, because that is what she taught me.

Trained in Hinduism

Among my earliest memories is visiting the Bhidbhanjan temple near our home. From infancy I was trained in Hindu worship. Even before I could walk, mother would carry me to the temple.

When I became five or six years old, I would go to the temple by myself. Every day, when I came home from school, I would either walk or ride my bicycle to the temple before supper. I would remove my shoes and enter. To worship there before the many gods was a moving experience to me. I always had a feeling of awe and adoration.

Inside the rather small, seatless hall I would bow on my knees before the image of Siva, repeating to myself his name.

In our house there was a long, narrow room, or temple, filled with idol gods. Before entering it we would bathe ourselves completely. I was taught how to sit in front of the gods with my legs crossed, and to empty my mind of all thoughts. One way of doing this, my parents explained, is to repeat a god’s name over and over, saying, for example, “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.”

Later I was given a string of brown stone beads, similar to the Catholic rosary. The idea is to go through the beads repeating the name of the god each time a bead is moved forward on the string.

My Desire to Know God

Although I was faithful in performing these prescribed religious acts, I did not feel I knew God. I wondered to myself, Is God a real person? What is His will for man? When I was young my questions were never answered.

Hindu parents generally are unprepared to give their children religious instruction. However, my mother did try to help me, but in a way that only caused confusion. For example, she taught me to kneel by my bed every night before going to sleep and to address my prayer, “Oh, God!” But really, I wondered, who is this God, for we had scores of images of gods around our home, several of them in every room.

As I was growing up there was no way for me to study the subject of religion. There is no provision for the vast majority of India’s more than 400 million Hindus to receive religious instruction in Hinduism. Hindu temples are not places of religious instruction. The priests there are not teachers of religion. Their work is simply to care for the temple and its grounds, to open the gates and doors in the morning and close them at night, to burn incense to the gods and receive offerings from worshipers.

Hindu priests have not studied at some school to prepare them for their position. A person becomes a priest simply because he is the son of a priest. So, surprising as it may seem to Westerners, Hindu priests have no more religious learning than the average Hindu. They are ignorant insofar as knowing anything about God, and so were unable to satisfy my personal desire to know God.

Life Beyond Death

The principal concept of Hinduism is that of the ever continuance of life. As the eminent Hindu Swami Vivekananda put it: “The human soul is eternal and immortal, . . . The soul will go on evolving up or reverting back from birth to birth and death to death.”

This belief is impressed upon every Hindu by daily attitudes and customs. For example, my mother would leave food out on our rooftop for the birds. And she would explain to me: “These birds may be the departed souls of persons we knew, and they will appreciate our kindness.”

Also, many cows walk freely around the streets of Jamnagar. I remember once, when I was about six years old, the gate to our yard was left open and some cows walked in. It was my job to shoo them out, and so I picked up a board and hit a cow to get it moving. My mother really scolded me for that. “Cows are not to be hit! They are holy!” she said, believing they have departed souls in them.

The reverence with which Hindus regard all living things at times creates problems and difficult-to-explain actions. For example, a Hindu mousetrap appears very strange to Westerners. It is a small box-like object into which a mouse enters to get the bait, and is caught alive when the door falls shut. When we would catch a mouse, mother would tell me to take it out into the street and release it. “But it will only come back in the house again,” I remember saying once. So she told me to take it several blocks away and let it go.

The main problem is with flies and insects. Usually when we would eat, someone had to stand by to wave the flies away. They would not swing so as to hurt them, but just to keep them off the food, all because they believed someone’s departed soul was in each fly.

I, too, believed that the human soul transmigrated, and that the goal was to advance to a superior state with each rebirth. Sitting together on our rooftop at night, my grandfather would sometimes talk to me about reaching nirvana, which is supposed to be nothingness or an ultimate union with God. This hard-to-comprehend idea certainly did not help me to know God. It only made God even more confusing to me.

Could a Guru Help Me?

The idea of nirvana convinced me that I needed to progress intellectually in Hinduism. This required getting a guru, or personal teacher. I can remember when my father first obtained his. The way he made his selection was to have different gurus visit our home. They would have dinner or lunch, and then sit around and talk. I sometimes would listen, although at the time I was quite young. Finally my father found the one he liked best.

A guru is a student of the Hindu sacred writings. He becomes a guru by first serving as a disciple of a guru. Gurus will usually not bother talking with less educated Hindus, because they feel that such persons cannot comprehend their teachings. Thus my father and grandfather, who were each instructed by their guru in the Hindu sacred writings, had a concept of god that was different from that of persons with less education.

They would sometimes talk about a god beyond the idols, and how the idols are not really gods. I remember sitting out on the rooftop at night with grandfather and listening to him explain about Tri-Murti, the triune god consisting of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva. “They are really just one god,” he would say. “There is only one supreme god.”