What type of religon is Hinduism?
Answers
Answer:
The word Hindu is derived from the Sanskrit word Sindhu, which means "a large body of water", It was used as the name of the Indus river and also referred to its tributaries. The actual term 'hindu' first occurs, as "a Persian geographical term for the people who lived beyond the river Indus (Sanskrit: Sindhu).The Punjab region, called Sapta Sindhu in the Vedas, is called Hapta Hindu in Zend Avesta.
Explanation:
The 6th-century BCE inscription of Darius I mentions the province of Hi[n]dush, referring to northwestern India. The people of India were referred to as Hinduvān (Hindus) and hindavī was used as the adjective for Indian in the 8th century text Chachnama. The term 'Hindu' in these ancient records is an ethno-geographical term and did not refer to a religion. The Arabic equivalent Al-Hind likewise referred to the country of India.
For more than 100 years the word Hindu (plural) continued to denote the Indians in general. But when, from AD 712 onward, Muslims began to settle permanently in the Indus valley and to make converts among low-caste Hindus, Persian authors distinguished between Hindus and Muslims in India: Hindus were Indians other than Muslim. We know that Persian scholars were able to distinguish a number of religions among the Hindus. But when Europeans started to use the term Hindu, they applied it to the non-Muslim masses of India without those scholarly differentiation.
Hindus subscribe to a diversity of ideas on spirituality and traditions, but have no ecclesiastical order, no unquestionable religious authorities, no governing body, nor a single founding prophet; Hindus can choose to be polytheistic, pantheistic, monotheistic, monistic, agnostic, atheistic or humanist. Because of the wide range of traditions and ideas covered by the term Hinduism, arriving at a comprehensive definition is difficult. The religion "defies our desire to define and categorize it" A Hindu may, by his or her choice, draw upon ideas of other Indian or non-Indian religious thought as a resource, follow or evolve his or her personal beliefs, and still identify as a Hindu.
Hindu', or 'Hindoo', was used towards the end of the eighteenth century by the British to refer to the people of 'Hindustan', the people of northwest India. Eventually 'Hindu' became virtually equivalent to an 'Indian' who was not a Muslim, Sikh, Jain or Christian, thereby encompassing a range of religious beliefs and practices. The '-ism' was added to Hindu in around 1830 to denote the culture and religion of the high-caste Brahmans in contrast to other religions, and the term was soon appropriated by Indians themselves in the context of building a national identity opposed to colonialism, though the term 'Hindu' was used in Sanskrit and Bengali hagiographic texts in contrast to 'Yavana' or Muslim