Hinduism: Revelation

In religion revelation is central to understanding God and spirituality. It's a way of revealing the 'truth' of that religion.

REVELATION

Revelation is to do with the ways that God communicates with people.

There are two types of revelation:

• General revelation is indirect, and available to everyone. Some truths about God can be revealed through reason, conscience, the natural world, or moral sense.
• Special revelation is direct revelation to an individual or a group. This sort of revelation includes dreams, visions, experience and prophecy.

Scripture

Hinduism has a large number sacred writings, many of which were originally written in sanskrit (the sacred language of the Hindu scriptures). There are two kinds of text:

• Sruti – ‘that which is heard’ (ie, revelation [Revelation:How God reveals himself, and communicates with humans. ])
• Smriti – ‘that which is remembered’ (ie, tradition, human wisdom)

The VEDAS are the oldest and most important of these sacred writings. These are called Sruti – ‘that which is heard’. Hindus believe that they were not written by a human being, but were ‘heard’ by wise men called rishis; they have been repeated from one generation to the next ever since.

The Vedas consist of chants, hymns, myths, prayers and songs. They contain stories of the gods and deal with questions such as:

• How did the world come into existence?
• Can people achieve immortality?
• What is wisdom?

Young boys reading the Vedas sacred writings

Other writings which are not so important are called Smriti – ‘that which is remembered’. The Smriti scriptures include: the Puranas(which contain well known stories of Hinduism), the Ramayana (the story of Rama and Sita), and theMahabarata (the story of the five Pandava princes and includes the Bhagavad Gita).

All Hindu sacred texts are respected by Hindus but they are not read and studied in the same way as the sacred texts of some other religions are studied by their followers.