[Florin_Andrei]

> I am appalled by the fact that the true knowledge and the diversity of different schools and line of thoughts has been dissolved and sublimated into a crude understanding of what Hinduism means.

Well, that's always a given when you look at a culture from outside. It takes time to uncover the details and the diversity.

[naravara]

> Well, that's always a given when you look at a culture from outside. It takes time to uncover the details and the diversity.

In this particular case, everyone is looking from "outside." Contemporary Hindus' own understandings of the religion are largely filtered through the modernist interpretations of reformers in the 19th and 20th centuries. They're somewhat divorced from the classical bardic and collegiate traditions that the various Hindu practices were originally developed through. It's not quite as divorced from the source as things like pagan reconstructionist movements trying to rebuild druidic practices, but it's not entirely an organic and internally driven process of evolution either. Western colonialism and the the disruptive Islamic conflicts that preceded it all have an impact.

The modernist reformers were mostly trying to condense Hinduism into a format that made sense to Abrahamic religions, so a lot of nuance got lost in the overall understanding of it. There are still plenty of local temples and village/caste traditions that are practiced they're not really systematized or written down for people to study and understand and they're usually ignored in discussions of the overarching concepts of what "Hinduism" is for that reason.

[Florin_Andrei]

> the modernist interpretations of reformers in the 19th and 20th centuries

E.g. Brahmo Samaj, that sort of thing? What other reformers you have in mind?

I'm curious where would you put Aurobindo in this context. He's definitely "modernist", but he stuck to the Vedas quite a lot.

[naravara]

Even people like Ramakrishna and Vivekananda had a lot of Theosophist influences. And much of the English translated works from people like Radhakrishnan were notable for speaking to Western audiences too. Then there is the whole VHP take on things which is a purely modernist (nationalism) prism.

[Florin_Andrei]

Ramakrishna is surprising to me. He literally grew up in a small village. Are you saying he was influenced later?

[naravara]

It's probably more accurate to ascribe it to his movement than Ramakrishna himself, but everyone would have been influenced by it. The "infrastructure" of philosophical discourse and spreading of ideas had largely atrophied away from neglect before the British even arrived in India. The big centers of learning, like Nalanda or Takshasila, had been burned out long ago.

The traveling orders of priests were greatly diminished and didn't hold the kind of intellectual or cultural sway among people in power that they used to. In Adi Shankaracharya's time they would travel around the country giving lectures and being feted by village heads and kings as they hosted big debates and symposiums. But once the background education system was gone, much of the continued development and education depended on the beneficence of sympathetic Muslim rulers.

[Florin_Andrei]

Fascinating. That's aligned with a few intuitions I had.

The atmosphere of philosophical debate was definitely alive during the time of Shankara. At what point between then and now did it die out?