Very interesting! So you are saying 70% of Hindus did not celebrate Laxmi Pujan at Diwali because they were busy worshiping Vishnu? And the massive number of people observing MahaShivratri are only from the remaining 30%… You must come from some special place in India.
That’s what I said most Hindus will not agree- but someday they will find out.
However you seem to be very knowledgeable about the ‘Monotheistic’ Hindus - I have not ever met one in all my life.(except maybe Hare Krishna followers).
Just recently I’ve read about
Advaita and
Dvaita philosophies. Dvaita philosophy is said to have influenced Chaitanya Mahāprabhu (the 16th century progenitor of Gaudiya Vaishnavism - the type ISKCON belongs to), so if you ask me that
may explain their ‘monotheistic’-esque philosophy.
(For the benefit of folks who don’t understand what the heck I’m talking about here (you probably already know this, openmind77
)
Advaita ‘non-dualism’ is the idea that the so-called
ātman (the true ‘self’; human soul) is indistinct from
Brahman, the unknown reality of everything. Advaita is quite close to and is often compared with the Western idea of panentheism (i.e. the universe exists within God, who penetrates and at the same time, extends beyond it) or monism.
Dvaita ‘dualism’ (not the same as the Western one), meanwhile, posits
contra Advaita that there is a distinction between Brahman, aka the ‘Supreme Ātman’ (
Paramātmā) - i.e. ‘God’ (in this case, identified with Vishnu by the founder of the school,
Madhvacharya) - and the individual souls (
jīvatma). Dvaita teaches the existence of two separate realities: on the one hand, you have Brahman/Paramātmā/Vishnu, the absolute truth of the universe; on the other hand you have stuff like the individual soul (
jīva) or inanimate matter, which are also different from each other.
So whereas Advaita teaches that Brahman = Ātman, Dvaita teaches the opposite: God and the individual are
not the same, with the existence of individuals being grounded in the divine. Also, while Advaita teaches that liberation or
moksha can be achieved with the realization that there is no difference between Brahman and Ātman - that Ātman is the only true existence, with the observable world being unreal and impermanent, Dvaita teaches that
moksha is attained by realizing that all finite reality is essentially dependent on the Supreme.
And yes, Madhvacharya’s doctrine is quite close to monotheism: by identifying Vishnu as the singular ‘Supreme Ātman’, all the other gods - Brahma and Shiva included - are relegated into inferior second-class positions. Dividing existence into
kshara (those who have destructible bodies) and
akshara (those who have indestructible bodies), Madhvacharya taught that only Lakshmi - Vishnu’s consort - is
akshara, while the other gods and every other life in the universe are
kshara. Vishnu, since he possesses no body to begin with, is exempt from this classification.
Madhvacharya also had the ‘novel’ idea (for Hindus) of dividing souls into three classes: those destined to achieve liberation (
mukti-yogya), those destined to be forever subject to death and rebirth (
nitya-samsarin), and evildoers who are condemned to eternal ‘damnation’ (
tamo-yogya).)
