Journeys with Krishna, Or How I Became a Hindu

Someone recently asked me how long I'd been a Hindu.  Of course, the real answer is that one doesn't become a Hindu; you simply are one.  But, semantics aside, I thought it was an interesting question and found myself wondering.  I mean, I know when I started using the label, but when did I really begin walking the path in a full, true way?

Ironically, it happened when I tried to become a Buddhist.  Meditating on the teachings of the Dalai Lama, I felt a bit of despair.  How would I ever conquer (notice the choice of words) the warrior nature that flows through my veins?  How could I ever achieve the sort of peace that is needed to "truly" practice buddhism? 

Thankfully, my despair didn't last too long.  My recovery from a childhood filled with Christian ideas of denying one's true self (because we are all sinners and flawed) prevented me from being able to consider, in even the tiniest way, the idea of dispelling my warrior nature.  The idea was completely anathema to my beliefs.  So, that put a quick end to that.  But what then?

Concurrent with this rejection of self-denial was the development of my discomfort with the idea of focusing my life and energy on reaching enlightenment.  Partly because an extroverted, warrior gal like me isn't exactly the best candidate for a successful hermit-on-the-mountain experience.  But more than that, I came to see that it would be selfish of me to seek my own personal enlightenment when there is SO MUCH suffering on Earth.  How could I free myself while so many others can barely survive, much less think of esoteric spiritual matters?

These two ideas collided to form a new path.  First, no matter how hard I try, I am not achieving enlightenment in this life anyway -- so why try?  I mean that in the sense of, why try in the sense of the hermit-on-the-mountain?  The ideals I have chosen to live my life by assure that I will be reborn with greater wisdom the next time around, and that's ok with me.  I don't think life here is all that bad anyhow.  Second, I am who I am in this life because of my past lives.  I am a warrior because that is where I am on my "evolutionary" path.  To use Christian terminology, this spirit is a god-given gift and to deny it would be wrong.  So, I choose to embrace it.

This acceptance of who I am in this life, who I might be in the next, and the seemingly odd contradiction of Fate and Free Will are the quintessential hallmarks of Hinduism.  And so I began calling myself such. 

Then along came the Mahabharata, that vast Indian epic.  It contains many, many treatises on many, many topics (maybe this is why Hindu gods have to have many, many arms?) -- but a main foundation is the concept of dharma.  I'll let you go wiki that for the general definition of the concept.  But as it applies here, the Maha discussed the dharma of the Ksatriya class -- warrior kings.  This is a caste you seldom here about as an American studying Hinduism.  But in the time it took me to read the sentence, it had filled the void I'd been trying to fill all along.

Ksatriyas find themselves in a bit of a karmic conundrum: as somewhat enlightened beings they are supposed to rule justly and all that.  But as kings, they sometimes have to do warrior things like attack and kill.  Hinduism has, as it does for so many things, a tidy way of dealing with that: the Ksatriya dharma is to be a good king, and to sometimes kill in the line of duty.  To do otherwise would be adharma, which might be best understood by an American as bad karma. 

So here is my religion telling me that it's not only ok for me to have warrior's blood, but that I am obligated to act on that nature for the betterment of all people.  (ok I aggrandized a little, but you get the point).  And that exactly reinforced the ideal that I had already come to on my own.  So, as far as being a good Hindu goes, I guess I'm on the right path. 

I have long described my spiritual evolution as a journey to find the religion that matched what was in my heart.  I have always been a Hindu;  I just didn't know it.