hinduism

The term Hinduism refers to the civilization of the Hindus (originally, the inhabitants of the land of the Indus River). Introduced in about 1830 by British writers, it properly denotes the Indian civilization of approximately the last 2,000 years, which evolved from Vedism the religion of the Indo-European peoples who settled in India in the last centuries of the 2nd millennium BC. The spectrum that ranges from the level of popular Hindu belief to that of elaborate …

…worship hundreds of additional minor deities peculiar to a particular village or even to a particular family. Although Hindus believe and do many apparently contradictory things, each individual perceives an orderly pattern that gives form and meaning to his or her own life. No doctrinal or clerical hierarchy exists in Hinduism, but the intricate hierarchy of the social system (which is inseparable from the religion) gives each person a sense of place within the whole.