Religion

Hinduism

HIN-doo-iz-um

Dharmic (Polytheistic)

Origin 1500 BCE to 500 BCE

Hinduism is the term used since the nineteenth century for the family of traditions native to the Indian subcontinent, and whether it names one religion or a European umbrella over many is still argued. What its traditions broadly share is a vocabulary rather than a creed: dharma, the order one is obliged to uphold; karma, action and its consequence; samsara, the round of rebirth; and moksha, release from it. Beyond that they diverge. Some direct devotion to Vishnu, Shiva or the Goddess as the one God; some hold that the self and the ultimate reality, Brahman, are finally one. It has no founder, no single scripture and no central authority, and counts roughly 1.2 billion adherents.

History & Origin

Hinduism has no single founder or founding event; scholars trace its roots to the blending of Vedic religion, brought by Indo-Aryan migration, with indigenous religious traditions of the Indian subcontinent over more than a millennium.

Facts

Status

Status Today

Living tradition, practised today 1

Law and State

Establishment Status

Varies by Province 8

Nepal was the world's only constitutionally Hindu kingdom under its 1962 and 1990 constitutions, a status ended by the 2006 interim constitution after the Maoist insurgency and the monarchy's abolition, with the 2015 constitution confirming Nepal a secular federal republic; India, home to the great majority of Hindus worldwide, amended its own constitution's preamble in 1976 to declare the Republic explicitly secular, so no country today establishes Hinduism as a state religion.

Trajectory

Membership Over Time

By 2020, the same Pew study found the global Hindu population had grown 12 percent to nearly 1.2 billion, remaining stable as a share of world population since non-Hindus grew at about the same rate; 99 percent of Hindus worldwide live in the Asia-Pacific region and about 95 percent in India alone. 9

Membership Over Time

In its December 2012 Global Religious Landscape study, Pew Research Center estimated about 1 billion Hindus worldwide as of 2010, 15 percent of the global population, while noting a lack of census or survey data on Hindu subgroups in most countries. 10

Membership Over Time

Pew's June 2025 update put its own 2010 Hindu estimate at a little under 1.1 billion, close to but modestly higher than the 2012 report's figure for the same year, a mild revision rather than the sharp divergence seen in the same pair of studies' Buddhist figures. 9

Membership Figure As Of

2010-01-01 9

Membership Figure As Of

2012-12-18 10

Membership Figure As Of

2020-01-01 9

Basis of the Membership Figure

Independent Survey 9

Basis of the Membership Figure

Scholarly or Demographic Estimate 9

Practice

Practice Status

Partly restricted: some elements are closed to outsiders 5

the subject's own accountHinduism is practised and studied openly across the world, and its core texts, including the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, are published in many languages. Two specific layers remain closed rather than published for general use: the direct oral recitation and transmission of Vedic mantras, traditionally passed from a qualified teacher to a formally initiated student, and Tantric initiation, which is given personally by a guru rather than learned from a book. The wider devotional and philosophical tradition around them is open.

Giving

Standing Giving Expectation

Dana, giving, is not a single uniform rule in Hindu tradition but a textual category examined at length across dharmashastra literature. Maria Heim's academic study Theories of the Gift in South Asia traces how thinkers writing across roughly 1100 to 1300 CE debated whether a gift is fully voluntary or carries an obligatory dimension, a live question precisely because the dharmashastra sources themselves classify gifts along a spectrum running from daily, expected household giving to occasional, circumstance-bound giving and freely chosen giving, without resolving which end of that spectrum binds an ordinary householder. Dakshina, the gift or fee traditionally owed an officiating priest at the close of a ritual, sits at the more expected end of the same spectrum: its Vedic root, traced to a fee due the priest, originally a cow, makes it read as more customary and completion-bound than a purely charitable dana, though its scale is set by custom and the giver's own means rather than by any stated rate. Hinduism has no single hierarchical body, no synod and no magisterium, that could codify either dana or dakshina into a binding rule with a stated percentage or a stated penalty for falling short; what the textual and scholarly record shows is a customary norm of long standing, carried by tradition and ritual expectation rather than by institutional enforcement. 6

How the Expectation Is Enforcedthe subject's own account

Customary Norm 7

Origins

Origin Period

1500 BCE to 500 BCE 1

Origin Period

No founding event 1

Place of Origin

The Indian subcontinent, chiefly the Indo-Gangetic plain 1

Founder

None; Hinduism has no founder and no founding event 1

Form of the Confession

Hinduism has no single creed and no central authority to issue one. Adherence centers on orthopraxy, correct ritual and social practice, rather than a shared confession, and schools agreeing on almost no metaphysical claim, including atheistic Samkhya and materialist Charvaka, are still counted within the tradition. A formula such as the Gayatri Mantra marks a school, not the whole of Hinduism. 2

Belief

Supreme Being

Hindu theology ranges from devotion to a single supreme deity, most often Vishnu or Shiva depending on the tradition, to a broader vision in which many deities are held to be manifestations of a single underlying reality, Brahman. 3

Theology

Polytheistic: many gods 1

Theology

Monistic: one ultimate reality behind all appearance 1

Theology

Panentheistic: the divine both within the world and beyond it 1

Transgression Category

Adharma, action contrary to one's dharma or to cosmic and moral order, is the broad Hindu category of wrongdoing. 3

Reach

Adherents Today

1,200,000,000 4

Adherents Today

Pew Research Center's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 report puts the global Hindu population at nearly 1.2 billion as of 2020, up 126 million from 2010, with about 99 percent of the world's Hindus living in the Asia-Pacific region and roughly 95 percent in India alone. 4

Learn More

What the Traditions Hold

There is no creed here, and no council ever met to fix one. What holds the traditions together is a set of shared terms, used differently by different schools but recognisable across all of them.

Dharma is the most important and the hardest to translate: the order of things and one's obligation within it, which varies by role, stage of life and circumstance rather than applying uniformly. Karma is action together with its consequence, working across lifetimes. Samsara is the resulting round of birth, death and rebirth, and moksha is release from it, the highest goal, though not the only one the traditions recognise, since duty, prosperity and pleasure are also counted as legitimate human ends.

Behind these lies the question of what the self ultimately is. The Upanishads pose it as the relation between atman, the innermost self, and Brahman, the reality underlying everything. Advaita Vedanta answers that they are not two; Vishishtadvaita holds the self to be real and distinct but wholly dependent on God; Dvaita holds God and the soul permanently separate. These are not sects so much as rival readings of the same texts.

Scripture is layered. Shruti, that which was heard, means the Vedas and the Upanishads and carries the highest authority in principle. Smriti, that which is remembered, includes the Mahabharata with the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana, the Puranas and the law books, and in practice these are far more widely read and recited.

Practice ranges from temple worship and household ritual to pilgrimage, festival, recitation, yoga and ascetic withdrawal. Puja, the offering made to an image understood as hosting the deity's presence, is the most common form; what the image is taken to be varies considerably from one tradition to another.

One Religion, or Many

The word is younger than the thing it names. Hindu began as a Persian term for the people living beyond the Indus, a geographic label rather than a religious one, and Hinduism, with the suffix that turns it into a system, is a nineteenth-century coinage in English. The traditions it covers had not previously grouped themselves under a single name of that kind.

This has consequences that are still argued over. One position holds that the category is largely an artefact of colonial administration and scholarship, imposed on a field of distinct traditions (Vaishnava, Shaiva, Shakta, Smarta, and a great many regional and community-specific practices), that had no need of it and often disagreed with one another as sharply as they disagreed with Buddhists or Jains. The opposing position holds that a genuine family resemblance long predates the label: shared texts, a shared ritual grammar, shared concepts, mutual recognition, and terms such as sanatana dharma, the eternal way, that Indian sources themselves used.

The dispute is not merely academic. It bears on who counts as Hindu, on how Indian law defines the community, and on the claims of twentieth-century political movements that treat Hinduism as a national identity as much as a religion.

For a reader, the practical upshot is that almost any general statement about what Hindus believe will be false of some large group of them. There are firm monotheists who regard Vishnu or Shiva or the Goddess as the one God and other deities as lesser or as aspects. There are monists for whom the plurality of deities is provisional. There are traditions in which the philosophical apparatus barely figures and the deity of the locality is what religion means. Hinduism has accommodated all of these without any mechanism for ruling any of them out.

Reform, Politics and the Present

Hinduism is the majority religion of India and of Nepal and has roughly 1.2 billion adherents worldwide, which places it third in size after Christianity and Islam. Its distribution beyond South Asia was shaped first by trade and the long Indian presence in Southeast Asia, where Bali remains predominantly Hindu, then by indentured labour under British rule, which established communities in Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname and South Africa, and more recently by migration to Britain, North America, the Gulf and Australia.

The nineteenth century brought organised reform under colonial conditions. The Brahmo Samaj, founded in 1828, pressed for a Hinduism without image worship and against practices its founders judged indefensible. The Arya Samaj, founded in 1875, argued for a return to the Vedas and against later accretion. Both were minority movements, but they set terms that later debate used. Vivekananda's appearance at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 marked the first sustained presentation of the tradition to a Western public on its own terms.

The twentieth century added a political dimension. Hindutva, a term given currency by V.D. Savarkar in 1923, defines Indian identity in terms of the traditions native to the subcontinent, and the movements built on it have been a major force in Indian politics since the late 1980s. Its relation to Hinduism as a religion is contested: supporters present it as the political expression of the tradition, critics as a modern nationalism that uses religious identity for other ends. Caste, abolished as a legal disability in independent India, remains a live question within the religion and about it.

Spread History

Marker size and shape show how established Hinduism was there: a small filled dot for an arrival, a larger one for an established or dominant presence, and a hollow, distinct marker where it was suppressed or nearly disappeared, never simply absent.

View the Full Spread Map

Hinduism Arrives In Cambodia With The Kingdom Of FunanCambodia, 100 to 450, Arrived
Sivaskandavarman Performs the Ashvamedha and Grants Land to Brahmins at KanchipuramIndia, 300, Established
King Bhadravarman Founds the My Son Sanctuary in ChampaVietnam, 380 to 413, Arrived
Isanavarman I Founds Isanapura and Its Shiva TemplesCambodia, 618, Established
Queen Lokamahadevi Builds the Virupaksha Temple at PattadakalIndia, 740, Established
Rakai Pikatan Dedicates the Prambanan Temple to ShivaIndonesia, 850 to 856, Established
Rajaraja I Dedicates the Brihadeeswarar Temple at ThanjavurIndia, 1010, Established
Angkor Wat Is Built As A Hindu TempleCambodia, 1113 to 1150, Dominant
Buddhism Displaces Hinduism At AngkorCambodia, 1178 to 1300, Extinct
The Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit Empire Dominates IndonesiaIndonesia, 1293 to 1389, Dominant
Islam Supplants Hinduism In JavaIndonesia, 1389 to 1527, Extinct
The Goa Inquisition Suppresses Hindu Worship in GoaIndia, 1560 to 1812, Suppressed
Shivaji's Coronation at Raigad Establishes Hindavi SwarajyaIndia, 1674, Revived
Indentured Labour Brings Hinduism To MauritiusMauritius, 1834, Arrived
Hinduism Grows In America After The 1965 Immigration ActUnited States, 1965, Established
Narendra Modi Consecrates the Ram Mandir in AyodhyaIndia, 2024, Established
The Maha Kumbh Mela Draws Hundreds of Millions to PrayagrajIndia, 2025, Established

Within Hinduism

Schools of Theology

Denominations

Gaudiya Vaishnavism

Hinduism

56 links

ISKCON (Hare Krishna)

Hinduism

70 links

Kashmir Shaivism

Hinduism

46 links

Lingayatism

Hinduism

40 links

Nath Sampradaya

Hinduism

37 links

Samkhya

Hinduism

55 links

Shaivism

Hinduism

84 links

Shaktism

Hinduism

79 links

Shri Vidya

Hinduism

38 links

Smartism

Hinduism

55 links

Sri Vaishnavism

Hinduism

51 links

Vaishnavism

Hinduism

97 links

Philosophical Schools

Nyaya

Philosophical Schools

8 links

Purva Mimamsa

Philosophical Schools

8 links

Vaisheshika

Philosophical Schools

7 links

Yoga Darshana

Philosophical Schools

7 links

In the Texts

Bhagavad Gita 11:12Srimad-Bhagavad-Gitavision and holiness

If the splendour of a thousand suns were to rise up at once in the sky, that would be like the splendour of that Mighty Being.