The Colas c33.30

c33.30

There is thus not a single element of popular Hinduism as we know it now that is not represented in the religious practice of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Foreign students of the religious history of India have often been puzzled and sometimes irritated by the utter recklessness with which Hinduism appears to sanction and absorb within itself the basest superstitions and devil worship as well as the noblest and purest forms of worship and meditation.⁵⁷ But in religion, as in other matters, the aim was to attain, not equality, but harmony; to evolve a system in which each person and class would find a proper place, a foothold from which the next step might be taken. The doctrines of *karma* and rebirth were parts of the living faith of the whole people, and the inclusion, within the common fold, of the more primitive manifestations of the religious impulse was but the result of a metaphysic which saw in the lowliest human being, in fact, in any living creature, a spark of divinity enveloped in the accidents of its own past and working out its way back to its pristine purity. The honoured place held by many *nāyanārs* and *āḻvārs* who were not of the priestly class by birth, and the story of the pariah saint Nandan show that the standard of spiritual values was by no means lowered by the admission of primitive faiths into the ante-chamber of Hinduism. The aim was ever to purify and sublimate the religious impulse, though it is probable that, in the attempt to raise the lower forms, the higher ones did not themselves altogether escape damage.