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Sanatana Dharma is perhaps the only religion that can be minimally defined. For the purpose of this definition a religion is defined as our concept about ourselves, the creation and the Creator and their inter relationship. With even one of these missing it is not a religion. The Oxford English Dictionary however holds only Buddhism, Christianity and Islam as religions and not Hinduism and Judaism apparently because the last two do not have a founder to entitle them to be called religions. The minimum beliefs that comprise Sanatana Dharma, which practically every Hindu accepts and for which no visible religious practice is inalienable or essential, are given below. Religious practice includes, ceremonies, worship, going to a temple or a place of pilgrimage, fast, festivals, group prayers, bhajan, discussion, listening to religious discourses and reading of any book or a guru. Beliefs 1. God has no form or 'niraakaara' because He is the only reality that there is. Everything that we see or feel or experience rests on this reality or has come out of it and ends in it. There is no outside Him. 2. God has a form 'saakaara' because being a reality we can experience Him by our five senses that is the only equipment that we have for experiencing Him. To fulfil this role of a reality for the creation He has a form and in addition appears on the earth in a human form from time to time as Shri Rama and Shri Krishna. 3. God is omnipresent or Sarvavyaapaka, that is present outside and inside every entity in the creation. 4. God is omnipotent or Sarvashaktiman. 5. God is omniscient or Sarvagya. 6. God's nature Satchidaananda or satya = truth, chit-ta = awareness or knowledge and aananda = bliss. 7. God is the personification of love or Praymaswaroopa. 6 and 7 are also the nature of living beings. 8. Law of Karma or A has to go through the shape of the consequences of his actions and never B, as the inexorable law of cause and effect governing the entire creation. But the impact of the consequences is under the supremacy of God over the law. Falling from a moving vehicle is the shape and form of the consequence but to die, break some bones or escape unscathed without a scratch is the impact of the consequence that is subject to God's grace. No religion can stand without this law as its base. The role of karma and time is the same. It is constant activity for six changes emanating, existing, growing, changing in form or shape, declining and dying. Karma is birth, sustenance, evolution, involution and dissolution. A man cannot cease from physical and mental activity, from breathing to thinking and to involuntary functions of his internal organs. In addition, he is constantly engaged in activity for his survival and progress. Every entity or phenomenon has a cause and every cause has a cause and so on. Religion rests on why, science rests on how by and large. 9. Rebirth on the earth. It is a phenomenon recorded in sufficient numbers to prove rebirth if exceptions prove a rule. Mercifully we are denied the conscious memory of our past lives. This memory was revised in a psychological laboratory in experiments called hypnotic prenatal mental regression. A hypnotized person was given mild electrical shocks to different parts of his brain. Some shocks made the subject talk a language of distant past and distant from his place of birth. Verification of his narration showed the events of long past. Once we understand the law of Karma that needs the concept of rebirth, we can forget rebirth as God Himself intends us to forget it. Otherwise He would have given us active memory of all our lives. 10. Vedanta or the philosophy of Sanatana Dharma is the answer to why we believe in the above beliefs that were revealed.. The testing of the truth of these revelations could be by the experiment of living by these beliefs and observing the experience and its repetition over countless generations. This testing and search for answers made the greatest discovery for man. It was the Advaita School of Vedanta. It found that the reality of man is one with that of God in His substance, nature, capacity and power. The science of receiving from God a mind empowered to its limitlessness is a corollary from Advaita. The power that Mahatma Gandhi received by living every moment of his life in the universal of Advaitic precepts proved the practical value of Advaita. It also proved the practicality of the science of receiving a mind empowered to its limitlessness that Tulsidas is teaching us for five centuries to make his Ramayan the most read scripture in India.
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