Does My Sunburn Add or Subtract from My Karma?

By way of preliminary I have to admit that intellectual Hinduism (vedanta) has always held a very powerful appeal to me; it seems scientific in a way which none of the Western so-called "Peoples of the Book"-oriented religions have ever done.  Largely this is because I harbor an invincible attachment to an essentially empirical premise:  the reproducibility of experimental results derived from within the context of the scientific method.  Truth cannot be handicapped by narrow limitations in space or time:  experimental results which are valid only in the thirteenth century, or only on the western coast of Greenland, cannot, by definition, be true.

Hinduism, like Buddhism, Zen, and probably Taoism, are not rooted in historical transactions:  there are no necessarily prerequisite historical events toward achieving enlightenment.  It does not matter, in the cosmic sense, whether one man enacted a covenant with God, whether another received a book from God, whether a third died on a cross.  The scientific religions remain equally true, and equally apprehensible, even if none of the merely historical events associated with their transmission ever in fact occurred.  This is summed up, in the case of Buddhism, by the well-known advice to those seeking enlightenment:  "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!"

Just as we might expect that all current science and mathematics could be rediscovered after a global cataclysm in which absolutely all knowledge was lost but humanity survived, it is safe to say that most of the four religious systems I have enumerated above, certainly their more significant elements, would all be rediscovered and replicated, eventually.  The jargon might differ, just as sacred words in English translation sometimes differ from the Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, or Japanese originals, but the essential ideational structure and psychological exercises would, I am convinced, eventually be replicated practically whole.

This is why I find the Upanishads so very much more impressive than the Old or New Testament (I can't speak for the Koran):  the sense of being on the right track toward real progress, in an extremely scientific sense, rather than getting bogged down in a congeries of historiographical myth-making.  The Tanakh, in particular, is of a piece with the Norse sagas like Burnt Njal or  the Nibelungenlied or the Volsunga saga, and, objectively considered, far less impressive as literature than these.  (But perhaps I have an uncommonly low threshold for jeremiads and lamentations; I don't care overmuch for the Vedic hymns, either.)

364 days, 50 novels, 50 books of non-fiction to go.