/lit/ - Literature

>>12413908
>does Hindu thought concern itself with establishing a common, unilateral approach to worship through debates,
Many of the major Hindu thinkers have attempted to unify diverse currents of thought and in doing so establish a common framework of worship (such as drawing from multiple darshanas as Vedanta does), and philosophical/religious debate has long been central to Hindu culture, Sanskrit was the lingua franca of the educated scholars and sages of India for almost its entire history and it was very common for towns to have a dedicated stage/area for traveling monks to debate each other and the Brahmins of that town. At the same time, dogmatism as found in the history of the Abrahamic religions is mostly absent from Hindu history. Opposing schools of thought criticize each other in their writings but violence between Hindu sects is almost entirely absent from history. Most of the occasions of violence have to do with either violent resistance to Muslim invaders/bandits or for a brief period against Buddhists when Buddhism was seen as being the religion of foreign dynasties imposing themselves on the subcontinent like the Kushans.

>as well as enforcing a single approach to how reality works, or is it that everyone is free to follow whatever they think is more sound to them?
The approach of 'enforcing' stuff is not really taken, it's more that if you want to follow and be accepted by a certain religious order/school/temple you'd have to accept their teachings or at least learn their lingo and critique them from the inside as a reformer, but the approach of trying to actively eliminate and silence other views is very rare. In any given place and time throughout history you'd often have half a dozen Vedic/Sramanic/Tantric/Puranic shrines and groups all in close proximity to each other in the same village.

>but not achieving any homogeneous way of looking at spirituality.
Yes and no, there are obviously dozens of completing theological interpretations within mainstream Hinduism, but at the same time there are a common set of values and beliefs which unite most of them such as valuing non-violence, dharma, reverence for the common basis of the Sruti, the ideal of the ascetic and devotee, the small rituals giving a divine context to stuff in daily life etc.

>>12300547
>All the gods in Hinduism are supposed to be the depictions of the one god in the Vedic scriptures?
Yes, it's generally understood by Hindus (someone who is uneducated or dumb might not always understand this though) that God doesn't actually look like the statues and they just symbolically represent the one God of the Vedas. Some Hindus believe in a more personal Godhead that has something sort of like a personality or divine attributes but they still don't think there is something looking like the statue hiding in the clouds or whatever (although they consider that the Godhead is easily capable of temporarily appearing as this if it wants to come to earth to teach spiritual truths like Krishna), even when they conceive of it with personality they still consider it as existing everywhere and all-pervading.

>And so there are no hindus that worship Vishnu, Shiva, and all the other gods at the same time?
Some do, but with the understanding that they are just symbolizing the one God. In fact one example of this, the Smarta tradition; is a sect of Hinduism that utilizes the symbolic worship of 5 deities to represent the Vedic Brahman, and it traces its origins to Adi Shankara, who is one of the main Hindu teachers of the idea that God is really formless and changeless, and the actual reality; and that this universe is just an illusion appearing like foam on the infinite ocean of God; and that individual beings are not real but there is only the one God observing its foam and that the the purpose of the spiritual path is realize that you as a person don't exist but there is just God observing the universe (similar ideas are found in Taṣawwuf and in the writings of Ibn Arabi, this is similar to what they call fanāʾ). Despite that this teaching does not have to do with the worship of statues, they are still able to harmonize that idea with rituals involving statues, in Hindu writings they talk about how ritual worship can help one purify one's heart and mind and can be used as a means for meditation. The Upanishads themselves talk about meditating on and feeling peace from symbolic acts of ritual worship.

>But I recently read that the different gods can interact with one another similar to the gods of the Greek pantheon, are all these gods just the one brahman interacting with himself?
Yes, it gets more complicated but that's basically how Hindus understand it