What is Hinduism, and who counts as a Hindu?

Hinduism is an umbrella term for a range of Indian traditions that are unified by adherence to dharma, a cosmic order kept up through rituals and righteous living, as expounded in the Vedas. It has no founder, and it has no central doctrinal authority. Scholars regard it as a synthesis of Brahmanical orthopraxy with various Indian cultures, with diverse roots. According to India's Supreme Court, the Hindu religion does not claim any one Prophet, does not worship any one God, and does not satisfy the traditional features of a religion or creed.

Even the word is borrowed. "Hindu" began as an outsider's word, derived from Sindhu, the Sanskrit name of the Indus River. In ancient records it was a geographical term and did not refer to a religion at all.

What holds the family together is a set of shared themes rather than a creed. Hindus speak of karma, the cycle of death and rebirth called samsara, and four goals of human life: dharma (duty), artha (prosperity), kama (desire) and moksha (liberation). They practise devotion, worship, sacrificial rites, meditation and Yoga, and they draw on scriptures such as the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which includes the Bhagavad Gita.

On the big questions, Hindus disagree. Hindus can be polytheistic, monotheistic, monistic, agnostic, atheistic or humanist. Many see the many deities as aspects of a single ultimate reality. Mahatma Gandhi went as far as saying that a person may not believe in God and still call himself a Hindu. The scholar Wendy Doniger puts it this way: even vegetarianism, nonviolence, belief in rebirth and caste are subjects of debate, not dogma.

With about 1.17 billion followers, roughly 15 percent of the world, it is the third-largest religion. So "what do Hindus believe?" has no single answer: it depends which tradition you ask.