heterodoxy. "We Europeans," writes Sir Alfred Lyall regarding Hinduism,
"can scarcely comprehend an ancient religion, still alive and powerful,
which is a mere troubled sea without shore or visible horizon."[62] In
these days of opportunist denunciation of creeds, the amorphous state of
creedless Hinduism may be noted.

The experience of the late Dr. John Henry Barrows, President of the
Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893, may be quoted in
confirmation of the absence of a Hindu creed. After he had won the
confidence of India's representatives as their host at Chicago, and had
secured for them a unique audience there, being himself desirous to
write on Hinduism, he wrote to over a hundred prominent Hindus
requesting each to indicate what in his view were some of the leading
tenets of Hinduism. He received only one reply.

[Sidenote: Pantheism, Maya, and Transmigration may be called Hindu
doctrines.]

No one doctrine is distinctive of Hinduism. It is an extreme misleading
statement, nevertheless, to say as some Western writers have done, and
at least one Hindu writer,[63] that Hinduism is not a religion at all,
but only a social system. There are several doctrines to which a great
many Hindus would at once conventionally subscribe, and these I venture
to call Hindu doctrines. In theological conversations with Hindus, three
doctrines very frequently show themselves as a theological background.
These are, first, Pantheism; secondly, Transmigration and Final
Absorption into Deity; and, thirdly, Maya, i.e. Delusion, or the
Unreality of the phenomena of Sense and Consciousness. I find a recent
pro-Hindu writer making virtually the same selection. In the ninth
century, she writes, Sankarachargya, the great upholder of Pantheism,