A course in Hinduism
Learn Hinduism
from the beginning.
60 lessons, in order. The first 6 are free, with no account and no card. English and हिन्दी.
- The course
- 60lessons in one path, in order
- Free
- 6no account, no card
- Languages
- English and हिन्दीswitched inside the lesson
- Depths
- Child, Seeker, Scholarthe same lesson, three ways
Who this is for
You do not need to have read anything first, and you do not need Sanskrit. Lesson 01 starts with what Hinduism is. Every lesson after it builds on the one before, so you can start at the top and keep going.
Most of what you find online is one story, or one verse, or a clip. Nothing around it. This is the part that usually gets left out: where the texts came from, why they disagree with each other, and what the words actually mean.
Every lesson is written three times, at three depths. So a parent and a child can read the same lesson on the same evening and actually be reading the same thing.
What you will understand
By the end you will know what dharma, karma, saṃsāra and mokṣa mean, and how they fit together. Not as four words you met separately. You will know the difference between śruti and smṛti, what the Vedas and Upaniṣads are, and why two Hindu texts can disagree without either one being wrong.
You will know what separates the Vaiṣṇava, Śaiva and Śākta traditions. You will know what is actually happening in a temple, and why: mūrti, pūjā, darśan, mantra. You will have read the real history of varṇa, jāti and untouchability, including the Hindus who refused it. Nothing is left out to make it easier. And you will know what the philosophical schools were arguing about: Sāṃkhya, Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā, and the Vedānta of Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja and Madhva.
One lesson, three depths
Child, Seeker and Scholar are not three courses. It is one lesson, written three times. You switch between them inside the reader. Below is the real opening of the first lesson, at each depth.
Some big things have one beginning. A story has a first page. A river has a spring.
Hinduism is not like that. Nobody started it. There was no first day.
It grew slowly, in one part of the world, over thousands of years, while people asked questions like: Who am I? What is the right thing to do? What is holy?
They did not all give the same answer.
Most descriptions of a religion begin with a founder and a book. Somebody stood up and said something; it was written down; what follows is the history of people trying to live by it. That shape is so familiar that we reach for it without noticing, and it works well enough for several of the world's largest traditions.
It does not work here.
The difficulty of defining Hinduism is not a failure of scholarship. It follows from the kind of object it is.
A tradition organised around a founder can be defined by fidelity to him. A tradition organised around a creed can be defined by assent to it. Hinduism is organised around neither, so the usual definitional machinery has nothing to grip.
From What Hinduism Is, lesson 01. Free to read in full.
What membership is
Lessons 01 to 06 are free to read. Always, and with no account and no card. Membership opens the other 54, from lesson 07 onward. All of them are written and readable today.
That is 54 more lessons you can open straight away. Month 1 is 01 to 30, and Month 2 is 31 to 60. The months are just how the course is grouped. They are not how long you subscribe for. Both languages and all three depths, on every lesson.
New lessons are included while your membership is active. We do not put a date on a lesson before it is ready. You can cancel renewal whenever you want. Your access runs to the date you have already paid for.
50% launch price
₹49₹99
₹99 / month from 1 December
Launch price available until 30 November 2026
Where this comes from
Every lesson names the texts it rests on. You can see them on the lesson itself, including which edition, and what was actually read. Sometimes a claim comes from a translation, or from a scholar, and not straight from the text. When that happens the lesson says so.
Hindu traditions disagree with each other. That is not a problem to tidy away, it is a lot of what there is to learn here. This is educational material and it is written to be checked. It is not a temple and it is not a sect, and finishing it does not qualify you in anything. If we have got something wrong, tell us and we will fix it.