Not a single religion with a founder, a creed, or a church, but a vast family of related Indian traditions that share a body of sacred texts and core ideas — duty, action and its fruits, rebirth, and release — while differing enormously in deity, practice, and philosophy. The very word is largely a modern, colonial-era umbrella; many practitioners call it Sanatana Dharma, the eternal way. It is now the world's third-largest religious tradition.
Hinduism has no founder, no single book, no governing church, and no agreed date of birth. A worshipper in one village may pray to a goddess unknown two hundred miles away, while a philosopher next door denies that any personal god exists at all. The word itself was largely fixed by outsiders, mostly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to name a diversity that had never thought of itself as one thing. Many who practice it call it instead Sanatana Dharma, the eternal way. What holds this family together is not a creed but a shared set of questions about duty, rebirth, and release.