Here's what I have so far (and please stop me if I err, particularly if you, unlike me, actually know what you are talking about):
Hinduism grew organically and spread throughout a wide area of what is now India, Nepal and surrounding territories. Today, there are approximately one billion Hindus, 905 million of whom live in India, Nepal or Bangladesh.
The religion encompasses a wide variety of traditions, including schools to which millions belong and also many small groups made up of just a few hundred adherents, or often fewer.
Hinduism is often defined in terms of its belief in the law of karma and the belief in reincarnation, although these belief systems are common also to Buddhism and Jainism.
The concept of God differs depending on which tradition and philosophy one subscribes to.
Some Hindus believe that the meaning of life is to realize that one's true self is identical to Brahman, the supreme spirit, and in so doing, to achieve liberation (every religion and philosophy that I have 'studied' in this search talks about achieving some sort of liberation. Am I the only one doesn't feel horribly constrained by the physical experience of life? Perhaps, if through this search I ever become smarter or wiser, I will find my human condition to be more of a burden).
Dualistic Hindu schools also understand Brahman as the supreme being, but in their case they think of him as having a personality that they worship as Vishnu, Brahma, Shiva or Shakti.
Some people call God Ishvara, sometimes identified as Vishnu, or as being Krishna. (It is a mark of my ignorance about this major world religion that, even at this point, I am beginning to feel as if I am reading a Russian novel).
The 330 million devas (oh yes, you read that correctly - 330 MILLION) are heavenly beings or gods about whom mythological stories are told and of whom icons are often made. These devas are sometimes thought to be quite different from Ishvara, but some people worship Ishvara as a favourite deva, or heavenly being.
Which deva you are particularly attached to depends normally upon your background and will often be dictated by which deva your family, caste or people in your local area worship. Certain devas are associated with particular needs or times of life. (So far, while I am confused, I can, to a point, make sense of this by remembering pictures that I have seen of some of the various devas. That said, imagining 330 million of anything is beyond my capacity.)
(Here's where it takes a turn into territory that I was not expecting to trod in this, my introduction to Hinduism) Many Hindus are atheists (does this come as as much of a shock to you as it did to me, or am I particularly ignorant?). Yes, within a religion that seems to be jam-packed with gods, many practitioners do not believe in the existence of any creator god or gods. Unlike your commoner-gardner atheists, who tend to believe (again, I must specify, that I mean this in my extremely limited and predominantly Christian personal experience) that if we are godless, we are also soulless, many Hindu atheists contend that the spirit is strong and exists in tandem with nature, only that within this system there is no supreme God.
It all seems so desperately confusing - how does one decide what one believes or who one believes in, or not? I mean, it's just so multifarious! Yet I wonder if it is as much a matter of choosing a stream of faith as it is of being born into one? Belief is rarely logical, I think that if anything, to make a leap of faith is to believe in the absence of logical reason to do so. I can imagine that few people have the opportunity to weigh up the various attractions of competing traditions or devas, before their belief has been shaped by what they learn from those around them.
How complicated the territory must become for someone who grows up in a world where faith comes second to fashion (or more usually further down the pecking order) but where their parents worship one deva or other, and have a complete understanding of the nature of their faith, absorbed, as if by osmosis, by being and living in a society where that faith was the centre of the world.
While many younger Hindus living in western society may find it difficult to balance their faith with modern existence (as do most people who live in the west and who practice any religion) it is reassuring to think that for many of the one billion Hindus, there is an answer to the question: what is the meaning of life? From my own point of view, the search must continue. It has become my practice to dip a toe here, make a few snatched observations there and I'm not always sure that I am doing more good than bad, but the searching, at least, is very interesting and I am satisfied even just to have learnt today that many of the most devout Hindus do not believe in God - what a wonderful contradiction of everything I had previously assumed that I knew about the major world religions. Holy is not always godly.
It is sometimes wonderful to discover that one has been wrong, if only because it gives one cause to realise that one is most definitely not always right.
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