The following is an augmented extract from a series of about 15  classroom lectures  delivered in the last part of  a semester-long course on Hinduism at BITS Pilani, Rajasthan, India in the  eighties of the last century. The content of the lectures was later incorporated in a book ‘Essentials of Hinduism’,  published 1989, now out of print, but which had the good fortune of Blessings from Swami Chinmayananda who wrote a kindly Foreword  to it. Questions that arose in class have been edited and built into the extract below at the appropriate contexts to synchronise with the flow of the text.]