On Sunday mornings, in the basement of the Interfaith Center, members of the Hindu Students Council shed their shoes and engage in aarti, the universal prayer.
They sit in a circle and commence their meeting by chanting "om" three times to open the mind and detach from day-to-day concerns.
Food is blessed and then eaten, and each student takes time to circulate the aarti plate, which itself acquires the power of the divine.
"Aarti is composed of eight verses that ask God to remove obstacles and in ones path and to help us attain enlightenment," said Maneesha Jamnada, vice president of the Hindu Students Council.
Hinduism, practiced by nearly a billion people worldwide, is the oldest major world religion.
At Hopkins, a relatively small number of students? - about 4.6 percent of the student body - identifies as Hindu, according to a 2007 poll conducted by the Interfaith Center.
Almost all of the members of the Council practice their religion at home as well as at college, and for many of them, the weekly meetings are a low-key way of keeping in touch with both religion and familial traditions.
"I think of Hinduism predominately as a way of living life. There are no commandments; instead, Hinduism stresses living a good and righteous life," graduate student Nirdhar Khazanie said. "Hinduism teaches us that everyone is born with a place in society and that your responsibility is to do your duties as an adult in the community."
"Hindu students at Hopkins do more on their own when it comes to their faith," said Shyam Khatau, president of the Hindu Students Council.
"We provide weekly meetings and celebrate major festivals, but we see our group as providing a stress-free place for students to practice their faith and learn."
Each year the Council's largest event is Diwali, the festival that celebrates the Hindu New Year. The festival becomes a gathering where students, parents and faculty enjoy food, traditional singing and dancing.
Current weekly meetings are used to plan Holi, the upcoming festival to welcome the arrival of spring.
"Sometimes we discuss a chapter from the Bhagavad G?t?, one of the major Hindu scriptures. Once, we talked about the significance of the phrase om in prayer," Khatau said.
But students also spend time discussing the difficulties of being Hindu in a Western culture.
Most students say they do not feel any conflict between their religious life and student life, stressing that many aspects of Hinduism merely reinforce virtues that they already hope to uphold.
"Respect and tolerance are large parts of Hinduism. There's no aspect of conversion to the religion - if you wish to be Hindu, you can be. Hinduism is a way of thinking; it's not a religion that is particularly governed by rules," sophomore Abhiram Bhashyam said.
Best encapsulating the philosophy of Hinduism is, according to Khatau, is "the truth is one."
"It means that there's no one particular way to obtain truthfulness, that many possible paths exist," Khatau said.
According to the students on the Council, despite the religion's longevity and global popularity, there are many pervasive misconceptions of Hinduism.
For one, Jamnada said, "Hinduism is a monotheistic religion. The many gods most people recognize are different representations or attributes of God."
