The seventh and final book of the monumental R?m?ya?a of V?lm?ki, the Uttarak???a, brings the epic saga to a close with an account of the dramatic events of King R?ma's millennia-long reign. It opens with a colorful history of the demonic race of the r?k?asas and the violent career of R?ma's villainous foe R?va?a, and later recounts R?ma's grateful discharge of his allies in the great war at Lank? as well as his romantic reunion with his wife S?t?. But dark clouds gather as R?ma, confronted by scandal over S?t?'s time in captivity under the lustful R?va?a, makes the agonizing decision to banish his beloved wife, now pregnant. As R?ma continues as king, marvelous tales and events unfurl, illustrating the benefits of righteous rule and the perils that await monarchs who fail to address the needs of their subjects. The Uttarak???a has long served as a point of social and religious controversy largely for its accounts of the banishment of S?t?, as well as of R?ma's killing of a low-caste ascetic. The translators' introduction provides a full discussion of these issues and the complex reception history of the Uttarak???a. This translation of the critical edition also includes exhaustive notes and a comprehensive bibliography.

A short reading for every day. Spurgeon wrote this selection of readings to encourage believers to enter into the full provision that their relationship to Jesus entitled them to realise, on a daily basis. He explains we have to present the promises of Scripture to God in prayer and faith, anticipating that he will honour what he has said. Beautiful volume in burgundy leather.

The volume collects a series of contributions that help reconstruct the recent history of the Nath tradition, highlighting important moments of self.reinterpretation in the sampradaya's interaction with different social milieus. The leitmotif tying together the selection of articles is the authors' explorations of the overlap between religious authority and political power. For example, in which ways do the Naths' hagiographical claim of possessing yogic charisma (often construed as supernatural powers, siddhis) translate into mundane expressions of socio-political power? And how does it morph into the authority to reinterpret and recreate particular traditions? The articles approach different aspects of the recent history of the Nath sampradaya, spanning from stories of yogis guiding kings in the petty principalities of the eighteenth century to gurus who sought prominence in the transnational environments of the twentieth century; examining some Nath lineages and institutions under the British Raj, in the history of Nepal, and in contemporary India.

In most mainstream traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, women have for centuries largely been excluded from positions of religious and ritual leadership. However, as this volume shows, in an increasing number of late-20th-century and early-21st-century contexts, women can and do undergo monastic and priestly education; they can receive ordination/initiation as Buddhist nuns or Hindu priestesses; and they are accepted as religious and political leaders. Even though these processes still take place largely outside or at the margins of traditional religious institutions, it is clear that women are actually establishing new religious trends and currents. They are attracting followers, and they are occupying religious positions on par with men. At times women are filling a void left behind by male religious specialists who left the profession, and at times they are perceived as their rivals. In some cases, this process takes place in collaboration with male religious specialists, in others against the will of the women's male counterparts. However, in most cases we see both acceptance and resistance. Whether silently or with great fanfare, women are grasping new opportunities to occupy positions of leadership. This book offers ten in-depth case studies analysing culturally, historically, and geographically unique situations in order to explore the historical background, contemporary trajectories, and impact of the emergence of new and powerful forms of female agency in mostly conservative Hindu and Buddhist religious traditions.

The Ramayana, one of the two pre-eminent Hindu epics, has played a foundational role in many aspects of India's arts and social norms. For centuries, people learned this narrative by watching, listening, and participating in enactments of it. Although the Ramayana's first extant telling in Sanskrit dates back to ancient times, the story has continued to be retold and rethought through the centuries in many of India's regional languages, such as Hindi, Tamil, and Bengali. The narrative has provided the basis for enactments of its episodes in recitation, musical renditions, dance, and avant-garde performances. This volume introduces non-specialists to the Ramayana's major themes and complexities, as well as to the highly nuanced terms in Indian languages used to represent theater and performance. Two introductions orient readers to the history of Ramayana texts by Tulsidas, Valmiki, Kamban, Sankaradeva, and others, as well as to the dramaturgy and aesthetics of their enactments. The contributed essays provide context-specific analyses of diverse Ramayana performance traditions and the narratives from which they draw. The essays are clustered around the shared themes of the politics of caste and gender; the representation of the anti-hero; contemporary re-interpretations of traditional narratives; and the presence of Ramayana discourse in daily life.

Paramahansa Yogananda - author of the bestselling classic "Autobiography of a Yogi" - delves into the deeper meaning of the Bhagavad Gita's symbology, and sheds a fascinating light on the true intent of India's beloved scripture. He describes how each of us, through applying the profound wisdom of yoga, can achieve material and spiritual victory on the battlefield of daily life. This concise and inspiring book is a compilation of selections from Yogananda's in-depth, critically acclaimed two-volume translation of and commentary on the Bhagavad Gita ("God Talks with Arjuna").

Burning the Dead traces the evolution of cremation in India and the South Asian diaspora across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through interconnected histories of movement, space, identity, and affect, it examines how the so-called traditional practice of Hindu cremation on an open-air funeral pyre was culturally transformed and materially refashioned under British rule, following intense Western hostility, colonial sanitary acceptance, and Indian adaptation. David Arnold examines the critical reception of Hindu cremation abroad, particularly in Britain, where India formed a primary reference point for the cremation debates of the late nineteenth century, and explores the struggle for official recognition of cremation among Hindu and Sikh communities around the globe. Above all, Arnold foregrounds the growing public presence and assertive political use made of Hindu cremation, its increasing social inclusivity, and its close identification with Hindu reform movements and modern Indian nationhood.

Mindfulness and yoga are widely said to improve mental and physical health, and booming industries have emerged to teach them as secular techniques. This movement is typically traced to the 1970s, but it actually began a century earlier. Wakoh Shannon Hickey shows that most of those who first advocated meditation for healing were women: leaders of the "Mind Cure" movement, which emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instructed by Buddhist and Hindu missionaries, many of these women believed that by transforming consciousness, they could also transform oppressive conditions in which they lived. For women - and many African-American men - "Mind Cure" meant not just happiness, but liberation in concrete political, economic, and legal terms. In response to the perceived threat posed by this movement, white male doctors and clergy with elite academic credentials began to channel key Mind Cure methods into "scientific" psychology and medicine. As mental therapeutics became medicalized and commodified, the religious roots of meditation, like the social-justice agendas of early Mind Curers, fell by the wayside. Although characterized as "universal," mindfulness has very specific historical and cultural roots, and is now largely marketed by and accessible to affluent white people. Hickey examines religious dimensions of the Mindfulness movement and clinical research about its effectiveness. By treating stress-related illness individualistically, she argues, the contemporary movement obscures the roles religious communities can play in fostering civil society and personal wellbeing, and diverts attention from systemic factors fueling stress-related illness, including racism, sexism, and poverty.

The idea of Maya pervades Indian philosophy. It is enigmatic, multivalent, and foundational, with its oldest referents found in the Rig Veda. This book explores Maya's rich conceptual history, and then focuses on the highly developed theology of Maya found in the Sanskrit Bhagavata Purana, one of the most important Hindu sacred texts. Gopal K. Gupta examines Maya's role in the Bhagavata's narratives, paying special attention to its relationship with other key concepts in the text, such as human suffering (duhkha), devotion (bhakti), and divine play (lila). In the Bhagavata, Maya is often identified as the divine feminine, and has a far-reaching influence. For example, Maya is both the world and the means by which God creates the world, as well as the facilitator of God's play, paradoxically revealing him to his devotees by concealing his majesty. While Vedanta philosophy typically sees Maya as a negative force, the Bhagavata affirms that Maya also has a positive role, as Maya is ultimately meant to draw living beings toward Krishna and intensify their devotion to him.

In India, statues of Ganesh are placed at the inner gates of many temples, symbolizing his role as keeper of sacred spaces. Here, pilgrims and passersby pay homage and seek his blessings. It is this symbolic presence at the entrance of our most holy places that makes Ganesh such a vital figure in our lives.
Stationed at the threshold of sacredness and awareness, mediating between the possibility of the profound and our often habitual, mundane perception of the world, Ganesh is the guiding force behind this very moment of experience - where desire meets possibility. "Ganesh: Removing the Obstacles" offers practical and meaningful interpretations of folk narratives and sacred texts concerning the larger-than-life elephant-headed god, Ganesh.

Traditions of asceticism, yoga, and devotion (bhakti), including dance and music, developed in Hinduism over long periods of time. Some of these practices, notably those denoted by the term yoga, are orientated towards salvation from the cycle of reincarnation and go back several thousand years. These practices, borne witness to in ancient texts called Upanisads, as well as in other traditions, notably early Buddhism and Jainism, are the subject of this volume in the Oxford History of Hinduism. Practices of meditation are also linked to asceticism (tapas) and its institutional articulation in renunciation (samnyasa). There is a range of practices or disciplines from ascetic fasting to taking a vow (vrata) for a deity in return for a favour. There are also devotional practices that might involve ritual, making an offering to a deity and receiving a blessing, dancing, or visualization of the master (guru). The overall theme-the history of religious practices-might even be seen as being within a broader intellectual trajectory of cultural history. In the substantial introduction by the editor this broad history is sketched, paying particular attention to what we might call the medieval period (post-Gupta) through to modernity when traditions had significantly developed in relation to each other. The chapters in the book chart the history of Hindu practice, paying particular attention to indigenous terms and recognizing indigenous distinctions such as between the ritual life of the householder and the renouncer seeking liberation, between 'inner' practices of and 'external' practices of ritual, and between those desirous of liberation (mumuksu) and those desirous of pleasure and worldly success (bubhuksu). This whole range of meditative and devotional practices that have developed in the history of Hinduism are represented in this book.

The appearance of "religion" as a category describing a set of practices and beliefs allegedly an aspect of all cultures dates only from the modern period, emerging as Europe expanded trade abroad and established its first colonial relations in the 17th and 18th centuries. The invention of Hinduism can be seen in the encounter between modernity's greatest colonial power, Britain, and the jewel of her imperial crown, India. This encounter was deeply shaded by the articulation and development of the concept of "religion," and it produced the now common idea that Hinduism is a religion. The Bengal Presidency, home of Calcutta - the capital of colonial India and center of economic gravity in the eastern hemisphere - emerged as the locus of ongoing and direct contact between Indians and colonial officials, journalists, and missionaries. Drawing on a large body of previously untapped literature, including documents from the Church Missionary Society and Bengali newspapers, Brian Pennington offers a fascinating portrait of the process by which "Hinduism" came into being. He argues against the common idea that the modern construction of religion in colonial India was simply a fabrication of Western Orientalists and missionaries. Rather, he says, it involved the active agency and engagement of Indian authors as well, who interacted, argued, and responded to British authors over key religious issues such as image-worship, sati, tolerance, and conversion. Pennington retells the story of Christians' and Hindus' reception of each other in the early 19th century in a way that takes seriously the power of their religious worldviews to shape the encounter itself and help to produce the very religions that colonialism thought it "discovered." While post-colonial theory can illuminate issues of power and domination, he demonstrates, history of religions reminds us of the continuing importance of the sacred and spiritual dimensions of the peoples under colonial rule.

In Hindutva as Political Monotheism, Anustup Basu offers a genealogical study of Hindutva-Hindu right-wing nationalism-to illustrate the significance of Western anthropology and political theory to the idea of India as a Hindu nation. Connecting Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt's notion of political theology to traditional theorems of Hindu sovereignty and nationhood, Basu demonstrates how Western and Indian theorists subsumed a vast array of polytheistic, pantheistic, and henotheistic cults featuring millions of gods into a singular edifice of faith. Basu exposes the purported "Hindu Nation" as itself an orientalist vision by analyzing three crucial moments: European anthropologists' and Indian intellectuals' invention of a unified Hinduism during the long nineteenth century; Indian ideologues' adoption of ethnoreligious nationalism in pursuit of a single Hindu way of life in the twentieth century; and the transformations of this project in the era of finance capital, Bollywood, and new media. Arguing that Hindutva aligns with Enlightenment notions of nationalism, Basu foregrounds its significance not just to Narendra Modi's right-wing, anti-Muslim government but also to mainstream Indian nationalism and its credo of secularism and tolerance.

Hinduism has two major roots. The more familiar is the religion brought to South Asia in the second millennium BCE by speakers of Aryan or Indo-Iranian languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family. Another, more enigmatic, root is the Indus civilization of the third millennium BCE, which left behind thousands of short inscriptions in a forgotten pictographic script. Discovered in the valley of the Indus River in the early 1920s, the Indus civilization had a population estimated at one million people, in more than 1000 settlements, several of which were cities of some 50,000 inhabitants. With an area of nearly a million square kilometers, the Indus civilization was more extensive than the other key urban cultures of the time, in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Yet, after almost a century of excavation and research the Indus civilization remains little understood. What language did the Indus people speak? How might we decipher the exquisitely carved Indus inscriptions? What deities did they worship? Are the roots of contemporary Hinduism to be found in the religion of the Indus civilization as well as in the Vedic religion? Since the rise of Hindu nationalist politics in the 1980s, these questions have been debated with increasing animosity, colored by the history of modern colonialism in India. This is especially true of the enigmatic Indus script, which is at the hub of the debates, and a particular focus of this book. Asko Parpola has spent fifty years researching the roots of Hinduism to answer these fundamental questions. In this pioneering book, he traces the Indo-Iranian speakers from the Aryan homeland north of the Black Sea through the Eurasian steppes to Central, West, and South Asia. Among many other things, he discusses the profound impact of the invention of the horse-drawn chariot on Indo-Aryan religion, and presents new ideas on the origin and formation of the Vedic literature and rites, and the great Hindu epics.

This book details the goddess Kali and the culture of devotion to her in West Bengal and South Asia. The term Adya means primal, original or archean. Adya Kali is the primordial energy, the shakti, that creates, preserves, and transforms/dissolves all existence. She is the womb that births all, and the tomb that swallows all. In Praise of Adya Kali is different from most contemporary books about Kali because it offers a liturgy of worship, a type of spiritual practice (sadhana) that the reader (both male and female) can use over the course of days, weeks, or months, to cultivate a direct devotional relationship to Kali. But, beyond that, In Praise of Adya Kali is a context-setting guide. Rather than simply recommending that we recite these sacred names, each one a prayer, the author establishes this practice as a general orientation to life. Furthermore, and most compelling, the text and Commentaries on this liturgy contain an intimate revelation of how the goddess establishes herself in her devotees' bodies and thus intervenes, by unconditional love and acceptance, in their lives. A lengthy Introduction, both scholarly and personal, describes the goddess and the possibilities that these prayers will offer. Aditi Devi guides us in how to build a shrine to Kali, various types of offerings to make to her, and suggests a schedule for how to use this liturgy with a long-term commitment over the course of 108 nights. This book presents a serious practice, not for the faint-hearted. It requires courage, strength and joy to permit the goddess's energy to slowly, sensuously and irrevocably be invoked-conceived, allowed to gestate, birthed according to her will. And while the orientation here is toward realizing her sacred presence in the "womb" of the devotee, the practice can be undertaken by anyone. The physical form of the body is not a limitation, as the author notes: "In this lineage we practice into the depths of whatever form we have, & arise from within that, knowing that we are her, male or female. This Song of the Hundred Names is a powerful teaching that all forms are her forms." Male, female or other gendered, we are presented with the possibility to experience the depths of our own internal feminine energies & thereby come into greater healing & wholeness, more readily able to express this often neglected part of ourselves. Aditi Devi's long study & spiritual practice within living tantric lineages in South Asia has made this book possible.