It has become increasingly clear that an adequate understanding of the contemporary processes of social, cultural, and religious change is contingent on an appreciation of the growing impact of social media. Utilising results of an unprecedented global study, this volume explores the ways in which young adults in seven different countries engage with digital and social media in religiously significant ways. Presenting and analysing the findings of the global research project Young Adults and Religion in a Global Perspective (YARG), an international panel of contributors shed new light on the impact of social media and its associated technologies on young people's religiosities, worldviews, and values. Case studies from China, Finland, Ghana, Israel, Peru, Poland, and Turkey are used to demonstrate how these developments are progressing, not just in the West, but across the world. This book is unique in that it presents a truly macroscopic perspective on trends in religion amongst young adults. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars working in religious studies, digital media, communication studies, sociology, cultural studies, theology and youth studies.

Inside the Yoga Sutras presents a clear, up-to-date perspective on the classic text of Yoga theory and practice: the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. This comprehensive sourcebook includes: commentary for each sutra, extensive cross referencing, a study gu

The rise, fall, and modern resurgence of an enigmatic book revered by yoga enthusiasts around the world Consisting of fewer than two hundred verses written in an obscure if not impenetrable language and style, Patanjali's Yoga Sutra is extolled by the yoga establishment as a perennial classic and guide to yoga practice-except it isn't. Virtually forgotten in India for hundreds of years and maligned when it was first discovered in the West, the Yoga Sutra has been elevated to its present iconic status only in the course of the past forty years. David Gordon White retraces the strange and circuitous journey of this confounding work from its ancient origins to today, bringing to life the improbable cast of characters whose interpretations and misappropriations of the Yoga Sutra led to its revered place in contemporary popular culture.

The fifth and most popular book of the Ramayana of Valmiki, Sundara recounts the adventures of the monkey hero Hanuman leaping across the ocean to the island citadel of Lanka. Once there, he scours the city for the abducted Princess Sita. The poet vividly describes the opulence of the court of the demon king, Ravana, the beauty of his harem, and the hideous deformity of Sita's wardresses. After witnessing Sita's stern rejection of Ravana's blandishments, Hanuman reveals himself to the princess, shows her Rama's signet ring as proof of identity, and offers to carry her back to Rama.

Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation

For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http: //www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Tantra occupies an odd position in Western understandings of Hindu spirituality. Its relationship to sex has made its name instantly recognizable, but this emphasis on sex has obscured its philosophical concerns and ritual practices, to say nothing of its overall importance to Hindu religious life. This book offers a clear, well-grounded overview of Tantra that offers substantial new insights for scholars and practitioners. Andre Padoux opens by detailing the history of Tantra, including its origins, founding texts, and major beliefs. The second part of the book delves more deeply into key concepts like the tantric body, mysticism, sex, mantras, sacred geography, and iconography, while the final part considers the practice of Tantra today, both in India and in the West. The result is an authoritative account of Tantra's history and present place in the world, suitable for beginners and longtime practitioners alike.

As yoga gains popularity across the U.S., many people are becoming interested in its traditional Vedic roots. While Buddhist meditation is well represented on bookshelves, there has been little Vedantic philosophy written in lay terms until now. Author David Frawley guides readers through the challenges of cultivating awareness, calming the mind, and practicing meditation according to Vedanta and Hinduism. He examines how cultural knowledge systems in the West lead individuals to disillusionment, and speaks about how meditation can aid in understanding the true nature of one's thoughts, emotions, and perceptions. Frawley explores meditation support practices such as yoga, mantras, kundalini, and pranayama, as well as the role of gurus, and concludes with a short, more technical essay on self-inquiry.

Hinduism is practised by nearly eighty per cent of India's population, and by some seventy million people outside India. In this Very Short Introduction, Kim Knott offers a succinct and authoritative overview of this major religion, and analyses the challenges facing it in the twenty-first century. She discusses key preoccupations of Hinduism such as the centrality of the Veda as religious texts, the role of Brahmins, gurus, and storytellers in the transmission of divine truths, and the cultural and moral importance of epics such as the Ramayana. In this second edition Knott considers the impact of changes in technology and the flourishing of social media on Hinduism, and looks at the presence of Hinduism in popular culture, considering pieces such as Sita Sings the Blues. She also analyses recent developments in India, and the impact issues such as Hindu nationalism and the politicization of Hinduism have on Hindus worldwide. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

An Introduction to Swaminarayan Hinduism, third edition, offers a comprehensive study of a contemporary form of Hinduism. Begun as a revival and reform movement in India 200 years ago, it has now become one of the fastest growing and most prominent forms of Hinduism. The Swaminarayan Hindu transnational network of temples and institutions is expanding in India, East Africa, the UK, USA, Australasia, and in other African and Asian cities. The devotion, rituals, and discipline taught by its founder, Sahajanand Swami (1781-1830) and elaborated by current leaders in major festivals, diverse media, and over the Internet, help preserve ethnic and religious identity in many modern cultural and political contexts. Swaminarayan Hinduism, here described through its history, divisions, leaders, theology and practices, provides valuable case studies of contemporary Hinduism, religion, migrants, and transnationalism. This new edition includes up-to-date information about growth, geographic expansion, leadership transitions, and impact of Swaminarayan institutions in India and abroad.

Hadimba is a primary village goddess in the Kullu Valley of the West Indian Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, a rural area known as the Land of Gods. As the book shows, Hadimba is a goddess whose vitality reveals itself in her devotees' rapidly changing encounters with local and far from local players, powers, and ideas. These include invading royal forces, colonial forms of knowledge, and more recently the onslaught of modernity, capitalism, tourism, and ecological change. Hadimba has provided her worshipers with discursive, ritual, and ideological arenas within which they reflect on, debate, give meaning to, and sometimes resist these changing realities, and she herself has been transformed in the process. Drawing on diverse ethnographic and textual materials gathered in the region from 2009 to 2017, The Many Faces of a Himalayan Goddess is rich with myths and tales, accounts of dramatic rituals and festivals, and descriptions of everyday life in the celebrated but remote Kullu Valley. The book employs an interdisciplinary approach to tell the story of Hadimba from the ground up, or rather, from the center out, portraying the goddess in varying contexts that radiate outward from her temple to local, regional, national, and indeed global spheres. The result is an important contribution to the study of Indian village goddesses, lived Hinduism, Himalayan Hinduism, and the rapidly growing field of religion and ecology.

The Ramayana is, quite simply, the greatest of Indian epics - and one of the world's supreme masterpieces of storytelling 'Almost every individual living in India,' writes R. K. Narayan in the Introduction to this new interpretation, 'is aware of the story of The Ramayana. Everyone of whatever age, outlook, education or station in life knows the essential part of the epic and adores the main figures in it - Rama and Sita. Every child is told the story at bedtime . . . The Ramayana pervades our cultural life.' Although the Sanskrit original was composed by Valmiki, probably around the fourth century BC, poets have produced countless variant versions in different languages. Here, drawing his inspiration from the work of an eleventh-century Tamil poet called Kamban, Narayan has used the talents of a master novelist to recreate the excitement and joy he has found in the original. It can be enjoyed and appreciated, he suggests, for its psychological insight, its spiritual depth and its practical wisdom - or just as a thrilling tale of abduction, battle and courtship played out in a universe thronged with heroes, deities and demons.

The earliest of the four Hindu religious scriptures known as the Vedas, and the first extensive composition to survive in any Indo-European language, "The Rig Veda" (c. 1200?900 bc) is a collection of more than 1,000 individual Sanskrit hymns. A work of intricate beauty, it provides unique insight into early Indian mythology and culture. Fraught with paradox, the hymns are meant ?to puzzle, to surprise, to trouble the mind, ? writes translator Wendy Doniger, who has selected 108 hymns for this volume. Chosen for their eloquence and wisdom, they focus on the enduring themes of creation, sacrifice, death, women, and the gods. Doniger's "The Rig Veda" provides a fascinating introduction to a timeless masterpiece of Hindu ritual and spirituality.

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.

The Oxford History of Hinduism: The Goddess provides a critical exposition of the Hindu idea of the divine feminine, or Devi, conceived as a singularity expressed in many forms. With the theological principles examined in the opening chapters, the book proceeds to describe and expound historically how individual manifestations of Devi have been imagined in Hindu religious culture and their impact upon Hindu social life. In this quest the contributors draw upon the history and philosophy of major Hindu ideologies, such as the Puranic, Tantric, and Vaisnava belief systems. A particular distinction of the book is its attention not only to the major goddesses from the earliest period of Hindu religious history but also to goddesses of later origin, in many cases of regional provenance and influence. Viewed through the lens of worship practices, legend, and literature, belief in goddesses is discovered as the formative impulse of much of public and private life. The influence of the goddess culture is especially powerful on women's life, often paradoxically situating women between veneration and subjection. This apparent contradiction arises from the humanization of goddesses while acknowledging their divinity, which is central to Hindu beliefs. In addition to studying the social and theological aspect of the goddess ideology, the contributors take anthropological, sociological, and literary approaches to delineate the emotional force of the goddess figure that claims intense human attachments and shapes personal and communal lives.

In thirteenth-century Maharashtra, a new vernacular literature emerged to challenge the hegemony of Sanskrit, a language largely restricted to men of high caste. In a vivid and accessible idiom, this new Marathi literature inaugurated a public debate over the ethics of social difference grounded in the idiom of everyday life. The arguments of vernacular intellectuals pushed the question of social inclusion into ever-wider social realms, spearheading the development of a nascent premodern public sphere that valorized the quotidian world in sociopolitical terms. The Quotidian Revolution examines this pivotal moment of vernacularization in Indian literature, religion, and public life by investigating courtly donative Marathi inscriptions alongside the first extant texts of Marathi literature: the Lilacaritra (1278) and the Jnanesvari (1290). Novetzke revisits the influence of Chakradhar (c. 1194), the founder of the Mahanubhav religion, and Jnandev (c. 1271), who became a major figure of the Varkari religion, to observe how these avant-garde and worldly elites pursued a radical intervention into the social questions and ethics of the age. Drawing on political anthropology and contemporary theories of social justice, religion, and the public sphere, The Quotidian Revolution explores the specific circumstances of this new discourse oriented around everyday life and its lasting legacy: widening the space of public debate in a way that presages key aspects of Indian modernity and democracy.

Hinduism has become a vital 'other' for Judaism over the past decades. The book surveys the history of the relationship from historical to contemporary times, from travellers to religious leadership. It explores the potential enrichment for Jewish theology and spirituality, as well as the challenges for Jewish identity.

About two hundred kilometers west of the city of Karachi, in the desert of Baluchistan, Pakistan, sits the shrine of the Hindu Goddess Hinglaj. Despite the temple's ancient Hindu and Muslim history, an annual festival at Hinglaj has only been established within the last three decades, in part because of the construction of the Makran Coastal Highway, which connects the distant rural shrine with urban Pakistan. Now, an increasingly confident minority Hindu community has claimed Hinglaj as their main religious center, a site for undisturbed religious performance and expression. In Hinglaj Devi, Jurgen Schaflechner studies literary sources in Hindi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, and Urdu alongside extensive ethnographical research at the shrine, examining the political and cultural influences at work at the temple and tracking the remote desert shrine's rapid ascent to its current status as the most influential Hindu pilgrimage site in Pakistan. Schaflechner introduces the unique character of this place of pilgrimage and shows its modern importance not only for Hindus, but also for Muslims and Sindhi nationalists. Ultimately, this is an investigation of the Pakistani Hindu community's beliefs and practices at their largest place of worship in the Islamic Republic today-a topic of increasing importance to Pakistan's contemporary society.

Die Beitrage in diesem Sammelband dokumentieren die heutige Diskussion um das Heilige, ein nach wie vor unerledigtes Problem der Religionswissenschaft. Sie wurden auf zwei verschiedenen Veranstaltungen prasentiert: einerseits auf dem Panel "Das Heilige als Problem in der Religionswissenschaft: Fragen und Perspektiven" der 31. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Vereinigung fur Religionswissenschaft in Goettingen im September 2013, andererseits auf dem Symposium "Die Diskussion um das Heilige: alte Fragen - neue Antworten" an der Goethe-Universitat in Frankfurt am Main im November 2013. Es geht um drei Themenbereiche: das Werk Rudolf Ottos, Anwendung der Kategorie des Heiligen in der Religionsforschung sowie die theoretische Auseinandersetzung mit der Kategorie des Heiligen.

Krishna, one of the most beloved characters of the Hindu pantheon, has been portrayed in many lights: a god-child, a prankster, a model lover, a divine hero, an exemplary ruler, and the Supreme Being. In _The Complete Life of Krishna_, Vanamali, a leading Krishna expert from a long line of prominent Krishna devotees, provides the first book in English or Sanskrit to cover the complete range of the avatar's life. Drawing from the Bhagavad Purana, the Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata, and India's sacred oral tradition, Vanamali shares stories from Krishna's birth in a dungeon and early days as a merry trickster in Vrindavana, through his time as divine ruler at Dwaraka, to his final powerful acts as the hero Arjuna's charioteer and guru in the Kurukshetra war. She explains how Krishna became a mahayogi, the greatest of all yogis, and attained complete mastery over himself and nature. By integrating the hero-child with the mahayogi, the playful lover with the divine ruler, Vanamali shows how the stories of Krishna's life are expressed with such simplicity and humor that they enable anyone--man, woman, or child--to see the wisdom of his teachings. This complete biography of the man who was also a god provides a valuable meditative tool allowing Krishna's lessons to illuminate from within.