Widely read, The Bhagavad Gita is a classic of world spirituality while The essential companion to The Bhagavad Gita, The Uddhava Gita has remained overlooked. This new accessible and only English translation in print of The Uddhava Gita offers a previously unexplored path to understanding Hinduism and Krishna s wisdom. Written centuries apart, the ideas of the two dialogues are similar although their approach and contexts differ. The Bhagavad Gita is filled with the urgency of battle while The Uddhava Gita takes place on the eve of Krishna s departure from the world. The Uddhava Gita offers the reader philosophy, sublime poetry, practical guidance, and, ultimately, hope for a more complete consciousness in which the life of the body better reflects the life of the spirit."

This study, based on the author's fieldwork among rural Tamil villagers in South India, focuses on the ways in which people in this society interact with the supernatural beings who play such a large role in their personal and corporate lives. Isabelle Navokov looks at a spectrum of ritualized contexts in which the boundaries between the natural and spiritual worls are penetrated and communication takes place. Throughout, Nabokov's meticulous analysis sheds new light on this hiterto almost unkown domain - and entire range of fascinating phenomena basic to South Indian religion as it is really lived.

A new selection from the national epic of India
Originally composed in Sanskrit sometime between 400 BC and 400 AD, "The Mahabharata"-with one hundred thousand stanzas of verse-is one of the longest poems in existence. At the heart of the saga is a conflict between two branches of a royal family whose feud culminates in a titanic eighteen-day battle. Exploring such timeless subjects as "dharma" (duty), "artha" (purpose), and "kama" (pleasure) in a mythic world of warfare, magic, and beauty, this is a magnificent and legendary Hindu text of immense importance to the culture of the Indian subcontinent.

As David White explains in the Introduction to "Tantra in Practice, " Tantra is an Asian body of beliefs and practices that seeks to channel the divine energy that grounds the universe, in creative and liberating ways. The subsequent chapters reflect the wide geographical and temporal scope of Tantra by examining thirty-six texts from China, India, Japan, Nepal, and Tibet, ranging from the seventh century to the present day, and representing the full range of Tantric experience--Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and even Islamic. Each text has been chosen and translated, often for the first time, by an international expert in the field who also provides detailed background material. Students of Asian religions and general readers alike will find the book rich and informative.

The book includes plays, transcribed interviews, poetry, parodies, inscriptions, instructional texts, scriptures, philosophical conjectures, dreams, and astronomical speculations, each text illustrating one of the diverse traditions and practices of Tantra. Thus, the nineteenth-century Indian Buddhist "Garland of Gems, " a series of songs, warns against the illusion of appearance by referring to bees, yogurt, and the fire of Malaya Mountain; while fourteenth-century Chinese Buddhist manuscripts detail how to prosper through the Seven Stars of the Northern Dipper by burning incense, making offerings to scriptures, and chanting incantations. In a transcribed conversation, a modern Hindu priest in Bengal candidly explains how he serves the black Goddess Kali and feeds temple skulls lentils, wine, or rice; a seventeenth-century Nepalese Hindu praise-poem hammered into the golden doors to the temple of the Goddess Taleju lists a king's faults and begs her forgiveness and grace. An introduction accompanies each text, identifying its period and genre, discussing the history and influence of the work, and identifying points of particular interest or difficulty.

The first book to bring together texts from the entire range of Tantric phenomena, "Tantra in Practice" continues the Princeton Readings in Religions series. The breadth of work included, geographic areas spanned, and expert scholarship highlighting each piece serve to expand our understanding of what it means to practice Tantra.

Tukoba (Tukaram) was a seventeenth-century Bhakti Sant (saint-poet) of the Varkari movement in Maharashtra. He is still considered the best Marathi poet. These new translations by Gail Omvedt and Bharat Patankar seek to capture the wonder of his writing, his lyricism and his profound meanings.

Kalighat is said to be the oldest and most potent Hindu pilgrimage site in the city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). It is home to the dark goddess Kali in her ferocious form and attracts thousands of worshipers a day, many sacrificing goats at her feet. In The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City, Deonnie Moodie examines the ways middle-class authors, judges, and activists have worked to modernize Kalighat over the past long century. Rather than being rejected or becoming obsolete with the arrival of British colonialism and its accompanying iconoclastic Protestant ideals, the temple became a medium through which middle-class Hindus could produce and publicize their modernity, as well as the modernity of their city and nation. That trend continued and even strengthened in the wake of India's economic liberalization in the 1990s. Kalighat is a superb example of the ways Hindus work to modernize India while also Indianizing modernity through Hinduism's material forms. Moodie explores both middle-class efforts to modernize Kalighat and the lower class's resistance to those efforts. Conflict between class groups throws into high relief the various roles the temple plays in peoples' lives, and explains why the modernizers have struggled to bring their plans to fruition. The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City is the first scholarly work to juxtapose and analyze processes of historiographical, institutional, and physical modernization of a Hindu temple.

Living Ahimsa Diet: Nourishing Love & Life is the extraordinary sequel to Maya Tiwari's best-selling book Ayurveda: A Life of Balance, which has been flying off bookshelves for more than a decade. Grounded in ancient Vedic principles, it is the first "food" book that sheds light on how we can cultivate a truly harmonious life through the practice of Living Ahimsa-by eating, living, and loving in harmony with Mother Nature and her seasonal rhythms. Pulling from her remarkable life, Maya Tiwari-known fondly the world over as Mother Maya-teaches us to heal ourselves and recognize our intrinsic rhythms so we can cultivate optimum health without devoting a huge amount of time worrying about food or illness. By working with our unique metabolic constitutions, we can develop the skills to convert personal karma into awareness, challenges into success, and lessons into knowledge. Laden with wholesome seasonal practices, vegetarian and gluten-free recipes, and guidelines for the whole family to live in harmony and love, this book teaches us to embrace the feast and the fast. Within these pages you'll recover your joy in preparing, sharing, and imbibing your meals with whole-hearted ease, learn to eat and live in blissful harmony with daily, seasonal, solar, and lunar cycles, and reconnect to your true nature of love There is a time to fast and a time to feast A time for love, and a time for sobriety A time for celebration and a time for cleansing A time for nurturance and a time for austerity A time to rest, meditate, play, and work "I picked up Living Ahimsa Diet and got total body chills of recognition. This book is filled with beauty and truth that nourishes at our deepest levels. Savor it " -CHRISTIANE NORTHRUP, MD, OB/GYN physician and author of the New York Times bestsellers: Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom and The Wisdom of Menopause "Mother Maya has written an inspirational text for all. Whether you are a novice to the yogic path or a practitioner of many years, this book is a refreshing compilation of the essential principles needed for living in balance with the earth and with the Divine. Mother Maya has crafted an accessible reader comprising the time-tested truths of the Vedic principles. This book is highly recommended for charting or supplementing one's path toward total well-being in the 21st century. Supplemented with factual accounts based on scientific research, Living Ahimsa Diet: Nourishing Love & Life will be bring benefit to all seekers." -DENA MERRIAM, Founder & Convener, The Global Peace Initiative of Women "Violence, actual and virtual alike, so thoroughly pervades human society that many people find it difficult even to envision a non-belligerent world. This book is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature that maps out routes to healthier, less savage modes of living that promote kinship with all life. Offering a powerful rebuttal to the voices that condone "business as usual," Living Ahimsa Diet provides effective, practical advice to anyone who seeks a rich, peaceful, truly satisfying existence." -ROBERT SVOBODA, Ayurveda Expert and Best-selling Author

In the sixties, Transcendental Meditation, a Hindu-based movement, became fashionable as a way to therapy and psychological well-being -- especially after being endorsed by the Beatles and the Beach Boys. Its influence waned, ironically, after the courts decided that TM was a religion rather than a form of therapy, as TM had claimed. But its popularity helped open the doors to a wider acceptance of Eastern philosophy and religions in mainstream America. Another Americanized form of Hinduism is Hare Krishna. This volume and the volume on Buddhism in this series together present a comprehensive overview of Eastern religions, their views, and their impact on contemporary North America. Why this series? This is an age when countless groups and movements, old and new, mark the religious landscape in our culture, leaving many people confused or uncertain in their search for spiritual truth and meaning. Because few people have the time or opportunity to research these movements fully, these books provide essential information and insights for their spiritual journeys. All books but the summary volume, Truth and Error, contain five sections: -A concise introduction to the group being surveyed -An overview of the group s theology --- in its own words -Tips for witnessing effectively to members of the group -A bibliography with sources for further study -A comparison chart that shows the essential differences between biblical Christianity and the group -Truth and Error, the last book in the series, consists of parallel doctrinal charts compiled from all the other volumes. -Three distinctives make this series especially useful to readers: -Information is carefully distilled to bring out truly essential points, rather than requiring readers to sift their way through a sea of secondary details. -Information is presented in a clear, easy-to-follow outline form with menu bar running heads. This format greatly assists the reader in quickly locating topics and details of interest. -Each book meets the needs and skill levels of both nontechnical and technical readers, providing an elementary level of refutation and progressing to a more advanced level using arguments based on the biblical text. The writers of these volumes are well qualified to present clear and reliable information and help readers to discern truth from falsehood."

The medieval vernacular (non-Sanskrit) traditions of yoga represent an aspect of Hinduism that to date has received much less scholarly attention than classical and contemporary Hinduism. Gordan Djurdjevic here brings together a representative selection of medieval Hindi poetry attributed to the legendary guru Gorakhnath. Gorakhnath is famed as the founder of the influential order of the Nath yogis, who are credited with the development of hatha yoga. The poetry gathered in the collection, known as The Sayings of Gorakh Bani, reflects this worldview. Its major thematic concerns relate to the practice of yoga, engagement with the various chakras within the body, and the attempts to reverse the flow of seminal fluid, by which process yogis believe the state of immortality may be reached. These often-enigmatic texts on the one hand provide a criticism of religious authority based on bookish knowledge, while on the other hand they celebrate yogic engagement with the subtle body and its centers of occult energy and miraculous powers. Sayings of Gorakhnath offers translations or the complete sabad and pad sections from the Gorakh Bani, the two largest sections in the collection. Some additional texts from the collection are also provided. Translations are preceded by an introduction and accompanied by notes, which contextualize and elucidate the subject matter.

Intended to be a treatise on life itself, this epic poem embraces religion and ethics, polity and government, philosophy and the pursuit of salvation. This collection of more than 4,000 verses is supplemented by a glossary, genealogical tables, and an index correlating the verses with the original Sanskrit text.

Tantra originated in India many centuries ago but it's uniquely placed to help people use real life as grist to the mill for spiritual transformation. The purpose of the book is to articulate what Tantra can be in our modern times and how it can be applied to all aspects of our everyday life. Traditionally Tantra was a path that brought spirituality out of the caves and monasteries and into the life of householders. It didn't seek to separate sexuality and spirituality and to force people to make a choice but rather to integrate the life of family and relationship with spirituality. This includes sexuality but it's not all about sexuality, and this is a rare book that applies Tantra to every aspect of life.Living Tantra is a body of work that aims to bring the essence and core message of tantra into relevance for our contemporary life and society as a path of spiritual growth and human development. It's based on her legendary workshops which book up via word of mouth and attracts attendees from across Europe and North America, especially Sweden, Austria, USA, Germany, Spain and the Czech Republic. The exercises here come out of these workshops and mean that we can benefit from this work in our own homes. The principles of Living Tantra are to use all life, all experience to learn and become more conscious of ourselves and the world around us, to care more for ourselves, each other and the world and to develop greater compassion. Tantra includes everything. It is "the weaving together of all that is".

For those who wonder what relation actual Tantric practices bear to the "Tantric sex" currently being marketed so successfully in the West, David Gordon White has a simple answer: there is none. Sweeping away centuries of misunderstandings and misrepresentations, White returns to original texts, images, and ritual practices to reconstruct the history of South Asian Tantra from the medieval period to the present day.
"Kiss of the Yogini" focuses on what White identifies as the sole truly distinctive feature of South Asian Tantra: sexualized ritual practices, especially as expressed in the medieval Kaula rites. Such practices centered on the exchange of powerful, transformative sexual fluids between male practitioners and wild female bird and animal spirits known as Yoginis. It was only by "drinking" the sexual fluids of the Yoginis that men could enter the family of the supreme godhead and thereby obtain supernatural powers and transform themselves into gods. By focusing on sexual rituals, White resituates South Asian Tantra, in its precolonial form, at the center of religious, social, and political life, arguing that Tantra was the mainstream, and that in many ways it continues to influence contemporary Hinduism, even if reformist misunderstandings relegate it to a marginal position.
"Kiss of the Yogini" contains White's own translations from over a dozen Tantras that have never before been translated into any European language. It will prove to be the definitive work for persons seeking to understand Tantra and the crucial role it has played in South Asian history, society, culture, and religion.

In recent times opportunistic teachers have presented Kundalini Yoga shorn of its deepest spirituality and focused only on hatha yoga and uninformed pranayam. In fact, the purpose of Kundalini Yoga is Self-realization. As a result of dumbing down the Kundalini Yoga philosophy, people have come to imagine, for instance, that the seven chakras are actually in the physical spine, when they are really found inwardly, in the subtle and causal bodies of humanity - and beyond. Kundalini Shakti is the dynamic spiritual energy conceived of as the Divine Mother of the Universe Who rises up (inwards) through the seven chakras, often termed "Lotuses." Mother Kundalini is coiled up at the "base of the spine," and ignobly limited to the lower three centers of eating, drinking, and sex life. Kundalini Yoga is about attracting Mother Power to uncoil Herself via well-informed spiritual practices. Reclaiming Kundalini Yoga, by Babaji Bob Kindler, is a concise and revealing book bringing an authentic and enlightened perspective to this esoteric subject. Fourteen teaching charts are included, along with a new translation of the Devi Gita from the Srimad Devi Bhagavatam. The author concludes with an important appendix detailing the role of pure and sanctified food and how to utilize its sublimated energy in realization of Kundalini Yoga.

Providing a unique and intimate view of Hindu marriage, the essays in this collection explore points at which the margins of marriage are traversed or transgressed. Rather than focus on normative expectations within marriage, they examine times in which norms are tested or rejected. Using stories, songs, and narrated accounts, the essays treat such topics as widowhood, adultery, levirate, divorce, and suttee, as well as the subversion of marriage by devotion to deities and by alternative constructions of conjugal duty and marital experience.

The three-thousand-year-old epic Ramayana chronicles Lord Rama's physical voyage from one end of the Indian subcontinent to the other and his spiritual voyage from Man to God. In Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God, anthropologist and journalist Jonah Blank gives a new perspective to this Hindu classic -- retelling the ancient tale while following the course of Rama's journey through present-day India and Sri Lanka. Ultimately, Blank's journey -- like that of Lord Rama -- evolves into a quest: to understand the chimerical essence of India itself, in all its overwhelming beauty and paradox. Quite possibly the most perceptive book that I have come across on India since the British Raj ended. -- Pranay Gupte, The Washington Post; What Hollywood attempted on the big screen with casts of thousands in Gandhi and A Passage to India, Jonah Blank has achieved in 350 stylistically rich pages. -- Los Angeles Times; This informative and entertaining book is something to be thankful for. -- The New York Times Book Review

The Upanishads are early philosophical texts of the Hindu religion. The Upanishads represent the loftiest heights of ancient Indo-Aryan thought and culture and are regarded as direct revelations of God. Because these teachings were usually given in the stillness of some distant retreat, where the noises of the world could not disturb the tranquillity of the contemplative life, they are known also as Aranyakas, Forest Books. This version is a translation of Swami Paramananda. Paramananda was an important Swami, mystic, poet, and an innovator in spiritual community living. Wilder Publications is a green publisher. All of our books are printed to order. This reduces waste and helps us keep prices low while greatly reducing our impact on the environment.

Though Freud never overtly refers to the Mahabharata, many of the Sanskrit epic's themes are illuminated by Freud's thought and, conversely, many incidents in the epic can be used to illustrate Freud's theories. In Freud's Mahabharata, the companion volume to Freud's India, Alf Hiltebeitel offers what he calls a "pointillist introduction" to a new theory about the Mahabharata based on Freud. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of the preoedipal, along with Freud's discussion of burial alive, ghosts and doubles, and castration anxiety, and looks at parallels with Indian theories of karma and reincarnation. In Chapter 2 Hiltebeitel draws on Andre Green's concept of "the dead mother," alive but dead to her child, to tell the epic's main story through the interactions between the peace-loving King Yudhisthira and his bellicose mother Kunti. Chapter 3 takes up three "dead mother" stories in the Mahabharata's early books, all of them featuring Kunti, among a plethora of really dead or divine past mothers in the Pandava lineage. Next, Chapter 4 looks at Fernando Wulff Alonso's hypothesis that the Mahabharata poets worked from Greek sources in modeling their stories. Hiltebeitel explores the epic's divine plan of the unburdening of the Earth, the goddess Earth, and its Greek counterpart in the Iliad's plan of Zeus. Girindrasekhar Bose's concept of the "Oedipus mother" is introduced in Chapter 5 through a discussion of Aravan, a minor figure throughout the Sanskrit epic tradition but one who looms in importance in the Draupadi cult and has a cult of his own, where he is called Kuttantavar. In both cults Aravan is worshiped for his self-mutilating sacrifice as a battle-opening offering to "mother" Kali, and he is worshipped in his own cult by Indian eunuchs or castrati called Aravanis in his honor. The book concludes with a new theory of the epic based on Freud's Moses and Monotheism, in which he argued that religious traditions deserve to be studied not only in what they say consciously about themselves, but in what they have registered unconsciously from past traumas, loss of memory, and the return of the repressed.

Philosophy of The Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction presents a complete philosophical guide and new translation of the most celebrated text of Hinduism. While usually treated as mystical and religious poetry, this new translation focuses on the philosophy underpinning the story of a battle between two sets of cousins of the Aryan clan. Designed for use in the classroom, this lively and readable translation: - Situates the text in its philosophical and cultural contexts - Features summaries and chapter analyses and questions at the opening and end of each of the eighteen chapters encouraging further study - Highlights points of comparison and overlap between Indian and Western philosophical concepts and themes such as just war, care ethics, integrity and authenticity - Includes a glossary allowing the reader to determine the meaning of central concepts Written with clarity and without presupposing any prior knowledge of Hinduism, Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction reveals the importance and value of reading the Gita philosophically.