The first comprehensive book on alcohol in pre-modern India, An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian History and Religions uses a wide range of sources from the Vedas to the Kamasutra to explore drinks and styles of drinking, as well as rationales for abstinence from the earliest Sanskrit written records through the second millennium CE. Books about the global history of alcohol almost never give attention to India. But a wide range of texts provide plenty of evidence that there was a thriving culture of drinking in ancient and medieval India, from public carousing at the brewery and drinking house to imbibing at festivals and weddings. There was also an elite drinking culture depicted in poetic texts (often in an erotic mode), and medical texts explain how to balance drink and health. By no means everyone drank, however, and there were many sophisticated religious arguments for abstinence. McHugh begins by surveying the intoxicating drinks that were available, including grain beers, palm toddy, and imported wine, detailing the ways people used grains, sugars, fruits, and herbs over the centuries to produce an impressive array of liquors. He presents myths that explain how drink came into being and how it was assigned the ritual and legal status it has in our time. The book also explores Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain moral and legal texts on drink and abstinence, as well as how drink is used in some Tantric rituals, and translates in full a detailed description of the goddess Liquor, Suradevi. Cannabis, betel, soma, and opium are also considered. Finally, McHugh investigates what has happened to these drinks, stories, and theories in the last few centuries. An Unholy Brew brings to life the overlooked, complex world of brewing, drinking, and abstaining in pre-modern India, and offers illuminating case studies on topics such as law and medicine, even providing recipes for some drinks.

Composed by three poet-saints between the sixth and eighth centuries A.D., the Tevaram hymns are the primary scripture of the Tamil Saivism, one of the first popular large-scale devotional movements within Hinduism. Indira Peterson eloquently renders into English a substantial portion of these hymns, which provide vivid and moving portraits of the images, myths, rites, and adoration of Siva and which continue to be loved and sung by the millions of followers of the Tamil Saiva tradition. Her introduction and annotations illuminate the work's literary, religious, and cultural contexts, making this anthology a rich sourcebook for the study of South Indian popular religion. Indira Peterson highlights the Tevaram as a seminal text in Tamil cultural history, a synthesis of pan-Indian and Tamil civilization, as well as a distinctly Tamil expression of the love of song, sacred landscape, and ceremonial religion. Her discussion of this work draws on her pioneering research into the performance of the hymns and their relation to the art and ritual of the South Indian temple. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The idea that there is a truth within the person linked to the discovery of a deeper, more fundamental, more authentic self, has been a common theme in many religions throughout history and an idea that is still with us today. This inwardness or interiority unique to me as an essential feature of who I am has been an aspect of culture and even a defining characteristic of human being; an authentic, private sphere to which we can retreat that is beyond the conflicts of the outer world. This inner world becomes more real than the outer, which is seen as but a pale reflection. Remarkably, the image of the truth within is found across cultures and this book presents an account of this idea in the pre-modern history of Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Furthermore, in theistic religions, Christianity and some forms of Hinduism, the truth within is conflated with the idea of God within and in all cases this inner truth is thought to be not only the heart of the person, but also the heart of the universe itself. Gavin Flood examines the metaphor of inwardness and the idea of truth within, along with the methods developed in religions to attain it such as prayer and meditation. These views of inwardness that link the self to cosmology can be contrasted with a modern understanding of the person. In examining the truth within in Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, Flood offers a hermeneutical phenomenology of inwardness and a defence of comparative religion.

An ancient classic that can become a companion for your own spiritual journey.

Millions of people turn daily to India's most beloved holy book, the Bhagavad Gita ("Song of the Lord"), to instruct their spiritual practice. A Hindu classic, it has universal appeal for people of all faith traditions who turn to its inspirational support in the struggles of life, its consolation in times of grief, and its deeply moving promise of God's love and guidance.

Composed in Sanskrit verse thousands of years ago, this timeless text tells the story of a distraught warrior on the verge of battle and the compassionate counsel he receives from Krishna God in human form. In just seven hundred lines, the Gita presents concise teachings on such topics as the immortality of the soul, meditation and yoga, worship and sacrifice, the ideal of selfless action, and the oneness of all life in the Divine.Now you can read and understand the Gita with no previous knowledge of Hinduism required.

This SkyLight Illuminations edition offers insightful yet unobtrusive commentary that explains references and philosophical terms; shares the inspiring interpretations of famous spiritual teachers; and addresses questions such as the inner meaning of India's caste system and why this sublime discourse on inner peace is set against the background of a violent civil war."

Many of the great thinkers and poets in Christianity and Islam led lives marked by personal and religious struggle. Indeed, suffering and struggle are part of the human condition and constant themes in philosophy, sociology and psychology. In this thought-provoking book, acclaimed scholar Mona Siddiqui ponders how humankind finds meaning in life during an age of uncertainty. Here, she explores the theme of human struggle through the writings of iconic figures such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Muhammad Ghazali, Rainer Maria Rilke and Sayyid Qutb - people who searched for meaning in the face of adversity. Considering a wide range of thinkers and literary figures, her book explores how suffering and struggle force the faithful to stretch their imagination in order to bring about powerful and prophetic movements for change. The moral and aesthetic impulse of their writings will also stimulate inter-cultural and interdisciplinary conversations on the search for meaning in an age of uncertainty.

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.

This is an incisive and inspiring meditation on finding your optimal vocation and life's work by one of yoga's great American masters, a book informed by the great Bhagavad Gita- yoga's ancient treatise on finding your purpose.

"Bhishma," the sixth book of the eighteen-book epic The Maha bh rata, narrates the first ten days of the great war between the K uravas and the P ndavas. This first volume covers four days from the beginning of the great battle and includes the famous "Bh gavad gita ("The Song of the Lord"), presented here within its original epic context. In this "bible" of Indian civilization the charioteer Krishna empowers his disciple Arjuna to resolve his personal dilemma: whether to follow his righteous duty as a warrior and slay his opponent relatives in the just battle, or to abstain from fighting and renounce the warrior code to which he is born.

A vibrant example of living literature, the Bhagavata Purana is a versatile Hindu sacred text written in Sanskrit verse. Finding its present form by the tenth century C.E., the work inspired several major north Indian devotional (bhakti) traditions as well as schools of dance and drama, and continues to permeate popular Hindu art and ritual in both India and the diaspora.

Introducing the Bhagavata Purana's key themes while also examining its extensive influence on Hindu thought and practice, this collection conducts the first multidimensional reading of the entire text. Each essay focuses on a key theme of the Bhagavata Purana and its subsequent presence in Hindu theology, performing arts, ritual recitation, and commentary. The authors consider the relationship between the sacred text and the divine image, the text's metaphysical and cosmological underpinnings, its shaping of Indian culture, and its ongoing relevance to contemporary Indian concerns.

Epics of ancient India rank with the timeless myths of classical Greece and Rome in the power of their language and the underlying moral lessons. The "Ramayana" and "Mahabharata, " both written in Sanskrit, contain vibrant stories of kings and princes, sages and tricksters, demons and gods, damsels in distress and mighty heroes. "Ganesha Goes to Lunch" collects some of the most vivid stories from these and other early Indian folklore and spiritual texts including the Vedas and the Puranas. These stories feature the gods of India in their celestial and earthly abodes, hapless humans struggling with life's many problems, and gods and humans interacting. Assembled by Kamla Kapur, these stories illustrate the great spiritual and practical themes of the human condition. Kamla Kapur brings her poet's eye and ear to the retelling of these stories, recreating and dramatizing them to illuminate their relevance to modern times.

"This book is an exemplary model of sophisticated use of sociological and semiotic theory in the analysis of complex historical and ethnographic materials. It will interest not only anthropologists and Indonesianists, but also historians, linguists, and students of the history of religion and mythology. The general reader would also enjoy the work, for it is gracefully and vividly written."--Hildred Geertz, Princeton University

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.

The 19th century was a pioneering age for vernacular texts in India. Vernacular writings became popular for making the 'first' interventions of their kind, written by Indians for Indians, and establishing new genres such as the novel. The Subhedar's Son, an award-winning Marathi novel, was written in 1895 and published by the Bombay Tract and Book Society. The novel comprises overlapping personal and political trajectories.The author, The Rev. Dinkar Shankar Sawarkar, inscribed multiple viewpoints into his narrative, including that of his own father, the Shankar Nana (1819-1884), a Brahmin who was one of the early converts of the Church Missionary Society in Western India and served the CMS and the Anglican Church in various capacities for many years. Apart from Shankar Nana's conversion-story, Sawarkar provides readers with a blueprint of what a Brahminical journey towards Christian conversion encompassed, while describing his personal background of having lived a Christian life as a product of both Brahminism and Christianity. He in effect attempts to deconstruct Brahmanism through Christianity and as a Christian he claims Brahmin roots, with the aim of combatting the stigma of Christian conversion. Contextualized by the history of Maharashtra's early missions and the specificities of individual conversions, the novel allows modern researchers to appreciate the particularity of regional and vernacular Indian Christianity. This culturally-specific Christianity spurred the production of Christian vernacular print culture, associating 'being Marathi' with broader and more universal frameworks of Christianity. But this new genre also produced nativist forms of Christian devotion and piety. Deepra Dandekar introduces this annotated translation of The Subhedar's Son, with: an examination of the Church Missionary Society's socio- political context; a biography of Shankar Nana gleaned from archival sources; a brief summary of Sawarkar's biography; and an analysis of the multiple political opinions framing the book. An appendix contains a transcription of Shankar Nana's Christian witness.

Since the beginning of modern Indology in the 19th century, the relationship between the early Indian religions of Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism has been predicated on a perceived dichotomy between two meta-historical identities: "the Brahmans" (purveyors of the ancient Vedic texts and associated ritual system) and the newer "non-Brahmanical" sramana movements from which the Buddhists and Jains emerged. Textbook and scholarly accounts postulate an opposition between these two groups, citing the 2nd-century BCE Sanskrit grammarian Patanjali, who is often quoted erroneously as likening them to the proverbial enemies snake and mongoose. Scholars continue to privilege Brahmanical Hindu accounts of early Indian history, and further portray Buddhist and Jain deviations from those accounts as evidence of their opposition to a pre-existing Brahmanism. In The Snake and The Mongoose, Nathan McGovern turns this commonly-accepted model of the origins of the early Indian religions on its head. His book seeks to de-center the Hindu Brahman from our understanding of Indian religion by "taming the snake and the mongoose"-that is, by abandoning the anachronistic distinction between "Brahmanical" and "non-Brahmanical." Instead, McGovern allows the earliest articulations of identity in Indian religion to speak for themselves through a comparative reading of texts preserved by the three major groups that emerged from the social, political, cultural, and religious foment of the late first millennium BCE: the Buddhists and Jains as they represented themselves in their earliest sutras, and the Vedic Brahmans as they represented themselves in their Dharma Sutras. The picture that emerges is not of a fundamental dichotomy between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical, but rather of many different groups who all saw themselves as Brahmanical. Thus, McGovern argues, it was through the contestation between these groups that the distinction between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical-the snake and the mongoose-emerged.

This is the third volume of a planned seven-volume translation of India's most beloved and influential epic tale--the Ramayana of Valmiki. This third volume carries forward the narrative by following the exiled hero Rama, his wife, and his brother on their wanderings. The book contains the narrative center of the epic, the abduction of Sita by the demon king Ravana. It provides a profound meditation on the paradox of the hero as both human and divine. The present translation seeks to provide a readable and trustworthy English version of the poem. It is accompanied by a full commentary elucidating the philological, aesthetic, and cultural problems of the text. Extensive use is made in the annotations of the numerous commentaries on the Ramayana. The substantial introduction to this volume aims to supply a historical context for an appreciation of the poem and a critical reading exploring the ideological components of the work. The volumes of this work will present the entire Ramayana, translated for the first time on the basis of the critical edition (Oriental Institute, Baroda).

Recent scholarship has shown that modern postural yoga is the outcome of a complex process of transcultural exchange and syncretism. This book doubles down on those claims and digs even deeper, looking to uncover the disparate but entangled roots of modern yoga practice. Anya Foxen shows that some of what we call yoga, especially in North America and Europe, is genealogically only slightly related to pre-modern Indian yoga traditions. Rather, it is equally, if not more so, grounded in Hellenistic theories of the subtle body, Western esotericism and magic, pre-modern European medicine, and late-nineteenth-century women's wellness programs. The book begins by examining concepts arising out of Greek philosophy and religion, including Pythagoreanism, Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, Galenic medicine, theurgy, and other cultural currents that have traditionally been categorized as "Western esotericism," as well as the more recent examples which scholars of American traditions have labeled "metaphysical religion." Marshaling these under the umbrella category of "harmonialism," Foxen argues that they represent a history of practices that were gradually subsumed into the language of yoga. Orientalism and gender become important categories of analysis as this narrative moves into the nineteenth century. Women considerably outnumber men in all studies of yoga except those conducted in India, and modern anglophone yoga exhibits important continuities with women's physical culture, feminist reform, and white women's engagement with Orientalism. Foxen's study allows us to recontextualize the peculiarities of American yoga-its focus on aesthetic representation, its privileging of bodily posture and unsystematic incorporation of breathwork, and above all its overwhelmingly white female demographic. In this context it addresses the ongoing conversation about cultural appropriation within the yoga community.