Like any other subject, the study of religion is a child of its time. Shaped and forged over the course of the twentieth century, it has reflected the interests and political situation of the world at the time. As the twenty-first century unfolds, it is undergoing a major transition along with religion itself. This volume showcases new work and new approaches to religion which work across boundaries of religious tradition, academic discipline and region. The influence of globalizing processes has been evident in social and cultural networking by way of new media like the internet, in the extensive power of global capitalism and in the increasing influence of international bodies and legal instruments. Religion has been changing and adapting too. This handbook offers fresh insights on the dynamic reality of religion in global societies today by underscoring transformations in eight key areas: Market and Branding; Contemporary Ethics and Virtues; Intimate Identities; Transnational Movements; Diasporic Communities; Responses to Diversity; National Tensions; and Reflections on 'Religion'. These themes demonstrate the handbook's new topics and approaches that move beyond existing agendas. Bringing together scholars of all ages and stages of career from around the world, the handbook showcases the dynamism of religion in global societies. It is an accessible introduction to new ways of approaching the study of religion practically, theoretically and geographically.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Routledge is now re-issuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes originally published between 1910 and 1965. The titles include works by key figures such asC.G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Otto Rank, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Susan Isaacs. Each volume is available on its own, as part of a themed mini-set, or as part of a specially-priced 204-volume set. A brochure listing each title in the "International Library of Psychology" series is available upon request.
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A celebrated Hindu pilgrimage site, Hardwar lies on the river Ganges at the edge of the Himalayas. Its identity as a holy place is inextricably tied to the mythology and reality of the Ganges, and traditional sources overwhelmingly stress this connection. Virtually nothing has been written about Hardwar's history and development, although the historical record reveals striking changes of the past few centuries. These changes have usually reflected worldly forces such as shifting trade routes, improved transportation, or political instability. Yet such mundane influences have been ignored in the city's sacred narrative, which presents a fixed, unchanging identity. The city's complex identity, says Lochtefeld, lies in the tension between these differing narratives. In this fieldwork-based study, Lochtefeld analyzes modern Hardwar as a Hindu pilgrimage center. He looks first at various groups of local residents -- businessmen, hereditary priests, and ascetics -- and assesses their differing roles in managing Hardwar as a holy place. He then examines the pilgrims and the factors that bring them to Hardwar. None of these groups is as pious as popularly depicted, but their interactions in upholding their own interest create and maintain Hardwar's religious environment. In conclusion, he addresses the wider context of Indian pilgrimage and the forces shaping it in the present day. He finds that many modern Hindus, like many modern Christians, feel some dissonance between traditional religious symbols and their 21st-century world, and that they are reinterpreting their traditional symbols to make them meaningful for their time.

The Sanskrit drama is said to have been invented by the sage Bharata, who lived at a very remote period of Indian history and was the author of a system of music. The earliest references to the acted drama are to be found in the Mahabhashya, which mentions representations of the Kansabadha and the Balibadha, episodes in the history of Krishna. Indian tradition describes Bharat as having caused to be acted before the gods a play representing the Svayamvara of Lakshmi.

Tradition further makes Krishna and his cowherdesses the starting point of the Sangita, a representation consisting of a mixture of song, music, and dancing. The Gitagovinda is concerned with Krishna, and the modern Yatras generally represent scenes from the life of that deity.

From all this it seems likely that the Hindu drama was developed in connection with the cult of Vishnu-Krishna; and that the earliest acted representations were, therefore, like the mysteries of the Christian Middle Ages, a kind of religious plays, in which scenes from the legends of the gods were enacted mainly with the aid of songs and dances supplemented with prose dialogues improvised by the performers. These earliest forms of Hindu dramatic literature are represented by those hymns of the Rig-Veda which contain dialogues such as those of Sarama and the Panis, Yama and Yami, Pururava and Urvaci.

UPDATED FOR THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF PARTITION 'Puri does profound and elegant work bringing forgotten narratives back to life. It's hard to convey just how important this book is' Sathnam Sanghera 'The most humane account of partition I've read ... We need a candid conversation about our past and this is an essential starting point' Nikesh Shukla, Observer ________________________ Newly revised for the seventy-fifth anniversary of partition, Kavita Puri conducts a vital reappraisal of empire, revisiting the stories of those collected in the 2017 edition and reflecting on recent developments in the lives of those affected by partition. The division of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 into India and Pakistan saw millions uprooted and resulted in unspeakable violence. It happened far away, but it would shape modern Britain. Dotted across homes in Britain are people who were witnesses to one of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. But their memory of partition has been shrouded in silence. In her eye-opening and timely work, Kavita Puri uncovers remarkable testimonies from former subjects of the Raj who are now British citizens - including her own father. Weaving a tapestry of human experience over seven decades, Puri reveals a secret history of ruptured families and friendships, extraordinary journeys and daring rescue missions that reverberates with compassion and loss. It is a work that breaks the silence and confronts the difficult truths at the heart of Britain's shared past with South Asia.

Since its discovery and the initial efforts toward its critical edition, the Paippaladasamhita of the Atharvaveda (PS) has attracted the attention of Vedic scholars and Indologists for several reasons. It constitutes a precious source for the study of the development of the earliest language. The text contains important information about various rites and magical practices, and hints about the oldest Indo-Iranian and Indo-European myths. All of this makes the PS a text of inestimable value for the study of Indian language and culture.

In a small medieval palace on Kathmandu's Durbar Square lives Nepal's famous Living Goddess - a child as young as three who is chosen from a caste of Buddhist goldsmiths to watch over the country and protect its people. To Nepalis she is the embodiment of Devi (the universal goddess) and for centuries their Hindu kings have sought her blessing to legitimize their rule. Legends swirl about her, for the facts are shrouded in secrecy and closely guarded by dynasties of priests and caretakers. How come a Buddhist girl is worshipped by autocratic Hindu rulers? Are the initiation rituals as macabre as they are rumoured to be? And what fate awaits the Living Goddesses when they attain puberty and are dismissed from their role? Weaving together myth, religious belief, modern history and court gossip, Isabella Tree takes us on a compelling and fascinating journey to the esoteric, hidden heart of Nepal. Through her unprecedented access to the many layers of Nepalese society, she is able to put the country's troubled modern history in the context of the complex spiritual beliefs and practices that inform the role of the little girl at its centre. Deeply felt, emotionally engaged and written after over a decade of travel and research, The Living Goddess is a compassionate and illuminating enquiry into this reclusive Himalayan country - a revelation.

This biography follows the life of Swami Kriyanandamodern-day hero who has persistentlydemonstrated spiritual courage, determination in the face of great obstacles, and personalsacrifice for an ideal throughout his life.Faith Is My Armor tells the complete story of his life from his childhood in Rumania, tohis desperate search for meaning in life, and to his training under his great Guru, the IndianMaster, Paramhansa Yogananda. As a youth of 22, he first met and pledged his discipleshipto Yogananda, entering the monastery Yogananda had founded in Southern California.In the nearly sixty years since then, Swami Kriyananda has traveled and lived around theworld, lecturing in five languages, writing 80 books and 400 pieces of music, and foundingseven spiritual communities in the United States, Europe, and India.It also recounts the drama of the powerful opposition and attacks he faced as he strove tofulfill the mission his Guru had bestowed upon him.Devi Novak is the co-Spiritual Director of Ananda Sangha and the editor of Intuition forStarters.

This review is from: Sudden Awakening: Into Direct Realization (Paperback) Amazon: For anyone who sincerely wants to have the truth laid out clearly, and concisely, leaving no traps of the mind unexposed, and who wants to receive a transmission of silence that your heart will recognize from every page - this book will be deeply satisfying. Eli Jaxon-Bear is able to transmit the truth in person and by the written word. Reading this book is being with your own self, not in any kind of New Age dream of enlightenment that just pleases the ego with a spiritual story, but in a real, tangible way that can give you the taste of what is actually possible for humanity, here and now. It is a very timely book, because when we look around and see that so many people are fed up with the results of business as usual, this book offers a real alternative, a radical shift of consciousness, that is so needed. I am very grateful that this book was written, and that it's so freely available.

This is a collection of previously unpublished essays exploring the meanings of marriage in South Asian Hindu culture: its practices, assumption, sensibilities and discontents. The authors use new understandings of gender to study local practices, attitudes, folk narratives, ritual symbols, and religious sensibilities as they bear on religion, gender, and social life in the Hindu world.

The Samkhyayoga institution of Kapil Math is a religious organisation with a small tradition of followers which emerged in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century in Bengal in India around the renunciant and yogin Hariharananda Aranya. This tradition developed during the same period in which modern yoga was born and forms a chapter in the expansion of yoga traditions in modern Hinduism. The book analyses the yoga teaching of Hariharananda Aranya (1869-1947) and the Kapil Math tradition, its origin, history and contemporary manifestations, and this tradition's connection to the expansion of yoga and the Yogasutra in modern Hinduism. The Samkhyayoga of the Kapil Math tradition is based on the Patanjalayogasastra, on a number of texts in Sanskrit and Bengali written by their gurus, and on the lifestyle of the renunciant yogin living isolated in a cave. The book investigates Hariharananda Aranya's connection to pre-modern yoga traditions and the impact of modern production and transmission of knowledge on his interpretations of yoga. The book connects the Kapil Math tradition to the nineteenth century transformations of Bengali religious culture of the educated upper class that led to the production of a new type of yogin. The book analyses Samkhyayoga as a living tradition, its current teachings and practices, and looks at what Samkhyayogins do and what Samkhyayoga is as a yoga practice. A valuable contribution to recent and ongoing debates, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of Religious Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Indology, Indian philosophy, Hindu Studies and Yoga Studies.

How does the soul relate to the body? Through the ages, innumerable religious and intellectual movements have proposed answers to this question. Many have gravitated to the notion of the "subtle body," positing some sort of subtle entity that is neither soul nor body, but some mixture of the two. Simon Cox traces the history of this idea from the late Roman Empire to the present day, touching on how philosophers, wizards, scholars, occultists, psychologists, and mystics have engaged with the idea over the past two thousand years. This study is an intellectual history of the subtle body concept from its origins in late antiquity through the Renaissance into the Euro-American counterculture of the 1960's and 70's. It begins with a prehistory of the idea, rooted as it is in third-century Neoplatonism. It then proceeds to the signifier "subtle body" in its earliest English uses amongst the Cambridge Platonists. After that, it looks forward to those Orientalist fathers of Indology, who, in their earliest translations of Sanskrit philosophy relied heavily on the Cambridge Platonist lexicon, and thereby brought Indian philosophy into what had hitherto been a distinctly platonic discourse. At this point, the story takes a little reflexive stroll into the source of the author's own interest in this strange concept, looking at Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical import, expression, and popularization of the concept. Cox then zeroes in on Aleister Crowley, focusing on the subtle body in fin de siecle occultism. Finally, he turns to Carl Jung, his colleague Frederic Spiegelberg, and the popularization of the idea of the subtle body in the Euro-American counterculture. This book is for anyone interested in yogic, somatic, or energetic practices, and will be very useful to scholars and area specialists who rely on this term in dealing with Hindu, Daoist, and Buddhist texts.

The basic questions of Who Am I? Where Am I Going? What Is the Purpose of Life? are asked by every generation, and Patanjali's answers (given in the third century BC) form one of the oldest spiritual texts in the world. 'That which unites' is called 'Yoga' - and is thus much broader than the form of exercise so popular today. It is a way to restore our lost wholeness, our integrity as complete human beings, by unifying the personality around a centre that is silent and unbounded. Alistair Shearer's superb introduction and translation bring these ancient, vital teachings to life in the modern world and are for all those who seek the benefits of self-knowledge.

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.