At the turn of the millennium, Nepal was the world's last remaining Hindu kingdom: even the most skeptical of observers could hardly imagine that the institution of the monarchy could ever be in jeopardy. In 2001, however, Nepal's popular King Birendra was killed in the royal palace. The crown passed to his brother Gyanendra, but the monarchy would never fully recover. Nepal witnessed an anti-king uprising in April 2006, and over the course of two years, an interim administration systematically took over all the king's duties and privileges. Most decisively, beginning in the summer of 2007, the government began blocking the king from participating in his many public rituals, sending the prime minister in his place instead. Demoting Vishnu argues that Nepal's dramatic political transformation from monarchy to republic was contested-and in key ways accomplished through-ritual performance. By co-opting state ritual, the king's opponents were able to attack the monarchy's social identity at its foundations, enabling the final legal dissolution of kingship in 2008 to take place without physically harming the king himself. All once-royal rituals continue to be performed, but now they are handled by the country's President-a position created in 2008 to take over state ceremonial functions. Ex-King Gyanendra Shah continues to live in Nepal, is permitted to move about the country and abroad, but is no longer king in any respect. Mocko's book theorizes the role of public ritual in producing Nepal's state ideology. It examines how royal ritual once authorized kings to serve as the privileged apex of national governance and how, in the 21st-century, those rituals stopped serving the king and began instead to authorize rule by a party-based 'head of state.' Demoting Vishnu illustrates how upheaval in ritual contexts undermined the institutional logic of the monarchy, demonstrating in very public ways that kingship was contingent, opposable, and ultimately dispensable.

The influence of the Universal World Teacher in the figure of Sri Sathya Sai Baba has already reached the far corners of the Earth. Yet this Avatar, His miracles and teachings, are still a great mystery to even those who are acquainted with Him. This book is thoroughly researched and gives an objective appreciation of Sai Baba's teachings about spirituality and modern science. Priddy gives an in-depth analysis of His miraculous actions and words, and shares the experiences, both subtle and indirect, that ultimately led him to make a major life transformation. Priddy appeals to both devotees and newcomers to Sai's teachings, and for the devotees, shares his accounts of Sai's mystery, grace, and joy, with balanced reflections upon their likely purpose and meaning.

Hindu Christian Faqir compares two colonial Indian saints from Punjab, the neo-Vedantin Hindu Rama Tirtha (1873-1906) and the Christian convert Sundar Singh (1889-1929). Timothy S. Dobe shows that varied asceticisms, personal exemplary models, and material religion exuded their ambivalent and powerful public presence in Protestant metropolitan centers as much as in colonial peripheries. Challenging ideas of the invention of modern Hinduism, the transparent translation of Christianity, and the construction of saints by devotees, this book focuses on the long-standing, shared religious idioms on which these two men creatively drew to appeal to transnational audiences and to pursue religious perfection. Following both men's usage of Urdu, the book adopts the word "faqir" to examine the vernacular and performative dimensions of Indian holy man traditions, thereby calling special attention to missionary and Orientalist anti-ascetic accounts of the "fukeer" indigenous Islamic traditions and this-worldly religion. Exploring Rama Tirtha and Sundar Singh's global tours in Europe and America, self-conscious sartorial styles, and intimate autobiographical writings, Dobe demonstrates that the vernacular holy man traditions of Punjab provided resources that both men drew on to construct their forms of modern monkhood. The rise of heroic, anti-colonial sannyasis or sadhus of modern Hinduism like Swami Vivekananda is thus repositioned in relation to global Christianity, Sufi, bhakti, and Sikh regional practices, religious boundary-crossing, contestation and conversion. A comparative and contextualized story of two Punjabi holy men's particular performance of sainthood, Hindu Christian Faqir reveals much about the broad, interactional history of religious modernities.

At last, an edition of the Bhagavad Gita that speaks with unprecedented fidelity and clarity. It contains an unusually informative introduction, the Sanskrit text of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute's critical edition, an accurate and accessible English translation, a comprehensive glossary of names and epithets, and a thorough index.

Kabir was a great iconoclastic-mystic poet of fifteenth-century North India; his poems were composed orally, written down by others in manuscripts and books, and transmitted through song. Scholars and translators usually attend to written collections, but these present only a partial picture of the Kabir who has remained vibrantly alive through the centuries mostly in oral forms. Entering the worlds of singers and listeners in rural Madhya Pradesh, Bodies of Song combines ethnographic and textual study in exploring how oral transmission and performance shape the content and interpretation of vernacular poetry in North India. The book investigates textual scholars' study of oral-performative traditions in a milieu where texts move simultaneously via oral, written, audio/video-recorded, and electronic pathways. As texts and performances are always socially embedded, Linda Hess brings readers into the lives of those who sing, hear, celebrate, revere, and dispute about Kabir. Bodies of Song is rich in stories of individuals and families, villages and towns, religious and secular organizations, castes and communities. Dialogue between religious/spiritual Kabir and social/political Kabir is a continuous theme throughout the book: ambiguously located between Hindu and Muslim cultures, Kabir rejected religious identities, pretentions, and hypocrisies. But even while satirizing the religious, he composed stunning poetry of religious experience and psychological insight. A weaver by trade, Kabir also criticized caste and other inequalities and today serves as an icon for Dalits and all who strive to remove caste prejudice and oppression.

Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets provides an ethnographic study of varmakkalai, or "the art of the vital spots," a South Indian esoteric tradition that combines medical practice and martial arts. Although siddha medicine is officially part of the Indian Government's medically pluralistic health-care system, very little of a reliable nature has been written about it. Drawing on a diverse array of materials, including Tamil manuscripts, interviews with practitioners, and his own personal experience as an apprentice, Sieler traces the practices of varmakkalai both in different religious traditions-such as Yoga and Ayurveda-and within various combat practices. His argument is based on in-depth ethnographic research in the southernmost region of India, where hereditary medico-martial practitioners learn their occupation from relatives or skilled gurus through an esoteric, spiritual education system. Rituals of secrecy and apprenticeship in varmakkalai are among the important focal points of Sieler's study. Practitioners protect their esoteric knowledge, but they also engage in a kind of "lure and withdrawal"--a performance of secrecy--because secrecy functions as what might be called "symbolic capital." Sieler argues that varmakkalai is, above all, a matter of texts in practice; knowledge transmission between teacher and student conveys tacit, non-verbal knowledge, and constitutes a "moral economy." It is not merely plain facts that are communicated, but also moral obligations, ethical conduct and tacit, bodily knowledge. Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets will be of interest to students of religion, medical anthropologists, historians of medicine, indologists, and martial arts and performance studies.

In this book, Tracy Pintchman has assembled ten leading scholars of Hinduism to explore the complex relationship between Hindu women's rituals and their lives beyond ritual. The book focuses particularly on the relationship of women's ritual practices to domesticity, exposing and exploring the nuances, complexities, and limits of this relationship. In many cultural and historical contexts, including contemporary India, women's everyday lives tend to revolve heavily around domestic and interpersonal concerns, especially care for children, the home, husbands, and other relatives. Hence, women's religiosity also tends to emphasize the domestic realm and the relationships most central to women. But women's religious concerns certainly extend beyond domesticity. Furthermore, even the domestic religious activities that Hindu women perform may not merely replicate or affirm traditionally formulated domestic ideals but may function strategically to reconfigure, reinterpret, criticize, or even reject such ideals.
This volume takes a fresh look at issues of the relationship between Hindu women's ritual practices and normative domesticity. In so doing, it emphasizes female innovation and agency in constituting and transforming both ritual and the domestic realm and calls attention to the limitations of normative domesticity as a category relevant to many forms of Hindu women's religious practice.

In Divine Mother, Blessed Mother, Francis X. Clooney, S.J., a scholar of Hinduism as well as a Catholic priest and theologian, offers the first full-length comparative study of Hindu goddesses and the Virgin Mary. Clooney begins by looking at three specific goddesses as they are presented and addressed in religiously and theologically rich hymns from the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions: Nullri Laksmi, the eternal consort of Lord Visnu and life-giver to Him and all the world; the great Goddess Devi, in whom the world and gods too exist and flourish; and the lovely Tamil Goddess Apirnullami, who illumines the inmost mind and heart. Clooney then shows how Goddess traditions can be drawn into fruitful conversation with Christian tradition, taking a fresh look at the veneration and theology of Mary, the Mother of Jesus and Mother of God, as displayed in three famous Marian hymns from the Greek, Latin, and Tamil traditions. The book is enriched by the inclusion of fresh and full translations of all of the hymns, including two translated here for the first time. Analyzing these six Hindu and Christian hymns, Clooney examines such questions as: How have Hindu theologians made room for a feminine divine alongside the masculine--and why? How has Christian thinking about divine gender differed from Hindu thinking? What might contemporary feminists learn from the goddess traditions of India? How might the study of Hindu goddesses affect Christian thinking about God and Mary? This is a book to read for its insights into the nature of gender and the divine, for the power of the hymns themselves, and for the sake of a religious adventure, an encounter with three Goddess traditions and Mary seen in a new light.

This affordable, critical edition of the Shiva Samhita contains a new introduction, the original Sanskrit, a new English translation, nine full-page photographs, and an index. The first edition of this classic Yoga text to meet high academic, literary, and production standards, it's for people who practice Yoga or have an interest in health and fitness, philosophy, religion, spirituality, mysticism, or meditation.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897-1981), a revered master of the Tantric Nath lineage, is an inspiring example of an ordinary family man who attained complete realization of the Infinite. His words carry a rare potency that can jolt the listener or reader into a profound sense of awareness, which at the same time signifies true freedom -- the freedom from all fear and mental suffering.

In this, the final volume of a trilogy published by Blue Dove Press, Nisargadatta clearly demonstrates that logic and spirituality do not necessarily stand in opposition to one another. In a chapter after which this book has been titled, Nisargadatta relentlessly pursues a logical argument with his visitor to its very end, showing that until there is transcendence of all thought, logic remains fully valid and should be pursued rigorously.

Every year, the Indian pilgrimage town of Pushkar sees its population of 20,000 swell by two million visitors. Since the 1970s, Pushkar, which is located about 250 miles southwest of the capital of New Delhi, has received considerable attention from international tourists. Originally hippies and backpackers, today's visitors now come from a wide range of social positions. To locals, though, Pushkar is more than just a gathering place for pilgrims and tourists: it is where Brahma, the creator god, made his home; it is where Hindus should feel blessed to stay, if only for a short time; and it is where locals would feel lucky to be reborn, if only as a pigeon. In short, it is their paradise. But even paradise needs upkeep. In Guest is God, Drew Thomases uses ethnographic fieldwork to explore the massive enterprise of building heaven on earth. The articulation of sacred space necessarily works alongside economic changes brought on by tourism and globalization. Here the contours of what actually constitutes paradise are redrawn by developments in, and the agents of, tourism. And as paradise is made and remade, people in Pushkar help to create a brand of Hindu religion that is tailored to its local surroundings while also engaging global ideas. The goal, then, becomes to show how religion and tourism can be mutually constitutive.

This book shows you how to access the wisdom of the Nakshatras in your personal life and for society. Through it the modern reader can understand the energies of their stars and learn how to utilize these to bring their lives into harmony with the great forces of the universe. This book is must reading not only for any students of astrology but for anyone interested in self-development or spiritual growth.

The Nay Science offers a new perspective on the problem of scientific method in the human sciences. Taking German Indological scholarship on the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita as their example, Adluri and Bagchee develop a critique of the modern valorization of method over truth in the humanities.
The authors show how, from its origins in eighteenth-century Neo-Protestantism onwards, the critical method was used as a way of making theological claims against rival philosophical and/or religious traditions. Via discussions of German Romanticism, the pantheism controversy, scientific positivism, and empiricism, they show how theological concerns dominated German scholarship on the Indian texts. Indology functions as a test case for wider concerns: the rise of historicism, the displacement of philosophical concerns from thinking, and the belief in the ability of a technical method to produce truth.
Based on the historical evidence of the first part of the book, Adluri and Bagchee make a case in the second part for going beyond both the critical pretensions of modern academic scholarship and and the objections of its post-structuralist or post-Orientalist critics. By contrasting German Indology with Plato's concern for virtue and Gandhi's focus on praxis, the authors argue for a conception of the humanities as a dialogue between the ancients and moderns and between eastern and western cultures.

In this book Paramahansa Yogananda offers prayers and affirmations that beginners and experienced meditators alike can use to awaken the boundless joy, peace, and inner freedom of the soul.

Includes introductory instructions on how to meditate. An encouraging guide that teaches us through our own experience how to spiritually enrich our everyday life.

Ma Anandamayi is generally regarded as the most important Hindu woman saint of the twentieth century. Venerated alternately as a guru and as an incarnation of God on earth, Ma had hundreds of thousands of devotees. Through the creation of a religious movement and a vast network of ashramsunprecedented for a womanMa presented herself as an authority figure in a society where female gurus were not often recognized. Because of her widespread influence, Ma is one of the rare Hindu saints whose cult has outlived her. Today, her tomb is a place of veneration for those who knew her as well as new generations of her followers. By performing extensive fieldwork among Ma's current devotees, Orianne Aymard examines what happens to a cult after the death of its leader. Does it decline, stagnate, or grow? Or is it rather transformed into something else entirely? Aymard's work sheds new light not only on Hindu sainthoodand particularly female Hindu sainthoodbut on the nature of charismatic religious leadership and devotion.

Drawing on ethnographic research spanning ten years, Antoinette Elizabeth DeNapoli offers a new perspective on the practice of asceticism in India today. Her work brings to light the little known and often marginalized lives of female Hindu ascetics (sadhus) in the North Indian state of Rajasthan. Examining the everyday religious worlds and practices of the mostly unlettered female sadhus, who come from a number of castes, Real Sadhus Sing to God illustrates that these women experience asceticism in relational and celebratory ways. They construct their lives as paths of singing to God, which, the author suggests, serves as the female way of being an ascetic. Examining the relationship between asceticism (sannyas) and devotion (bhakti) in contemporary contexts, the book brings together two disparate fields of studyyoga/asceticism and bhaktiusing the singing of bhajans (devotional songs) as an orienting metaphor. This is the first book-length study to explore the ways in which female sadhus perform and thus create gendered views of asceticism through their singing, storytelling, and sacred text practices, which DeNapoli characterizes as their "rhetoric of renunciation".

Today's globalized society faces some of humanity's most unprecedented social and environmental challenges. Presenting inspiring and effective approaches to a range of these challenges, the timely volume before you draws upon individual cases of exemplary leadership from the world's Dharma traditions-Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism. The volume's authors refer to such exemplary leaders as "beacons of Dharma," highlighting the ways in which each figure, through their inspirational life work, provide us with illuminating perspectives as we continue to confront cases of grave injustice and needless suffering in the world. Taking on difficult contemporary issues such as climate change, racial and gender inequality, industrial agriculture and animal rights, fair access to healthcare and education, and other such pressing concerns, Beacons of Dharma offers a promising and much needed contribution to our global conversations. Seeking to help alleviate and remedy such social and environmental issues, each of the chapters in the volume invites contemplation, inspires action, and offers a freshly invigorating source of hope.

The historical and empirical project presented here is grounded in a desire to theorize 'religion-state' relations in the multi-ethnic, multi-religious, secular city-state of Singapore. The core research problematic of this project has emerged out of the confluence of two domains, 'religion, law and bureaucracy' and 'religion and colonial encounters.' This work has two core objectives: one, to articulate the actual points of engagement between institutions of religion and the state, and two, to identify the various processes, mechanisms and strategies through which relations across these spheres are sustained. The thematic foundations of this book rest on disentangling the complex interactions between religious communities, individuals and the various manifestations of the Singapore state, relationships that are framed within a culture of bureaucracy. This is accomplished through a scrutiny of Hindu domains on the island nation-state, from her identity as part of the Straits Settlements to the present day. The empirical and analytical emphases of this book rest onthe author'sengagement with the realm of Hinduism as it is conceived, structured, framed and practiced within the context of a strong state in Singapore today. Ethnographically, the book focusses on Hindu temple management and the observance of Hindu festivals and processions, enacted within administrative and bureaucratic frames."

The book throws light on the nature of various inner powers which we already possess and use more or less unconsciously, as well as with latent powers within, which are as yet undeveloped. The book is of interest to the general reader as well as to the spiritual seeker.

What is 'evil'? What are the ways of overcoming this destructive and morally recalcitrant phenomenon? To what extent is the use of punitive violence tenable? Evil and the Philosophy of Retribution compares the responses of three modern Indian commentators on the Bhagavad-Gita - Aurobindo Ghose, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi. The book reveals that some of the central themes in the Bhagavad-Gita were transformed by these intellectuals into categories of modern socio-political thought by reclaiming them from pre-modern debates on ritual and renunciation. Based on canonical texts, this work presents a fascinating account of how the relationship between 'good', 'evil' and retribution is construed against the backdrop of militant nationalism and the development of modern Hinduism. Amid competing constructions of Indian tradition as well as contemporary concerns, it traces the emerging representations of modern Hindu self-consciousness under colonialism, and its very understanding of evil surrounding a textual ethos. Replete with Sanskrit, English, Marathi, and Gujarati sources, this will especially interest scholars of modern Indian history, philosophy, political science, history of religion, and those interested in the Bhagavad-Gita.

Feeding the Dead outlines the early history of ancestor worship in South Asia, from the earliest sources available, the Vedas, up to the descriptions found in the Dharmshastra tradition. Most prior works on ancestor worship have done little to address the question of how shraddha, the paradigmatic ritual of ancestor worship up to the present day, came to be. Matthew R. Sayers argues that the development of shraddha is central to understanding the shift from Vedic to Classical Hindu modes of religious behavior. Central to this transition is the discursive construction of the role of the religious expert in mediating between the divine and the human actor. Both Hindu and Buddhist traditions draw upon popular religious practices to construct a new tradition. Sayers argues that the definition of a religious expert that informs religiosity in the Common Era is grounded in the redefinition of ancestral rites in the Grhyasutras. Beyond making more clear the much misunderstood history of ancestor worship in India, this book addressing the serious question about how and why religion in India changed so radically in the last half of the first millennium BCE. The redefinition of the role of religious expert is hugely significant for understanding that change. This book ties together the oldest ritual texts with the customs of ancestor worship that underlie and inform medieval and contemporary practice.