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.

This book examines historical changes in the grammar of the Indo-Aryan languages from the period of their earliest attestations in Vedic Sanskrit (around 1000 bc) to contemporary Hindi. Uta Reinoehl focuses specifically on the rise of configurational structure as a by-product of the grammaticalization of postpositions: while Vedic Sanskrit lacks function words that constrain nominal expressions into phrasal units - one of the characteristics of a non-configurational language - New Indo-Aryan languages have postpositions which organize nominal expressions into postpositional phrases. The grammaticalization of postpositions and the concomitant syntactic changes are traced through the three millennia of Indo-Aryan attested history with a focus on Vedic Sanskrit, Middle Indic Pali and Apabhramsha, Early New Indic Old Awadhi, and finally Hindi. Among the topics discussed are the constructions in which the postpositions grammaticalize, the origins of the postpositional template, and the paradigmatization of the various elements involved into a single functional class of postpositions. The book outlines how it is semantic and pragmatic changes that induce changes on the expression side, ultimately resulting in the establishment of phrasal, and thus low-level configurational, syntax.

Hinduism comprises perhaps the major cluster of religio-cultural traditions of India, and it can play a valuable role in helping us understand the nature of religion and human responses to life. Hindu image-worship lies at the core of what counts for Hinduism - up-front and subject to much curiosity and misunderstanding, yet it is a defining feature of this phenomenon. This book focuses on Hindu images and their worship with special reference to Vaisnavism, a major strand of Hinduism. Concentrating largely, but not exclusively, on Sanskritic source material, the author shows in the course of the book that Hindu image-worship may be understood via three levels of interpretation: the metaphysical/theological, the narratival or mythic, and the performative or ritual. Analysing the chief philosophical paradigm underlying Hindu image-worship and its implications, the book exemplifies its widespread application and tackles, among other topics such as the origins of image-worship in Hinduism, the transition from Vedic to image worship, a distinguishing feature of Hindu images: their multiple heads and limbs. Finally, with a view to laying the grounds for a more positive dialogic relationship between Hinduism and the "Abrahamic" faiths, which tend to condemn Hindu image-worship as "idolatry", the author examines the theological explanation and justification for embodiment of the Deity in Hinduism and discusses how Hinduism might justify itself against such a charge. Rich in Indological detail, and with an impressive grasp of the philosophical and theological issues underlying Hindu material culture, and image-worship, this book will be of interest to academics and others studying theology, Indian philosophy and Hinduism.

This new verse translation of the classic Sanskrit text combines the skills of leading Hinduist Gavin Flood with the stylistic verve of award-winning poet and translator Charles Martin. The result is a living, vivid work that avoids dull pedantry and remains true to the extraordinarily influential original. A devotional, literary, and philosophical masterpiece of unsurpassed beauty and imaginative relevance, The Bhagavad Gita has inspired, among others, Mahatma Gandhi, J. Robert Oppenheimer, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, and Aldous Huxley. Its universal themes life and death, war and peace, sacrifice resonate in a West increasingly interested in Eastern religious experiences and the Hindu diaspora."

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.

After the War is a new translation of the final part of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit Epic poem about a devastating fraternal war. In this aftermath of the great war, the surviving heroes find various deaths, ranging from a drunken debacle in which they kill many of their own comrades to suicide through meditation and, finally, magical transportation to both heaven and hell. Bereaved mothers and widows on earth are comforted when their dead sons and husbands are magically conjured up from heaven and emerge from a river to spend one glorious night on earth with their loved ones. Ultimately, the bitterly opposed heroes of both sides are reconciled in heaven, but only when they finally let go of the vindictive masculine pride that has made each episode of violence give rise to another. Throughout the text, issues of truth and reconciliation, of the competing beliefs in various afterlives, and of the ultimate purpose of human life are debated. This last part of the Mahabharata has much to tell us both about the deep wisdom of Indian poets during the centuries from 300 BCE to 300 CE (the dates of the recension of this enormous text) and about the problems that we ourselves confront in the aftermath of our own genocidal and internecine wars. The author, a distinguished translator of Sanskrit texts (including the Rig Veda, the Laws of Manu, and the Kamasutra), puts the text into clear, flowing, contemporary prose, with a comprehensive but unintrusive critical apparatus. This book will delight general readers and enlighten students of Indian civilization and of great world literature.

For countless generations families have lived in isolated communities in the Godavari Delta of coastal Andhra Pradesh, learning and reciting their legacy of Vedas, performing daily offerings and occasional sacrifices. They are the virtually unrecognized survivors of a 3,700-year-old heritage, the last in India who perform the ancient animal and soma sacrifices according to Vedic tradition. In Vedic Voices, David M. Knipe offers for the first time, an opportunity for them to speak about their lives, ancestral lineages, personal choices as pandits, wives, children, and ways of coping with an avalanche of changes in modern India. He presents a study of four generations of ten families, from those born at the outset of the twentieth century down to their great-grandsons who are just beginning, at the age of seven, the task of memorizing their Veda, the Taittiriya Samhita, a feat that will require eight to twelve years of daily recitations. After successful examinations these young men will reside with the Veda family girls they married as children years before, take their places in the oral transmission of a three-thousand-year Vedic heritage, teach the Taittiriya collection of texts to their own sons, and undertake with their wives the major and minor sacrifices performed by their ancestors for some three millennia. Coastal Andhra, famed for bountiful rice and coconut plantations, has received scant attention from historians of religion and anthropologists despite a wealth of cultural traditions. Vedic Voices describes in captivating prose the geography, cultural history, pilgrimage traditions, and celebrated persons of the region. Here unfolds a remarkable story of Vedic pandits and their wives, one scarcely known in India and not at all to the outside world.

Techniques explained by the masters for today s spiritual seeker

Meditation is designed to give you direct access to the spiritual. Whether it s through deep breathing during a busy day, listening to the quiet after turning off the car radio, chanting in prayer, or ten minutes of visualization exercises each morning, meditation takes many forms. But it is always a personal method of centering our spiritual self.

Meditation has long been practiced in the Jewish community as a powerful tool to transcend words, personality, and ego and to directly experience the divine. Inspiring yet practical, this introduction to meditation from a Jewish perspective approaches it in a new and illuminating way: As it is personally practiced by today s most experienced Jewish meditators from around the world.

A how to guide for both beginning and experienced meditators, Meditation from the Heart of Judaism will help you start meditating or help you enhance your practice. Meditation is a Jewish spiritual resource for today that can benefit people of all faiths and backgrounds and help us add spiritual energy to our lives. Contributors include:

People have argued since time immemorial. Disagreement is a part of life, of human experience. But we now live in times when any form of protest in India is marked as anti-Indian and met with arguments that the very concept of dissent was imported into India from the West. As Romila Thapar explores in her timely historical essay, however, dissent has a long history in the subcontinent, even if its forms have evolved through the centuries. In Voices of Dissent: An Essay, Thapar looks at the articulation of nonviolent dissent and relates it to various pivotal moments throughout India's history. Beginning with Vedic times, she takes us from the second to the first millennium BCE, to the emergence of groups that were jointly called the Shramanas-the Jainas, Buddhists, and Ajivikas. Going forward in time, she also explores the views of the Bhakti sants and others of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and brings us to a major moment of dissent that helped to establish a free and democratic India: Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha. Then Thapar places in context the recent peaceful protests against India's new, controversial citizenship law, maintaining that dissent in our time must be opposed to injustice and supportive of democratic rights so that society may change for the better. Written by one of India's best-known public intellectuals, Voices of Dissent will be essential reading not for anyone interested in India's fascinating history, but also the direction in which the nation is headed.

Filled with down-to-earth wisdom, "The Law of Success" provides a spiritual dimension to such topics as creativity, positive thinking, dynamic will, self-analysis, as well as the power of meditation. This potent book can inspire us all to move through obstacles, overcome fears, and invite success into our own lives. More than 650,000 copies sold.

Explaining the origins, beliefs, scriptures and philosophies of this ancient religion, Klaus K. Klostermaier succeeds in capturing the rich diversity of rituals and gods that comprise Hinduism, while keeping the tone both engaging and informative. Covering contemporary issues such as the relationship between Hinduism and modern Western ideas, and imminent challenges the religion faces, this sweeping exploration of a fascinating and long-lasting belief system is essential reading for students, followers, and interested readers alike.

One of India's greatest epics, the Ramayana pervades the country's moral and cultural consciousness. For generations it has served as a bedtime story for Indian children, while at the same time engaging the interest of philosophers and theologians. Believed to have been composed by Valmiki sometime between the eighth and sixth centuries BC, the Ramayana tells the tragic and magical story of Rama, the prince of Ayodhya, an incarnation of Lord Visnu, born to rid the earth of the terrible demon Ravana. An idealized heroic tale ending with the inevitable triumph of good over evil, the Ramayana is also an intensely personal story of family relationships, love and loss, duty and honor, of harem intrigue, petty jealousies, and destructive ambitions. All this played out in a universe populated by larger-than-life humans, gods and celestial beings, wondrous animals and terrifying demons. With her magnificent translation and superb introduction, Arshia Sattar has successfully bridged both time and space to bring this ancient classic to modern English readers.

In recent years, India's ''sacred groves,'' small forests or stands of trees set aside for a deity's exclusive use, have attracted the attention of NGOs, botanists, specialists in traditional medicine and anthropologists. Environmentalists disillusioned by the failures of massive state-sponsored solutions to ecological problems have hailed them as an exemplary form of traditional community resource management. For, in spite of pressures to utilize their trees for fodder, housing and firewood, the religious taboos surrounding sacred groves have led to the conservation of pockets of abundant flora in areas otherwise denuded by deforestation. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu over seven years, Eliza F. Kent offers a compelling examination of the religious and social context in which sacred groves take on meaning for the villagers who maintain them, and shows how they have become objects of fascination and hope for Indian environmentalists. Sacred Groves and Local Gods traces a journey through Tamil Nadu, exploring how the localized meanings attached to forested shrines are changing under the impact of globalization and economic liberalization. Confounding simplistic representations of sacred groves as sites of a primitive form of nature worship, the book shows how local practices and beliefs regarding sacred groves are at once more imaginative, dynamic, and pragmatic than previously thought. Kent argues that rather than being ancient in origin, as previously asserted by scholars, the religious beliefs, practices, and iconography found in sacred groves suggest origins in the politically de-centered eighteenth century, when the Tamil country was effectively ruled by local chieftains. She analyzes two projects undertaken by environmentalists that seek to harness the traditions surrounding sacred groves in the service of forest restoration and environmental education.

This book explores the relationship between ethics, aesthetics, and religion in classical Indian literature and literary theory by focusing on one of the most celebrated and enigmatic texts to emerge from the Sanskrit epic tradition, the Mahabharata. This text, which is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important sources for the study of South Asian religious, social, and political thought, is a foundational text of the Hindu tradition(s) and considered to be a major transmitter of dharma (moral, social, and religious duty), perhaps the single most important concept in the history of Indian religions. However, in spite of two centuries of Euro-American scholarship on the epic, basic questions concerning precisely how the epic is communicating its ideas about dharma and precisely what it is saying about it are still being explored. Disorienting Dharma brings to bear a variety of interpretive lenses (Sanskrit literary theory, reader-response theory, and narrative ethics) to examine these issues. One of the first book-length studies to explore the subject from the lens of Indian aesthetics, it argues that such a perspective yields startling new insights into the nature of the depiction of dharma in the epic through bringing to light one of the principle narrative tensions of the epic: the vexed relationship between dharma and suffering. In addition, it seeks to make the Mahabharata interesting and accessible to a wider audience by demonstrating how reading the Mahabharata, perhaps the most harrowing story in world literature, is a fascinating, disorienting, and ultimately transformative experience.

Singing a Hindu Nation is a study of rags>riya kirtan, a western Indian performance medium that combines song, Hindu philosophical discourse, and nationalist storytelling. Beginning during the anti-colonial movement of the late nineteenth-century, performers of rags>riya kirtan led masses of Marathi-speaking people in temples and streets, and they have continued to preach and sing nationalism as devotion in the post-colonial era, and into the twenty-first century. In this book, author Anna Schultz demonstrates how, through this particular form of musical performance, the political becomes devotional, and explores why it motivates people to action and violence. Through both historical and ethnographic studies, Schultz shows that rags>riya kirtan has been especially successful in combining these two realms because kirtankars perform as representatives of the divine sage Narad, thereby infusing their nationalist messages with ritual weight. By speaking and singing in regional idioms with rich associations for Maharashtrian congregations, they use music to combine political and religious signs in ways that seem natural and desirable, promoting embodied experiences of nationalist devotion. As the first monograph on music and Hindu-nationalism, Singing a Hindu Nation presents a rare glimpse into the lives and performance worlds of nationalists on the margins of all-India political parties and cultural organizations, and is an essential resource for ethnomusicologists, as well as scholars of South Asian studies, religion, and political theory.

Singing a Hindu Nation is a study of rags>riya kirtan, a western Indian performance medium that combines song, Hindu philosophical discourse, and nationalist storytelling. Beginning during the anti-colonial movement of the late nineteenth-century, performers of rags>riya kirtan led masses of Marathi-speaking people in temples and streets, and they have continued to preach and sing nationalism as devotion in the post-colonial era, and into the twenty-first century. In this book, author Anna Schultz demonstrates how, through this particular form of musical performance, the political becomes devotional, and explores why it motivates people to action and violence. Through both historical and ethnographic studies, Schultz shows that rags>riya kirtan has been especially successful in combining these two realms because kirtankars perform as representatives of the divine sage Narad, thereby infusing their nationalist messages with ritual weight. By speaking and singing in regional idioms with rich associations for Maharashtrian congregations, they use music to combine political and religious signs in ways that seem natural and desirable, promoting embodied experiences of nationalist devotion. As the first monograph on music and Hindu-nationalism, Singing a Hindu Nation presents a rare glimpse into the lives and performance worlds of nationalists on the margins of all-India political parties and cultural organizations, and is an essential resource for ethnomusicologists, as well as scholars of South Asian studies, religion, and political theory.

David Shulman and Velcheru Narayana Rao offer a groundbreaking cultural biography of Srinatha, arguably the most creative figure in the thousand-year history of Telugu literature. This fourteenth- and fifteenth-century poet revolutionized the classical tradition and effectively created the classical genre of sustained, thematically focused, coherent large-scale compositions. Some of his works are proto-novellas: self-consciously fictional, focused on the development of characters, and endowed with compelling, fast-paced plots. Though entirely rooted in the cultural world of medieval south India, Srinatha is a poet of universal resonance and relevance. Srinatha: The Poet who Made Gods and Kings provides extended translations of Srinatha's major works and shows how the poet bridged gaps between oral (improvised) poetry and fixed literary works; between Telugu and the classical, pan-Indian language of Sanskrit; and between local and trans-local cultural contexts. Srinatha is a protean figure whose biography served the later literary tradition as a model and emblem for primary themes of Telugu culture, including the complex relations between sensual and erotic excess and passionate devotion to the temple god. He established himself as an ''Emperor of Poets'' who could make or break a great king and who, by encompassing the entire, vast geographical range of Andhra and Telugu speech, invented the idea of a comprehensive south Indian political empire (realized after his death by the Vijayanagara kings). In this wide-ranging and perceptive study, Shulman and Rao show Srinatha's place in a great classical tradition in a moment of profound cultural transformation.

Mirigavati or The Magic Doe is the work of Shaikh Qutban Suhravardi, an Indian Sufi master who was also an expert poet and storyteller attached to the glittering court-in-exile of Sultan Husain Shah Sharqi of Jaunpur. Composed in 1503 as an introduction to mystical practice for disciples, this powerful Hindavi or early Hindi Sufi romance is a richly layered and sophisticated text, simultaneously a spiritual enigma and an exciting love-story full of adventures. The Mirigavati is both an excellent introduction to Sufism and one of the true literary classics of pre-modern India, a story that draws freely on the large pool of Indian, Islamic, and European narrative motifs in its distinctive telling of a mystical quest and its resolution. Adventures from the Odyssey and the voyages of Sindbad the Sailor-sea voyages, encounters with monstrous serpents, damsels in distress, flying demons and cannibals in caves, among others-surface in Suhravardi's rollicking tale, marking it as first-rate entertainment for its time and, in private sessions in Sufi shrines, a narrative that shaped the interior journey for novices. Before his untimely death in 2009, Aditya Behl had completed this complete blank verse translation of the critical edition of the Mirigavati, which reveals the precise mechanism and workings of spiritual signification and use in a major tradition of world and Indian literature.

"The books line up on my shelf like bright Bodhisattvas ready to take tough questions or keep quiet company. They stake out a vast territory, with works from two millennia in multiple genres: aphorism, lyric, epic, theater, and romance."
--Willis G. Regier, "The Chronicle Review"

"No effort has been spared to make these little volumes as attractive as possible to readers: the paper is of high quality, the typesetting immaculate. The founders of the series are John and Jennifer Clay, and Sanskritists can only thank them for an initiative intended to make the classics of an ancient Indian language accessible to a modern international audience."
--"The Times Higher Education Supplement"

"The Clay Sanskrit Library represents one of the most admirable publishing projects now afoot. . . . Anyone who loves the look and feel and heft of books will delight in these elegant little volumes."
--"New Criterion"

"Published in the geek-chic format."
--"BookForum"

"Very few collections of Sanskrit deep enough for research are housed anywhere in North America. Now, twenty-five hundred years after the death of Shakyamuni Buddha, the ambitious Clay Sanskrit Library may remedy this state of affairs."
--"Tricycle"

aNow an ambitious new publishing project, the Clay Sanskrit Library brings together leading Sanskrit translators and scholars of Indology from around the world to celebrate in translating the beauty and range of classical Sanskrit literature. . . . Published as smart green hardbacks that are small enough to fit into a jeans pocket, the volumes are meant to satisfy both the scholar and the lay reader. Each volume has a transliteration of the original Sanskrit texton the left-hand page and an English translation on the right, as also a helpful introduction and notes. Alongside definitive translations of the great Indian epics -- 30 or so volumes will be devoted to the Maha-bharat itself -- Clay Sanskrit Library makes available to the English-speaking reader many other delights: The earthy verse of Bhartri-hari, the pungent satire of Jayanta Bhatta and the roving narratives of Dandin, among others. All these writers belong properly not just to Indian literature, but to world literature.a
--"LiveMint"

aThe Clay Sanskrit Library has recently set out to change the scene by making available well-translated dual-language (English and Sanskrit) editions of popular Sanskritic texts for the public.a
--"Namarupa"

"The Book of Virata" details the Pandavas' 13th year in exile, when they live disguised in King Virata's court. They suffer the humiliation of becoming servants; a topic explored both through comedy and pathos. Having maintained their disguise until the very end of the year, then their troubles really begin. Bhima is forced to come to Draupadi's rescue when King Virata's general, Kichaka, sets his sights on her. Duryodhana and the Tri-gartas decide to invade the defeated Virata's kingdom, unaware the Pandavas are hidden there. In the ensuing battles the Pandavas play a crucial role, save Virata and reveal their true identities. The book ends in celebration, with the Pandavas ready to return from exile and reclaim their kingdom. However, the battles in "Virata" foreshadow the war to come, proving it will not be easy.

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

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

There are many holy cities in India, but Mumbai is not usually considered one of them. More popular images of the city capture the world's collective imagination--as a Bollywood fantasia or a slumland dystopia. Yet for many, if not most, people who live in the city, the neighborhood streets are indeed shared with local gods and guardian spirits. In The Neighborhood of Gods, William Elison examines the link between territory and divinity in India's most self-consciously modern city. In this densely settled environment, space is scarce, and anxiety about housing is pervasive. Consecrating space--first with impromptu displays and then, eventually, with full-blown temples and official recognition--is one way of staking a claim. But how can a marginalized community make its gods visible, and therefore powerful, in the eyes of others? The Neighborhood of Gods explores this question, bringing an ethnographic lens to a range of visual and spatial practices: from the shrine construction that encroaches on downtown streets, to the "tribal art" practices of an indigenous group facing displacement, to the work of image production at two Bollywood film studios. A pioneering ethnography, this book offers a creative intervention in debates on postcolonial citizenship, urban geography, and visuality in the religions of India.

This in-depth study of the classical Hindi tradition brings the world of Mughal-era poetry and court culture alive for an English readership. Allison Busch draws on the perspectives of literary, social, and intellectual history to elucidate one of premodern India's most significant textual traditions, documenting the dramatic rise of a new type of professional Hindi writer while providing critical insight into the motives that animated this literary community and its patrons.
Busch examines how riti literature served as an important aesthetic and political resource in the richly multicultural world of Mughal India, and provides, for the first time in a Western language, a detailed study of the fascinating oeuvre of Keshavdas, whose seminal Rasikpriya (Handbook for poetryconnoisseurs, 1591) was the catalyst for a new Hindi classicism that attracted a spectacular following in the leading courts of early modern India. The circulation of Hindi literature among diverse communities during this period is testament to a remarkable pluralism that cannot be understood in terms of the nationalist logic that has constrained modern Hindi and Urdu to be "Hindu" and "Muslim" languages since the nineteenth century. With the cultural reforms ushered in by colonialism, north Indians repudiated the classical traditions of the courtly past, a complex process given extended treatment in the final chapter.
Busch provides valuable insight into more than two centuries of Hindi courtly culture. Poetry of Kings also showcases the importance of bringing precolonial archives into dialogue with current debates of postcolonial theory.