Featuring chapters by an international team of leading scholars in the field, this is a comprehensive reference guide to Hindu Studies. "The Continuum Companion to Hindu Studies" offers the definitive guide to Hinduism and study in this area. This book covers all the most pressing and important themes and categories in the field - areas that have continued to attract interest historically as well as topics that have emerged more recently as active areas of research. Seventeen specially commissioned essays from an international team of experts reveal where important work continues to be done in the field and, valuably, how the various topics intersect through detailed reading paths. Featuring a series of indispensible research tools, including a detailed list of resources, chronology and diagrams summarizing content, this is the essential reference tool for anyone working in Hindu Studies. "The Continuum Companions series" is a major series of single volume companions to key research fields in the humanities aimed at postgraduate students, scholars and libraries. Each companion offers a comprehensive reference resource giving an overview of key topics, research areas, new directions and a manageable guide to beginning or developing research in the field. A distinctive feature of these series is that each companion provides practical guidance on advanced study and research in the field, including research methods and subject-specific resources.

This fascinating and innovative book explores the relationship between the philosophical underpinnings of Advaita Vedanta, Zen Buddhism and the experiential journey of spiritual practitioners. Taking the perspective of the questioning student, the author highlights the experiential deconstructive processes that are ignited when students' "everyday" dualistic thought structures are challenged by the non-dual nature of these teachings and practices. Although Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism are ontologically different, this unique study shows that in the dynamics of the practice situation they are phenomenologically similar. Distinctive in scope and approach Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism: Deconstructive Modes of Spiritual Inquiry examines Advaita and Zen as living practice traditions in which foundational non-dual philosophies are shown "in action" in contemporary Western practice situations thus linking abstract philosophical tenets to concrete living experience. As such it takes an important step toward bridging the gap between scholarly analysis and the experiential reality of these spiritual practices. >

Arthur Osborne has packed into this small volume all of the essential information relating to the life and teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950). The extraordinary teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi continue to bless the lives of countless seeking souls, and his life fills us with wonder. As a teenager-hardly seventeen-he realized the Self through a spontaneous act of Self-enquiry without conscious effort or special training imparted by a teacher. He left his home (at Madurai) in 1896 and came to Arunachala (Tiruvannamalai), where he lived as an all-renouncing sage in a state of continuous Self-realization for fifty-four years-until his mahanirvana in 1950. The author includes in this volume instructions given by Sri Ramana to early devotees, such as Sivaprakasam Pillai, Frank Humphreys, Kavyakanta, Natesa Mudaliar, and others, as well as the experiences of Paul Brunton and other later devotees. Sri Maharshi's central message is that Self-knowledge is not something to be acquired afresh. It is only becoming aware of one's own natural state of Pure Being, through Self-enquiry. Arthur Osborne (1906-1970) was an ardent devotee of Sri Ramana Maharshi and particularly well known as founder-editor of The Mountain Path, the spiritual journal of Sri Ramanasramam. After completing his studies at Oxford, he moved first to Poland, then to Bangkok, where he lectured at Chulalonghorn University and through a friend learnt about French metaphysician Rene Guenon, whose works dealt comprehensively with Hindu metaphysics, eventually translating into English his Crisis of the Modern World. He later spent four years as a prisoner of war of the Japanese before being united with his family, who were waiting at Sri Ramanasramam, Tiruvannamalai. He spent the remainder of his life there, writing about Sri Ramana and related subjects. He died in 1970, his body much weakened by the effect of his years in the concentration camp.

Many persons have written the Mantras, Stotras, Stuti, Chalisa and Aarti in English but this is the first time that they have been written in English rhyme. The Author, Munindra Misra has covered the most popular Hindu Gods and Goddesses and thus made it easier for people to comprehend the meaning and also appreciate the same in rhyme. The Deities covered are Lord Ganesh, Lord Shiv, Lord Vishnu, Lord Krishna, Lord Ram, Lord Hanuman, Lord Shani, Ma Gayatri, Ma Durga, Ma Laxmi, Ma Mahakali, Ma Saraswati, Ma Ganga and Ma Santoshi and others. A general understanding of each deity has also been written by the author in English rhyme as a primer to each Deity.

Recent years have seen an explosion in the scholarship on the religious experiences of women. The contributors to this volume believe that more sophisticated studies at higher levels of theoretical analysis are now needed. Their essays involve the close reading of situations in which women are given or denied authority in ritual and interpretive situations. This approach involves not only how women are represented by Indian texts, but several other perspectives: how the particular strategies of debate about women are carried on, how women are depicted as negotiating certain kinds of authority, and how women might resist particular kings of traditional authority in certain colonial and post-colonial situations. Including new work by such scholars as Stephanie Jamison, Vasudha Narayanan, and Ann Grozdins Gold, this collection will set a new benchmark for feminist studies of Hinduism.

The translator's idea of rendering the Upanishads into clear simple English, accessible to Occidental readers, had its origin in a visit paid to a Boston friend in 1909. The gentleman, then battling with a fatal malady, took from his library shelf a translation of the Upanishads and, opening it, expressed deep regret that the obscure and unfamiliar form shut from him what he felt to be profound and vital teaching. The desire to unlock the closed doors of this ancient treasure house, awakened at that time, led to a series of classes on the Upanishads at The Vedanta Centre of Boston during its early days in St. Botolph Street. The translation and commentary then given were trans-cribed and, after studious revision, were published in the Centre's monthly magazine, "The Message of the East," in 1913 and 1914.. Still further revision has brought it to its present form.

Ren Gunon's Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrines can serve as an introduction to all his later works-especially those which, like Man and His Becoming according to the Vedanta, The Symbolism of the Cross, The Multiple States of the Being, and Studies in Hinduism, expound the more profound aspects of metaphysical doctrines in greater detail. In Part I Guenon clears away certain ingrained prejudices inherited from the 'Renaissance', with its adulation of the Greco-Roman culture and its compensating depreciation-both deliberate and instinctive-of other civilizations. In Part II he establishes the fundamental distinctions between various modes of thought and brings out the real nature of metaphysical or universal knowledge-an understanding of which is the first condition for the personal realization of that 'Knowledge' which partakes of the Absolute. Words like 'religion', 'philosophy', 'symbolism', 'mysticism', and 'superstition', are here given a precise meaning. Part III presents a more detailed examination of the Hindu doctrine and its applications at different levels, leading up to the Vedanta, which constitutes its metaphysical essence. Lastly, Part IV resumes the task of clearing away current misconceptions, but is this time concerned not with the West itself, but with distortions of the Hindu doctrines that have arisen as a result of attempts to read into them, or to graft onto them, modern Western conceptions. The concluding chapter lays down the essential conditions for any genuine understanding between East and West, which can only come through the work of those who have attained, at least in some degree, to the realization of 'wisdom uncreate'-that intellective, suprarational knowledge called in the East jana, and in the West gnosis.

This excellent book represents one of the first and best presentations of Eastern wisdom in the English language. It concerns ancient Hindu traditions and the Yogic practice of observing and regulating the breath. We begin with an admission that Western students are often confused by what exactly Yoga is, and what it is meant to accomplish. Stereotypes of the yogi as spindly, dirty and disheveled men commonly seen sitting in fixed posture at a roadside or marketplace abound. Yet these dismissive images serve only to neglect the spiritual substance and ancient wisdom of yogi science. Seeking to dispel the negative stereotypes and present the vivid truth, Atkinson discusses the multiple schools of yoga and their general purpose. Some emphasize control over the body's motions, while others favor inner development of the spirit. Several however emphasize the control of the breath; and it a practical explanation of this that Atkinson relays in the remaining fifteen chapters of this book.

Translating Kali's Feast is an interdisciplinary study of the Goddess Kali bringing together ethnography and literature within the theoretical framework of translation studies. The idea for the book grew out of the experience and fieldwork of the authors, who lived with Indo-Caribbean devotees of the Hindu Goddess in Guyana. Using a variety of discursive forms including oral history and testimony, field notes, songs, stories, poems, literary essays, photographic illustrations, and personal and theoretical reflections, it explores the cultural, aesthetic and spiritual aspects of the Goddess in a diasporic and cross-cultural context. With reference to critical and cultural theorists including Walter Benjamin and Julia Kristeva, the possibilities offered by Kali (and other manifestations of the Goddess) as the site of translation are discussed in the works of such writers as Wilson Harris, V.S. Naipaul and R.K. Narayan. The book articulates perspectives on the experience of living through displacement and change while probing the processes of translation involved in literature and ethnography and postulating links between 'rite' and 'write,' Hindu 'leela' and creole 'play.'

Studies in Hinduism consists of articles published posthumously, to which has been added Ren Gunon's separate study, Eastern Metaphysics, the text of a lecture delivered at the Sorbonne. In this work Gunon completes his presentation of Hindu metaphysics, which he considered the most primordial and comprehensive body of spiritual teaching possessed by the human race, one capable of throwing light upon and illuminating the essence of every other Tradition. Of special interest are three chapters on various aspects of tantra-a doctrine profoundly misunderstood in the contemporary West-which Hindu authorities consider the spirituality most appropriate to the Kali Yuga, as well as a chapter on the sanatana dharma, the Hindu concept closest to the ancient and medieval Christian idea of the philosophia perennis, which led St Augustine to declare that Christianity has always existed, but only came to be so called after the coming of Christ. Included are extensive reviews of books on Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo Ghose, Rabindranath Tagore, Mircea Eliade, Paul Brunton, and others, as well as 40 pages of reviews of books and articles by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Leading Indian thinkers have called Gunon the most authentic expositor of Hindu metaphysics in any Western language.

Life History of Shirdi Sai Baba was originally written in Telugu by Ammula Sambasiva Rao, and translated into English by Thota Bhaskara Roa. The book delves deep into the details of the life of Shirdi Sai Baba right from his birth till his attainment of Samadhi. The author has expounded Sai Tatwa or Sai philosophy in a simple language, interspersed with engrossing anecdotes in the life of Sai devotees.

In literature and popular imagination, the Bauls of India and Bangladesh are characterized as musical mystics: orange-clad nomads of both Hindu and Muslim backgrounds. They wander the countryside and entertain with their passionate singing and unusual behavior, and they are especially well-known for their evocative songs, which challenge the caste system and sectarianism prevalent in South Asia.
Although Bauls claim to value women over men, little is known about the individual views and experiences of Baul women. Based on ethnographic research in both the predominantly Hindu context of West Bengal (India) and the Muslim country of Bangladesh, this book explores the everyday lives of Baul women. Lisa Knight examines the contradictory expectations regarding Baul women: on the one hand, the ideal of a group unencumbered by societal restraints and concerns and, on the other, the real constraints of feminine respectability that seemingly curtail women's mobility and public performances.
Knight demonstrates that Baul women respond to these conflicting expectations in various ways, sometimes adopting and other times subverting local gendered norms to craft meaningful lives. More so than their male counterparts, Baul women feel encumbered by norms. But rather than seeing Baul women's normative behavior as indicative of their conformity to gendered roles (and, therefore, failures as Bauls), Knight argues that these women creatively draw on societal expectations to transcend their social limits and create new paths.