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.

"Hindutva" in India is a chauvinist and majoritarian political ideology that conjures up the image of a peaceful Hindu Self vis-a-vis the threatening minority Other. It is "porno-nationalism" in its obsessive preoccupation with the predatory sexuality of the putative Muslim figure and the dangers to the integrity of the Hindu bodies. The proponents of "Hindutva" mobilize and generate negative stereotypes of Islam and putative Muslims to legitimize violence against actual Muslims living in India. Adopting a critical ethnographic approach, this book investigates myriad ways in which the discourses of culture, insecurity, gender, identity, and violence intersect in Hindu nationalism's reactionary and right-wing politics of fear and imagination.

Renowned lecturer Mark W. Muesse brings readers into an encounter with the world's oldest living religious tradition, known as Hinduism. Muesse's brief survey challenges the perception of Hinduism as one religious tradition, showing how wonderfully rich and diverse this ancient story truly is. Muesse traces the vast history and practices of classic and diverse traditions, moving from the origins in the Indus Valley up through classic and contemporary periods. He exhibits a keen sense of the myriad spiritualities associated with Hinduism, demonstrating how the religious tradition is both monotheistic and polytheistic. With photographs and maps, chapter overviews, timelines, summaries, key terms, study questions, suggested readings, and a glossary, Muesse's work incorporates valuable pedagogy to enhance his engaging account of the many Hindu traditions.

Hindu God, Christian God offers an in-depth study of key themes common to the Hindu and Christian religious traditions. It redefines how we think about Hinduism, comparative study, and Christian theology. This book offers a bold new look at how the two traditions encounter one another, and how comparisons can be made between the two. Redefining theology as an interreligious, comparative, dialogical, and confessional practice open to people of all traditions, it invites not only Hindus and Christians, but also theologians from all religious traditions, to enter into conversation with one another.

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.

Kali Kaula is a practical and experiential journey through the land of living magickal art that is Tantra, guided by the incisive, inspired and multi-talented hands of Jan Fries. By stripping away the fantasies and exploring the roots, flowers and fruits of Tantra, the author provides an outstandingly effective and coherent manual of practices. Acknowledging the huge diversity of Tantric material produced over the centuries, Jan Fries draws on several decades of research and experience and focuses on the early traditions of Kula, Kaula and Krama, and the result is this inimitable work which shines with the light of possibility. Unique in style and content, this book is more than a manual of tantric magick, it is a guide to the exploration of the inner soul. It contains the most lucid discussions of how to achieve liberation in the company of numerous Indian goddesses and gods, each of whom brings their own lessons and gifts to the dedicated seeker. It is also an eloquent introduction to the mysteries of the great goddess Kali, providing numerous views of her manifold nature, and showing the immense but hidden role played throughout history by women in the development and dissemination of tantric practices and beliefs.Jan Fries explores the spectrum of techniques from mudra to mantra, pranayama to puja, from kundalini arousal to purification to sexual rites, and makes them both accessible and relevant, translating them out of the Twilight Language of old texts and setting them in the context of both personal transformation and the historical evolution of traditions. The web of connections between Tantra and Chinese Alchemy and Taoism are explored as the author weaves together many of the previously disparate strands of philosophies and practices. This book challenges the reader to dream, delight, and develop, and provides an illustrated guidebook on how to do so. Bliss awaits those who dare.

The advent of Hindu Studies coincides with the emergence of modern hermeneutics. Despite this co-emergence and rich possibilities inherent in dialectical encounters between theories of modern and post-modern hermeneutics, and those of Hindu hermeneutical traditions, such an enterprise has not been widely endeavored. The aim of this volume is to initiate such an interface. Essays in this volume reflect one or more of the following categories: (1) Examination of challenges and possibilities inherent in applying Western hermeneutics to Hindu traditions. (2) Critiques of certain heuristics used, historically, to "understand" Hindu traditions. (3) Elicitation of new hermeneutical paradigms from Hindu thought, to develop cross-cultural or dialogical hermeneutics. Applications of interpretive methodologies conditioned by Western culture to classify Indian thought have had important impacts. Essays by Sharma, Bilimoria, Sugirtharajah, and Tilak examine these impacts, offering alternate interpretive models for understanding Hindu concepts in particular and the Indian religious context in general. Several essays offer original insights regarding potential applications of traditional Hindu philosophical principles to cross-cultural hermeneutics (Long, Bilimoria, Klostermaier, Adarkar, and Taneja). Others engage Hindu texts philosophically to elicit deeper interpretations (Phillips, and Rukmani). In presenting essays that are both critical and constructive, we seek to uncover intellectual space for creative dialectical engagement that, we hope, will catalyze a reciprocal hermeneutics.

This book investigates Rammohun Roy as a transnational celebrity. It examines the role of religious heterodoxy--particularly Christian Unitarianism--in transforming a colonial outsider into an imagined member of the emerging Victorian social order It uses his fame to shed fresh light on nineteenth-century British reformers, including advocates of liberty of the press, early feminists, free trade imperialists, and constitutional reformers such as Jeremy Bentham. Rammohun Roy's intellectual agendas are also interrogated, particularly how he employed Unitarianism and the British satiric tradition to undermine colonial rule in Bengal and provincialize England as a laggard nation in the progress towards rational religion and political liberty.

People in India form images of Jesus Christ that link up with their own culture. Hindus have given Jesus a place among the teachers and gods of their own religion, seeing in his life something of the wisdom and mysticism that is so central to Hinduism. Christians in India also make use of the concepts provided by Hinduism when they wish to express the meaning of Christ. Thus, in any case, Jesus is-for Hindus and Christians-a guru, a teacher of wisdom who speaks with divine authority. But for many Hindu philosophers and Christian theologians there is much more that can be said about him within the Indian framework. He can be described as an "avatara," a divine descent, or linked to the Brahman, the all-encompassing Reality. This study looks at both Hindu and Christian views of Christ, starting with that of the Hindu reformer Rammohan Roy at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as well as those of the first Christian theologians of India. The views of Mahatma Gandhi and the monks of the Ramakrishna Mission are discussed, and those of influential Christian schools such as the Ashram movement and "dalit" theology. Five intermezzos indicate how artists in India portray Jesus Christ.

A fascinating read for scholars and general readers alike, Class and Religion highlights the interdependence between the class structure and the Vedic and Brahmanical form of religion in ancient India. It seeks to demolish the myth that religiosity and spirituality were the distinctive characteristics of ancient Indian civilization. The author demonstrates that religion was a superstructure of class relations used primarily by the ruling class and the state to perpetuate a predatory class structure based on exploitation and oppression. Buddhism, foreign immigrant communities, Atheist-rationalist philosophies and the rise of Shudra dynasties threatened to destabilize the class-caste structure that had come into existence in the late Rig Vedic period. However, the Brahmanical revival led by the ruling class and the state from the second century B.C. restored the Vedic religion and the class-caste structure in a slightly modified form. A thorough analysis of the Vedas and Upanishads, Manusmriti, Gita, Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Puranas has been attempted in the context of the relevant period.

Offering multilayered explorations of Hindu understandings of the Feminine, both human and divine, this book emphasizes theological and activist methods and aims over historical, anthropological, and literary ones.

Followers of the early "New Age" movement known as New Thought, which was wildly popular at the turn of the 20th century, were intensely interested in gleaning the fruit of all of humanity's spiritual wisdom. In this 1908 work, one of the most influential New Thought writers and editors shares with Western readers the "root-ideas" of Indian language, symbology, and philosophy that have given birth to much of the knowledge of all of humanity, casting the mysteries of the East in an easily comprehensive light. He discusses: . the Sankhya system . the Vedanta system . Patanjali's yoga system . Buddhism . Sufiism . the Vedas . and more. American writer WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON (1862-1932) was editor of the popular magazine New Thought from 1901 to 1905, and editor of the journal Advanced Thought from 1916 to 1919. He authored dozens of New Thought books under numerous pseudonyms, some of which are likely still unknown today, including "Yogi Ramacharaka" and "Theron Q. Dumont."

Here in one compact volume is the "cream of Hindu philosophical thought," a collection of aphorisms, sayings, and proverbs culled from the Upanishads, the sacred writings of India, and assembled by one of the most influential writers and editors of the New Thought movement of the early 20th century, the adherents of which were profoundly interested in the collective spiritual wisdom of all humanity. This 1907 volume features the fruit of Hindu thinking on: . The Real Self . The Way . The Student . The Teacher . The Law of Karma . Spiritual Knowing . and more. American writer WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON (1862-1932) was editor of the popular magazine New Thought from 1901 to 1905, and editor of the journal Advanced Thought from 1916 to 1919. He authored dozens of New Thought books under numerous pseudonyms, some of which are likely still unknown today, including "Yogi Ramacharaka" and "Theron Q. Dumont."

Using original religious-philosophical texts and sociological research, the author explores the various dimensions of the Virasaiva religious tradition. His sociological analyses of the monastic organization and social structure, the family and the community, the roles of women, and the future of the community emphasize the intricate relationship between religion and the social system. This study of a largely unknown religious community demonstrates how the followers of Virasaivism, known as Lingayats, have been adapting to the changing milieu in North America while retaining the religion's core values. Dr. Chekki shows the interplay between tradition and modernity as the Virasaivas attempt to maintain a distinct identity while adopting the ways of modern culture.