Originally published in 1956, this book provides a clear, scholarly, introduction to the main tenets of Zoroastrian dualism presented largely in the words of the Zoroastrian texts themselves. The book demonstrates the essential reasonableness of Zoroastrian dualism, which is the dualism of a good and an evil spirit, and to show what the means in everyday life and how it is philosophically justified. There are chapters on cosmology, the relation of man to God, the nature of religion, ethics, sacraments and sacrifice, the soul’s fate at death and eschatology.

Originally published in 1956, this book provides a clear, scholarly, introduction to the main tenets of Zoroastrian dualism presented largely in the words of the Zoroastrian texts themselves. The book demonstrates the essential reasonableness of Zoroastrian dualism, which is the dualism of a good and an evil spirit, and to show what the means in everyday life and how it is philosophically justified. There are chapters on cosmology, the relation of man to God, the nature of religion, ethics, sacraments and sacrifice, the soul's fate at death and eschatology.

The author, one of the foremost writers in the history of religions, intended this book to be the starting point for those searching for a personal religious experience and begins with an examination of the nature of mystical states and their differentiation from drug-induced states. He proceeds to the question of whether there is religious experience to either state. He offers those impatient with a traditional Christianity alternate routes to explore, by examining Zen, the Upanishads, Huxley, Bonhoeffer, Leary, Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and commenting upon each with his ascerbic wit. This reprint of the 1972 American edition published by Pantheon contains a new foreword by one of Zaehner's former Oxford students, William L. Newell.

Comprises such sacred books of India as the hymns of the Rig-Veda, the world's first recorded poems, the stirring pantheistic speculations of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita, a cosmic drama of God's self-revelation in human history, on the field of human battle.

This book, based upon a Jordan Lecture in Comparative Religion of 1959, traces the development of mystical thought during the formative periods of the Hindu and Muslim traditions. The religions are discussed separately but comparisons are offered wherever appropriate. The part on Hinduism focuses on the classical Upanishads, the Yogasutras, the Bhagavad-Gita, and Ramanuja's commentary on them. For Islam, the focus is on the monistic revolution introduced by Abu Yazid, which Zaehner traces to the influence of Indian thought and through Junayd's restoration of the theistic balance to the monism of the late writings of Ghazali.