Hinduism

Hinduism is practised by nearly eighty per cent of India's population, and by some seventy million people outside India. In this Very Short Introduction, Kim Knott offers a succinct and authoritative overview of this major religion, and analyses the challenges facing it in the twenty-first century. She discusses key preoccupations of Hinduism such as the centrality of the Veda as religious texts, the role of Brahmins, gurus, and storytellers in the transmission of divine truths, and the cultural and moral importance of epics such as the Ramayana. In this second edition Knott considers the impact of changes in technology and the flourishing of social media on Hinduism, and looks at the presence of Hinduism in popular culture, considering pieces such as Sita Sings the Blues. She also analyses recent developments in India, and the impact issues such as Hindu nationalism and the politicization of Hinduism have on Hindus worldwide.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The Bhagavad Gita, "The Song of the Lord," is probably the best known of all the Indian scriptures, and Easwaran's clear, accessible translation is the best-selling edition. The Gita opens dramatically, with prince Arjuna collapsing in anguish on the brink of a war that he doesn't want to fight. Arjuna has lost his way on the battlefield of life, and turns to his spiritual guide, Sri Krishna, the Lord himself. Krishna replies in 700 verses of sublime instruction on living and dying, loving and working, and the nature of the soul. This book includes an extensive and very readable introduction, which places the Gita in its historical setting, explains the key concepts, and brings out the universality of its teachings. Individual chapter introductions prepare the reader for the main themes, and notes, a Sanskrit glossary, and an index are included. Although the battlefield is a perfect backdrop, for Easwaran the Gita's subject is the war within, the struggle for self-mastery that every human being must wage. Arjuna's dilemma is acutely modern, and the Gita's message remains as relevant for us now as it was for ancient India.

Ideal for courses in beginning Sanskrit or self-study, this textbook employs modern, tried-and-tested pedagogical methods and tools, but requires no prior knowledge of ancient languages or linguistics. Devanāgarī script is introduced over several chapters and used in parallel with transliteration for several chapters more, allowing students to progress in learning Sanskrit itself while still mastering the script. Students are exposed to annotated original texts in addition to practise sentences very early on, and structures and systems underlying the wealth of forms are clearly explained to facilitate memorisation. All grammar is covered in detail, with chapters dedicated to compounding and nominal derivation, and sections explaining relevant historical phenomena. The introduction also includes a variety of online resources that students may use to reinforce and expand their knowledge: flash cards; video tutorials for all chapters; and up-to-date links to writing, declension and conjugation exercises and online dictionaries, grammars, and textual databases.

Discover the traditional stories and wisdom behind your favourite yoga poses in this stunningly illustrated book of Indian mythology for yogis of all levels.A beautifully written introduction to Indian mythology, join storyteller, scholar and teacher, Dr Raj Balkaran, and explore the unforgettable tales behind 50 key yoga poses, such as: Vīrabhadrāsana II, the original warrior poseTāḍāsana, mountain poseBhujaṅgāsana, cobra poseGaruḍāsana, eagle posePadmāsana, lotus poseVīrāsana, hero poseŚavāsana, corpse pose Meet iconic Gods and Goddesses, from Gaṇeśa, the elephant-headed god of wisdom, to Śiva, Lord of Yogis, and Kali, goddess of mind, body, soul and death. Explore the rivalry between the sages Vasiṣṭha and Viśvāmitra, and their cosmic feud over a wish-fulfilling cow.Plunge into the depths of one of the richest myths in Hinduism: the battle between the demons and the gods who churn the cosmic oceans in search for the elixir of immortality. And learn how Śiva got his blue throat!  Learn, through the mythology of the poses, more about the roots of this ancient practice and how you can use their teachings to better appreciate and respect yoga’s true origins.  Enhance your practice by reading one story before or at the end of class, and incorporating the poses and their teaching into your life, as well as your yoga practice, and transform the way you view and practice this timeless art.

Upanisadernas många anonyma författare levde under de sju sista århundradena före vår tideräkning en tid av dramatiska förändringar i norra Indien, då nya läror som buddhismen och jainismen uppstod. Deras verk ger oss en fascinerande inblick i människans sökande efter sanningen, ofta i form av dialoger mellan mästare och lärjungar. Här möter vi för första gången i den indiska idéhistorien begrepp som karma och yoga, föreställningar om återfödelse och om andlig frigörelse genom självinsikt. Denna bok innehåller de tolv äldsta och mest välkända upanishaderna, som nu för första gången föreligger i direktöversättning från sanskrit till svenska. Den texttrogna översättningen grundar sig på den senaste forskningen, men riktar sig till en bred publik. Detta är ett av hinduismens mest kända verk vid sidan om Bhavadgita (utgavs av Norstedts i översättning av Martin Gansten).

In this magisterial volume of essays, Wendy Doniger enhances our understanding of the ancient and complex religion to which she has devoted herself for half a century. This series of interconnected essays and lectures surveys the most critically important and hotly contested issues in Hinduism over 3,500 years, from the ancient time of the Vedas to the present day.The essays contemplate the nature of Hinduism; Hindu concepts of divinity; attitudes concerning gender, control, and desire; the question of reality and illusion; and the impermanent and the eternal in the two great Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Among the questions Doniger considers are: Are Hindus monotheists or polytheists? How can atheists be Hindu, and how can unrepentant Hindu sinners find salvation? Why have Hindus devoted so much attention to the psychology of addiction? What does the significance of dogs and cows tell us about Hinduism? How have Hindu concepts of death, rebirth, and karma changed over the course of history? How and why does a pluralistic faith, remarkable for its intellectual tolerance, foster religious intolerance?Doniger concludes with four concise autobiographical essays in which she reflects on her lifetime of scholarship, Hindu criticism of her work, and the influence of Hinduism on her own philosophy of life. On Hinduism is the culmination of over forty years of scholarship from a renowned expert on one of the world's great faiths.

För en västerländsk publik kommenterar Paul Brunton centrala delar av Bhagavadgita, den österländska heliga skriften.Prins Arjuna, en människa med höga andliga ideal, drar ut i striden med bågar, spjut och slamrande sköldar. I denna högdramatiska omgivning får han undervisning av Krishna, den gudomlige läraren. Det ger Arjuna frid i sinnet och kraft och mod att handla. Han inser att hans motståndare är evighetsväsen som han själv.Arjunas strid kunde lika gärna ha förts på marknadsplatsen eller var som helst där materialistiska krafter hotar att förkväva den inre människan.Ur innehållet:Inblickar i högre indisk filosofi; Träd med många grenar; Det Gudomliga Jaget; Medvetandet och världen; Självförverkligande; Många yogasystem; Lärarens roll; Kosmologi; Karmas lag

Among the oldest of India's spiritual texts, the Upanishads are records of intensive question-and-answer sessions given by illumined sages to their students - in ashrams, at family gatherings, in a royal court, and in the kingdom of Death. The sages share flashes of insight, extraordinary visions, the results of their investigation into consciousness itself. The Upanishads have puzzled and inspired wisdom seekers from Yeats to Schopenhauer. In this best-selling translation, Eknath Easwaran makes these challenging texts more accessible by selecting the passages most relevant to readers seeking timeless truths today. This book includes an overview of the cultural and historical setting, with chapter introductions, notes, and a Sanskrit glossary. But it is Easwaran's understanding of the wisdom of the Upanishads that makes this edition truly outstanding. Each sage, each Upanishad, appeals in a different way to the reader's head and heart. For Easwaran, the Upanishads are part of India's precious legacy, not just to Hinduism but to humanity, and in that spirit they are offered here.

The Upanishads, the earliest of which were composed in Sanskrit between 800 and 400 bce by sages and poets, form part of the Vedas - the sacred and ancient scriptures that are the basis of the Hindu religion. Each Upanishad, or lesson, takes up a theme ranging from the attainment of spiritual bliss to karma and rebirth, and collectively they are meditations on life, death and immortality. The essence of their teachings is that truth can by reached by faith rather than by thought, and that the spirit of God is within each of us - we need not fear death as we carry within us the promise of eternal life.

Snakes exist in the myths of most societies, often embodying magical, mysterious forces. Snake cults were especially important in eastern India and Bangladesh, where for centuries worshippers of the indigenous snake goddess Manasa resisted the competing religious influences of Indo-Europeans and Muslims. The result was a corpus of verse texts narrating Manasa’s struggle to win universal adoration.The Triumph of the Snake Goddess is the first comprehensive retelling of this epic tale in modern English. Scholar and poet Kaiser Haq offers a composite prose translation of Manasa’s story, based on five extant versions. Following the tradition of mangalkavyas—Bengali verse narratives celebrating the deeds of deities in order to win their blessings—the tale opens with a creation myth and a synopsis of Indian mythology, zooming in on Manasa, the miraculous child of the god Shiva. Manasa easily wins the allegiance of everyone except the wealthy merchant Chand, who holds fast in his devotion to Shiva despite seeing his sons massacred. A celestial couple is incarnated on earth to fulfill Manasa’s design: Behula, wife to one of Chand’s slain sons, undertakes a harrowing odyssey to restore him to life with Manasa’s help, ultimately persuading Chand to bow to the snake goddess.A prologue by Haq explores the Bengali oral, poetic, and manuscript traditions behind this Hindu folk epic—a vibrant part of popular Bengali culture, Hindu and Muslim, to this day—and an introduction by Wendy Doniger examines the history and significance of snake worship in classical Sanskrit texts.

**A Financial Times Best Summer Book of 2025 **'A brave and magnificent book, and a vital intervention: as elegant as it is witty, as erudite as it is wise, and as stylish as it is scholarly. Manu Pillai is fast becoming one of India's most accomplished and impressively wide-ranging historians' William DalrympleWhen European missionaries arrived in India in the sixteenth century, they entered a world both fascinating and bewildering. Hinduism, as they saw it, was a pagan mess: a worship of devils and monsters by a people who burned women alive, performed outlandish rites and fed children to crocodiles. But it quickly became clear that Hindu ‘idolatry’ was far more layered and complex than European stereotypes allowed, surprisingly even sharing certain impulses with Christianity.Nonetheless, missionaries became a threatening force as European power grew in India. Western ways of thinking gained further ascendancy during the British Raj: while interest in Hindu thought influenced Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire in Europe, Orientalism and colonial rule pressed Hindus to reimagine their religion. In fact, in resisting foreign authority, they often adopted the missionaries’ own tools and strategies. It is this encounter, Manu S. Pillai argues, that has given Hinduism its present shape, also contributing to the birth of an aggressive Hindu nationalism.Gods, Guns and Missionaries surveys these remarkable dynamics with an arresting cast of characters – maharajahs, poets, gun-wielding revolutionaries, politicians, polemicists, philosophers and clergymen. Lucid, ambitious, and provocative, it is at once a political history, an examination of the mutual impact of Hindu culture and Christianity upon each other, and a study of the forces that have prepared the ground for politics in India today. Turning away from simplistic ideas on religious evolution and European imperialism, the past as it appears here is more complicated – and infinitely richer – than previous narratives allow.

Adi Shankaras klassiska Sutras nu äntligen på svenska! Översättning och kommentarer av Jan Fahleman. Atma Bodha, Aparokshanbhuti och Bhaja Govindam är författade av Sri Adi Shankara, troligen i början av 800-talet. Texterna består av verser på rad/tråd – Sutras och beskriver den ickedualistiska filosofin Advaita Vedanta. Sri Shankaras filosofi är baserad på den fullständiga identiteten mellan Atman och Brahman. Allt är Brahman, Gudomens och tillvarons enhet samt Atmans (Själens) gudomlighet. Texten är tillägnad hans lärjunge Padmapada. Den ingår i Prakarana Grantha som är en mängd skrifter eller Upanishader skrivna av lärare eller andliga mästare, som skall bidra till att öka förståelsen för Vedanta. Under resor i Indien med sina lärjungar gav han sig ofta in i filosofoska diskussioner med företrädare för andra filosofier. Det var ett sätt för honom att kunna framhålla Advaita Vedanta. Jan Fahleman

ÄNTLIGEN NYUTGÅVA PÅ SVENSKA! Bhagavad-Gita, Herrens sång, är en av världens mest älskade böcker. Genom århundraden har Krishnas ord till den förtvivlade Arjuna väglett villrådiga sökare med sin tidlösa visdom. Bhagavad-Gita visar vägen till ljuset, bevittnandet och glädjen. Den inspirerar och stillar sinnet. Den hjälper dig att öppna ditt hjärta. ”När tvivlen jagar mig...och jag inte kan se en enda stråle av hopp vid horisonten...då vänder jag mig till Bhagavad-Gita...och då börjar jag omedelbart att le trots att jag är överväldigad av sorg.” Mahatma Gandhi ”Gitan är...den eviga kärlekens ljus, som förtar fruktan, min största fiende.” Dan Andersson

New Bonus Materials added to this edition include: · The last chapter that Yogananda wrote covering the years 1946-1951 that was not available in the original edition. · The eulogy that Yogananda wrote for Gandhi. · A new afterword by Swami Kriyananda, one of Yogananda's closest disciples. · Named One of the Top 100 Spiritual Books of Last Century This is not an ordinary book. It is a spiritual treasure. To read its message of hope to all truthseekers is to begin a great adventure. Paramhansa Yogananda was the first yoga master of India whose mission it was to permanently live and teach in the West. In the 1920's, as he criss-crossed the United States on what he called his "spiritual campaigns," his enthusiastic audiences filled the largest halls of America. His initial impact was truly impressive. But his lasting influence is greater still. This book, first published in 1946, helped launch, and continues to inspire, a spiritual revolution in the West. Only rarely does a sage of Paramhansa Yogananda's stature write a firsthand account of his life experiences. Followers of many religious traditions have come to recognize AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A YOGI as a masterpiece of spiritual literature. Yet, for all its depth, it is full of gentle humor, lively stories, and practical common sense. This is a verbatim reprinting of the original 1946 edition. Although subsequent reprintings, reflecting revisions made after the author's death in 1952, have sold over a million copies and have been translated into more than 19 languages, the few thousand of the original have long since disappeared into the hands of collectors. Now, with this reprint, the 1946 edition is again available, with all its inherent power, just as the great master of yoga first presented it.

A richly illustrated tapestry of interwoven studies spanning some six thousand years of history, Daemons Are Forever is at once a record of archaic contacts and transactions between humans and protean spirit beings--daemons--and an account of exchanges, among human populations, of the science of spirit beings: daemon-ology. Since the time of the Indo-European migrations, and especially following the opening of the Silk Road, a common daemonological vernacular has been shared among populations ranging from East and South Asia to Northern Europe. In this virtuoso work of historical sleuthing, David Gordon White recovers the trajectories of both the "inner demons" cohabiting the bodies of their human hosts and the "outer daemons" that those same humans recognized each time they encountered them in their enchanted haunts: sylvan pools, sites of geothermal eruptions, and dark forest groves. Along the way, he invites his readers to reconsider the potential and promise of the historical method in religious studies, suggesting that a "connected histories" approach to Eurasian daemonology may serve as a model for restoring history to its proper place, at the heart of the history of religions discipline.

'When the wheel of sexual ecstasy is in full motion, there is no textbook at all, and no order.'The Kamasutra is the oldest extant Hindu textbook of erotic love. It is about the art of living - about finding a partner, maintaining power in a marriage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using drugs - and also about the positions in sexual intercourse. It was composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India, sometime in the third century CE. It combines an encyclopaedic coverage of all imaginable aspects of sex with a closely observed sexual psychology and a dramatic, novelistic narrative of seduction, consummation, and disentanglement. Best known in English through the highly mannered, padded, and inaccurate nineteenth-century translation of Sir Richard Burton, the text is presented here in an entirely new translation into clear, vivid, sexually frank English, together with three commentaries: translated excerpts from the earliest and most famous Sanskrit commentary (13th century) and from a twentieth-century Hindi commentary, and explanatory notes by the two translators. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Bhagavad Gita is the best known of all the Indian scriptures, and Eknath Easwaran’s best-selling translation is reliable, readable, and profound.Easwaran's 55-page introduction places the Bhagavad Gita in its historical setting, and brings out the universality and timelessness of its teachings. Chapter introductions clarify key concepts, and notes and a glossary explain Sanskrit terms.Easwaran grew up in the Hindu tradition in India, and learned Sanskrit from a young age. He was a professor of English literature before coming to the West on a Fulbright scholarship. A gifted teacher, he is recognized as an authority on the Indian classics and world mysticism.The Bhagavad Gita opens, dramatically, on a battlefield, as the warrior Arjuna turns in anguish to his spiritual guide, Sri Krishna, for answers to the fundamental questions of life. Yet, as Easwaran points out, the Gita is not what it seems – it’s not a dialogue between two mythical figures at the dawn of Indian history. “The battlefield is a perfect backdrop, but the Gita’s subject is the war within, the struggle for self-mastery that every human being must wage if he or she is to emerge from life victorious.”Arjuna’s struggle in the Bhagavad Gita is acutely modern. He has lost his way on the battlefield of life and turns to find the path again by asking direct, uncompromising questions of his spiritual guide, Sri Krishna, the Lord himself. Krishna replies in 700 verses of sublime instruction on living and dying, loving and working, and the nature of the soul.Easwaran shows the Gita’s relevance to us today as we strive, like Arjuna, to do what is right.“No one in modern times is more qualified – no, make that ‘as qualified’ – to translate the epochal Classics of Indian Spirituality than Eknath Easwaran. And the reason is clear. It is impossible to get to the heart of those classics unless you live them, and he did live them. My admiration of the man and his works is boundless.”  – Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions.

The spiritual classic, the Devimahatmya, is a central text for worshippers of the Hindu Goddess Devi. Written about 16 centuries ago, it addresses the perennial questions of the nature of the universe, humankind, and divinity. This is the first translation of the Devimahatmya to combine sound scholarship, the language skills of a native English speaker, and an insider's perspective based on 35 years of spiritual practice within the Hindu tradition.

The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. It is of immense importance to the culture of the Indian subcontinent, and is a major text of Hinduism. Its discussion of human goals (artha or 'purpose', kama or 'pleasure', dharma or 'duty', and moksha or 'liberation') takes place in a long-standing tradition, attempting to explain the relationship of the individual to society and the world (the nature of the 'Self') and the workings of karma.