This second half of Bhishma describes the events from the beginning of the fifth day till the end of the tenth of the great battle between the K&#225uravas and the P&#225ndavas. Despite grandfather Bhishma's appeal to conclude peace with the P&#225ndavas, Dury&#243dhana continues the bloody battle. The key strategist is general Bhishma, commander of the K&#225urava forces. Even though he is compelled to fight on the side of the K&#225uravas, Bhishma's sympathies are with the P&#225ndavas. After the ninth day of war, when Bhishma has wreaked havoc with their troops, the P&#225ndavas realise that they will be unable to win as long as invincible Bhishma is alive. Bhishma willingly reveals to them how he can be destroyed. Strictly observing the warrior code, he will never fight with Shikh&#225ndin, because he was originally born a woman. Bhishma advises the P&#225ndava brothers that &#193rjuna should strike him from behind Shikh&#225ndin's back, and they follow the grandfather's advice.

Hinduism has become a vital 'other' for Judaism over the past decades. The book surveys the history of the relationship from historical to contemporary times, from travellers to religious leadership. It explores the potential enrichment for Jewish theology and spirituality, as well as the challenges for Jewish identity.

In The Cow in the Elevator Tulasi Srinivas explores a wonderful world where deities jump fences and priests ride in helicopters to present a joyful, imaginative, yet critical reading of modern religious life. Drawing on nearly two decades of fieldwork with priests, residents, and devotees, and her own experience of living in the high-tech city of Bangalore, Srinivas finds moments where ritual enmeshes with global modernity to create wonder-a feeling of amazement at being overcome by the unexpected and sublime. Offering a nuanced account of how the ruptures of modernity can be made normal, enrapturing, and even comical in a city swept up in globalization's tumult, Srinivas brings the visceral richness of wonder-apparent in creative ritual in and around Hindu temples-into the anthropological gaze. Broaching provocative philosophical themes like desire, complicity, loss, time, money, technology, and the imagination, Srinivas pursues an interrogation of wonder and the adventure of writing true to its experience. The Cow in the Elevator rethinks the study of ritual while reshaping our appreciation of wonder's transformative potential for scholarship and for life.

India celebrates itself as a nation of unity in diversity, but where does that sense of unity come from? One important source is a widely-accepted narrative called the "bhakti movement." Bhakti is the religion of the heart, of song, of common participation, of inner peace, of anguished protest. The idea known as the bhakti movement asserts that between 600 and 1600 CE, poet-saints sang bhakti from India's southernmost tip to its northern Himalayan heights, laying the religious bedrock upon which the modern state of India would be built. Challenging this canonical narrative, John Stratton Hawley clarifies the historical and political contingencies that gave birth to the concept of the bhakti movement. Starting with the Mughals and their Kachvaha allies, North Indian groups looked to the Hindu South as a resource that would give religious and linguistic depth to their own collective history. Only in the early twentieth century did the idea of a bhakti "movement" crystallize-in the intellectual circle surrounding Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal. Interactions between Hindus and Muslims, between the sexes, between proud regional cultures, and between upper castes and Dalits are crucially embedded in the narrative, making it a powerful political resource. A Storm of Songs ponders the destiny of the idea of the bhakti movement in a globalizing India. If bhakti is the beating heart of India, this is the story of how it was implanted there-and whether it can survive.

In the context of Dutch colonialism, world war, the incorporation of Bali into the Indonesian state and the tourist boom, this book examines the complex relationships between the changing nature and continuing relevance of Balinese hierarchy, the neo-Hindu reforms of Balinese religion, and the impact these have had on new forms of identity. Since at least the 1920s commoners and other intellectuals and reformers have sought ways to challenge Balinese caste hierarchy, both through egalitarian re-interpretations of Balinese institutions and through changing religious ideas and practices. State initiatives to transform 'traditional' Balinese religion into monotheistic and more 'authentic' form of Hinduism have precipitated the appearance of many indigenous new religious movements and the importation from India of devotional forms of Hinduism (Sai Baba and Hare Krishna), which has created a vastly more intricate religious landscape. These various forms of Hinduism, and the conflict and competition between, both undermine and sustain relations of hierarchy. Through historically informed, ethnographic analyses of status competition, caste conflict, ritual inflation, religious innovation, and the cultural politics of identity this book, written in an accessible style, makes a major contribution to our understanding of modern Balinese society and its future development.BR> Series editors: Wendy James & N.J. Allen

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali is widely regarded as the most authoritative text on yoga. It comprises a collection of 196 Indian sutras ("threads" - as sutra translates from Sanskrit) written 1,700 years ago. These threads or aphorisms were compiled by the Indian sage Patanjali and offer guidelines for living a meaningful and purposeful life.The book is organized into four parts and provides descriptions of the eight limbs of yoga, such as pranayama and asana. The translated text is presented alongside a clear and insightful commentary by Swami Vivekananda, which makes them more accessible to the modern reader and yoga practitioner. His message of universal brotherhood and self-awakening remains relevant today, especially in the current backdrop of widespread political turmoil around the world.

This book is the first to present current scholarship on gender and in regional and sectarian versions of the Ramayana. Contributors explore in what ways the versions relate to other Ramayana texts as they deal with the female persona and the cultural values implicit in them. Using a wide variety of approaches, both analytical and descriptive, the authors discover common ground between narrative variants even as their diversity is recognized. It offers an analysis in the shaping of the heterogeneous Rama tradition through time as it can be viewed from the perspective of narrating women's lives. Through the analysis of the representation and treatment of female characters, narrative inventions, structural design, textual variants, and the idiom of composition and technique in art and sculpture are revealed and it is shown what and in which way these alternative versions are unique. A sophisticated exploration of the Ramayana, this book is of great interest to academics in the fields of South Asian Studies, Asian Religion, Asian Gender and Cultural Studies.

Presents the various religious approaches to Yoga described by Haribhadra, the eighth-century sage, who held a universal view of religion. Includes a translation of his original text on Yoga. Reconciling Yogas explores five approaches to the accomplishment of Yoga from a variety of religious perspectives: Jaina, Hindu, and Buddhist. Haribhadra, a prolific Jaina scholar who espoused a universal view of religion, proclaimed that truth can be found in all faiths and sought to elucidate differences between various schools of thought. In Yoga, he discovered a form of spiritual practice common to many faiths and juxtaposed their paths to demonstrate the common goal of liberation. Utilizing the structure of Patanjali's advanced eightfold path of Yoga in the Yoga Sutra. Haribhadra formulates his own eight stages of Yoga to which he assigns titles in the feminine gender that echo the names of goddesses. Discussed are the Jaina stages of spiritual ascent and two forms of Yoga for which there is no other account. Also included is a new translation of the Yogadrstisamuccaya, an eighth-century text by Haribhadra.

Since the beginning of modern Indology in the 19th century, the relationship between the early Indian religions of Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism has been predicated on a perceived dichotomy between two meta-historical identities: "the Brahmans" (purveyors of the ancient Vedic texts and associated ritual system) and the newer "non-Brahmanical" sramana movements from which the Buddhists and Jains emerged. Textbook and scholarly accounts postulate an opposition between these two groups, citing the 2nd-century BCE Sanskrit grammarian Patanjali, who is often quoted erroneously as likening them to the proverbial enemies snake and mongoose. Scholars continue to privilege Brahmanical Hindu accounts of early Indian history, and further portray Buddhist and Jain deviations from those accounts as evidence of their opposition to a pre-existing Brahmanism. In The Snake and The Mongoose, Nathan McGovern turns this commonly-accepted model of the origins of the early Indian religions on its head. His book seeks to de-center the Hindu Brahman from our understanding of Indian religion by "taming the snake and the mongoose"-that is, by abandoning the anachronistic distinction between "Brahmanical" and "non-Brahmanical." Instead, McGovern allows the earliest articulations of identity in Indian religion to speak for themselves through a comparative reading of texts preserved by the three major groups that emerged from the social, political, cultural, and religious foment of the late first millennium BCE: the Buddhists and Jains as they represented themselves in their earliest sutras, and the Vedic Brahmans as they represented themselves in their Dharma Sutras. The picture that emerges is not of a fundamental dichotomy between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical, but rather of many different groups who all saw themselves as Brahmanical. Thus, McGovern argues, it was through the contestation between these groups that the distinction between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical-the snake and the mongoose-emerged.

The Mahabharata, an ancient and vast Sanskrit poem, is a remarkable collection of epics, legends, romances, theology, and ethical and metaphysical doctrine. The core of this great work is the epic struggle between five heroic brothers, the Pandavas, and their one hundred contentious cousins for rule of the land. This is the third volume of van Buitenen's acclaimed translation of the definitive Poona edition of the text. Book 4, The Book of Virata, begins as a burlesque, but the mood soon darkens amid molestation, raids, and Arjuna's battle with the principal heroes of the enemy. Book 5, The Book of the Effort, relates the attempts of the Pandavas to negotiate the return of their patrimony. They are refused so much as a pinprick of land, and both parties finally march to battle.

The Mahabharata, an ancient and vast Sanskrit poem, is a remarkable collection of epics, legends, romances, theology, and ethical and metaphysical doctrine. The core of this great work is the epic struggle between five heroic brothers, the Pandavas, and their one hundred contentious cousins for rule of the land. This is the second volume of van Buitenen's acclaimed translation of the definitive Poona edition of the text. Book two, The Book of the Assembly Hall, is an epic dramatization of the Vedic ritual of consecration that is central to the book. Book three, The Book of the Forest, traces the further episodes of the heroes during their years in exile. Also included are the famous story of Nala, dealing with the theme of love in separation, and the story of Rama, the subject of the other great Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, as well as other colorful tales.

“I wish I had a sister who loved me so fiercely.” Surya and Anjani are twins, but they could not be more different. Anjani is calm, devout and responsible, while Surya just wants to party the days away. When they leave the safety of their affluent Durban suburb to attend university in the Eastern Cape, Anjani knows where her duty lies – to look after Surya at all costs. There is no way their conservative Hindu parents would have let them go otherwise. But fate intervenes in the form of a vicious assault, and for a while it seems as though the twins’ bond may be shattered forever. As they start rebuilding their lives, little do they know that divine providence is on their side.

This new collection brings together the sacred scriptures of the Hindu tradition to provide readers with a comprehensive overview of the classical form of one of the world's oldest existing religions. Selections from the Vedas, the Upanisads, the Bhagvagad Gita and many more cover topics such as creation, sacrifice, birth, marriage and death and tell the stories of the great Hindu gods. But over the last two hundred years reformed, anti and radical versions of Hinduism have emerged which question the laws, traditions and even the category of Hinduism itself.

Uniquely, this reader juxtaposes the classic scriptures with the works of reformers and radicals to illuminate the new face of contemporary Hinduism. With an introduction to each reading from editor Deepak Sarma, this reader is suitable for Hinduism courses of all levels.

Tantra occupies an odd position in Western understandings of Hindu spirituality. Its relationship to sex has made its name instantly recognizable, but this emphasis on sex has obscured its philosophical concerns and ritual practices, to say nothing of its overall importance to Hindu religious life. This book offers a clear, well-grounded overview of Tantra that offers substantial new insights for scholars and practitioners. Andre Padoux opens by detailing the history of Tantra, including its origins, founding texts, and major beliefs. The second part of the book delves more deeply into key concepts like the tantric body, mysticism, sex, mantras, sacred geography, and iconography, while the final part considers the practice of Tantra today, both in India and in the West. The result is an authoritative account of Tantra's history and present place in the world, suitable for beginners and longtime practitioners alike.

No other Sanskrit work approaches the Bhagavadgita in the influence it has exerted in the West. Philosophers such as Emerson and the other New England Transcendentalists were deeply affected by its insights, a dozen or more scholars, including Annie Besant and Mahatma Gandhi, have attempted its translation, and thousands of individuals struggling with the problems divided loyalties have found comfort and wisdom in its pages.
The Bhagavadgita (Song of the Lord) tells of the young and virtuous Prince Arjuna who is driven to lead his forces into battle against an opposing army composed of close relatives and others whom he loves. The Lord Krsna, appearing in the poem as Arjuna's friend and charioteer, persuades him that he must do battle, and we see Arjuna changing from revulsion at the thought of killing members of his family to resignation and awareness of duty, to manly acceptance of his role as warrior and defender of his kingdom.
The Bhagavadgita is a self-contained episode in the Mahabharata, a vast collection of epics, legends, romances, theology, and metaphysical doctrine that reflects the history and culture of the whole of Hindu civilization. The present edition forms a part of J. A. B. van Buitenen's widely acclaimed translation of this great work. Here English and Sanskrit are printed on facing pages, enabling those with some knowledge of Sanskrit to appreciate van Buitenen's accurate rendering of the intimate, familial tone and directness of the original poem.

Modern science and ancient wisdom traditions agree that the universe is a symphony of vibrational frequencies. In this beautiful, comprehensive, and unique work, Dr. Frawley elaborates the essential truths about cosmic sound, and how we can employ important mantras for healing, transformation and inner awakening.

THE BHAGAVAD-GITA (For Children and Beginners in English only. Book Size 5.25" x 8.0") With Introduction, children level meaning of more than 181 simpler Gita Verses and is illustrated With 26 Stories from our scriptures and 14 pictures. It is suitable for children of grades 8th. and above as well as the first-time readers. A meditation technique and simple mantras are also included. This will make a great gift to children.

This is a new release of the original 1944 edition.

In this work, Brian Philip Dunn focuses on the embodiment theology of the South Indian theologian, A. J. Appasamy (1891-1975). Appasamy developed what he called a 'bhakti' (devotional) approach to Christian theology, bringing his own primary text, the Gospel of John, into comparative interaction with the writings of the Hindu philosopher and theologian, Ramanuja. Dunn's exposition here is of Appasamy's distinctive adaptation of Ramanuja's 'Body of God' analogy and its application to a bhakti reading of John's Gospel. He argues throughout for the need to locate and understand theological language as embedded and embodied within the narrative and praxis of tradition and, for Appasamy and Ramanuja, in their respective Anglican and Srivaisnava settings. Responding to Appasamy, Dunn proposes that the primary Johannine referent for divine embodiment is the temple and considers recent scholarship on Johannine 'temple Christology' in light of Srivaisnava conceptions of the temple and the temple deity. He then offers a constructive reading of the text as a temple procession, a heuristic device that can be newly considered in both comparative and devotional contexts today.

This brief introduction to Hinduism is designed to help readers understand this important religious tradition. With both nuance and balance, this text provides broad coverage of various forms of Hinduism with an arresting layout with rich colors. It offers both historical overviews and modern perspectives on Hindu beliefs and practices. The user-friendly content is enhanced by charts of religious festivals, historic timelines, updated maps, and a useful glossary. It is ideal for courses on Hinduism and South Asian religions and will be a useful, concise reference for all readers eager to know more about this important religious tradition and its place in our contemporary world.

The roots of monasticism may go back as far as 1700 BCE, to ascetic practices in ancient India. Since that time, the monastic world has naturally developed its own extensive and distinct vocabulary. Countless volumes have been written on monasticism yet many do not clearly define obscure or vernacular terms. Some terms may be found in standard dictionaries but without in-depth explanations. This first comprehensive dictionary--not a proselytizing work but a reference with historical and biographical focus--fills the gap, with a worldwide scope covering not only Christianity, but all faiths that have monastic traditions, including but not limited to Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism.