Recorded in sacred Sanskrit texts, including the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata, Hindu Myths are thought to date back as far as the tenth century BCE. Here in these seventy-five seminal myths are the many incarnations of Vishnu, who saves mankind from destruction, and the mischievous child Krishna, alongside stories of the minor gods, demons, rivers and animals including boars, buffalo, serpents and monkeys. Immensely varied and bursting with colour and life, they demonstrate the Hindu belief in t...
This is a book about a deeply beloved place-many call it the spiritual capital of India. Located at a dramatic bend in the River Yamuna, a hundred miles from the center of Delhi, Vrindavan is the spot where the god Krishna is believed to have spent his childhood and youth. For Hindus it has always stood for youth writ large-a realm of love and beauty that enables one to retreat from the weight and harshness of world. Now, though, the world is gobbling up Vrindavan. Delhi's megalopolitan sprawl i...
Abraham's Family (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, #415)
Abraham, whom the apostle Paul calls the "father of us all" (Rom 4:16), was a central figure in Judaism from the outset and came to be important in Christianity and Islam. The Abraham tradition is an issue of narrative and counter-narrative, memory and counter-memory. Moreover, Abraham's family is brought in as a network of meaning to express opposition, antithesis or common ground within and between different religious movements. The contributions to this volume discuss the presentation and rec...
L'exposition du nom divin dans le livre de l'Exode (Forschungen zum Alten Testament 2. Reihe, #102)
by Guillaume Lepesqueux
Guillaume Lepesqueux presente dans ce livre l'interpretation d'Ex 3,14 dans le contexte d'enonciation du livre de l'Exode et de sa composition litteraire. L'histoire de la reception de ce verset en Occident montre en effet qu'il n'a ete le plus souvent lu qu'au prisme de ses traductions grecque et latine, en etant presque toujours isole du contexte litteraire dans lequel il fait prioritairement sens. L'auteur se propose ainsi de resituer et d'interpreter Ex 3,14 dans le cadre de la pericope du b...
The "Yoga Sutra of Patanjali" (Lives of Great Religious Books)
by David Gordon White
Consisting of fewer than two hundred verses written in an obscure if not impenetrable language and style, Patanjali's Yoga Sutra is today extolled by the yoga establishment as a perennial classic and guide to yoga practice. As David Gordon White demonstrates in this groundbreaking study, both of these assumptions are incorrect. Virtually forgotten in India for hundreds of years and maligned when it was first discovered in the West, the Yoga Sutra has been elevated to its present iconic status--a...
Bedeutende Lehrerfiguren
Dieser Sammelband geht auf eine Vorlesungsreihe zuruck, welche das Forschungszentrum "Bildung und Religion (EDRIS)" der Universitat Goettingen ausgerichtet hat. In 12 Einzelbeitragen beleuchtet er das Themenfeld von Bildung und Religion anhand bedeutender Lehrer, von denen die meisten wahrend der Zeit des fruhen roemischen Kaiserreichs bis zur klassischen Periode des Islam (1.-13. Jh. n. Chr.) wirkten. Vorgestellt werden Lehrerpersoenlichkeiten wie etwa Platon, Jesus, Plutarch, Flavius Josephus,...
Singing the Goddess into Place (SUNY series in Hindu Studies)
by Caleb Simmons
Scholars of Vedic religion have long recognized the centrality of ritual categories to Indian thought. There have been few successful attempts, however, to bring the same systematic rigor of Vedic Scholarship to bear on later "Hindu" ritual. Excavating the deep history of a prominent ritual category in "classical" Hindu texts, Geslani traces the emergence of a class of rituals known as Santi, or appeasement. This ritual, intended to counteract ominous omens, developed from the intersection of th...
This collection of articles places the frequently discussed question of the introvert Self into a new interdisciplinary context: rather than tracing a linear development from social forms of life with an outward orientation to individual introspection, it argues for significant overlaps between interior and exterior dimensions, between the Self and society. A team of internationally renowned experts from different fields examines Pagan, Jewish and Christian voices on an equal basis and explores...
Debatten um die Bibel (Beitrage zur historischen Theologie, #193)
by Valentin Wendebourg
Wie lassen sich der Anspruch der Bibel, "Heilige Schrift" zu sein, und die historische Kritik miteinander in Einklang bringen? Der Beginn der sich Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts ausbreitenden radikalen Religions- und Bibelkritik in Europa hing eng mit der Dynamik einer theologischen Debattenkultur zusammen, die sich aus dem institutionellen Rahmen der Universitaten in eine breitere, gelehrte OEffentlichkeit auszubreiten begann. Wesentlichen Anteil hieran hatte das Aufkommen des Zeitschriftenwesens,...
What is Sikhism?
by Dr Amrik Singh, Rattan Priya Bhasin, and Justice Choor Singh
What is Hinduism? Historians, teachers, scholars, and gurus have disagreed for centuries-and continue to disagree. One reason is because Hinduism-the world's oldest continuously extant major religion-is not a single faith with a static set of beliefs and a single sacred scripture. It is actually a mixture of faiths that have evolved from the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent-a universal faith that is open to interpretation and evolving scientific truth, and one that deeply respects individu...
A Brief History Of The Immortals Of Non-Hindu Civilizations
by Shri Bhagavatananda Guru
This book deals with the early development of Saivism in ancient Daksina Kosala, the region that roughly corresponds to the modern state of Chhattisgarh, plus the districts of Sambalpur, Balangir and Kalahandi of Odhisha (formerly Orissa). At the end of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh century, this region was under the control of the Pandava king Sivagupta alias 'Balarjuna' hailing from Sripura (the modern village of Sirpur), who was a great patron of religion. Epigraphical evidence,...
In 1965, a seventy-year-old man set sail from India to America with a few books in his bag, pennies in his pockets, and a message of love in his heart. He landed in New York at the peak of the revolutionary counterculture movement of the '60s, and went on to spark a global spiritual renaissance that led to the creation of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Through the depiction of Prabhupada as both an enlightened luminary and a personable, funny, and conscientious individual,...
Andrea Vestrucci presents a pioneering perspective on Luther and Erasmus's theological dispute on freedom. He argues that Luther's "De servo arbitrio" does not simply negate Erasmus's concept of freedom; rather, and more profoundly, Luther's work questions and modifies the logical foundations of Erasmus's position. As a result, theology is the freedom to challenge the formal conditions of meaning. In accordance with this new perspective, the author introduces groundbreaking analyses of central t...