Religion in India: A Historical Introduction

Such is his greatness; greater indeed, than this is Purus.a. All creatures constitute but one-quarter of him, his three-quarters ...

A different myth – that of the hiran.yagarbha(golden reed or germ) reflected the idea of the poet imagining creation to be like ...

The later sam.hita ̄s, in their oral form, reflected rudimentary patterns of agriculture and made reference to the area between ...

The shift of emphasis intimated in the A ̄ran.yakasserved as prelude to the next stage of Indian culture and religion, a stage w ...

Possehl, G. ed. Harappan Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective. Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1982. Renfrew, C. Archeology a ...

3 The Early Urban Period TheUpanis.ads The “heterodoxies” Jainism Early Buddhism Recommended reading The time from roughly the s ...

some chieftains and would-be rulers called on bra ̄hman.apriests for the conduct of elaborate sacrifices such as the ra ̄ jasu ̄ ...

pattern through the discourses was an attempt to make congruences between the older Vedic ritual symbolism and other domains, es ...

“Cut it up.” “I’ve cut it up, sir.” “What do you see there?” “These quite tiny seeds, sir.” “Now, take one of them and cut it up ...

underlying reality of the universe. The individualized counterpart to brahman in the same passage was a ̄tman– that manifestatio ...

The fundamental human problem then, was notunderstanding,notseeing (avidya ̄). In the same Cha ̄ndogyapassage cited above, the s ...

bring about favorable consequences. The term became an even more significant part of the path to ultimate liberation for Jains a ...

groups which were not accommodated by the sacrificial system. The move- ments that arose in the Gangetic plain often challenged ...

renounced wealth, and set out in search of the truth, the same pattern as is found in the story of Buddhism’s founder. Jains ins ...

centuries. As with most Indian schools of thought, one starts with a funda- mental cosmology: for the Jains, the world was compo ...

be inadvertently swallowed. It was partially to avoid the possibility of catching insects in the folds of one’s garments that th ...

Similarly, there was the Jain doctrine of relative viewpoints (nayava ̄da). These included seven propositions: 1) An object may ...

reminded by his charioteer that illness, old age, and death were very much a part of life. On yet another “field trip” he saw an ...

certain logic to the succession of these things based on the principle of karma. The river that flows past one now is not the sa ...

putting logs on the fire. That is, nirva ̄n.awas not a place (such as “heaven”) nor immortality – it was, at most, a change of c ...