The Life of Hinduism

introduction. 5 ence to ahimsa,nonviolence, and Pramukh Swami made history in September 2002 when he urged his followers not to ...

6. introduction specifically Maharashtrian. So it was that on the morning of January 5, 2004, a mob of young men recruited by th ...

introduction. 7 Tamil Nadu, and they worship Arokia-mariamma (Mary, Our Lady of Health) in St. Mary’s Basilica in Bangalore. Thu ...

8. introduction women between twelve and fifteen years of age—singing the first verse of the Tiruppavai.Other stations carried c ...

introduction. 9 for him epitomized the message he wanted to convey: that reality is fundamentally synchronistic, nonlocal, nondu ...

10. introduction THE TERM “HINDUISM” The English word Hinduism was coined by British writers in the final decades of the eightee ...

introduction. 11 the desire not to harm, tends to be qualified by a recognition that people in different life-positions will nee ...

12. introduction whole? The answer is not easy, but across the sweep of Indian religious history over the past two millennia, on ...

introduction. 13 modern practice, especially in life-cycle rites, and they do thereby serve a unifying function. But much more i ...

14. introduction in fact. Non-Hindu groups living in India are also affected—Christians, Jains, Sikhs—and the idea of the fourva ...

introduction. 15 and chaos or duty and play. In generating, performing, and listening to these sto- ries, Hindus have often expe ...

16. introduction widely recited version of the Ramayanain Hindi-speaking India, is sometimes praised for articulating a version ...

introduction. 17 was perfectly in keeping with the deep meaning of all ritual events. It was an act of transformation, a time wh ...

18. introduction midnight in Banaras’s main cremation ground. It was at that point that his initiating guru, who bore the lineag ...

introduction. 19 brightly colored water and a lot else the following morning is followed by a com- plete reversal of mood at noo ...

20. introduction In the essay that follows Philip Lutgendorf shows us what happened when the Ramayanamoved into the medium of te ...

introduction. 21 which concerns gurus—beings who straddle the line between the human and the di- vine, or obliterate it altogeth ...

22. introduction Actually it is not the charisma ofdarshan that bothers Kakar, but some of what Cha- ran Singh says as he gives ...

introduction. 23 religious voices to have emerged from the “bottom” of Indian caste society. He is a sixteenth-century bhakti po ...

24. introduction We begin with issues that arise in connection with Hinduism’s recent diasporiza- tion. Early in this introducti ...