agehananda bharati(1923–1991) was born in Vienna as Leopold Fischer. His early
interest in Hinduism led ultimately to his being initiated into the Dasanami Sannyasi
monastic order, whereupon he received the name Agehananda Bharati. After many
years as a renunciant and teacher in India, Bharati took up residence in the United States
as a professor of cultural anthropology at Syracuse University. He is the author of nu-
merous books and articles, including an autobiography, The Ochre Robe(1962), and The
Tantric Tradition(1970).
margaret h. case, who holds a doctorate in the history of India from the University
of Chicago, was for many years Asian Studies editor at Princeton University Press.
Since retiring in 1992, she has made several extended visits to Vrindaban. She has been
volume editor of numerous books on South Asian subjects, and in 2000 published See-
ing Krishna,which expands on the context for the essay included in this volume.
sitansu s. chakravarti, who comes from a family of well-known Sanskritists,
holds a doctorate in philosophy from Syracuse University with a concentration in phi-
losophy of language. He has served as visiting professor of philosophy at the Univer-
sity of Rajasthan, in Jaipur, and at Visva-Bharati, in Santiniketan. Chakravarti has pub-
lished in the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logicand the Journal of Indian Philosophy
and has contributed an essay on the spirituality of Tagore to the Crossroads World Spir-
ituality Series. He is the author ofHinduism: A Way of Life(1991) and Modality, Refer-
ence, and Sense: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (2001) and is currently working
on a book entitled Ethics in the Mahabharata: A Philosophical Inquiry.In all his writings
Chakravarti combines the philosophical perspectives of East and West. He has repre-
sented Hinduism at several forums in Canada, where he lives with his family.
diana l. eckis professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard Uni-
versity and president of the American Academy of Religion for 2005–2006. She is also
the founding director of the Pluralism Project, which seeks to document the growth of
less-well-known religious communities in the United States, including Hindus. Her
books on India include Darsan: Seeing the Divine in India(1981), Banaras, City of Light
(1982), and a Festschrift for Charlotte Vaudeville entitled Devotion Divine (1991), which
she coedited with Françoise Mallison. Eck’s award-winning book Encountering God
(1994) is a comparative study of Hinduism and Christianity. Her research on Hindus liv-
ing in the United States can be seen in On Common Ground, a CD-ROM she has edited
with the Pluralism Project (rev. ed., 2000), and in her most recent book, A New Religious
America(2001).
kathleen m. erndlis associate professor of religion at the Florida State University.
She received her doctorate in the religions of South Asia from the University of