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This chapter describes character as a second self or, on the other hand, as a first self. To understand the importance of character in human life, we must appreciate who it is that has a character. Full understanding of what character is will have to include the background of a metaphysical account of the self. The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self. Everyone is born with a self, which remains strictly self-identical throughout that person's life, in that, whatever character the person develops or however he or she changes, the self remains itself.

The longing for conflict-free and harmonious living is both an ancient and a continuing human aspiration. Multiplicity of tribes and beliefs has been a special feature of the Indian society since early times. The earliest known Indian civilization, the Indus Valley Civilization, was already quite advanced by about 2500 BC. It decayed in the middle of the second millennium BC, perhaps because of invasion by people who described themselves as Aryans. The most ancient works of the Vedic period are the four Vedas — Rig Veda, Sama Veda, Yajur Veda, and Atharva Veda. Each Veda contains four sections consisting of Samhita or collection of hymns, prayers, benedictions, sacrificial formulae and litanies; Brahmanas or prose treatises discussing the significance of sacrificial rites and ceremonies; Aranyakas or forest texts, which are partly included in the Brahmanas and partly considered as independent; and Upanishads.

Jainism traces the roots of violence in absolutism of knowledge. Badrinath is of the opinion that the Jaina syada-vada suggests that to every assertion one has to add a syat, or a ‘maybe’, ‘perhaps’, or ‘in a sense’. This leads us to perceiving the truth of anything, or of any person, as not something ‘one-sided’ but ‘many-sided’ at the same time; that every variety of human violence, with its cruelty and degradation, has flowed from the competing one-sided ideas of what truth is, and hence from one-sided judgements about oneself and about others. Jainism liberates us from the violence of one-sided truths. Badrinath informs us that both the Mahabharata and Jainism say to us that to be sensitive at all times to the other dimensions of truth is the best form of security.

In the last essay of the book Badrinath mentions that both relativity and quantum mechanics were compelled by their own discoveries to discard the logical framework of either/or, in which not only modern science and philosophy but also practically the whole of Western political thought have been rooted as any reliable guide to the knowledge of truth. The Upanishads and Jaina thought, as well as the Mahabharata in relation to daily human living, show decisively that either/or has very limited value; and when it is applied indiscriminately, it takes us away from truth. Peace among the peoples of the world can be founded only on truth; and truth is to be found in the natural unity of I and the other, where unity is not uniformity, and diversity is not the enemy of unity.

This chapter explores several notes of ambiguity or self-correction in Hindu faith: the relationship between mystical certitude and discursive doubt in the Upanishads; bhakti (devotional faith) and the limitations of dharma in the epics; the questioning of assumptions about reality spurred by the doctrine of maya; and the paradoxical character of Hindu theism as reflected in the figure of Shiva. This fourfold examination illustrates ambiguities in a few of the very different strands of Hindu thought and practice. Behind all four thematic strands is a sense that beyond the worldly values of dharma teachings, the spiritual journey requires self-correction as part of the transformative experience of religious transcendence.

The central concept of atman was acknowledged to be 'ungraspable and unthinkable'. This problem is related to the contrast between the ontological completeness of atman and the ontological incompleteness of the physical world of the senses and mind. In order to understand the entrance of atman into the world of imperfect existence, there is a need for precise philology, and in particular the meanings of the verbs as ('being') and bhu ('becoming'), and the prefix vi-. The ontological issue is then related to socio-economic structure.

This chapter compares the Rgveda, the early Upanishads, and Plato's Timaeus for their conception of the universe, the inner self, and the relation between them. All three texts envisage the universe as a hierarchically organised system in which order (rta in the Rgveda) prevails. But only in the Timaeus is there the motivation to create a cosmos endowed with beauty and goodness. Only in the Timaeus and the Upanishads is cosmology a prerequisite for self-knowledge and ethics, and both texts lay the foundations for moral realism, the belief in the objective validity of moral values.

This chapter begins with a consideration of tree worship as a worldwide phenomenon, exploring the sentience of trees in such practices as the worship of oak trees in Europe. The specific worldview that informs much tree worship and makes it so widespread in India is taken up next. The extensive history of Indian thought expresses a major tenet of Hindu religious philosophy: the interconnectedness and sacred nature of all life. The whole world in its myriad of forms springs from and participates in a unified reality, often called Brahman in the Upanishads and Puranas. Importantly, the great variety of embodied forms of divinity include trees. This chapter concludes with an examination of the long history of tree worship (puja) in India. Virtually all sacred trees in India have been considered a kalpa-vriksha, the famous mythological “Wishing-Tree” that yields many kinds of favorable results, both material and spiritual.

The chapter demonstrates the intellectual sources from which Gandhi and King drew their inspiration; besides the external sources, both of them seem to have drawn more on the indigenous intellectual sources: for Gandhi, it was the Indian religious and other classical texts while King focused more on the New Testament. Furthermore, in formulating their political strategies, they depended a great deal on their colleagues who held similar ideological predisposition: The chapter thus argues that without their equally committed partners it would not have been possible for them to achieve what they sought to achieve. What was unique in their endeavour was a very creative blending of religion with non-violence which acted most effectively in non-violent civil disobedience against racial atrocities and colonial exploitation in the US and India respectively.

This chapter examines the teachings of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gītā concerning God and the good. For both the Upanishads and the Gītā, the goal to be pursued in life is liberation from samsāra, the cycle of birth and death. In the early Upanishads, liberation is attained through knowledge of the identity of one's inner self, the ātman, with the cosmic principle, brahman. In the later Upanishads, there develops a devotional theism to a personal God. Liberation is then redefined to mean abiding with the object of our devotion. The Upanishads maintain that the Absolute has qualities not only of being and goodness, but of awareness and joy. On the other hand, the Gītā points out that to discover the Absolute by knowledge alone requires intense concentration. The Good for Hinduism is moksa, freedom or liberation.

In 1864, Fustel de Coulanges argued that burial rites were the basis of the ancient city-state, a claim that harmonized well with late nineteenth-century anthropology. Like the Cambridge anthropologists who drew on Fustel, Jesse Weston held similar views about burial rites, and those views had a strong impact on T. S. Eliot. Drawing from Weston, Paul Deussen’s translations of the Upanishads, and other sources, Eliot presented the neglect of burial rites as equally central to the decline of modern culture, a perspective that dominates The Waste Land. Eliot connects the neglect of the burial of the dead—metaphorically, of the past of one’s civilization and hence the trigger of cultural decay—to a specific alteration in England’s own theological politics: the Reformation’s break with the past, which had haunted England ever since the “dissociation of sensibility” initiated by Cromwell’s and Milton’s era. Eliot’s response is the reimagination of promised land.

In 1656, towards the end of a brilliant two-decades-long scholarly career, Dara Shukoh commissioned a translation of the Upanishads. He believed he had found the lost kitab al-maknun, or hidden/protected book, referred to in the Quran as humanity’s first monotheistic text. This chapter explores the journey that led Dara Shukoh to proclaim the Upanishads’ importance to Muslims and to the world; it interrogates the prince’s reliance on Shankaracharya, the eighth century Advaita Vedantin, for commentary on the Upanishads; and it investigates the political context in which Dara Shukoh was operating to indicate one possible way to understand his idiosyncratic editorial decisions and his controversial proclamations.

This chapter examines the place of ethics in Hinduism. It shows that though Hinduism has shown a strong inclination to metaphysics and spiritualism, it has certainly not ignored ethics. It explains that ethics as dharma comes first among the goals of human beings in Hinduism and the scriptures insisted that other goals are to be pursued according to dharma. This chapter also discusses the misunderstandings about ethics in Hinduism, the ethics in the Vedas and Upanishads, the contribution of the Bhagavadgita to Hindu ethics, and the ethics of sants and social reformers.

In France, the negotiation between religious and national identity had been strongly polarized between religious traditionalists of the Catholic party and secularist inheritors of the revolutionary agenda. Furthermore, unlike in the German lands, which shared no capital city, the new fields of study were mostly concentrated in Parisian scholarly institutions, whereas little of scholarly significance occurred in provincial universities. Finally, the role and status of Jews in the study of religion in France differed strikingly from their parallel role and status in Germany. A prominent reason for this difference, of course, was the non-theological character of most scholarly institutions, even before the final suppression of the Faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne in 1882.

This chapter highlights different conceptualizations of akshara described by Swaminarayan in the Vachanamrut, and surveys its usage by Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhva, and Swaminarayan as understood by BAPS Swaminarayan Hindus. It pays special attention to the aspect of akshara as guru as emphasized by Swaminarayan in the Vachanamrut and draws connections with the concept of the ideal devotee as discussed in the traditions of Ramanuja and Chaitanya.