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Candrakiriti rejects Brahmin priests’ belief in immortality, whether defined as eternal life in heaven, as the continuance of life on earth through the birth of sons, or as specialized knowledge acquired through meditation. His arguments demonstrate his familiarity with the early Vedas’ advocacy of physical immortality through procreation and later Upaniṣads’ advocacy of spiritual immortality acquired through knowledge of the identity of the individual soul with the cosmic source of all life. The practice of mindfulness applied to the body provides direct and immediate perception of its mortal nature. The main thrust of Buddhist teachings on death is threefold: death is certain, the time of death is uncertain, and only religious practice will be of any value when death comes.

The Introduction establishes the significance of the god Viṭṭhal of Pandharpur for the religious history of Maharashtra from the eleventh or twelfth century onwards, pointing out that for the Vārkarī saint-poets, he is identical with the cowherd Kṛṣṇa. However, Viṭṭhal is not mentioned in the Vedas, the Epics, or the major Purāṇas, nor is he included in any list of the incarnations or names of Viṣṇu. Viṭṭhal must be a folk deity who gradually became famous. Who was this folk deity? What was he originally? What special characteristics enabled his transformation into Viṣṇu-Kṛṣṇa? After pointing out the difference between the religious study of a god and scholarly research into people's ideas about the god, the Introduction gives an account of the process of preparation of the book, acknowledges people who assisted in its completion, and discusses the opposition that some of the book's ideas had already aroused before its publication.

The second chapter explores animal-friendly teachings and practices in Vedic, Hindu, and Jain religious traditions through sacred texts and teachings and through the lives of religious exemplars, including key topics such as the sacred power of the natural environment, ahimsa, reincarnation and karma, oneness, interspecies kinship, Vishnu's incarnations, and the historic Hindu tendency toward a diet devoid of flesh and eggs. This chapter also probes rich affiliations between Vedic/Hindu deities and nonhuman animals, including vehicles associated with gods and goddesses, Krishna's connection with cows, and the importance and power of serpents/snakes/nagas, the elephant-headed Ganesha, and the much-revered monkey Hanuman. Chapter 2 closes by demonstrating animal activism in Hindu religious traditions through the life and teachings of Gandhi, as well as the lives and work of two contemporary Hindu animal liberationists, Dharmesh Solanki and PETA's Anuradha Sawhney.

Pre-British Indian learning for both elite Indian females and those of lesser status as early as 1,000 B.C. introduces this chapter. Complex female learning traditions were established for Indian females well before the arrival of the British. After 1818 British East India Company officials worried about the admittance of culturally insensitive Evangelical missions, whose networks threatened to undermine Company power and trade. The missions disrupted earlier emotional and partner relationships between Company officials and Indian women. These missions projected a story of emotional deficits in Indian females, contributing to the unravelling of orientalist-inspired knowledge transfer modalities that supported an equable relationship between East and West. The gender narratives coming out of CMS schools established a damaging contest with imaginative orientalist, village, schooling experiments in North India, as well as those sponsored by native education societies in Bombay. The initial easy harvest of ‘cholera orphans’ in CMS mission girls’ schools veiled the limited access such schools could have into the main Indian communities in Calcutta. Company and later state preference for missionary girls’ education led to perversions of state action in north India regarding female infanticide. Crude language policy for school teaching further undermined colonial claims to be educating Indian females.

Classical Hindu thought did not suddenly emerge fully fashioned in every respect. Even within the classical period, the key concepts underwent change, or at least refinement and realignment. The constituent elements of classical Hinduism emerged in a certain order—a chronological order, as they achieved a certain logical order. This chapter attempts the task of historically surveying the emergence of the various key concepts of classical Hinduism. It concludes with a reference to the position of the Vedas.

Since the beginnings of Western scholarship in India, the figure of the blood-thirsty, violent, and explicitly sexual goddess Kālī appears to have held an especially central, but also ambivalent and disturbing, place in the colonial imagination. In the eyes of the early British colonial authorities, missionaries, and scholars, Kālī was identified as the most depraved of all forms of modern popular Hinduism, the quintessence of the licentiousness and idolatry that had destroyed the noble, monotheistic spirit of the Vedas and Vedānta. This chapter argues that Kālī was conceived by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonialists as the worst example of irrational Indian savagery. Such a reading of Kālī as the quintessential Other and the “extreme Orient” influenced Britons' dealings with the “Thugs” and led to the creation of a genre of Victorian novels centered on the lurid East. The chapter also discusses the strategies of appropriation and subversion used by Indian nationalists, who turned this Orientalist Kālī against her colonial creators in their own literatures and actions.

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.

The first member of the Hindu trinity is Brahmā. The name has usually been explained as the masculinization of Brahman, which designates the ultimate reality in the neuter. However, it is also plausible that the god arose as a divinization of Brahmā, a word which originally designated a supervisory priest. Brahmā is closely associated with the Vedas, and to see how this association is connected with creation, one has to take into account certain characteristic Hindu ideas. One of them is that the universe undergoes periodic cycles of appearance and dissolution, on a rather spectacular scale. This chapter provides an account of the temporal dimensions involved, before which even computation in light years begins to appear rather dim.

Classical Hinduism accepted, by and large, the dogma of Vedic authority and infallibility as far as knowledge about dharma and moksa was concerned; it did so on the basis of the claim that the Vedas were eternal and self-revealed. Although some of modern Hinduism's representatives, such as Swāmī Dayānanda Sarasvatī, took a stand similar to the classical one, modern Hindus have generally taken a different view. Whereas the classical doctrine of the verbal authority of the Vedas involved a theory of language, modern Hinduism looks upon the Vedas as the record of the religious experience of seers, and hence of value—the scriptures of the other religions of the world could also be viewed similarly. Thus, modern Hinduism tends to take into account all the scriptures of the world and even consider them as Vedas.

This chapter discusses the significance of the Vedas as books. The Vedas are the sacred books of the Hindus. They are to the Hindus what the Bible is to the Christians, and the Qur'ān to the Muslims. According to the traditional Hindu view of the Vedas, these books are eternal, beginning-less, not made by man, and moreover, they are the source of all religion. Modern Western scholarship considers the following features of great significance in relation to the Vedas as books: the purity of the texts; the antiquity of the texts; and the importance of the texts in the history of Hinduism. The essence of the significance of the Vedas as books lies in the fact that the Vedas are ‘the book of origins’. They are the original Indo–European work, and contain the origins of later Hindu development in the religious and even secular fields.

Hinduism as the third largest contemporary religion and comprises a whole number of different religions, which coexist peacefully. There are four dominant religions that arose within Hinduism: Vishnuism, Shivaism, Shāktism, and Vedānta. In this chapter, the social teachings of Hinduism are examined. It describes the notions of world and human being laid down in the holy texts called the Vedas. The chapter then discusses the politicization of religion and the attempts to homogenize the state and society in India.

This chapter reflects on mythology, which it says belongs to “a deeper and more ingenuous level of thought, when men pored on the world with intense indiscriminate interest, accepting and recording the mind's vegetation no less than that observable in things, and mixing the two developments together in one wayward drama.” A good mythology cannot be produced without much culture and intelligence. The chapter argues that mythology is essentially not a half-way house between animal vagueness in the soul and scientific knowledge, that myth is a natural prologue to philosophy, and that myth justifies magic. For Santayana, myths might be metaphysical, appear ready made like parts of the social fabric, and perplex the conscience. He also talks about incipient myth in the Vedas and suggests that one function of mythology has been to carry religion over from superstition into wisdom, from an excuse and apology for magic into an ideal representation of moral goods.

Hindu law has allowed different groups and regions to develop their own dharmas. The growth of law in India may be likened to the evolution of disciplines like grammar, poetics, etymology, and prosody. Soon, however, these sciences freed themselves from sacerdotal concerns and came to be established as independent subjects of enquiry, paying only lip service to the authority of the Vedas. The same may be said to be true of law which was an appendage to sacred literature only in the period of the sūtras. Even earlier than the earliest of the known metrical sṃrtis, the artha śāstra tradition had recognised that politics and administration were outside the domain of the sacred. The sṃrtis of Nārada, Ḅrhaspati and Kātyāyana clearly recognise law as distinct from other branches of dharma and therefore they deal exclusively with law.