Hindus (The Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices) - Hardcover

Lipner, Julius

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415051819 ISBN 13: 9780415051811

Publisher: Routledge, 1993

Synopsis

Hinduism is a vastly complex phenomenon, a world religion with a history of over three thousand years. It has produced men and women who have made outstanding contributions across the range of civilised human behaviour, and played a crucial part in the rise of two other great religions - Buddhism and Sikhism. Julius Lipner was born and raised in India and is able to draw on his own experience of Hindu beliefs and practices to explain what it means to be Hindu in a changing world.
Hindus examines the religion as a plural phenomenon - that is, as a family of religions rather than a monolithic entity. The approach is thematic, and the author considers various topicssuch as the status of women - in more than one place and from more than one angle. He also tells and sometimes analyses Hindu stories, stressing the narrative quality of Hindu religion and giving us an insight into the nature of the Hindu phenomenon itself.
Hindus will be valuable on more than one level: as a source of instruction, as a basis for discussion, seminars and further study, even as a challenge for further research. It provides a new perspective on what it means to live as a Hindu and enables readers to appreciate this great and marvellous religious phenomenon, its extraordinary richness, and the way it encompasses the diversity of human experience.

About this title

About the Author

Julius Lipner is Professor in Hinduism and the Comparative Study of Religion at the University of Cambridge. He was born and brought up in India where he experienced and learned about Hinduism at first hand. Among his books are The Face of Truth (on Ramanuja), Hindu Ethics: Purity, Abortion and Euthanasia; and Brahmabandhab Upadhyay: the Life and Thought of a Revolutionary. He is the author of the keynote article in The Hindu World (Routledge 2004), ‘On Hinduism and Hinduisms’.

Review

'A landmark in the study of the Hindu traditions when it was first published, Julius Lipner’s Hindus is now even more outstanding.  It incorporates the results of recent research (much of it by the author himself) in a substantially expanded and revised text, which brings clearly to the fore Lipner’s illuminating understanding of the Hindu traditions as polycentric.  More than ever this book is essential reading for anyone interested in them.' - John Brockington, University of Edinburgh, UK

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0415051819
• ISBN 13: 9780415051811
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 375