The R?gveda is the oldest of the books that comprise the scriptures of Hinduism. While its age cannot be accurately determined, it can be said with reasonable certainty that it must have existed in its present form at least as early as 1000 BC. It consists of 1,028 hymns, arranged, according to the form in which the R?gveda has been transmitted, in ten divisions, called man?d?alas. This volume consists of a selection of hymns, translated into English and annotated, as well as short introductions to the R?gveda as a whole and the different themes around which the selected hymns are grouped, a bibliography, and an index.

The Rigveda is the oldest Sanskrit text, consisting of over one thousand hymns dedicated to various divinities of the Vedic tradition. Orally composed and orally transmitted for several millennia, the hymns display remarkable poetic complexity and religious sophistication. As the culmination of the long tradition of Indo-Iranian oral-formulaic praise poetry and the first monument of specifically Indian religiosity and literature, the Rigveda is crucial to the understanding both of Indo-European and Indo-Iranian cultural prehistory and of later Indian religious history and high literature. This new translation represents the first complete scholarly translation into English in over a century and utilizes the results of the intense research of the last century on the language and the ritual system of the text. The focus of this translation is on the poetic techniques and structures utilized by the bards and on the ways that the poetry intersects with and dynamically expresses the ritual underpinnings of the text.

This open access book provides both a broad perspective and a focused examination of cow care as a subject of widespread ethical concern in India, and increasingly in other parts of the world. In the face of what has persisted as a highly charged political issue over cow protection in India, intellectual space must be made to bring the wealth of Indian traditional ethical discourse to bear on the realities of current human-animal relationships, particularly those of humans with cows. Dharma, yoga, and bhakti paradigms serve as starting points for bringing Hindu—particularly Vaishnava Hindu—animal ethics into conversation with contemporary Western animal ethics. The author argues that a culture of bhakti—the inclusive, empathetic practice of spirituality centered in Krishna as the beloved cowherd of Vraja—can complement recently developed ethics-of-care thinking to create a solid basis for sustaining all kinds of cow care communities.

RGVV (History of Religion: Essays and Preliminary Studies) brings together the mutually constitutive aspects of the study of religion(s)—contextualized data, theory, and disciplinary positioning—and engages them from a critical historical perspective. The series publishes monographs and thematically focused edited volumes on specific topics and cases as well as comparative work across historical periods from the ancient world to the modern era.

Embraces a wide range of aspects of Indian mysticism, displaying the structural patterns in mystical experiences and the mystic paths in different traditions and schools, while there are also significant contributions to comparative mysticism, Eastern and Western. First published in 1989.

The first complete English translation in over a century of the Rigveda, the oldest Sanskrit text. Its thousand hymns, of remarkable poetic complexity and religious sophistication, are crucial to the understanding of the Indo-Iranian oral tradition from which they emerged and the rich flowering of Indian religious and literary expressions that followed it.

The Rigveda is a monumental text in both world religion and world literature, yet outside a small band of specialists it is little known. Composed in the latter half of the second millennium BCE, it stands as the foundational text of what would later be called Hinduism. The text consists of over a thousand hymns dedicated to various divinities, composed in sophisticated and often enigmatic verse. This concise guide from two of the Rigveda's leading English-language scholars introduces the text and breaks down its large range of topics--from meditations on cosmic enigmas to penetrating reflections on the ability of mortals to make contact with and affect the divine and cosmic realms through sacrifice and praise--for a wider audience.

Description: The Buddha, upon the attainment of enlightenment, found out that the conditioned existence, whatever be its form or state, is basically and inherently characterized by pain. The conditioned existence is painful on account of it being insubstantial and impermanent and also due to it being subject to constant becoming. As life in the world is painful, so it is necessary to find out such a treatment by the application of which suffering as such could be transcended. The basic thrust of the Dharma of the Buddha, thus, is not to realize the telos of life in and through the world; rather it is to go beyond that which is given. It is the negation or transcendence of the given that the ultimate goal is reached, which is termed as nirvana or the extinction of suffering. Since it is not possible for every individual to reach this ultimate goal of nirvana, so Buddhism, particularly in its Mahayana version, devised a practical scheme in terms of which a Bodhisattva, seen as the embodiment of compassion, could come to the rescue of those who sought his help. As a religious idea, the compassion of a Bodhisattva for sentient beings became the basis of Buddhist spirituality, which meant that no more would one seek self-salvation unless each creature attained to the state of freedom from becoming. It is towards the salvation of others that a Bodhisattva works for, and not for his own salvation. The question that arises is this: Is this selfless compassion equivalent to the Christian charity which the Word, upon becoming flesh, expressed upon the Cross at Calvary? As Buddhism believes neither in the existence of a loving and living God nor in a substantial self, so the compassion of a Bodhisattva cannot be accorded with any ontic reality. As and when a Buddhist speaks of compassion, he treats it merely as an expedient means. In contrast with this Buddhist concept of compassion as an expedient means, Christianity treats love both as a means and as a goal of life. Moreover, love is seen as the very nature of God. As love has its source in God, so we are asked to love our neighbour as we love ourselves, and this love found its ultimate expression when offered himself as a victim upon the Cross for the remission of sins of mankind. What it amounts to saying is this: Christian idea of love radically differs from that of Buddhist compassion. It is this theme of love versus compassion that constitute the heart of the book.