Tag: Hinduism
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Thinking about the Mahabharata
I have been thinking about the Mahabharata. Not because I am an expert. I finally acquired the new-ish huge-for-an-abridgement English translation of this epic sacred text by John D. Smith, but haven’t read it. I have read the Bhagavad-Gita, but my knowledge of that is still mostly superficial, honestly. I know the outline of the […]
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The Gita is not the “Hindu Bible”
One of the pitfalls of the “world religions approach” is students’ understandable tendency to want to fit everything into a paradigm they already know. Understandable, because the approach itself developed on the foundation of 19th century scholars’ and colonialists’ efforts to do exactly the same thing: to locate the religious structures that corresponded to the […]
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Reading for World Religions
This [delightful, but massive] book1 has been on my shelf for at least five years – long past the time it was withdrawn from the Indian market, according to one commentator because it “wasn’t boring enough.” I have managed to read the introduction and chapter one more than once. But it has always gotten set […]
Matters of Interpretation 