Religions of Early India: A Cultural History
Hardcover
- Price:
- $39.95/拢35.00
- ISBN:
- Published (US):
- Nov 26, 2024
- Published (UK):
- Jan 21, 2025
- Copyright:
- 2024
- Pages:
- 616
- Size:
- 6.13 x 9.25 in.
- 9 color + 60 b/w illus. 18 maps.
- Main_subject:
- Religion
ebook
From its earliest recorded history, India was a place of remarkable and varied religious activity, ranging from elaborate sacrificial rituals and rigorous regimes of personal austerity to psycho-spiritual experimentation and utopian visions. In this ambitious and wide-ranging chronicle, Richard Davis offers a history of India鈥檚 myriad religious cultures that spans two thousand years, from 1300 BCE to 700 CE. India, Davis writes, was not only the birthplace of the religions we now know as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It was also the home of other, often unnamed religions that can be classified as 鈥渇olk鈥� or 鈥減opular鈥� religions. Tracing these intertwined practices, Davis shows that the ardent and heterogeneous religious cultures of early India came to define and redefine themselves in relation to one another.
Davis recounts this history through voices鈥攙oices recorded in hymns, poems, songs, didactic stories, epic narratives, scientific treatises, and theological discourses, as well as voices that speak through material remains, whether monumental sculptures or tiny terracotta figurines of nameless goddesses. He focuses on the long millennium often designated as 鈥渃lassical India,鈥� which stretches from the time of the founding figures of Buddhism and Jainism during the sixth century BCE through the seventh-century-CE dynasties of the Chalukyas and the Pallavas in southern India. Throughout, he emphasizes encounter, interaction, debate, critique, and borrowing among religious communities within a shared, changing social and political reality. The voices and visions of early India鈥檚 religions, Davis shows us, are fascinating in their multiplicity.