Mythology
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Uniting India with Itihasa-Purana
In India, the phrase ‘itihasa-puranaʼ has been used for 2,500 years to refer to transmitted memories. Many assume that this is an ancient division between history and mythology. However, the split between history and mythology happened only in the 19th…
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Shiva and Vishnu in My Son, Vietnam
If one travels to Da Nang in Vietnam, then takes an hour’s drive to the city of My Son, one finds a cluster of Hindu temples made of brick. They are dedicated to Hindu gods. One realises these were built…
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Secularising Ramayana and Mahabharata
When we study Buddhist and Jain lore, we realise many stories there are quite similar to stories found in Ramayana and Mahabharata.
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Legacy Of Those Denied Success By Heartless Gods
This is a story from Sumerian mythology. Sumer is a region in southern Iraq where the world’s first cities were established around 3500 BC.
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What Do We Really Know About Shankaracharya?
Comic books and popular mainstream films have created the impression that we know a lot about Adi Shankaracharya. But we know very little.
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Gluttony Of Glamour
If one sees television serials today, you see this desire and gluttony for glamour. It’s not enough to be rich. It is important to show that you are rich.
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Was Brihaspati the Patron Of the Charvaka Materialists?
How do we prevent our sense-organs from leading us astray? That was the concern of the spiritualists. For materialists, the spiritualists were people seeking power by controlling others.
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Kingdom Is Responsibility, Not Property
Dharmic Leadership (is) different from Conventional Leadership. Dharmic Leadership is not prescriptive. It is introspective.
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No Leather In Temples, But Silk?
Recently, at a temple, a monk wearing ochre-saffron, to advertise his ‘celibacy’, yelled at a girl for wearing a leather belt and entering the temple. Somehow, he had given himself the authority of purity. It struck me how this arrogant…
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Loss and Recovery of the Vedas
The conch-shell trumpet heralds the shift of time: a great battle that witnesses the end of Dwapara Yuga and the start of Kali yuga.
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No Dharma Without Dharma-sankat
Yagna is the primal ritual of the Veda. Mistranslated as sacrifice, it is a ritual of exchange and reciprocity.
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From Vedic Soma to Puranic Amrut
Early scholars wondered what this Soma was, leading to rather colourful research. Was it a magical drink?
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The Mysterious Temple Texts Called Agama
Agamas are essentially manuals that were produced to manage temples. It is mainly, though not exclusively, a South Indian phenomenon, where there were vast temple complexes controlled by the Brahmins.
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Pursuit of Justice in Time
Everybody is seeking to reach the future by erasing the past. But time as a concept is the very opposite of justice.
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Non-Vedic Hinduism
The study of Hinduism reveals much more than the narrow ideas of the Vedic corpus. Yet it was the Veda that was privileged by the British, who were looking for a Hindu “holy book”.
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How Story-telling Became a Vedic Tool
Stories transmitted over generations serve as the glue of a community.