Preface to Chapters 35—44

The religious situation in India has been infinitely more complicated than conventional labels like ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Buddhism’ suggest. On the one hand, a typological analysis will have to distinguish a wide spectrum of essentially different religious attitudes and expressions; on the other hand, such types appear frequently in ‘Hindu’, ‘Buddhist’, etc.

Vedic Religion (pp. 575-81) looks at the oldest documented type of religion. Brought into India by the Aryas, it has interacted in many ways with other indigenous traditions, offering points of reference not only in later Hindu religions, but also in those cases where it it consciously rejected.

The Renouncer Traditions (pp. 582-603) share certain typical assumptions which distinguish them from Vedic ritualism. While the Upanisads attempt a new synthesis, both Jainism and Buddhism reject such a possibility and replace rituals by asceticism and meditation.

A further component emerges as Epic and Purdnic Religion (pp. 604—26), which introduces monotheism and devotion to the Hindu traditions. In Buddhism too, at least comparable features emerge as part of the Mahayana (pp. 627-36).

As well as the great range of religious practice described, India developed sophisticated modes of reflection by utilising philosophical and theological tools that allow a tradition to rationalise and justify its premisses. Whilst such modes have a more overtly Buddhist, Hindu and Jain orientation, they remain nevertheless embedded in an overall Indian intellectual pursuit.

Finally, any account of the classical Indian religions must take note of religious developments that either place themselves above the mainstream or that reject the latter outright: The Esoteric Traditions and Antinomian Movements (pp. 649-58) attempts some assessment of these.

The remaining chapters of Part Four of The World’s Religions describe further aspects already touched on in this chapter, and in particular the developments of the classical Indian religious tradition inside and outside the sub-continent. Not all areas on the typological spectrum described earlier have been studied to the same extent. Some, like the esoteric traditions (popularly known as ‘Tantrism’) have only very recently become the object of serious scholarship and a special study ofSaivismand the Tantric Traditions (Chapter 36, pp. 660-704) has been included to explore this subject in greater detail.

The classical heritage of the Indian religions has, over time, been broken up into more self-contained entities. This process has been the result of a variety of factors.

The influx of Western ideas gave rise to conscious reflections, for instance in India, on the Hindu traditions—a Modern Hin­duism (Chapter 37, pp. 705-13) has to be placed now alongside the continu­ing older traditions.

From within the antinomian movements the Sikhs developed a very specific and distinct self-awareness which makes it possible to treat Sikhism (Chapter 38, pp. 714—25) as a separate religion.

Forms of Buddhism were taken to many other Asian countries, and once established there, developed along relatively self­contained lines. Theravada Buddhism in South-East Asia (Chapter 39, pp. 726-38) explores this process for an early transplant from India. In the cases of China and Japan, and then Tibet and Mongolia (Chapters 41-4, pp. 756-817), we are dealing with two later stages of Indian Buddhism. On the other hand, Nepal (Chapter 40, pp. 739-55) has preserved a situation that in some respects corresponds to that of classical India before 1200 ce when Hindus and Buddhists were still living side by side within one society and culture.