The Library

At the end of the festival they carry the god to the sea and let the clay dissolve. If Hindus believed the image was God, they could not do that. 'Idol' is a borrowe…

In a Prakrit romance finished in 779 CE the holders of the shabara knowledge are Vidyadharas in bark and berries, not Shabaras.…

Around Shiva at the centre stands the whole pantheon of a civilisation, arranged in rings: the goddess in her nines, a hundred Shivas, the fifty-six Ganeshas and twe…

The charter text of the Shabara corpus is extant in about fifteen manuscripts, and one complete copy sits in the Asiatic Society at Kolkata, described in print since…

A walk south to north along the crescent, from Assi where the pilgrimage begins to Adi Keshava at the northern end, past the burning grounds, the great aarti, and so…

Three of the greatest philosophers India produced read the same handful of sacred texts and reached three opposite conclusions about the one question that mattered m…

For centuries the civilization with the most sophisticated oral-memory system on earth refused to write its highest scripture down. This chapter asks why, and tracks…

Sanatana Dharma carries two bodies of revelation that both claim to be revealed: the Veda and the Āgama. How they differ, how the orthodox denied the second, how the…

The sixth gate, between the brows, lies beyond the five elements. Two petals, the syllable OM, and the place where the three great channels meet. This is the third e…

The fourth gate, at the heart, is named for a sound that nothing strikes. Twelve petals, the element air, two interlaced triangles, and a wishing-tree: this is the c…

A Hindu temple is a building you are meant to walk into the way a soul walks toward God: from the bright, crowded, carved outer world to one small, dark, silent room…

Not every form of the divine has a face. A black fossil stone from a Himalayan river is worshipped as Vishnu himself; a diagram of interlocking triangles is treated …

The traveller who climbs toward Shiva's mountain expects to find silence and a solitary god. Instead the slopes are crowded — with drums, ghosts, ascetics, dwarfs, s…

The self and the absolute, and the equation at the heart of Vedanta: that your innermost self and the ground of all being are, in some sense, one.…

The eighth Mahavidya is golden and still. Bagalamukhi seizes the enemy's tongue and raises her club, the goddess of stambhana, the power that paralyses speech, motio…

The tradition answers the question of where karma first began by denying the question a footing: karma and the cycle of rebirth are anadi, beginningless.…

The fifth Mahavidya is heat: the fierce counterpart of Tripura Sundari, the ascetic fire of tapas and the decay folded into everything that is made. Bhairavi is the …

An eighth-century hymn that calls itself a hammer, swung verse by verse at everything we mistake for permanent. A reading of the whole of Bhaja Govindam, and why its…

The most radical purification in the Hindu world does not wash the body. It destroys it. Before a tantric worshipper may approach the deity, they must dissolve their…

The fourth Mahavidya is the gentlest of cosmic claims: that the universe is a body the Goddess wears, not a thing she made and set aside. Bhuvaneshvari is space itse…

The whole power of the alphabet, concentrated into a single grain. The bija mantra is one syllable held to contain a deity, and it forces the hardest question in the…

Three near-identical words that mean three completely different things: the Absolute, a god, and a class of people. Here is how to tell Brahman, Brahmā and Brahmin a…

The tradition offers three great paths out of the round of karma, and the Bhagavad Gita holds them together.…

Charvaka, also called Lokayata, was India's bold materialist school: no soul, no afterlife, no karma, only this body, this world, and the evidence of the senses.…

The most shocking image in Hindu iconography, and one of the most precise. Chhinnamasta holds her own severed head and drinks the blood from her own neck, standing o…

Every culture peoples the space between the human and the ultimate — with angels, daimones, kami, valkyries, spirits of every kind. Setting the Hindu retinues beside…

Shiva as the silent, south-facing guru: a young teacher under a banyan, four aged sages, and a raised hand. Decode each element of the image and it turns out to teac…

In the oldest hymns the word asura is a title of honour, and it belongs to the gods. Three thousand years later it means demon. What happened in between, and who in …

Devipuram's Sahasrakshi Meru Temple inaugurated an open-access model for Sri Vidya practice.…

The last three limbs are one deepening movement: concentration, then unbroken meditation, then absorption. Together Patanjali calls them samyama, and their aim is li…