The Hindu Tradition: Readings in Oriental Thought

Book Overview

This book, compiled from basic Hindu writings, is an exploration of the essential meaning of the Hindu tradition, the way of thinking and acting that has dominated life in India for the last three... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394717023
• Release Date: January 1972
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.8" x 0.7" x 4.1"

Customer Reviews

Still a Classic Compendium of Primary Sources

Although this work first came out in 1972 (and still bears the unfortunate word "Oriental" in the subtitle, which is very misleading for a book about South Asia), it retains its relevance and usefulness, especially if you are seeking a book to accompany a course on ancient and medieval India. As a professor of South Asian history, I have used this work several times in the first half of a two-part survey of Indian history, and my students have found it comprehensible, readable, and very useful for writing papers. It contains well-selected excerpts from most of the major texts you are likely to discuss in a survey course: the Vedas, the Dharmashastras, the Arthashastra, Kama Sutra, Bhagavad Gita, and so forth - right through to the Mughal period. Unlike a lot of recently-published "document readers," it is not a compendium of obscure and unusable primary sources which were selected only because they were available without copyright restrictions! No, every page of this inexpensive little gem of a book is pedagogically useful, and students will find that Indian terms used in it are clearly and carefully defined. Praises given, there are a few drawbacks to this book, apart from the unfortunate title: it represents the elite Hindu tradition almost exclusively, and it fails to integrate in any clear fashion the Islamic tradition that played such a major role in shaping the "Hindu" tradition of South Asia after about 1100 CE. A new edition of this work, properly edited, would be a fantastic addition to the field of South Asian Studies and History, which currently suffers from a plethora of recently-published general histories, most of which are terribly dry, poorly-organized, badly-edited, hastily-knocked off volumes, some riddled with factual errors, that will have your students in a state of mutiny in no time. Embree and Bary are old masters of the field, and this particular book if one of their greatest achievements.