Customer Reviews

Hindus (The Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices)

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I am a Hindu, but know very little of Vedas, Upanishads, the rituals, the festivals, and all the other things that I see being done everyday. This book links all these up telling us how they came to be and how they are related and make sense. This is a serious book. Every chapter took a double read to absorb well.

Recommended

Lipner will absolutely stand out as the ONE book to get for a thorough, if for some too dense or "academic" in style, investigation of what it has meant and now means "to be a Hindu." If you read your T.S. Eliot when you were younger and still kick yourself that you don't know what the Upanishads really are, and you know Oppenheimer repeated "I am the destroyer of worlds" that time but just haven't gotten around the finding the locus classicus: You are obviously very interested in Hinduism, but haven't had the time to bone up on it. Read this book while you are re-reading the Bhagavad Gita (not an Upanishad and careful that you don't just call it an "epic.". The depth of Lipner's knowledge of his massive subject is plain to the careful reader on every page.