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Hindu Scriptures (Everymans's Library 944)

Hindu Scriptures (Everymans’s Library 944) (Used)

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Edited by R. C. Zaehner

HB | pp. 328 | 1966 | Everyman’s Library | Used

Hindu Scriptures by R. C. Zaehner provides translations of a selection of scripture at various stages of Hinduism’s historical development.

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Edited byR C Zaehner
Hardback|328 pages|1966|Everyman's Library

Hindu Scriptures by R. C. Zaehner provides translations of a selection of scripture at various stages of Hinduism's historical development.

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Professor Zaehner has newly translated this important Everyman collection of representative writings from the main Hindu scriptures, and there are considerable differences between the original Everyman and the present edition. Professor Zaehner has varied the style of each translation to suit the genre translated throughout. He has also compiled this new selection with a view to easier comprehension, and giving relevance to the overall development of Hinduism from these canonical texts.

It is a constantly repeated truism that all wisdom came from the East, and a great deal of it is embodied in the philosophy associated with religious belief. For a Western mind the most significant benefit emerging from a reading of these writings is that the hymns of the Rig-Veda do not read so much as ‘commandments’ enjoined by priests and prophets (identified in the European mind with oriental religions), but as ‘a poetic testament of a people’s collective reaction to the wonder and awe of existence’.

The selections represent three successive stages in the history of ancient Hinduism. First are the eight translations of hymns from the Rig-Veda which in original sequence range perhaps from 1500 B.C. to 1200 B.C. They reveal a close contact with nature, and show man’s early attempts to seek and discover the significance of the world and his life and existence within it. Professor Zachner’s selection is confined to those which are formative of later thought, and he has also added four hymns from the Atharva-Veda which bear out the same principles.

The next stage, represented by the Upanishads, is the real core of all subsequent Hindu religion, for the Upanishads are the classic formulation of pantheistic mysticism which sees the cosmos as a unitary whole suffused and held together in and by One Reality which both transcends and indwells all things. Moreover some of the Upanishads have a tinge of irony, giving them an unexpectedly modern feeling.

The final contribution is the Bhagavad-Gita (“The Lord’s Song’), where a new religious environment is immediately sensed. Its hold on tradition is maintained through the form of the ‘Vedic deity Vishnu, the Absolute manifesting itself in its incarnation as Krishna. For centuries the work has proved to be a ‘spring of living religious emotion’, While its teaching is theistic, it is not unreservedly so–‘it is & garland of many coloured beauties rather than a well-knit harmony of the truth’,

Editor:

R. C. Zaehner
Binding:

Hardback
Publisher:

Everyman's Library
Pages:

328
Year of Publication:

1966
Edition:

First
Condition:

Used
Country of Origin:

United Kingdom

About the Editor

The author was a British academic whose field of study was Eastern religions. He understood the original language of many sacred texts, e.g., Hindu (Sanskit), Buddhist (Pali), Islamic (Arabic). Earlier, starting in World War II, he had served as an intelligence officer in Iran. At Oxford University his first writings had been on the Zoroastrian religion and its texts. Appointed Spalding Professor, his books addressed such subjects as mystical experience (articulating a widely cited typology), Hinduism, comparative religion, Christianity and other religions, and ethics. He translated the Bhagavad-Gita, providing an extensive commentary based on Hindu tradition and sources.

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