Product Description: King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India presents an English translation of Kautilya's Arthasastra (AS.) along with detailed endnotes. When it was discovered around 1905, the AS. was described as perhaps the most precious work in the whole range of Sanskrit literature, an assessment that still rings true...read more

Product Description: This collection brings together a series of Patrick Olivelle’s research papers, published over a period of about ten years, whose unifying theme is the search for hidden historical context and developments within words and texts...read more

Product Description: The Law Code of Visnu (Vaisnava-Dharmasastra) is one of the latest of the ancient Indian legal texts composed around the seventh century CE in Kashmir. Both because the Vaishnava-Dharmasastra is the only Dharmasastra that can be geographically located and because it introduces some interesting and new elements into the discussion of Dharmasastric topics, this is a document of interest both to scholars of Indian legal literature and to cultural historians of India, especially of Kashmir...read more

In the first major English translation of the ancient Upanisads for over half a century, Olivelle's work incorporates the most recent historical and philological scholarship on these central scriptures of Hinduism. Composed at a time of great social, economic, and religious change, the Upanisads document the transition from the archaic ritualism of the Veda into new religious ideas and institutions. The introduction and detailed notes make this edition ideal for the non-specialist as well as for students of Indian religions.

Product Description: The Dharmasutras are the four surviving written works of the ancient Indian tradition on the subject of dharma, or the rules of behavior a community recognizes as binding on its members.Written in a pithy and aphoristic style and representing the culmination of a long tradition of scholarship, the Dharmasutras record intense disputes and divergent views on such subjects as the education of the young, rites of passage, marriage and marital rights, the proper interaction between different social groups, sins and their expiations, institutions for the pursuit of holiness, crimes and punishments, death and ancestral rites...read more

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Product Description: Rules and Regulations of Brahmanical Asceticism is the critical edition and translation of a twelfth-century Sanskrit text written by Yadava Prakasa, whose life and activities are of historical interest because, according to tradition, he was the teacher of the great Vaisnava theologian Ramanuja...read more

Product Description: Rules and Regulations of Brahmanical Asceticism is the critical edition and translation of a twelfth-century Sanskrit text written by Yadava Prakasa, whose life and activities are of historical interest because, according to tradition, he was the teacher of the great Vaisnava theologian Ramanuja...read more

Product Description: This comprises a translation and study of the largest single collection of mainstream Hindu texts that deal with asceticism and monasticism.