Religions of Early India

A Cultural History

Richard H. Davis

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780691199269
• eBook ISBN: 9780691265780
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Historia de la India y el sur de Asia

The extraordinary multiplicity of religions and religious cultures in India, chronicled over two thousand years

From its earliest recorded history, India was a place of remarkable and varied religious activity, ranging from elaborate sacrificial rituals and rigorous regimes of personal austerity to psycho-spiritual experimentation and utopian visions. In this ambitious and wide-ranging chronicle, Richard Davis offers a history of India’s myriad religious cultures that spans two thousand years, from 1300 BCE to 700 CE. India, Davis writes, was not only the birthplace of the religions we now know as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It was also the home of other, often unnamed religions that can be classified as “folk” or “popular” religions. Tracing these intertwined practices, Davis shows that the ardent and heterogeneous religious cultures of early India came to define and redefine themselves in relation to one another.

Davis recounts this history through voices—voices recorded in hymns, poems, songs, didactic stories, epic narratives, scientific treatises, and theological discourses, as well as voices that speak through material remains, whether monumental sculptures or tiny terracotta figurines of nameless goddesses. He focuses on the long millennium often designated as “classical India,” which stretches from the time of the founding figures of Buddhism and Jainism during the sixth century BCE through the seventh-century-CE dynasties of the Chalukyas and the Pallavas in southern India. Throughout, he emphasizes encounter, interaction, debate, critique, and borrowing among religious communities within a shared, changing social and political reality. The voices and visions of early India’s religions, Davis shows us, are fascinating in their multiplicity.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Abbreviations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Living Landscape of India
• 2. Indo-Aryans and the Vision of the Rig Veda Poets (1300–1000 BCE)
• 3. The World of Sacrifice (1000–600 BCE)
• 4. A New Urban Culture and Renunciatory Religion (600–300 BCE)
• 5. The Mauryan Era: Religious Cultures of Empire (321–187 BCE)
• 6. Disciplinary Communities and Religious Quests
• 7. Popular Religious Cultures during the Shunga Era (200 BCE–0 CE)
• 8. The Sanskrit Epics: Imagined Empires of the Hindus
• Color Plates
• 9. The Kushana Era and Pan-Asian Buddhism (0 CE–300 CE)
• 10. Visual Religion: Icons, Worship, and Devotion
• 11. The Four Human Aims: Guides for the Good Life
• 12. The Gupta Era: Religious Cultures of Court and Beyond (300–500 CE)
• 13. The Puranas: Varieties of Hindu Theism
• 14. Homes for Gods (460 CE–700 CE)
• Epilogue. Varieties of Religious Cultures in Early India
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index