This Special Issue of Religions brings together a talented group of international scholars who have studied and written on the Hindu tradition. The topic of religious experience is much debated in the field of Religious Studies, and here, we present studies of the Hindu religious experience explored from a variety of regions and perspectives. Our intention is to show that the religious experience has long been an important part of Hinduism, and should not be dismissed or considered as irrelevant. As a body of scholarship, these articles refine our understanding of the range and variety of religious experience in Hinduism. In addition to their substantive contributions, the authors also show important new directions in the study of the third-largest religion in the world, with over one billion followers.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue Religious Experience in the Hindu Tradition that was published in Religions

Originally published in 1977, The Hindu Religious Tradition provides a detailed exploration into the different doctrines regarding the nature of Religious Reality and the many paths of search for this Reality within the Hindu religion. The book discusses these differing doctrines from the point of view of their philosophical significance and their use in man’s search for the divine in consideration of the traditional teaching that the divine is already in man and can be realised in direct experience. It provides a comprehensive account of this tradition through considering all aspects that are integral to it, and highlights that the profundity of this tradition lies in that it cannot be limited to the requirements of any one form of conceiving the divine. The Hindu Religious Tradition will appeal to those with an interest in Hinduism, religious philosophy, and theology.

Hindus will be valuable on more than one level: as a source of instruction, as a basis for discussion, seminars and further study, even as a challenge for further research. It provides a new perspective on what it means to live as a Hindu and enables readers to appreciate this great and marvellous religious phenomenon, its extraordinary richness, and the way it encompasses the diversity of human experience.

History of man's religious experience.

Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature explores the nature of religion and, in James' observation, its divorce from science when studied academically. After publication in 1902 it quickly became a canonical text of philosophy and psychology, remaining in print through the entire century. "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind."