The Pancatantra is the most famous collection of fables in India and was one of the earliest Indian books to be translated into Western languages. No other Indian work has had a greater influence on world literature, and no other collection of stories has become as popular in India itself. A significant influence on the Arabian Nights and the Fables of La Fontaine, the Pancatantra teaches the principles of good government and public policy through the me...

Whether defined by family, lineage, caste, professional or religious association, village, or region, India's diverse groups did settle on a concept of law in classical times. How did they reach this consensus? Was it based on religious grounds or a transcendent source of knowledge? Did it depend on time and place? And what apparatus did communities develop to ensure justice was done, verdicts were fair, and the guilty were punished?Addressing these questions and more, A Dharma...

The Dharmasutras are the four surviving works of the ancient Indian expert tradition on the subject of dharma, or the rules of behaviour 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 and their rites of passage, ritual procedures and religious ceremonies, marriage and marit...

This translation of a twelfth-century Sanskrit text is the most comprehensive presentation of Hindu ascetic practices available in English. It is also the clearest.Rules and Regulations of Brahmanical Asceticism is the critical edition and translation of a twelfth-century Sanskrit text written by Yadava Prakasaa, whose life and activities are of historical interest because, according to tradition, he was the teacher of the great Vais'n'ava theologian Ramanuja....

There are few historical figures more integral to South Asian history than Emperor Ashoka, a third-century BCE king who ruled over a larger area of the Indian subcontinent than anyone else before British colonial rule. Ashoka sought not only to rule his territory but also to give it a unity of purpose and aspiration, to unify the people of his vastly heterogeneous empire not by a cult of personality but by the cult of an idea—"dharma"—which served as the linchpin of a new moral order. He a...

For scholars of ancient Indian religions, the wandering mendicants who left home and family for a celibate life and the search for liberation represent an enigma. The Vedic religion, centered on the married household, had no place for such a figure. Much has been written about the Indian ascetic but hardly any scholarly attention has been paid to the married householder with wife and children, generally referred to in Sanskrit as grhastha: "the stay-at-home." The institution of th...

Through pointed studies of important aspects and topics of dharma in Dharmaśāstra, this comprehensive collection shows that the history of Hinduism cannot be written without the history of Hindu law. Part One provides a concise overview of the literary genres in which Dharmasastra was written with attention to chronology and historical developments. This study divides the tradition into its two major historical periods--the origins and formation of the classical texts and the late...

The Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law is the first of its kind in the field of comparative ancient legal history. Written collaboratively by a dedicated team of international experts, each chapter offers a new framing and understanding of key legal concepts, practices and historical contexts across five major legal traditions of the ancient world. Stretching chronologically across more than three and a half millennia, from the earliest, very fragmentary, proto-cuneiform tablets ...