For more than fifty years, students and teachers have made the two-volume resource Sources of Indian Traditions their top pick for an accessible yet thorough introduction to Indian and South Asian civilizations. Volume 2 contains an essential selection of primary readings on the social, intellectual, and religious history of India from the decline of Mughal rule in the eighteenth century to today. It details the advent of the East India Company, British colonization, the struggle for liberation, the partition of 1947, and the creation of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and contemporary India. This third edition now begins earlier than the first and second, featuring a new chapter on eighteenth-century intellectual and religious trends that set the stage for India's modern development. The editors have added material on Gandhi and his reception both nationally and abroad and include different perspectives on and approaches to Partition and its aftermath. They expand their portrait of post-1947 India and Pakistan and add perspectives on Bangladesh. The collection continues to be divided thematically, with a section devoted to the drafting of the Indian constitution, the rise of nationalism, the influence of Western thought, the conflict in Kashmir, nuclear proliferation, minority religions, secularism, and the role of the Indian political left. A phenomenal text, Sources of Indian Traditions is more indispensable than ever for courses in philosophy, religion, literature, and intellectual and cultural history.

-- Wendy Doniger, University of Chcago

Contains an essential selection of primary readings on the social, intellectual, and religious history of India from the decline of Mughal rule in the eighteenth century to today.

Sources of Vietnamese Tradition provides an essential guide to two thousand years of Vietnamese history and a comprehensive overview of the society and state of Vietnam. Strategic selections illuminate key figures, issues, and events while building a thematic portrait of the country's developing territory, politics, culture, and relations with neighbors. The volume showcases Vietnam's remarkable independence in the face of Chinese and other external pressures and respects the complexity of the Vietnamese experience both past and present. The anthology begins with selections that cover more than a millennium of Chinese dominance over Vietnam (111 B.C.E.–939 C.E.) and follows with texts that illuminate four centuries of independence ensured by the Ly, Tran, and Ho dynasties (1009–1407). The earlier cultivation of Buddhism and Southeast Asian political practices by the monarchy gave way to two centuries of Confucian influence and bureaucratic governance (1407–1600), based on Chinese models, and three centuries of political competition between the north and the south, resolving in the latter's favor (1600–1885). Concluding with the colonial era and the modern age, the volume recounts the ravages of war and the creation of a united, independent Vietnam in 1975. Each chapter features readings that reveal the views, customs, outside influences on, and religious and philosophical beliefs of a rapidly changing people and culture. Descriptions of land, society, economy, and governance underscore the role of the past in the formation of contemporary Vietnam and its relationships with neighboring countries and the West.

Ascetics and mystics have played a prominent role in the development of nearly all religious traditions. The particular importance of such figures within Hinduism is especially evident in the traditions recounted of the Seven Rsis--the seven archetypal sages or seers who are depicted as being more important and powerful than even the gods themselves: indeed, through their asceticism the Rsis become the progenitors of the gods, as also of men, demons and all other orders of creation. Traditions of the Seven Rsis is the first systematic study of these traditions, and consists of two separate but closely related parts: the first part is a text-historical examination of how and when different traditions were formulated, while the second part explores the various activities and ideas associated with the Seven Rsis. Basing his study on the Sanskrit sources, but making use also of Tamil, tribal and non-Indian sources, Dr. Mitchiner sets out the main traditions associated with the Seven Rsis and traces the underlying themes in those traditiions--particularly that of the creative role of these ascetic figures. The work encompasses a wealth of original literary material, much of it previously untranslated, and is both a sourcebook of the Rsi traditions and a study of the historical development, symbolic meaning and interconnectedness of those traditions, illustrating above all the dynamically creative role of the ascetic and mystic within Hinduism.