'Read! Your Lord is the Most Bountiful one who taught by the pen, who taught man what he did not know.' The Qur'an, believed by Muslims to be the word of God, was revealed to the …
The Bible is the most important book in the history of Western civilization, and also the most difficult to interpret. It has been the vehicle of continual conflict, with every …
A classic study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind, and the progress through magic and religion to scientific thought, The Golden Bough has a unique status in modern …
'The profoundest book there is, born from the innermost richness of truth, an inexhaustible well into which no bucket descends without coming up with gold and goodness.' Thus Spoke …
'If religion generated everything that is essential in society, this is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.' In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), …
'When the wheel of sexual ecstasy is in full motion, there is no textbook at all, and no order.' The Kamasutra is the oldest extant Hindu textbook of erotic love. It is about the …
'I have heard the supreme mystery, yoga, from Krishna, from the lord of yoga himself.' Thus ends the Bhagavad Gita, the most famous episode from the great Sanskrit epic, the …
Written in India in the early eighth century AD, Santideva's Bodhicaryavatara became one of the most popular accounts of the Buddhist's spiritual path. The Bodhicaryavatara takes …
'Athena seized the writhing serpent and hurled it into the sky, and fixed it to the very pole of the heavens.' The constellations we recognize today were first mapped by the …
'Of ways you may speak, but not the Perennial Way; By names you may name, but not the Perennial Name.' The best-loved of all the classical books of China and the most universally …
