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[German Version] I. History of Religions – II. Missiology I. History of Religions Bhakti (Sanskrit, “participation, devotion, love”) is a devotional, in some respects ecstatic, adoration of God and personal experience of God. It originated in southern India in the 7th century and spread to northern India from the 12th/13th centuries. The novelty in this often popular bhakti piety was the fact that …

[German Version] (Sanskrit: neut. bráhman, accented on the first syllable; masc. brahmán, nom. brahmā). Brahman is a fundamental concept of Indian thought. In the earlier Veda, bráhman (neut.) means a formulaic utterance, hymn, or saying; later it comes to mean also the truth indwelling the utterance, the sacral power that controls even the gods. The masculine form denotes bearers of this power, for example priests (Brahmin). In the Brāhmaṇas (after c. 1000 bce), this power becomes the primordial ground ( Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.10: “Verily, in…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies A pilgrimage is a journey by an individual or group, religiously motivated, usually over a substantial distance and (esp. in earlier periods) demanding great effort. A Western pilgrim today can hardly imagine the dangers to which a peregrinus was exposed. This Latin term, the etymon of the English word pilgrim, denoted a foreigner or in some cases an exile. A person who undertook a pilgrimage was thus someone who had to leave his or her familiar environment. The element of foreignness and movement also induced…

[German Version] I. Terminology All the major concepts in soteriology have biblical roots. Of central importance today is the notion of reconciliation (II), which bridges the theological and secular realms. The original Greek word καταλλαγή/ katallagḗ involves the notion of exchange, which was early taken to imply that Christ takes the place of the sinner before God, so realizing atonement (at-one-ment) and making expiation. Associated ideas include substitution and representation, which conceive Christ as standing in for the sinner before God. Particular theolo…

[German Version] I. History – II. Religious Doctrine – III. Society – IV. Hinduism and Christianity I. History 1. Historical outline Hinduism, from Persian hindu (“one who lives by the Indus River”), is a collective term for those religious communities and their systems that formed on the south Asian subcontinent (India: I) or spread there, whose social organization is characterized by particular rules of lineage and marriage (the so-called caste system, see III, 2 below; Caste: I), who primarily uphold Vedic-Brahm…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies The phenomenology of religion is the study of manifestations of religious phenomena (Phenomenon, Phenomenology), or their comparative morphology. The prime task is the recording of elements constituting religion, for example sacred objects, sacred sites, sacred times, actions, holy scriptures or people and groups, and also forms of religiosity. But the phenomenology of religion was usually less interested in finding analogies and parallels than in “grasping the essence” ( Wesenserfassung, Lanczkowski) of religious phenomena. In the fi…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies Social norms are the interiorized but controlled rules of conduct of a social group. They include rules and standards for decency and mores, that is, for religious, moral, and right behavior. Unlike ideals or values, norms are mostly specific and concrete. There are various theories of the meaning of norms; most widely accepted is the thesis that norms serve the development of social controls and group solidarity or cultural identity. Validity is generally claimed for religious and moral norms by appeal to a religious authority (go…

Until 2006, Nepal declared itself to be the only constitutionally Hindu kingdom in the world; Hinduism was the official state religion, and many other forms of religion such as Buddhism were more or less declared to be part of Hinduism. Given such claims, the statistics provided by the Nepalese government are difficult to trust. According to the 2001 census, some 87% of people were officially Hindus, while only 5–7% were officially Buddhist. Most of the Buddhists that live in the eastern hills, …

Saṃskāra is the Sanskrit term mostly used for Brahmanical-Sanskritic life-cycle rituals that are mainly widespread between Hindu and other (Buddhist, Jaina) communities. They belong to a category of Sanskritic domestic rituals ( karman, kriyā) that generally includes vedic sacrifices ( homa, yajña, iṣṭi, bali) and mantras, but sometimes also forms of religious services ( pūjā, upacāra, sevā), oaths ( vrata), or pilgrimages ( tīrthayātrā). The Hindu tradition knows up to 40 saṃskāras, of which 16 have achieved an almost canonical status (see below) and of which …