Bøger af Johannes Bronkhorst

Certain religious behaviours clearly reduce biological fitness. These behaviours include celibacy along with various forms of asceticism, and rituals that harm the performer. Such behaviours are found in widely different cultures. How is this possible? This book shows that these behaviours (as is religion in general) are by-products of features of the human mind whose evolutionary fitness is beyond doubt and explores those features. Which are those features? This book proposes a twofold answer. It draws attention to the layered nature of human consciousness, in which different manners of experience are superimposed on each other. This goes a long way toward accounting for the universal religious belief in some kind of transcendental world, a "higher" reality, different from "ordinary" reality. The layering of consciousness comes about in childhood and gains in prominence with the acquisition of a first language, which is the second feature highlighted in this book. Together, these features explain a variety of "normal" religious behaviours and beliefs, and account for the possibility of mystical experience. They also explain the occurrence of behaviours that do not augment evolutionary fitness.

Through a detailed analysis of the available cultural and chronological data, this book overturns traditional ideas about the cultural history of India and proposes a different picture instead. The idea of a unilinear development out of Brahmanism, in particular, is challenged.

Karma has become a household word in the modern world, where it is associated with the belief in rebirth determined by one's deeds in earlier lives. This belief was and is widespread in the Indian subcontinent as is the word "karma" itself. In lucid and accessible prose, this book presents karma in its historical, cultural, and religious context.

This book was written as a doctoral thesis. His ability to understand difficult grammatical and philosophical texts in Sanskrit was unequalled, and without his help it would have taken far longer to write this book and indeed might very well have proved impossible.