Flowers and Diwali lamps - the Diwali festival What does "Diwali" mean? Diwali is a Sanskrit word originally meaning "a row of lights". "Dipa" is the Sanskrit word for "light". Diwali [...]
What is dharma? Arjuna fights Shiva (in a story from the Mahabharata) because that is his dharma Dharma is an Indian idea Dharma is a Sanskrit word originally meaning order or [...]
Ganesh cursed the moon (Musee Guimet, Paris, from Tamil Nadu, ca. 1500 AD) Narada offered a sacrifice Now long ago Brahma was sitting with Shiva when a man called Narada came along. And Narada [...]
Brahma (Musée Guimet, Paris,from Madhya Pradesh, about 1100 AD) Who was the god Brahma? Brahma was, along with Vishnu and Shiva, one of the three main gods of Hinduism. More about Vishnu And about [...]
A Song Dynasty statue of the boddhisatva Guanyin What is a boddhisatva? A boddhisatva, in Buddhist religion, was a holy man or woman. They were special, closer to God than other [...]
Mughal painting of the blind men and the elephant, from the 1600s AD (now in Walters Art Museum) A story that's a metaphor Once there was an elephant, a tame [...]
What is the Bhagavad Gita? The Bhagavad Gita is part of a longer poem, the Mahabharata, that was written in India probably about 300 BC. Historians disagree about the date though. The Bhagavad Gita (BA-ga-vad GEE-ta [...]
Guru Nanak Dev How did Sikhs get started? Just before 1500 AD, a man called Nanak who lived in India had a vision where he saw that there was no caste, there was no Hindu or Buddhist or Muslim, [...]
Mughal religion: the Taj Mahal New religions reach India In the 1500s and 1600s AD, many Europeans and West Asians tried to force other people to believe in their religion [...]
The god Zeus is the lightning and the thunder Zeus was, for many people in ancient Greece, the king of the gods. Homer shows Zeus this way in the Iliad, for example. But mainly, Zeus is [...]
