Hinduism

Hindu cosmology's system of four yugas, repeating across vast cosmic ages, is among the tradition's most elaborated doctrines.

The Bhagavad Gita teaches karma as an impersonal, action-based causal law central to Hindu ethics.

Advaita Vedanta, the most influential school of Vedanta, holds that Brahman alone is ultimately real.

Samkhya, one of the six classical schools of Hindu philosophy, holds purusha and prakriti as its foundational dualism.

The caves are Buddhist, Hindu and Jain together, cut over some four centuries.

Author of the Kitab al-Hind, the major medieval Islamic study of Hindu religion; not a practitioner, a comparative scholar of it.

The Archaeological Survey of India's collections include Hindu temple sculpture.

Roughly 8 per cent of the population, much reduced since partition through migration and periodic violence.

Its rulings on sati, personal law and education shaped nineteenth century Hindu reform.

About 22 per cent of the population, concentrated among Nepali speaking Lhotshampa communities in the south.

The Lhotshampa were predominantly Hindu. This is an Associated With edge to the tradition documented as one strand of the campaign's target, not a perpetrator-tradition edge; the perpetrator was the Bhutanese state.

The Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra is associated with Hinduism, its own tradition field.

The Chola temple endowments made the temple an economic as well as a ritual institution.

The tradition's liturgical, scriptural or ancestral language belongs to this family.

A tradition held by peoples inside this grouping. The grouping is not itself a religious body.

About 28 per cent of the population, among Indo Fijians descended from labourers indentured between 1879 and 1916.

The Gheranda Samhita, a classic hatha yoga text, is associated with Hinduism, its own tradition field.

About 79 to 80% of the population is Hindu, the largest religious group by a wide margin.

The tradition's liturgical, scriptural or ancestral language belongs to this family.

The tradition's liturgical, scriptural or ancestral language belongs to this family.

The Vedic hymns name the rivers of this plain; the relation of Harappan religion to later Hinduism is disputed.

Kanjira keeps rhythm under Carnatic bhajan and other South Indian devotional singing, alongside the mridangam.

Also used in Shaiva tantric practice

Kartal or manjira lets any member of a congregation join in keeping rhythm during devotional singing.

Khmer kingship, temple form and iconography were drawn from Indian cosmology, with Mount Meru modelled by the temple mountain.

Yogananda founded the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles in 1920.

About 6 per cent of the population, predominantly within the Indian Malaysian community.

The Varkari abhangas and the Jnaneshwari are Marathi devotional works.

The largest community at 48.5 per cent in 2011, brought by Indian indentured labourers from 1834; the Maha Shivaratri pilgrimage to Ganga Talao is among the largest Hindu gatherings outside India.

Hindu landlords, moneylenders and villagers in the affected taluks were the principal targets of the communal violence that spread through the rebellion's later months, documented in detail in Wood's account.

About 81% Hindu, the majority tradition.

The first Hare Krishna temple in the West opened on Second Avenue in 1966.

Newar religious life mixes Hinduism within the same caste hierarchy as their Buddhism.

Hindu residents of Noakhali and Tippera were the targeted population of the violence, including forced conversions and the destruction of Hindu religious property.

Expatriate communities sustain Hindu temples in Muscat, some of them predating the modern state.

Hindu communities, chiefly in Punjab and Bengal, were both targets and, in the same reciprocal violence, perpetrators against Muslim neighbors during Partition.

Hanuman patronage and akhara culture in Hindu lineages

Hinduism is the majority tradition east of the partition border in Punjab.

Sandalwood paste is among the standard offerings of Hindu puja, applied to the image and to the worshipper's brow. Buhnemann records it in the Smarta sequence.

Murugan, Mayon and Korravai belong to the religious world of the Sangam poems.

Sanskrit is the canonical and liturgical language of Hinduism, the language of the epics, the Puranas and most temple ritual formulas.

The Sat-Cakra-Nirupana is associated with Hinduism, its own tradition field.

The manuscript tradition of Kashmir Shaivism is written in Sharada.

About 5 per cent of the population, centred on temples such as Sri Mariamman, the oldest Hindu temple in the country.

About 12% Hindu, chiefly among the Tamil minority.

About 22 per cent of the population, descended from indentured labourers recruited from British India after 1873.

Tabla keeps rhythm under devotional singing in this tradition, though the instrument itself is shared with secular Hindustani classical and film music.

Tamil Shaivism and the Bhakti hymns of the Alvars and Nayanars are Tamil-language Hindu traditions.

The colonial regulation declaring the burning or burying of Hindu widows culpable homicide.

About 18 per cent of the population, descended from Indian indentureship after 1845, with Divali observed as a national holiday.

Expatriate communities worship at temples granted land by the rulers, including the Bur Dubai temples and the BAPS Mandir opened in 2024.

The Vedanga Jyotisha is associated with Hinduism, its own tradition field.

Vedic Sanskrit is the archaic form of Sanskrit in which the four Vedas were composed, older and grammatically distinct from later Classical Sanskrit.

Swami Vivekananda's 1893 address to the Parliament is credited with introducing Vedanta to a mass American audience.

Modern breathwork descends from the pranayama of the hatha yoga texts by way of twentieth-century adaptation.

Rajneesh taught as a guru in an Indian idiom and drew on Hindu, Buddhist and Western therapeutic material together.

The riots were organized substantially by Hindu nationalist organizations, including groups affiliated with the Hindu Dharma Raksha Samiti, who circulated inflammatory rumors to mobilize participants, and Kumar and the Reddy Commission both find the violence directed disproportionately against the city's Muslim minority. This connects the organizing identity of the violence to Hindu nationalist mobilization as the sources describe it; it is not a claim that Hindu teaching called for it.

The killing was organized chiefly by Hindu nationalist organizations invoking the Godhra train deaths, and Nussbaum situates it within their longer campaign to define Indian national identity in explicitly Hindu religious terms against Muslim and other minorities. This connects the violence to that organizing identity; it is not a claim that Hindu teaching called for it.

Within the Ayurvedic daily regimen, dinacharya

Clergy or specialist role within Hinduism.

Derived: this work depicts a figure already recorded as belonging to this tradition; the work-to-tradition link is inferred from that live depicts edge and the figures own attested tradition affiliation, not independently sourced beyond it.

Derived: this work depicts a figure already recorded as belonging to this tradition; the work-to-tradition link is inferred from that live depicts edge and the figures own attested tradition affiliation, not independently sourced beyond it.

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Tantra and kundalini yoga); also Vajrayana Buddhism.

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Advaita Vedanta).

Ahimsa is the first of the five yamas in Yoga Sutra 2.30, foundational to classical Hindu yogic ethics.

A Rigvedic name carried on by enumeration and later by jyotisha.

A Rigvedic name preserved by formula rather than by cult.

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Upanishadic).

Ayurveda is counted an upaveda, a subordinate limb of the Vedic corpus attached to the Atharvaveda, and its account of the three doshas sits inside the same cosmology as Hindu ritual; today it is practised as licensed medicine in India, largely detached from worship.

Balinese Hinduism specifically; the atlas carries no separate Balinese Hinduism entity yet.

Bharatanatyam is Hindu temple dance in origin and its concert repertoire remains overwhelmingly devotional.

Clergy or specialist role within Hinduism.

The Samaj is a reform movement within Hinduism, not a separation from it.

Yogic pranayama is the developed system.

Hindu households light the diya, a clay lamp of oil and cotton wick, at dusk and in quantity at Diwali.

The system comes from Hindu tantra and hatha yoga, where the centres are visualised along the spine with their seed syllables and petals and the coiled energy is roused to rise through them; the seven-centre scheme now standard is one of several the texts describe.

A nastika (heterodox) school classified within the landscape of Indian philosophy; it explicitly denies Vedic authority rather than affirming it.

Chaturmasya, the four month period during which Vishnu is said to sleep, belongs to Hinduism, its own Origin field names Vaishnava vrata literature.

The Hindu pranapratishtha rite installs the deity's presence in an image, making a carved figure a murti.

Hindu sampradayas are lines of transmission rather than membership bodies. They have no register, no boundary that must be crossed and no expulsion, and a household commonly keeps more than one orientation at once.

The kinship framing of the rivalry, and its best known episode, the churning of the ocean of milk, are Hindu Puranic material.

Marginal in the Rigveda and developed in the epics and Puranas.

Derived: this work depicts a figure already recorded as belonging to this tradition; the work-to-tradition link is inferred from that live depicts edge and the figures own attested tradition affiliation, not independently sourced beyond it.

The third of the four Puranic yugas, in which the Vishnu Purana holds dharma reduced to two legs, part of the same Hindu cosmological scheme as its sibling yugas.

The Erawan Shrine's own deity and ritual form are Hindu-Brahmanist in origin, distinct from the mostly-Buddhist tradition of the majority of its visitors.

The Newar festival's wider Hindu setting in the Kathmandu Valley.

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Vedic).

The chakra system of Hindu tantra supplies the system's language of energy centres and their transformation, reworked and renumbered; the borrowing is at the level of vocabulary and diagram rather than of yogic practice or Hindu doctrine.

Clergy or specialist role within Hinduism.

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism, across Shaiva, Shakta and Vaishnava lineages.

Its own record calls it the setting the Vedic student stage of life describes.

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Tantra and kundalini yoga).

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Gaudiya Vaishnava).

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Shakta Tantra).

The chakra system of Hindu tantra is expanded from seven centres into the system's nine, read as defined or open; the borrowing supplies vocabulary and layout rather than any yogic practice, and Hindu tradition has no part in the system.

Hindu puja circles a burning stick before the deity as one of the sixteen services offered to a guest.

The fourth and present Puranic yuga, in which the Vishnu Purana holds dharma reduced to a single leg, the close of the mahayuga cycle this atlas records as Hindu cosmological time.

A day of Brahma in Hindu Puranic cosmology, one thousand mahayugas, closed by dissolution and followed by a night of equal length before creation renews.

The violence was organized chiefly by Hindu nationalist organizations, the Vishva Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal, avenging a murdered Hindu religious leader and forcing mass reconversion to Hinduism; this connects the violence to that organizing identity, not a claim that Hindu teaching called for it.

A Vedic name that becomes the trunk of Puranic genealogy, and survives as a brahmin gotra.

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Shakta and Krishna devotion).

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Tantra and kundalini yoga).

The lingam is the aniconic form of Shiva and the principal object of Shaiva temple worship.

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Shaiva).

Clergy or specialist role within Hinduism.

The basic repeating unit of Hindu cosmic time in the Puranas, one complete cycle of the four yugas reckoned at 4,320,000 human years.

The japamala of one hundred and eight beads is used for counted recitation of a mantra or a divine name.

Derived: this work depicts a figure already recorded as belonging to this tradition; the work-to-tradition link is inferred from that live depicts edge and the figures own attested tradition affiliation, not independently sourced beyond it.

The reign of one Manu in Hindu Puranic cosmology, seventy one mahayugas, with the present age identified in the same tradition as the manvantara of Manu Vaivasvata.

A Vedic name, kept in later Sanskrit as an epithet rather than as an object of worship.

Prominent in Hindu wedding customs, part of the pre-wedding rites, understood as auspicious and protective.

A murti is not a picture of a deity. After the consecration rite it is treated as a residence, which is why it is woken, fed, dressed and put to rest.

Derived: this work depicts a figure already recorded as belonging to this tradition; the work-to-tradition link is inferred from that live depicts edge and the figures own attested tradition affiliation, not independently sourced beyond it.

Narsinh Mehta, Vaishnava poet-saint of Gujarat, belongs to Hinduism, its own tradition field.

A Vedic power of aversion who becomes a guardian of the south west in the later directional schemes.

The Balinese Hindu Day of Silence.

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Ganapatya and general).

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Shaiva).

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Vaishnava).

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Vaishnava).

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Vaishnava and Shakta).

Hasta samudrika shastra, the reading of the hand, is treated as an ancillary limb of Jyotisha and consulted alongside a birth chart, particularly on marriage and longevity; it is a folk and professional practice rather than a part of Hindu worship.

The five Ms belong to the Shakta and wider tantric lineages within Hinduism.

Parjanya belongs to the Vedic layer of Hinduism and has no independent cult in later practice.

Its home, the akhara, is in Hindu practice kept as sacred ground under the patronage of Hanuman.

Hindus perform puja daily at a home shrine and in temple, treating the image as an honoured guest: light, incense, flowers, water and cooked food are offered, and the blessed remainder is shared back as prasad.

Clergy or specialist role within Hinduism.

Clergy or specialist role within Hinduism.

The great Vedic royal consecration, set out in the Yajurveda and the Brahmanas.

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Tantra and kundalini yoga).

Derived: this work depicts a figure already recorded as belonging to this tradition; the work-to-tradition link is inferred from that live depicts edge and the figures own attested tradition affiliation, not independently sourced beyond it.

Clergy or specialist role within Hinduism.

Derived: this work depicts a figure already recorded as belonging to this tradition; the work-to-tradition link is inferred from that live depicts edge and the figures own attested tradition affiliation, not independently sourced beyond it.

The movement arises within the Hindu devotional world, while setting aside much of its ritual apparatus.

The first of the four Puranic yugas, the age in which the Vishnu Purana holds dharma to stand complete on all four legs, part of the Hindu cosmological time scheme this atlas records across the mahayuga cycle.

Sewa International describes itself as a Hindu American volunteer-service and humanitarian organization, part of a wider Hindu service movement, not tied to one specific denomination within Hinduism, so linked to Hinduism at the religion level.

The Sai Baba movement at Shirdi is most commonly classified within Hinduism in general reference works, though it also draws on Sufi and Islamic devotional strands (see this file's gap record for the more specific unresolved fact).

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Shakta and Vaishnava).

Siddhivinayak Temple is a Hindu pilgrimage site dedicated to Ganesha.

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Vedanta and yoga).

A Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu in his reclining form as Padmanabha, per the temple's own description.

The shilpa shastra texts treat the temple architect as holding a priestly office, required to know the ritual texts as well as the proportional systems.

Reverent attention to the rising sun is ancient and widespread, from Vedic surya upasana onward.

Suryavarman II, builder of Angkor Wat as a Hindu temple, belongs to Hinduism, its own tradition field.

Clergy or specialist role within Hinduism.

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Advaita Vedanta).

The January 1993 violence was organized in large part by the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party, and the Srikrishna Commission found the Bombay police showed bias against Muslims during that phase; this edge connects that organizing identity to the riots without asserting the violence as Hinduism's own position.

The water rites that descend from these hymns are universal in Hindu practice.

Among the most invoked gods of the Rigveda, and carried forward by Ayurveda and by jyotisha rather than by temple worship.

The karsevaks who tore down the mosque were mobilized by Hindu nationalist organizations and acted on the claim that the site was Rama's birthplace, but no mainstream Hindu religious authority ordered the demolition; this edge connects that mobilizing communal identity to the event without asserting it as Hinduism's own doctrine.

The full span of Brahma's own existence in Hindu Puranic cosmology, a hundred of his years built from the kalpa and its following night, the largest cyclical unit this atlas records in that tradition.

The dissolution that follows each Puranic kalpa in Hindu cosmology, matching it in length, during which the three worlds lie unmanifest and Brahma sleeps.

The part of the Vedic pantheon whose rites have never lapsed.

Derived: this work depicts a figure already recorded as belonging to this tradition; the work-to-tradition link is inferred from that live depicts edge and the figures own attested tradition affiliation, not independently sourced beyond it.

A Vedic class fixed at eight by the later literature and given its one story by the Mahabharata.

Carried into the present by the domestic offering and the ancestral rite rather than by hymn recitation.

Swami Sri Yukteswar's own reinterpretation of the Hindu yuga cycle, set out in The Holy Science within the Kriya Yoga lineage he founded, tying cycle length to precession rather than to the larger Puranic reckoning.

The second of the four Puranic yugas, in which the Vishnu Purana holds dharma to decline to three legs as ritual and sacrifice appear, part of the same Hindu cosmological scheme as its sibling yugas.

A Vaishnava observance.

Vaishno Devi is a Hindu pilgrimage shrine; this site carried sacred-to edges to related figures but no belongs-to-tradition edge until this file.

The word and the object come from Indra's thunderbolt weapon before Buddhism takes them over.

Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Hinduism (Tantra and kundalini yoga).

Jyotisha is counted one of the six Vedangas, a limb of Vedic learning, and is woven into Hindu life: charts cast at birth, matched before marriage, and consulted to fix auspicious times, with remedial rites and gemstones prescribed against unfavourable periods.

A late Vedic and Puranic name rather than a figure of living devotion.