Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices

Julius Lipner's Hindus, Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, published by Routledge in 2010, is a wide ranging academic survey of Hindu belief and practice by a scholar with a long career teaching Hinduism at the university level. Its authority rests on standard academic peer review and Lipner's own standing as a respected specialist in Hindu philosophy and theology. Its strength is its range, covering doctrine, practice, philosophy and social context within a single accessible academic survey. Its limit is exactly that breadth: as a survey covering the whole of a vast and internally diverse tradition, a specific claim about one particular regional practice or philosophical school benefits from a more narrowly focused specialist study where precision on that one point matters.