Hindu Images and their Worship with special reference to Vaisnavism

Julius J. Lipner is Professor Emeritus of Hinduism and the Comparative Study of Religion in the University of Cambridge, UK, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of a number of books, including Hindus: their religious beliefs and practices (2nd edition, Routledge, London, 2010).

• Introduction: On the Object and Scope of our InquiryPart 11. "The heathen in his blindness….": Methodological Considerations2. In Retrospect: The Trajectory of Image-Worship in the Light of Yāmuna’s Āgamaprāmāṇya3. On Conceptualizing the Foundations of Hindu Image-Worship4. The Sāṃkhya Paradigm re-configured and re-imagined: Three Further IllustrationsPart 25. The Art of the Possible: On Establishing a Convention6. Hindu dharma and the Making of Images7. On the Sense and Sensibility of Hindu Religious Art8. Deity Embodied: a Theological Consideration of the Form, Worship and Meaning of Hindu Images

"In this volume, Julius J. Lipner offers a learned and detailed examination of Hindu images particularly, as the title suggests, in the Vaiṣṇava tradition. He reflects on them by way of a close reading of relevant texts, with attention to aesthetic, philosophical, religious, and theological implications. Underlying this study is Lipner’s keen sensitivity to the long history of Christian and Western hostility to idols, grounded in a sad history, in the deep-rooted religious dispositions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and in large part in grave misunderstanding of what Hindus actually do and mean by their worship. His richly nuanced, multifaceted study of images and their worship is a fine effort to remedy such misunderstanding, drawing as much as possible on Hindu sources, classical and modern, in order to counter a long history of confusion and suspicion. Rigorous in his scholarly standards throughout, Lipner also demonstrates comparative empathy, the "desire to open channels of communication in relationships of true reciprocity,"."Francis X. Clooney, International Journal of Hindu Studies (2019)