Hindu Ideas of Creation

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Hindu ideas about Creation. According to most Western religious traditions, a deity was the original creator of the Universe. Hinduism, on the other hand, has no single creation story. For thousands of years, Hindu thinkers have taken a variety of approaches to the question of where we come from, with some making the case for divine intervention and others asking whether it is even possible for humans to comprehend the nature of creation. The origin of our existence, and the nature of the Universe we live in, is one of the richest strands of Hindu thought.

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Guests

• Jessica Frazier 10 episodes
  Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Kent and a Research Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies at the University of Oxford
• Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad 5 episodes
  Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster University
• Gavin Flood No other episodes
  Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Oxford

Reading list

• Hindu Myths
  Wendy Doniger (Penguin, 2004) Google Books →
• An Introduction to Hinduism
  Gavin Flood (University of Cambridge, 1996) Google Books →
• Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices
  Julius Lipner (Routledge, 2010) Google Books →
• Studies in Hinduism: Vedism and Hinduism
  Gerhard Oberhammer (ed.) (Austrian Academy of Science Press, 1997) Google Books →
• Vac: The Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras
  Andre Padoux (SUNY Press, 1990) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b03k289f

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03k289f

Auto-category: 294.5 (Hinduism)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. The Bhrumandapurana, an important Hindu text written over a thousand years ago, contains an account, one of many, of the beginning of the universe.