Abstract
The exploration of the views that have been developed within religious systems about the afterlife is, in effect, also a study of their distinctive understandings of the hic et nunc, for death is viewed by these systems not as an absolute termination but as a stage on the individual’s ongoing journey towards a specific goal. We will see in this chapter how this generalisation is exemplified by some of the multi-layered traditions of Hindu thought and practice, where the strands of theological anthropology, religious epistemology, and metaphysics are woven together to articulate a vision of the ‘pilgrim’s progress’ through vast cosmological cycles to the projected goal of human existence. The complex intellectual, historical, and sociological materials on Hindu views of the afterlife have often been shaped down the millennia by dialectical debates over two intensely contested questions: who is the pilgrim? and what is the nature of this progress?
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Barua, A. (2017). Hinduism. In: Nagasawa, Y., Matheson, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Afterlife. Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48609-7_4
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