About this Site

Mahavidya is designed to promote the scholarly study of the Hindu tradition from the wide-ranging approaches common to the discipline of religious studies. The majority of category entries are written by second year university students at the University of Lethbridge who were in their first semester-long course on Hinduism. Some entries are from students in upper level classes. Thus the prose styles and quality of the articles vary considerably. Nevertheless, the content is derived from enthusiastic efforts by novice students to conduct research into various topics, and write about these in an informed manner that complies with fundamental principles of good scholarship. The sources of information have been books and scholarly articles. It is our hope that these articles (both for their content, and for the bibliographic references they provide) may assist others in learning more about Hinduism. The related website links were not information sources for the articles.

A Note on Transliteration

Wherever possible, the articles on the site use the standard system of Sanskrit transliteration. However, due to technical shortcomings, these are rendered without their diacritic marks. Thus a word like Siva is rendered without an accent over the S, and Krsna is written without the diacritic dots under the r, s, and n. Since there are numerous student authors contributing to this site, there may be occasional variations in this format. For aid in pronunciation, readers may consult:

Rodrigues, Hillary (2017) Hinduism – the eBook. 2nd Edition. Journal of Buddhist Ethics Online Books

https://worldreligionsebooks.com/eBooks/hinduism/

Rodrigues, Hillary (2017) Introducing Hinduism. 2nd Edition. London and New York: Routledge

https://www.routledge.com/Introducing-Hinduism/Rodrigues/p/book/9780415549660

https://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Hinduism-Religions-Hillary-Rodrigues/dp/0415549663