ABSTRACT
Religion is the subject of many different methods of investigation, but two have achieved particular prominence. The first centres round the concept of religious ‘traditions’ such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity. These are treated as relatively self-contained and discrete entities which should be explored in terms of their most characteristic phenomena. The latter include distinctive personalities, events, beliefs, practices and rituals (thus this approach is sometimes referred to as ‘phenomenological’). Scholarly access to these different internal dimensions of a religion is largely by way of texts; the raw materials of this mode of interpretation and analysis are normally scriptures and other written deposits of a religion.
