ABSTRACT
It was pointed out in the last chapter that Weber’s work ‘The Religion of India-The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism’, which contains his main views on Indian religion, was a part of his major work Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion published in three volumes. Volume II of this series deals with Indian religion under the title cited above. In this work Weber deals with various aspects of the major Indian religions, i.e. Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, and how they affected Indian society. However, his central theme in this work remains the same as that which he had taken up in his first famous essay ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ (published in 1904-5), i.e. how the economic ethics of different religions have affected the development of modern Capitalism and the social stratification of their environment.
