ABSTRACT
The religious situation in India has been infinitely more complicated than conventional labels like ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Buddhism’ suggest. On the one hand, a typological analysis will have to distinguish a wide spectrum of essentially different religious attitudes and expressions; on the other hand, such types appear frequently in ‘Hindu’, ‘Buddhist’, etc. garbs. The present chapter on The Classical Religions of India attempts to present this typological differentiation, along with its considerable overlap between different traditions. Instead of dividing the material artificially into ‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’, etc. or simply presenting conventional norms put forward by some representatives of these traditions, it describes what is actually found there.
