Sunday 18 January – Saturday 14 March 2026
Library opening hours are Monday to Friday, 9.30am-5.30pm.
Weeks 1-8, Friday 4.00-5.00, Faculty of Theology & Religion
Dr Rembert Lutjeharms
This paper traces the development of Hinduism from the medieval period through to modernity. The course will examine Hindu scholasticism, devotional and tantric traditions, and modern Hindu thought. The lectures will explore themes of liberation, the soul and the divine, Tantra and meditation, devotional literature and the formation of modern Hindu identity.
Weeks 1-8, Thursday 4.00-5.00, Schwarzman Building (30.301b, side B)
Dr Jessica Frazier and Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen
This new FHS paper explores manifestations of yoga and meditation across a range of Indic traditions, ranging from classical yoga, Buddhist meditation, tantric visualisation, and devotional practices, to modern yoga and mindfulness. Focusing on texts, practices, and accounts of inner experiences, it engages with the theory and theology of such traditions. We also compare and contrast the styles, goals and worldviews behind such meditative practice.
The content will focus upon sources that have been influenced by classical Indian yoga traditions, but will not be limited to them. Precise topics taught may vary by year, but the course will critically explore 1) the history of scholarly approaches to yoga and meditation, 2) the roots of meditative practice in India, 3) ideas of the self, 4) Buddhist meditation, 5) Haṭhayoga and physical ritual, 6) tantric visualisation, 7) ecstatic devotional practices, and 8) innovations and controversies surrounding modern yoga and meditation.
Week 1: Theories of yoga and meditation – Dr Jessica Frazier
This lecture will situate the study of yoga and meditation within the larger history of study of mysticism, esoteric traditions and experiential forms of religion. It will set out a basic outline of yoga and meditation, and go on to consider some scholarly approaches (e.g. Hadot’s notion of meditation as a ‘technique of the self’, Eliade’s gnostic interpretation of yoga as flight from mortality, King and Carrette’s critical reading of modern inner spirituality as privatisation and commodification of religion, and Luhrmann’s idea of inner spirituality as bringing alternative realities into embodied life). It will also consider methodological questions that they raise, and encourage students to develop their own theoretically rich reading of primary sources.
Week 2: The origins of yoga and meditation in India – Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen
Yoga, meditation, and asceticism have been intimately linked throughout Indian religious history since the early beginnings in the ascetic discourse of what has been referred to as India’s ‘axial age’. This lecture will look at yoga and meditation through the lens of asceticism as ‘self-training’ and provide a tentative historical overview of origins, sources, and formations across a range of Indic traditions. The lecture will introduce key themes and concepts in the study of yoga and meditation in India, and will focus on texts in context, techniques of the self, and accounts of transformative inner experience.
Week 3: Consciousness, self and divinity in Classical Yoga – Dr Jessica Frazier
This lecture looks at the philosophy and practices of classical yoga, focusing on primary texts but also placing them in historical context among other approaches to meditation and asceticism that were present at the time. It explores the model of self in the text, its mechanisms for transformation, and the different, potentially contrasting, goals opened up to its readers.
Week 4: Buddhist Meditation – Dr Sarah Shaw
This lecture explores the philosophy and praxis of early Pāli Buddhist meditation. The Buddha taught a wide range of practices that all come under the general heading of bhāvanā, or cultivation. Some of these are taught to develop mindfulness and attention for the attainment of calm (samatha) and the gradual purification of the mind from craving. Others are dedicated to the cultivation of insight (vipassanā) into the three signs of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self; these are intended to dispel ignorance and confusion. Many practices develop both calm and insight; mindfulness is always considered necessary. Traditionally, both calm and insight were taught for balanced development, as seen in the highly varied styles of modern practice, which have developed around these core features. Meditative goals will be discussed: within Buddhist understanding ‘desire’ (chanda) may be wholesome, when orientated towards peace in the Buddhist path.
Week 5: Embodiment in yoga and meditation – Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen
This lecture looks at the nature and development of physical yoga and its relation to visualising meditation in later tantric traditions. This will involve an examination of different physical practices and their goals, such as yogic postures, bodily techniques, and breath control. Drawing on texts, theory, and fieldwork, the lecture will reflect on the relationship between yogic thought and praxis by looking at different yogic models of the human, yogic practice knowledge, and embodied memory.
Week 6: Visualisation and power in tantric yoga – Professor Gavin Flood
This lecture looks firstly at tantric meditation as a structured path to power and liberation linked to the cosmological hierarchy of levels. This will involve an examination of visualising deities, such as the Goddess and the ferocious Bhairava, a discussion of mantras, and examining an early kind of Kuṇḍalinī yoga. Secondly we will reflect on the theological implications of these practices and the relation of practice to philosophical/ theological doctrines.
Week 7: Love and Emotion in bhakti–yoga – Dr Rembert Lutjeharms
This lecture looks at devotional (bhakti) practices of meditation and visualisation within the traditions of Vaiṣṇavism, and show how such practices are intended to “make God real” to the practitioner, to use Tanya M. Luhrmann’s phrase. Vaiṣṇava theologians, such as Rūpa Gosvāmī (sixteenth century), have defined devotion (bhakti) as the loving service of God with the faculties of the body, and this emphasis on embodiment is the case too for contemplative practices, in which the practitioner is expected to worship and experience God with their (visualised) sensory faculties, which can lead to a absorption and transformation of one’s emotions.
Week 8: Modern yoga and mindfulness – Dr Jessica Frazier
In the modern period yoga and meditation ‘went global’ – inspired both enhanced global media and travel allowing the world to access to the thought of Asian thinkers like Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and others directly. But with interest came adaptation and consumerisation, with new Western forms often representing themselves as authentic while ultimately deserting the original aims. Eventually, yoga and meditation also became a new kind of political capital in India’s Hindu Right, representing conservative traditional values for populist parties. This topic assesses the processes and implications of adaptation in modern postural yoga, and meditation in practices like mindfulness. It also looks at the politicisation of these traditions and brings us back to Foucault’s and Hadot’s questions about practice, self-cultivation, well-being and spirituality.
Weeks 1-8, Thursday 12.00-1.00, OCHS Library
Dr Rembert Lutjeharms
Vedānta—theology grounded in the systematic exegesis of the Upaniṣads—has for centuries been the primary discourse for Hindu thought. These reading sessions are intended for students who have at least an introductory knowledge of Sanskrit and are interested in Vedānta texts.
Sanskrit & Pali, Weeks 1-4, Wednesday 10.00-11.00, Friday 10.00-12.00, OCHS Library
Sanskrit, Weeks 5-8, Wednesday 10.00-11.00, Friday 2.00-4.00, OCHS Library
Pali, Weeks 5-8, Tuesday 10.00-11.30, Friday 10.00-11.30, OCHS Library
Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen
The course provides an introduction to Sanskrit for the preliminary paper of the Theology and Religion Faculty in Elementary Sanskrit. Students of Pali will join the Sanskrit course in Michaelmas Term and for the first four weeks of Hilary Term. From week 5 of Hilary Term, Sanskrit and Pali will be taught as two separate courses, i.e. Sanskrit Prelims and Pali for Sanskritists.
Weeks 3 and 7, Wednesday 4.30-6.00, OCHS Library
Dr Jessica Frazier
This series of regular seminars brings together scholars and students working on Indic philosophies and religions. It focuses on topics of current research: in each session, two people will present a context they are investigating for 20min, and then open it for discussion on key questions. All researchers, graduates and finalists in all areas are welcome to join.
SPEAKERS TO BE ANNOUNCED
Weeks 1-8, Monday 12.00-1.00, OCHS Library
Professor Gavin Flood
Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century, and it has also had a deep impact on other theoretical fields more widely conceived. [Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy contd.]
Weeks 1, 3, 5, and 7, Monday 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library
Professor Gavin Flood
Chapter 10 of the Svacchandatantra contains the bhuvanādhvan, the ‘path of the worlds’, describing the text’s cosmological structure. In these readings we will read sections of the text along with Kṣemarāja’s commentary (Svacchandodyota).
Weeks 4 and 6, Monday 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library
Professor Gavin Flood
The categories ‘person’ and ‘self’ have been central to the history of religions across civilizations, central to ideas about purpose, value, politics, and redemption. These lectures will offer a comparative history and phenomenology of the categories of person and self across medieval religious worlds focussing on India. The central thesis I will develop is that the idea of the person in these civilizations arose not primarily from doctrine but from ritual systems that organised the social, metaphysical, and affective life of human communities. Persons were constituted in ritual action: in sacrifice, liturgy, initiation, and ascetic transformation. These ritual systems, while inheriting older sacrificial structures, transcended them in symbolic and contemplative forms. By examining the ritual foundations of personhood, the lectures propose that the category of the person in religious history is ritually enacted and so grounded in a mode of being-in-the-world. The lectures conclude that even in modernity, the human person remains a ritual and desiring being, embodied in world yet oriented toward transcendence.
Lecture 1: The Sacrificial and Transcendent Self in India
Week 4, Monday 9 February 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library
The opening lecture will reflect on early concepts of ‘self’, ‘person’, and ‘agent’, and how these articulate with notions of sacrifice and sovereignty in the Indian context. The ‘sacrificial self’ becomes the template for later notions of divine embodiment and sovereignty. The lecture will argue that ritual performance (sacrifice, liturgy, initiation, tantric praxis) instantiates a shared cultural ontology (especially the idea of a vertical cosmos) that supplies the categories available to persons and textual self-understanding.
Lecture 2: Comparing Cultures, Comparing Selves
Week 6, Monday 23 February 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library
The second lecture attempts to articulate a phenomenology of the religious person that bridges civilizations. The argument will be that close textual reading across civilizational divides, as illustrated through the study of Europe and India, reveals analogous patterns across the longue durée of history, how the ritual frameworks explain continuities into modernity and how comparison has implication for understanding a shared humanity in the concrete, material particularity of its situatedness.
Week 4, Thursday 12 February 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library
Dr Jessica Frazier
Gadamer on Being: Beauty, Globalism and the Modern Sublime
This forthcoming book explores Gadamer’s development of a grand narrative of ‘sublime’ modernity, in which we re-engage with Being under a new dispensation no longer afraid of its infinite, dynamic, dialogical and ever-growing character. With a new wave of thinkers (including Jean Grondin, Theodore George, Gunther Figal), this book reads Gadamer as departing from Heidegger’s critical approach to Metaphysics. In his works beyond Truth and Method he develops a rich and radical new ontology – a ‘Hermeneutic metaphysics’, or ‘Hermeneutic realism’ – rooted in Late Plato, Hegel, Poetic Language and more. In chapters on the prophecy of modernity, truth and metaphysics, beauty and spirituality, and ethics and globalism, this book tries to rethinks the heritage of Post-Heideggerian phenomenology, and modern metaphysics.
Week 4, Wednesday 11 February 2.30-3.30, OCHS Library
Dr Alan Herbert
I am interested in whether typical philosophical methods can adequately grasp diverse, and even contradictory, conceptions of divinity. As an illustrative example, I will look to the concept of Kṛṣṇa in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava theology. This tradition seeks to accommodate and balance a Vedāntic perspective in which Kṛṣṇa is positioned as the fullest expression of God, or Bhagavān, surpassing Brahman (by way of its interpretations of the Upaniṣads, Purāṇas, and Tantras), with its own intensely emotive bhakti (devotion), which regards Kṛṣṇa as incomplete without his intrinsic potency, or Śakti—specifically Rādhā, his closest confidante. This Gauḍīya approach raises questions about the problems that philosophy has in explaining hierarchical features of the divine alongside the deeply personal reality of God, the understanding of which, especially in this case of Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa, is often gained through a recommended participatory engagement in a religious process.
Alan Herbert’s specialities and interests lie in philosophy, religion, Indian thought and culture. He is also acquainted with sociology. He draws on a wide range of teaching experience in both tertiary and secondary/high school education in the USA, UK, and Asia, all of which informs his research. Currently, he is a research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. There he directs research projects, develops and runs online courses, teaches, tutors, mentors, publishes, and organises conferences. Recently he has been working on projects and papers exploring issues in the philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, personal identity, imagination studies, Indian theology, and societal problems among contemporary Hinduism and Hindus.
Week 2, Thursday 29 January 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library
Dr Radha Raghunathan
One of the debates among the different schools of Vedānta is regarding Brahman as the cause of creation ― the dualistic schools like Sāṁkhyā, Dvaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita and others hold that the universe is real, it is transformation (pariṇāma) of Brahman. The Advaitin’s explanation is that in this modification Brahman undergoes no change but merely ‘lends’ existence; thus, the universe is a transfiguration (vivarta) of Brahman. As do all schools of Vedānta, the Advaitin quotes the famous statement from Ch.Up. 6.1.4–6 and 6.4.1–4), “Any modification is a name dependent on words / speech.” (“vācā’’rambhaṇaṁ vikāro nāmadheyam…”)
Radha Raghunathan examines the statement “vācā’’rambhaṇaṁ vikāro nāmadheyam…,” in the light of the Advaitins Śaṅkarācārya (8th cent. C.E.), Ānandagiri also known as Ānandajñāna (14th cent. C.E.), Upaniṣad Brahmayogin (fl. 1800 C.E.), Bellaṁkoṅḍa Rāmarāya Kavi (early 20th cent. C.E.), and ‘lalitaalaalitaḥ’ (current times) to see how far they succeed in establishing that creation is transfiguration and not transformation of the changeless (nirvikāra) Brahman.
Week 6, Thursday 26 February 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library
Dr Radha Raghunathan
Veṅkaṭanātha, revered by the Śrī Vaiṣṇavites as Śrī Vedānta Deśika (hereafter Deśika), was a prolific writer. The chapter, ‘Pracchanna-bauddha-bhangādhikāra’ of his Paramata-bhaṅga is a brief critique of the Advaitins. Here, his focus is especially on Advaita’s (i) validity of the means of knowledge (prāmāṇya), (ii) doctrine of undifferentiated (nirviśeṣa) Reality, (iii) the plurality of the individual soul (jīvātman), (iv) non-real nature (mithyātva) of the universe and (v) concept of māyā. Deśika’s detailed refutation on Advaita is found in his Śatadūṣaṇī and such.
Radha Raghunathan presents a sample of the debates between the Viśiṣṭādvaitins and Advaitins from Deśika’s Śatadūṣaṇī (14th cent.), Nurani Anantakrishna Sastry’s Śatabhuṣaṇī (20th cent.), Uttamur Veeraraghavacharya Swami’s Paramata Bhūṣaṇam (20th cent.), and Kāśikānanda Giriji Maharāj’s Advaita Parishuddhi: Śatadūṣaṇī Parihāraḥ (21st cent.) on ‘the validity of the means of knowledge,’ of Deśika’s Paramatabhaṅga, as elaborated by him in ‘Argument 9’ (Vāda 9), ‘The Advaitin’s ineligibility for discussion / debate (kathanādhikāra)’ of his Śatadūṣaṇī.
Radha Raghunathan received her PhD from the University of Madras in 2015. She serves as Honorary Director and Gen. Editor, Adyar Library and Research Centre (ALRC), Theosophical Society, Adyar, Chennai. She is an author, translator, editor, reviewer and researcher in Vedānta and manuscripts. She has edited nine volumes of the annual research journal and twenty-one books for ALRC, has authored six books and published articles in various research journals, presented distinguished lectures and chaired sessions at many seminars. She is currently authoring a book on the Tamil Advaitin Tattuvarāyar’s ‘Cacivaṉṉa pōtam’ (Skt. ‘Śaśivarṇa-bodha’) and two chapters on Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta, and Bhāskara’s and Yādavaprakāśa’s Bhedābheda for an analysis of six select chapters from Śrī Vedānta Deśika’s Paramatabhaṅga.
Week 3, Thursday 5 February 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library
Dr Malini Murali
Following the 19th Century’s feverish preoccupation with the East, very little sustained work has emerged over the next two centuries on translating pre-modern Indian texts and engaging with the reflective paradigms they endorse. The earlier efforts, mostly carried out by Orientalists, led to the establishment of Indology departments across Europe. In India, on the other hand, such rigorous institutional spaces are practically absent. The present interest in regional languages too tends to privilege a certain curated sense of “ancientness” as seen in the case of Bhakti poets. This has a direct bearing on translation practises that, when they do occur, seldom exhibit necessary critical shifts in the articulation of cultural difference. Hence, there is a pressing need to imagine translation as a mode through which the past may be rendered through renewed linguistic, aesthetic and epistemic registers; in other words, to conceive of translation as a way of configuring contemporaneity. I will illustrate this proposition through my engagements with two pre-modern compositions from Kerala—Adhyatmaramayanam Kilipattu and Nalacharitam Attakatha.
Malini Murali is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Devaswom Board College, Thalayolaparambu, affiliated with Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala. She is the 2026 Charles Wallace Fellow at the British Centre for Literary Translation, University of East Anglia, where she will undertake an English translation of Unnayi Warrier’s Nalacharitam Attakatha, the most celebrated composition in the Kathakali repertoire. Her doctoral work, Offering to Ezhutachan: An Annotated Translation of Adhyatmaramayanam Kilipattu, was awarded an Excellent Grade by the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, and is scheduled for publication by Rupa in 2026. Her talks on language, literature, and culture are periodically broadcast on All India Radio. Her research interests include critical humanities, literary and cultural studies, and South Asian studies. She is actively engaged in the study and translation of both pre-modern and contemporary Malayalam compositions.
Week 8, Thursday 12 March 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library
Dr Janne Kontala
Yoga’s long journey from ancient South Asia to global studios and fitness centers has transformed its meanings in remarkable ways. Rooted in the religious traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism—especially the rich theistic currents within Hinduism—yoga today often appears as a secular, even commercial, pursuit. Many practitioners describe it as “spiritual but not religious,” yet traces of devotion and religious belief surface in both commercial presentations and polemical discussion.
This lecture explores how theistic worldviews live on within contemporary yoga. As part of a four-year research project Yoga in Finland (YOFI), funded by the Research Council of Finland and Polin Institute, I draw on over 500 responses from practitioners in Finland and India. I combine surveys, Q-methodology, and interviews to examine how beliefs, practices, and identities intertwine. The findings suggest that existing typologies of modern yoga overlook the fluid, lived realities of practitioners. Instead of fixed categories, I propose thinking of yoga through dimensions—practice, identity, belonging, and belief—revealing a far more complex and human picture of what it means to do yoga today.
Janne Kontala received his PhD at Åbo Akademi University, Finland, in 2016. He is currently employed as a researcher within the project Yoga in Finland (YOFI), funded by the Research Council of Finland and Polin Institute, where his research focuses on worldviews and values in contemporary yoga. As a teacher, Janne is currently also in charge of a yoga studies minor program in humanities.